One day a lion was stalking through the jungle. He thought he was really something. The King of the Jungle. The greatest beast of the wild. And he wanted to make sure everyone else thought that as well.
He grabbed a tiger who was passing by. The lion put a strangle-hold on the tiger. The lion growled ferociously and said, “Who’s the King of the Jungle?” And the tiger, trembling and shaking, said, “You are, O Lion. You are the King of the Jungle!”
Then there was a bear that passed by. And again the lion grabbed him, and put a strangle hold on him and growled ferociously, and said, “Who’s the King of the Jungle?” And the bear too, trembling like the tiger, said, “You are, O Lion. No question about it. You are the King of the Jungle!”
And then the lion came upon a mighty elephant, huge, massive, towering many feet above the lion! And once more he asked with a ferocious growl, “Who’s the King of the Jungle? Who’s the greatest beast of the wild?”
And the elephant didn’t say anything. He just picked up the lion with his trunk, whirled him around several times, and smashed him into a tree.
As the lion got up, broken and bleeding, he said to the elephant, “Look buddy, just because you don’t know the answer is no reason for you to get so rough!”
The lion thought he was the King of the Jungle. In time he found out he was not.
In 1 Samuel 8:4-22, the elders of Israel come to Samuel, restless, eyes turned toward the nations around them. “Give us a king to rule over us,” they say, seeing how other kingdoms operate — their rulers draped in wealth and power, their borders clear and well-defended. And something in them stirs. They want to be like the others.
Samuel, old and grieved, warns them about what a king does: he will take your sons for war, your daughters for service; he will tax your fields, take your vineyards, claim your labor for his own. A king will make you servants in your own land (Verses 11–17). Samuel is not offering theory here. He is speaking the way history always speaks — through the wounds of those who have lived under power’s grasp.
Still, they insist. We want a king to fight our battles.
There is something haunting and autocratic in the way the people ask for a king. It is not a simple request, not a passing desire. It is a demand, a grasping toward empire, an ache for hierarchy, for false protection, as a balm — and a scapegoat — for their insecurity.
And God, in a voice full of sorrow, tells Samuel: Give them what they ask for. They are not rejecting you. They are rejecting me. When God sent them his own Son Jesus, they rejected him as well. The sign above his head on the cross may have said, “King of the Jews,” but he was a king who washed feet the night before he died. Jesus was the Servant – King.
Why do YOU think that people throughout history and even today want a king to rule over them?
Thanks to Kat Armas and Maxie Dunnam
YOU WILL NEVER REGRET CHOOSING TO DO THINGS GOD’S WAY!
Please add Pope Francis to your prayers today.
