Royal Failure
When the Israelites asked for a king in 1 Samuel 8, God took it as a failure of loyalty on their part, a rejection of his kingship. Yet he gave them what they wanted and used it to further his own purpose in bringing the Messiah, who would be known as the Son of David, the greatest of their kings. Then, when the Messiah came, they rejected God as king a second time, and God used that to further his original plan of bringing blessing to the Gentiles through the Abrahamic Covenant.
God works through the failures of his people to accomplish his purposes. He does so as much because of as in spite of their failures. The depth, intricacy, and richness of his providential working is far beyond anything we are capable of imagining —but we are given hints of it when we make connections like the one between the kingship of God in 1 Samuel 8 and the King of Kings in the New Testament.
Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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