Israel Wanted a King. So Do We, If We're Honest.

Yesterday, like thousands of other Americans, I woke up deeply unsettled by the weekend’s chaotic turn of events.

My parents had just arrived in town for the weekend when it all went down. We were enjoying a glass of wine in the sunny backyard of their Air BNB rental when my dad glanced down at his phone, his voice turning somber as he read aloud in disbelief, “Trump has been shot.”

And like thousands of other Americans, I was shocked and completely unsurprised all in the same dizzying breath. I couldn’t believe it had happened, but I also couldn’t believe it had taken so long.

I’m already chronically online, but I found myself glued even more closely to my phone than usual as the night went on. I wanted answers I already knew better than to trust. It’s an election year. Nothing else is going to matter to the people crafting the narrative.

Who was trying to kill Trump? How would the media spin this to the left’s advantage? How would the GOP spin it to theirs? How could one of the top security teams in the world do such shoddy work? Was it an inside job? What information would the powers-that-be choose to hide from the peasantry? How on earth would we know who to trust? Was the shooter a Republican or a Democrat? Did he act alone? Was it really who they say it is?

And of course in the absence of these answers, conspiracy theories emerged to fill the gaps of discomfort of uncertainty.

Georgia Representative Mike Collins tweeted that “Joe Biden sent the orders.” Alex Jones called it a “failed coup” and predicted that “we’re about to see the end of civilization.” And then we have the anonymous user on 4chan who claimed to be the Secret Service counter sniper and that he had been given direct orders NOT to take down the would-be assassin.

It certainly doesn’t help that, in April, Mississippi congressman and ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Representative Bennie Thompson, introduced legislation designed to strip convicted felons sentenced to prison of Secret Service protection. It doesn’t help that it was co-sponsored by a bunch of Democrats. To me, that really looks like they were trying to get Trump killed. I mean, it’s pretty dirty, all things considered, and it only adds fuel to an already blazing fire, legitimizing concerns that would otherwise be dismissed as conspiracies.

And on the flipside, we’ve got a whole ton of Democrats who are thoroughly convinced that this entire thing was staged to win Donald Trump the election. “It wasn’t a bullet that hit his ear; it was glass from the teleprompter.” “That photo of him with his fist in the air was totally staged. No one does that if they’re actually afraid for their lives.” “Who goes golfing the day after someone tries to shoot them?”

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman was so thoroughly convinced that the assassination attempt was a fake that he even wrote a letter to journalists to convince them not to believe it was real. One “possibility -- which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally -- is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash,” he wrote.

My husband is a security guru. It’s his bread and butter. He’s literally contracted for security by the government, and protection and self defense are his native tongue. He’s been reviewing all the information about the shooting in dumbfounded bewilderment. “Babe,” he told me yesterday. “I’m not saying this out of ego or a critical spirit, but I’m telling you, I could round up a group of guys in about 20 minutes and get them all on the same page to do a way better job than what I saw in that footage. It makes zero sense. There’s no way in the world that guy would end up on the roof with a range finder.”

And I believe him. It just doesn’t seem to add up. There are too many questions, and I’m not at all surprised to see people filling in the blanks. It’s human nature. In a world of chaos and uncertainty, we CRAVE the security of answers and hidden knowledge. We want to know what’s happening because we want assurance that what comes next will be okay.

Now I’m going to try to tread really lightly on this next part because my clumsiness in discussing it already cost me one long-time friend today. But one of the most concerning trends I’ve observed in this whole debacle is the certainty with which many Trump supporters are misapplying Scripture to make sense of these events. “God is protecting Donald Trump because Trump is His chosen instrument,” they insist.

And hear me when I say that’s more than possible. The God I serve is sovereign, omnipotent, and actively involved in the lives of His people. He is responsive to prayer, and countless people have been praying diligently for Donald Trump. I believe in guardian angels. I believe in divine intervention. I believe God cares about things like elections and the affairs of men.

I believe God can use Donald Trump, just like I believe God can use Joe Biden. “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord.” If God can use a talking ass, He can accomplish His purpose through deeply flawed humans; that’s all He really has to work with. As a conservative Christian, I do believe the Republican platform is more hospitable to God’s blessing than the Democratic platform is. I don’t think He can bless abortion or child sterilization. I think these are pretty heavy hitters in His economy. But Republicans are not inherently holy—not by a long shot.

My concern, one I’ve addressed before, is the subtle turn I’ve seen toward near idolatry where Trump is concerned. There is such a thing as overspiritualizing things, of applying a God lens to things that don’t deserve one, of connecting dots that do not go together, and I’ve seen a lot of this in recent history. See screenshots below.

And this.

I honestly don’t even know if I could articulate to you why this is problematic because I’m so bewildered by the fact that I even have to. It’s an egregious abuse of Scripture. You could literally take any topic under the face of the sun and pair it with any passage of Scripture and hand them to me, and I guarantee I could find a way to connect them to one another. But that doesn’t mean I should. And it’s consequential if we do this when we shouldn’t.

People do this for the exact same reason that they latch onto conspiracy theories. They desperately want to believe that they’re on the winning side, that things will end well for them, that they’re aligned with God Almighty and, as such, nothing bad is going to happen to them. And once they can convince themselves that their guy is God’s chosen vessel, well then the chosen vessel can get away with all manner of evil because “God chose him flaws and all.” They’re absolved from the responsibility of wrestling with sin in their own camp because the other camp is always “so much worse.”

And it makes us blind to the planks in our own eyes. I don’t know if anyone else has noticed, but Donald Trump has single-handedly shifted the entire platform of the Republican party to the degree that we are no longer even pro-life or traditional marriage. That’s a major, major shift. It’s like anything goes as long as it’s Trump doing it. If Bill Clinton did it, we would demand his head on a platter, but if Trump does it… oh well—no one is perfect. Any hint of criticism is categorized as the persecution of the Lord’s anointed in this milieu. We aren’t allowed to have legitimate concerns. Voicing them is proof positive of our traitorous nature.

But in my troubled condition yesterday morning, I felt the Lord calling me to pray. He didn’t want me to groan on Twitter. He didn’t want me to rationalize in my own strength. He wanted me to talk to Him about the things that were bothering me. So I did. And in the middle of this gripe fest, I heard loud and clear that “Israel wanted a king.”

It didn’t make sense to me at first, so I just kind of ignored it. Then, five minutes later, someone I don’t even know commented on my Facebook post about Israel wanting a king. So I took the hint and opened my Bible to 1 Samuel 8—the passage about Israel wanting a king.

For those who weren’t raised in Sunday School, I’ll summarize: In the Bible, there’s a story about God delivering Israel out of slavery. He does all these amazing miracles to protect and provide for them: parting seas, sending food like rain from heaven, destroying their enemies when there’s no reasonable explanation for their victory. Time and time again, He shows up to meet their every need. He loves them. He just wants them to trust in His goodness and provision even when they don’t understand it. He wants them to risk the uncertainty and lean on His goodness.

Israel is not interested in this arrangement. They want certainty. They want political power. They want a physical leader to fight their enemies and create a sense of safety for them, and they’re willing to compromise on righteousness in order to get one. God isn’t happy about this request. He warns Israel that a king is going to come at a pretty high cost to them on a personal level. They don’t care. They want the king.

So God gives them what they want. He gives them a powerful king named Saul, and He even blesses Saul for a time with His anointing. But Saul cares more about maintaining power than He does about honoring God, and He’s willing to perpetuate evil in order to dominate. It doesn’t end well for Saul, and it doesn’t go great for the Israelites, but you get what you pay for when you prioritize power of righteousness.

Now obviously I don’t believe that God gave us this story as a metaphor about the political climate of today’s America. But I do think He gives us stories in order to learn from them and apply the principles to our own lives. And I do see a lot of parallels between Israel’s relationship to King Saul and Republicans’ relationship to Donald Trump. I do think, in many cases, we want power more than we want righteousness. We will justify it by saying we think Trump will usher in righteous laws, but at the end of the day, we are willing to overlook a whole heckuva lot and to compromise our principles beyond recognition in order to get him in the White House come November.

Now listen, I’m not going to tell you how to vote or judge you for how you decide to cast your ballot. That’s between you and God. I’m not here to cast aspersions on that. We don’t have any good choices. Follow your conscience and let God work out the rest. That’s not what this is about.

But this morning a woman who claims to be a Christian actually asked me, “What good is righteousness without power?”

And the point at which we find ourselves actually asking that question as though it has merit is the point at which we need to hit our knees and ask for God’s forgiveness. The Bible assures us that “righteousness is its own reward.” The original disciples were nearly all martyred for their faith. They had the power of the Holy Spirit, not the power of the legislative system.

So tonight, I’m just burdened to urge intellectual honesty and prayerful caution in the way we choose to engage the political process. If the good Lord convicts you that it’s your job to cast your vote a certain way, then follow where you’re led. Elections are important, and we each have to do the best we can to vote for righteousness, however that looks. But God is not limited by elections, so prioritize righteousness first, and trust Him to work out the rest even if you can’t immediately see how exactly He is going to do it.

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