Recently, I had a discussion with an old friend of mine about a particular statement I had written in an article on the webpage (article written in late 2001) entitled “ Armorwearers Not Armorbearers …
I had re-read the article and pondered about what he had stated and two things came into my mind:
(1): The Grassley Investigation and Lee Grady’s two excellent articles entitled Integrity, Accountability and the Grassley Investigation and In Defense of the Good Senator and also Paul Crouch, Jr.s “rebuttal”.
(2):1 Samuel 8
What made me think about this more was this statement I made in page 2 of my “Armorwearers…” article when I stated:
…Because of this, the Israelites pleaded for a king. Samuel pleaded with God about the Israelites foolishness and God told Samuel that they were rejecting God and not Samuel and therefore, Samuel did what God told him to do and annointed a king named Saul. Beforehand, Samuel warned the people that this king would take their slaves and their vineyards for their officers, their daughters to make perfumes and breads, and their sons for his army, their sons for his slaves, and still require a tenth of their flocks and harvests. And the people still replied “We want a king and we want to be like the nations around us.” We see throughout the Old Testament that what Samuel foretold happened exactly as told to the Israelites.
Even though I barely touched on the subject in late 2001, it came to me some six years later that:
Why would I want to be a part of a so-called ‘Christian system’ that can trace it’s roots to an act of rejecting and forsaking God Almighty?
Ladies and Gentlemen, this entire pentecostal / charismatic / word of faith ‘independent megachurch’ concept where pastors turned from servants to kings, from churches to corporations, and from pentecost to politics is the byproduct of rejecting God and not the blessings from serving and obeying God.
So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who asked him for a king.
And he said, “This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some will run before his chariots. He will appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties, will set some to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and some to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. And he will take the best of your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants. And he will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest young men, and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your sheep. And you will be his servants. And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the LORD will not hear you in that day.”
Does this sound like the aftermath of the Ego Kingdoms consisting of ‘armorbearers’, ‘Joel’s Army’, “touch not mine anointed…”, “Nehemiah’s Wall Builders”, “Psalms 66:12 blessings”, and other twisted scriptures that run prevalent in many churches today?
But behind the quest for a King lies a very disturbing desire that is revealed in verses 19 and 20:
Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, “No, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles.”
(1): They wanted a king to judge them because if God judged them right now, they would be deserving of death. However, by shifting their allegiance from God to a king, the people (knowing the king is human) would likely be less harsh to them than God would be (so that’s what they think…)
(2): They wanted a king to fight their battles because a king would not take a long time (compared to God’s timing) to ‘defeat’ their defined enemies (the DEMONcrats, the secular news media, a Senate committee, the ACLU, the ‘mainline churches’, anyone who disagrees with them theologically or disagrees with them period, etc).
The fact that their sufficency would have came from their own thoughts and energies instead of the wisdom and might of God really shows in that last verse. In fact, what have we really seen in the past when these leaders of Ego Kingdoms and many televangelist ministries do? Go to their own human efforts and try to ’spiritualize’ their desires by adding ‘thus saith the Lord’ to the end.
When they talk about God ’striking their accuser dead’, they are trying to justify and rationalize their desire to murder the individual / organization by trying to place a spiritual twist to their statement in the form of “So-and-so died because they touch God’s anointed”. When they talk about God ’sending disaster and calamity’ to the hometown and surrounding areas where the accuser lives, they are trying to justify and rationalize their hopeful desire of wanting to see natural disaster come down to where they can blame the accuser for the disaster by trying to place a spiritual twist to their statement in the form of “God sent this hurricane because so-and-so disagreed with me and this is where so-and-so lives”..
I want blessings and favor that comes from the abundance, sovereignty, and providence of God himself, not a byproduct of a judgment that came from rejecting God.
It’s called codependency on the part of the people. They want someone else to make their decisions for them. And that is when the controller appears.