Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Samuel 8-10.

The first thing we see in today’s passage is that when Samuel became old and appointed his sons to take over his duties, they turned out to be much like Eli’s sons had been.  This led the Israelites to request that Samuel appoint a king over them.  It really tells us a lot that the Israelites response to having two leaders in a row whose sons turned out to be evil and corrupt when their fathers turned leadership over to them decided that the solution was to appoint a leader with even greater authority whose son would, by default, inherit their father’s authority.  They would replace a leader whose authority came from the agreement of those who followed them with one to whom they had granted the authority to enforce his commands by force.  This new leader would be given hereditary authority which would pass on to his son.  They did this because the sons of their most two recent leaders were corrupt and exercised what limited authority their fathers passed on to them poorly.  Rather than recognize that the reason they had poor leaders was because they failed to choose to faithfully follow God, they blamed it on their leaders not having enough authority.  They thought that if only they had a stronger ruler who could have forced people to more stringently keep God’s laws, they would have been a better people.  Rather than turn to God and follow Him with all of their heart, they chose to try setting up a government which would force them to do so.  It doesn’t work that way, it never has, and it never will.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.