The King is not the King - Audio
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Well, I first, I have to apologize for breaking my promise to you. I, yeah, we were supposed to be in a series called Love and Respect. It's a marriage series. For those of you who are here on Tuesday, we had an awesome thing with Jim Burnsey came and gave like an incredible talk, tons of content. And I promised you last week that this week we would jump into practical stuff about love. Well, I lied. I lied because this last night I just, my spirit was very disturbed. Primarily because the elections coming up and I have been very saddened to see the level of division and hatred that's going on in our country. And part of it is I'm sitting there and I'm wondering, like, because I've been praying for unity in our country now, it feels like a decade. It's probably a bit about that long and I feel like I keep asking and God keeps saying no. He keeps saying no, we're going to have hatred, we're going to have division. And so I started wondering, you know, how is it that God is actually like acting? What is God doing? And how does that matter for us? How is that happening in and through, you know, the elections and all the things? Because right now, I mean, presumably on Tuesday, although now I guess it takes a couple of weeks to find out who won. But over the next few weeks, we'll find out if it's Trump again or if it's Kamala. And I've just been wondering, where is God in this? And so I've been thinking about power. You know, the reason that we get so upset, the reason that we get so passionate about this is because we're, you know, we get to choose our kings, right? Our kings are queens here in the United States of America. And we assume and we know that once the king or queen is selected, that person wields an enormous amount of power. And we presume then that if it's the wrong one, they're going to do stuff that we hate. And if it's the right one, then they're going to save us. But how does the Bible think about the king? Let's take a look at Proverbs 21, where the Bible kind of explains in a very short way how God thinks about the people in power. The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of Yahweh, the Lord. He directs it wherever he wants. Everyone's path is straight in their own eyes, but Yahweh weighs the heart. So a couple things. First, the word king in Hebrew is Melech for a queen, it's Melechah. And when we hear like king or queen, we think about like Queen Elizabeth, God rest her soul, or what's her son, King, what's his name? Charles, King Charles, I guess. And we think about robes and stuffters and pomp and circumstance. That's not really how the Bible thinks about kings and queens. The Bible thinks about kings and queens sort of like chiefs, like a tribal chief. Anytime you have like a group of people or an institution, whoever is at the top of that, the Bible calls a Melech or a Melechah. And so in our last series, we met a number of these people who kind of run the show. If it's a small community, they're kind of like a sheriff and a judge all rolled into one. If it's a larger community, then they're much more like the kings that we think of. But what this means is that from the Bible's perspective, yes, Trump or Kamala would be the king of the United States of America. But there's more than just the king or the queen of the United States of America. Everyone from Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, to anyone, me, I would be sort of considered a little bit of a king, a sad, pathetic one, but a little bit of a Melech. And if you're a business owner, for example, you're a Melech or a Melechah of your business. So when the Bible's talking here, the Bible's not just talking about David or King George or whoever. The Bible is talking about anybody with power influences at the top of an institution. And what does it say? It says the king's heart is like channels of water in the hands of Yahweh. That word channels, it actually has two different meanings. One meaning is a sort of like, I have a picture here of an eddy, right?
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org