Living Under Authority

 

Submit to authority. Obey your leader. Do what your parents say. Do what your pastor says. Do what your coach says. On and on and on we continually hear that we must submit to authority. But…why? How can I really live under authority? Isn’t God my authority? Only God can judge me, right?!

Throughout my life I’ve had it hammered in to me from my parents to always obey authority. I thought that I didn’t have a problem with submitting to authority and living under that same authority. Reading through the story of King Saul, I saw myself as someone who would never let that happen. Of course I would obey God 100% of the time. What I didn’t expect to see in myself is the idea of incomplete obedience. Getting the major details right, but missing badly on the smaller ones. Whoops. That pierced my heart. In the story, King Saul is told by God to destroy all the Amalekites. Every. Single. One. Even their animals! This is one of those stories in the Bible where mass genocide can be hard to swallow. The Amalekites has wronged the Israelites when they came out of slavery in Egypt, but doesn’t God forgive and forget? God made a promise in the time of Moses to “utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” God didn’t forget about that and used Samuel to relay the message. I think God’s exact quote was “do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” So I imagine myself as King Saul. I would want to do exactly what God says, but winning the battle seems to be enough. I think I would gloss over the whole kill everything part…just win the battle and move on. King Saul did just that. He let Agag, king of the Amalekites, live along with some of the best animals.

After all of this, God comes to Samuel and says that infamous line – “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following Me and has not performed My commandments.” Samuel goes to confront Saul and the first thing Saul says is that he has done the will of the Lord and all is great! Saul wants to keep the best animals and the king as a “holy sacrifice” to the Lord. Making his own sacrifice, his own way. He was sacrificing FOR God. But…obedience always trumps sacrifice.

Wait…obedience always trumps sacrifice? But doesn’t God always want me to give away my time, money and lay it all down? Maybe, but only when he commands it! So many times in my life I look back and see that I have “sacrificed” for God, but never really invited him in to any of it! I do what I think is best and what would be most pleasing to Him. Not what he asks. I wanted to feel good about myself in those situations by either bragging to myself (or others) about how much I sacrificed for God. Look at me and how awesome I am! It leaves me with the question…when and where have I sacrificed that God wasn’t asking me to do that? Where have I missed out on blessing someone because I went out of turn and did my own thing because it seemed like more of a sacrifice? I now have a focus on God and what He says about my time, talents and treasures. I have a desire to bring Him in to it because He is vastly more competent with all that I have than I am!