Bible Questions: What do Scriptures say about Kings?

July 7, 2010
Bible Questions: What do the scriptures say about Kings?
Old Testament Era

“The Samuel Principle”

Samuel the prophet as a boy. Later he anointed Saul and David as kings.

Samuel did his best to discourage the appointment of a king, knowing full well the atrocities and tragedies that follow in the wake of absolute power corrupting absolutely. Jehovah gave the same cautions and specific warnings about what happens to a people when an unrighteous monarch abuses his power and thereby corrupts society. Israel rejected these warnings and continued their pleadings. God therefore gave to the people that they wanted: a king. President Ezra Taft Benson said, “Sometimes He temporarily grants to men their unwise requests in order that they might learn from their own sad experiences. Some refer to this as the ‘Samuel principle’”. (Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, 84). Newell, Millet, A Lamp Unto My Feet, p.117

1 Samuel 8:5-7;11-20
And [they] said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations. But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us.
And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots. And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots. And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, [perfumers, ointment-makers] and to be cooks, and to be bakers.

And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants. And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and . . . . put them to his work.

He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.
Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; 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.

The Samuel Principle
And Samuel prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.

Ancient America
(Book of Mormon) Mosiah 29:21-23; 34-36
And behold, now I say unto you, ye cannot dethrone an iniquitous king save it be through much contention, and the shedding of much blood. For behold, he has his friends in iniquity, and he keepeth his guards about him; and he teareth up the laws of those who have reigned in righteousness before him; and he trampleth under his feet the commandments of God;

And he enacteth laws, and sendeth them forth among his people, yea, laws after the manner of his own wickedness; and whosoever doth not obey his laws he causeth to be destroyed; and whosoever doth rebel against him he will send his armies against them to war, and if he can he will destroy them; and thus an unrighteous king doth pervert the ways of all righteousness.

And he [Mosiah] told them that these things ought not to be; but that the burden should come upon all the people, that every man might bear his part. And he also unfolded unto them all the disadvantages they labored under, by having an unrighteous king to rule over them;
Yea, all his iniquities and abominations, and all the wars, and contentions, and bloodshed, and the stealing, and the plundering, and the committing of whoredoms, and all manner of iniquities which cannot be enumerated—telling them that these things ought not to be, that they were expressly repugnant to the commandments of God.

2 Nephi 10:10-11,14 (God speaking to the prophet Nephi)
But behold, this land, said God, shall be a land of thine inheritance, and the Gentiles shall be blessed upon the land.
And this land shall be a land of liberty unto the Gentiles, and there shall be no kings upon the land, who shall raise up unto the Gentiles.
For he that raiseth up a king against me shall perish, for I, the Lord, the king of heaven, will be their king, and I will be a light unto them forever, that hear my words.

Early America

In May 1782, after returning to his headquarters at Newburgh, New York, George Washington received a horrifying proposal. Colonel Lewis Nicola, commander of the Invalid Regiment, wrote a detailed letter reciting the chronic grievances of the army. They had gone too long with inadequate food and scanty clothing, he said—and when would they be paid? Nicola placed the blame for their sorry condition directly at the feet of the present form of government. Congress was too weak. The states were unwilling to relinquish adequate power to a centralized government. Only one solution would work: the army must establish a new monarchy—and George Washington was the man who should be crowned king.

Nicola’s suggestion was not as outrageous as it may seem to the modern mind. A monarchical government was the form found throughout the world in the eighteenth century, and it had been so thought all the centuries before.
The matter of the grievances of the army was terribly real, of course. But the idea of having an American king was profoundly distasteful to Washington. It was a slap in the face to everything he had given his life and fortune to achieve. His reply to Nicola was stern and uncompromising:

“No occurrence in the course of the war has given me more painful sensations than your information of there being such ideas existing in the army,. . .and [these] I must view with abhorrence and reprehend with severity.” (Parry and Allison, The Real George Washington, pp.372-373)

Today
Some in our society say, like the people in Samuel’s time, that they want to be like Europe, that they want more and stronger government. They treat their president like a king, and they act like his subjects.

A modern commentary on the passage in Samuel. “The system of kingly government itself, no matter how talented or noble an individual occupant of the throne may be, does not make the best form of government, one in which the instinctive and automatic concern of government is to look after the best interests of the body of the people. It is inherent in the nature of even the best and most ideal kingly systems that special privilege and questionable adulation [worship] be heaped upon those in the ruling class.” (Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 414-15.)

Tomorrow, Kings part 2: “Rebellion to tyrants,” penned Jefferson, Franklin, and before them John Bradshaw, “is obedience to God.”