7 And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken to the voice of the people in all they say to you; for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me, that I should not be King over them.

18 In that day you will cry out because of your king you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not hear you then. – 1 Samuel 8:7, 18, Amplified Bible (AMP)

Getting what we want from God could lead to horrible, unintended consequences.

When the Israelites demanded a human king, God let Samuel know that it wasn’t Samuel the people were rejecting; it was God Himself they were rejecting. He also let Samuel know that, in return for putting their trust in a human king, God would scale down the amount of support that He would give His children.

It is obvious from reading Scripture that God did not abandon His people because of the demand for a human king. God delivered His people many times through the hands of Saul, David, and other kings of Israel and Judah. But, when the people’s distaste for kingly overreaches of power drove them to cry unto God, God’s response was basically, “You wanted a man to rule over you more than you wanted me to rule over you, so now you’ve gotten what you deserve.”

So often we cry unto The Lord for deliverance, and we demand the deliverance be given to us according to our plans and desires. If we whine and complain long enough, God might get tired of hearing us nag, and He might give us what we want just to shut us up. But, sadly, we will find that when God gives us what we want in response to our whining, we will encounter one or more unintended consequences as a result. The worst of these, no doubt, is that God won’t be quick to rescue us from our poor choices. Instead, He will make us live with the undesirable results of our demands to help us understand that we should have trusted His wisdom, not our wisdom, all along.

The pressures of life will tempt us to beg for relief in ways that may not be part of God’s perfect plan. There’s nothing wrong with humbly placing our plans of rescue before God in prayer, but we must do so with a heart of submission to His perfect will. Had the Israelites asked God meekly, “Lord, would you have us be ruled by a human king, or no?”, then God would likely have guided His people away from the rocky path of human rule. But, with the Israelites demanding their own way like a child throwing a temper tantrum, God gave them what they asked for, and so the tragedies of human rule in Israel began. If we throw our own temper tantrums, we can expect a similar response from God, and we will deserve all of the unintended consequences that follow our poor choices.

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