No Messiah

Ruins of King David's palace, image by Deror_avi

And the Lord told him (Samuel):

“Listen to all that the people are saying to you;

it is not you they have rejected,

but they have rejected me (God) as their king.

As they have done from the day

I brought them up out of Egypt until this day,

forsaking me and serving other gods,

so they are doing to you. 

~1 Samuel 8:7-8

I am going to say something that is not going to sit well with either Christians or Jews: there is no Messiah. The idea of a Messiah, a godly king, is and always was a terrible mistake.

What is the message that God tells men repeatedly from the Exodus onwards? That men are darkened, wicked, that even the best of them are corruptible. Even the best of them sin. And of course, most are not the best, most of the Israelites were rejecting God repeatedly from the first footstep of the Exodus to the very last book of the Old Testament.

The idea of a messiah began with King David, a man who murdered a man to screw the man's wife, likely in addition to other misdeeds not chronicled. However, the reason Israelites had kings at all began in the days of Samuel. The Israelites wanted to have a king like all the neighboring lands had kings: prior to this they had judges who would wander around deciding matters. Some of the judges were good like Samuel and some were bad, like Samuel's sons. The fact that they even needed judges was a testament to their disunity and rebellion from God's law. So the Israelites came up to Samuel and said basically that Samuel was old and his sons were bad and every other people around them had kings, so they wanted a king too. Samuel took this complaint to God, and as the quote above says, God told them that the people of Israel had rejected Him (God) as their king. In other words, God was their only rightful king, and a human king would be an usurpation of God's proper place in their lives. Which means that David was not the rightful king either.

Just a quick aside - the phrase "kingdom of heaven" or "kingdom of God" has tended to take on a vaguely esoteric air in the centuries that have elapsed since Jesus' time. What it really means is exactly what it says: rule of the world and human beings directly by God. Now, what role would a human king play in such rulership? None at all: in this current epoch no human being could possibly be qualified to rule in place of God (it would be nearly blasphemous to say they could,) and in "the world to come" as religious Jews say, there would be no need of such a human king. Isaiah says, "The knowledge of God would fill the land like water fills the sea." In other words, everyone blessed to live in such a world would know what God wants immediately - no human ruler needed.

This has been what it has all been about from the beginning - the rulership of God. Not men, not "god-men" if such an abomination were ever allowed, just God.

Getting back to David - the Israelites loved David. He brought them victory in battle and did not seem as arrogant as most kings. He listened to the prophets. He was still a really bad guy in absolute terms - murder being a very grievous sin in most people's understanding of the word - but he was not AS bad as most kings of the time and he did bring them victory and glory and a capital city. So of course, being weak humans, they viewed their religion to some degree through that lens. There are Jews today waiting for their new David. Christians think they have already gotten theirs, but he has left the physical scene for a time until the end of days. In truth, there is no messiah: the whole thing was an invention of people who were addicted to worldly glory and national pride.

The quote from Samuel should tell us everything we need to know. We should feel it in our bones, too: I have no king but God. Not a distorted Christ, not a past or future Jewish David, no king but adonai elohim, the Lord our God. The only one possibly qualified to run the world. The only source of sufficient wisdom. The only incorruptible. The only sinless. Why in the world should we look to some human ruler instead of the very One whose knowledge is like the sand on an endless beach, like the stars in the universe? The very idea of a messiah is a confession of ignorance.

Of course, people like messiahs. Messiahs are glamorous. They flatter human vanity and cater to human emotions. But there is no messiah.

No King But God Alone.