““About this time tomorrow I will send you a man from the land of Benjamin, and you shall anoint him to be ruler over My people Israel; and he will save My people from the hand of the Philistines. For I have regarded My people because their cry has come to Me.” Now Samuel saw Saul, and Yahweh answered him, “Behold, the man of whom I spoke to you! This one shall restrict My people.”” 1 Samuel 9:16-17 LSB https://bible.com/bible/3345/1sa.9.17.LSB

God said the king, the government the people insisted upon, would come and restrict His people. Israel lived in freedom from centralized government. Religious leaders acted as judges who settled disputes between neighbors by the standard of God’s law. Beyond this, the Israelites were a free people, each person having their own plot of land in order to feed themselves from what it produced and what they exchanged with their neighbor. But Israel wanted more, they wanted a king, to protect them from their enemies. Israel had trouble because they rebelled against God resulting in His hand of discipline upon them through the oppression of the peoples living near them. So too our sin, our disobedience to God, causes us problems. Rather than turning to God for help, for repentance and empowerment to stop disobeying Him, we turn to others, the government, to solve the problems our own sin created. We want the government to stop poverty yet we refuse to work, we want the government to stop division but we refuse to love our neighbor as ourselves, we want the government to stop injustice, yet we refuse to do to others as we would have done to us. The remedy to our problems is not government fixing the consequences of our poor choices for they too are people making bad choices. The solution to our problems is to live in obedience to God’s ways, imploring His presence to live as His people, so that we can once again live in the freedom of unrestrained goodness rather than in the constraint of law because we are evil.