Longing For a Better King

“If you will walk before me, as David your father walked, with integrity of heart and uprightness, doing according to all that I have commanded you, and keeping my statutes and my rules, then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever, as I promised David your father.” (1 Kings 9:4-5) Mount Rushmore is an interesting man-made sculpture carved into granite that depicts the faces of four presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln. From a distance, you cannot see the cracks and imperfections in the surfaces of the sculptures without a camera with a high-power lens or good binoculars. Being able to see Mount Rushmore from both zoom-in and zoom-out perspectives will greatly enrich the appreciation of these massive rock-carved images.   In the past year or so, we looked at the book of 1 Kings from a zoomed-in angle. We looked at each chapter and the messages they convey. This was not an exhaustive study but a systematic one in which we sought to