King Jehoshaphat of Judah was on a state visit to King Ahab of Israel. The theme of their discussions was a military alliance to undertake a war against Syria. The cause of the projected hostilities was the failure by the Syrians to keep the terms of a peace treaty imposed by Ahab on them three years previously when a war of aggression on their part had failed. They had promised to yield certain cities to Ahab and had not kept their word. Ahab, therefore, proposed to take one of them, Ramoth-Gilead, by force, and entered into negotiations with Jehoshaphat to lend him military assistance. It is not clear what the latter hoped to gain from the alliance. Foolishly, however, as the event proved, he was persuaded (possibly because his daughter had married Ahab’s son) to give his aid without stint
Jehoshaphat, however, demanded that Jehovah should be consulted as to whether the campaign was likely to be successful or not Thrones had been erected for the two monarchs outside the gate of the city of Samaria and there they sat surrounded by their retinues At the behest of Ahab, four hundred prophets, led by Zedekiah, the son of Chenaanah, appeared, and with one voice declared the certainty of victory Their leader reinforced their opinion with a little play acting He made horns of iron in token of coming victory, and said “With these shalt thou push the Syrians until thou have consumed them”
Is there a Prophet of the Lord?
Jehoshaphat was as little impressed by the theatricals of Zedekiah as by the victory chant of his colleagues To him it seemed that they were just saying pleasant things without much concern for the will of the Lord “Is there not here a prophet of the Lord besides,” he asked, that we might inquire of him?” (1st Kings 22 7) Ahab said there was another, but he didn’t like him because the prophet didn’t prophesy good concerning him, but evil His name,” added Ahab, “is Micaiah, the son of Imlah ” If the statement of Josephus is correct, Ahab had good reason to dislike Micaiah, because he was the prophet who met him when he was returning home flushed with his previous victory over the Syrians, and by the ruse of feigning to be an escaped prisoner, had forced the king to see vividly his folly in sparing the Syrians when they were at his mercy Nevertheless, Jehoshaphat persisted, and Ahab yielded and sent a messenger to bring Micaiah The messenger was not slow to advise Micaiah to be sure to agree with the other prophets, but the prophet declared that he would say nothing but what God told him to say Nevertheless, when the kings asked whether the battle would be successful or not, he said at once that it would be Even Ahab, however, realized that he was speaking ironically, and impatiently demanded that he should express his real opinion.
Micaiah retorted by two parables separated in the narrative (1st Kings 22) by Ahab’s remark to Jehoshaphat “Did I not tell thee that he would prophesy no good concerning me, but evil?’ (Verse 18)
The first parable “I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have no master let them return every man to his house in peace” (verse 17)
The second parable “Hear thou, therefore, the word of the Lord I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left And the Lord said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-Gilead? And one said on this manner, and another on that manner And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the Lord and said, I will persuade him And the Lord said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets And he said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also go forth and do so Now, therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these, thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee” (verses 19-23)
Struck on the Cheek
This counter parable to his own angered Zedekiah, and he struck Micaiah on the cheek “Which way went the Spirit of the Lord from me to speak unto thee In other words, “When did God stop speaking through me in order to speak through you?” Micaiah received scant consideration at the hands of the king who was so set on the enterprise which he had planned that he utterly disregarded the prophet’s words and sent him to prison pending the expected victorious return Micaiah bore himself calmly, but before being hurried away he warned Jehoshaphat that he would have to flee for his life, and Ahab that he would not return victorious Ahab preferred the honeyed words of the massed prophets to the gloomy prediction of the lone Micaiah Even Jehoshaphat allowed himself to be persuaded, and the siege of Ramoth-Gilead was commenced. The Syrians realized that their main hope of success was to deprive their foes of their leader. Orders were given to find and to kill Ahab. The latter strove to cheat the enemy by entering the battle disguised, hoping that Jehoshaphat might be taken for him. The subterfuge was vain. Though Jehoshaphat was hotly assailed he escaped by revealing his identity. On the other hand, a chance arrow wounded Ahab mortally. He withdrew from the fight and at eventide he died. A proclamation demobilizing the army was made, and the ill-fated campaign was over almost before it had begun.
Of the three parables related in connection with these events, that of Zedekiah needs no comment. Micaiah’s word-pictures furnish more food for thought. The parable of shepherd and sheep was naturally a favorite Jewish theme, and the general lesson of the prophet’s words is clear. Israel are the sheep. The man who should have shepherded them but did not do so was Ahab. A difficulty of interpretation arises, however, if we regard the parable as relating o the time after the battle. Sheep left grazing on the hills would not find their way to their pens without guidance, and the suggestion that Israel should return home in peace does not seem appropriate to a disastrous retreat. If we refer the parable to a situation before the battle the difficulty disappears. Although Ahab was a brave leader, and, judged by human standards, a virile king, he was a failure as a spiritual shepherd and master, and Israel in this sense were as sheep without a shepherd. Far better that the army should be disbanded now and the men sent home in peace, than that they should go to material and spiritual defeat under a king who had ceased to show any allegiance to the God of his fathers.
The second parable, which is a purely imaginary story, raises a number of interesting points. Its theme is the infinite capacity of human nature to believe what it wants to believe. The theme is elaborated by means of the device, used in other places in both Old and New Testaments, of an evil spirit from the Lord deceiving evil men. Thus, in connection with the parable of the trees (Judges 9), the fulfillment of the parable is brought about by the advent of an evil spirit from God causing mutual suspicion between Abimelech and the men of Schechem. It was also an evil spirit from the Lord which caused Saul to try to destroy David with a javelin, while in the New Testament record it was delusion from God that caused men, who already had refused o receive the love of the truth and did not like to retain God in their knowledge to believe a lie.
Free will still Free
In all these cases there is no question of interference with the free will of those concerned. None of them were constrained to do what he did not want to do, or to believe what he did not want to believe. On the contrary, he was allowed o have it as he loved to have it. The first lesson of the parable is that there lies behind it “a great truth to which religious experience of all ages bears witness. The man who sells himself to work evil, loses his power of discerning between good and evil; the flattering tongue of a number of worldly prophets prevails with such a man over the utterances of the one spiritually minded seer” — (Barnes).
God was not unjust to Ahab. Although the four hundred time-serving prophets claimed that they were prophets of Yahweh and were accepted as such by Jehoshaphat and, therefore, by Ahab (“is there not a prophet of the Lord, besides?” asked the former), a true message from God was provided in the words of Micaiah, which would have saved Ahab if he had heeded it. But he was so full of wishful thinking, and the words of the false prophets accorded so well with his desires, that he refused to hear the lone voice of sanity, and became the architect of his own doom.
Micaiah’s parables were addressed mainly, but not wholly, to Ahab, Jehoshaphat had also to learn his lesson. It seems almost incredible that, having justly estimated the worthlessness of the promises of the false prophets, and insisting on hearing the opinion of a true seer, the king of Judah should be willing to engage in an enterprise which he knew was sure to fail Yet such was Ahab s power over him that he consented to go His misgivings must have increased when Ahab calmly proposed that he should concentrate the battle upon himself by dressing regally, while Ahab disguised himself as an ordinary soldier His rashness nearly cost him his life Had there not been good things found in him, in that he had taken away the groves out of the land and had prepared his heart to seek God (2nd Chronicles 19 3), he would probably have shared the fate of Ahab As it was, though being brought very near to destruction by his folly, God heard his cry of distress in the battle, and caused the Syrian captains to turn back from pursuing him This was not all, for when the battle was over and he had returned to Jerusalem, the prophet of God waited upon him to inform him that he had incurred the wrath of the Lord and to administer the stinging rebuke, “Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that hate the Lord?” Jehoshaphat profited by his lesson, and, apart from one subsequent lapse, resulting in the loss of a number of ships in the Red Sea (2nd Chronicles 20 35-37), his reign was right in the sight of the Lord
Outnumbered Yet Steadfast
An effective counterpoise to the lack of moral fiber in both Ahab and Jehoshaphat is found in the staunchness of Micaiah The false prophets were four hundred men and he only remained a true seer of the Lord Yet he would not prophesy smooth things His ironical first reply to Ahab’s question about the possibility of victory shows clearly that he knew that, whatever he said, Ahab would do what he had set his heart on doing, and that no matter how graphic his parables might be, they would not dissuade the monarch He did not flinch from judgment and prison, although his quest was useless He stands with such men as Daniel, Jeremiah, Peter and John, who, like him, found their support in the belief, “I saw the Lord,” and steadfastly declined, regardless of penalty, to subordinate the Word of God to the word of man
A French proverb says of human nature that the more it changes the more it is the same, and as much as any Bible history, the story of Micaiah is true for all ages including our own We do not command men, as Ahab commanded them, or speak by inspiration, as Micaiah did, but in our own small sphere we face their problems anew For us the parables have two messages, one stern, and the other gracious The first is that in our spiritual lives we must avoid complacency and drift The theory that all will come right in the end is utterly untrue if we are listening only to voices which tell us comfortable things and making no effort to constrain ourselves to hear the still small voice of God and obey its dictates Ahab might have escaped a bloody death at Ramoth-Gilead had he listened to the son of Imlah rather than to the son of Chenaanah So shall we escape if we listen to the Word of God, gird up the loins of our mind and determine to follow the Word against all loss of temporal advantage Micaiah is a pattern for us here
When we have learned the first lesson, the second is gentle and sweet It is of the almost unbelievable long-suffering of God Even when Ahab had been flattered and seduced by the multitude of deceivers, room for repentance was found for him, at the eleventh hour, and it was only when he spurned the divine counsel that he was suffered to go to his death The previous fidelity of Jehoshaphat won him an even further opportunity He, too, listened to Micaiahs parables heedlessly, but on his repentance he was snatched from death when it was fast closing in upon him Thus the parable bids us behold both the goodness and severity of God and gives us the assurance, comforting if rightly received, that His goodness fails not for us unless, in our determined self will, we quench it.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One