1 Kings 22:1-38 Part 1: The Prophets and the Prophet

Introduction

Let’s Pray.

Let’s find our text’s place in Scripture so we know where we’re at.

Israel comes out of Egypt and is ruled by the judges.

The people of Israel reject the Lord’s rule over them and demand a king.

God gives them Saul, and then David, and then Solomon, and then Solomon’s son rules poorly and the kingdom splits into the northern and southern kingdoms. Kings who don’t descend from David rule the northern kingdom, which is still called Israel. David’s line rules the southern kingdom, which is called Judah. Jerusalem is in Judah, which is a problem for the kings of the northern kingdom. They can’t have their citizens going up—one always goes up to Jerusalem—for fear that they might get too cozy with the other tribes in the kingdom of Judah and start thinking about reunification.

So, the northern kingdom sets up some high places of their own and start a syncretistic religion that looks like they’re worshipping God but they’re kind of doing it their own way and making up their own rules as they go. So they fall away from the faith quickly and begin worshipping the Baals and Ashteroth.

The king of Israel right now is named Ahab. He’s bad.

The king of Judah right now is named Jehoshaphat. He fears the Lord and serves him.

We’re going to look at this text twice; this week and next week. This week we’re going to look at the prophets and the prophet. Next week we’re going to look at the kings and the king.

This week, though, is the prophets and the prophet. There’s your title. The prophets, and the prophet.

It’s been a while since we’ve done narrative text. Getting this narrative out in front of us is going to take five or six minutes. It’s a good chunk of text. But it’s a great story, and we’re going to read it in full this week and next week. Don’t get bored and wish we would hurry up and get to the sermon part while we read. This is the good part.

Also, we customarily use the English Standard Version here. Today I’m going to be reading from the American Literary Version, because it uses the Covenant name of the Lord. Yahweh. I am doing this because the use of God’s covenant name is actually an important part of the text. In your Bibles, you will probably see LORD in all caps. That usually means Yahweh was used there. Lord with a little o-r-d means another word was used. This is the Word of the Lord.

1 Kings 22:1-28

Whew. That’s quite a story, and that’s quite an ending. That’s not quite appropriate for polite company. But God put it in scripture for a reason, so let’s see if we can’t tease out why over the next two weeks.

Today, we’re going to be focusing on verses 1-28. We’re looking at the Prophets, and the Prophet.

The main point that we’re going to pull from this text today is that the word of the Lord cannot be bound. God’s word cannot be bound.

We’re going to come at this through three main headings:

The False Prophets

The Hearers’ Expectation

The Lord’s Prophet

1. The False Prophets (v1-12)

Ask the Lord through False Prophets

So Ahab asks Jehosaphat for military assistance. Jehosaphat says sure thing. I am as you are, my people as your people, my horses as your horses.” Then he asks the king of Israel to double-check with God to make sure that he is with them in this endeavor.

So Ahab says, “Sure thing, I’ve got you covered. So we can be extra sure, I’m not just going to ask one prophet. I’ve got 400 we can check with.”

The False Prophets give False Approval

And all four hundred of these prophets say, “Go up, for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.”

Righteous king is dissatisfied with false message

The language here is fascinating. Jehosaphat says Yahweh. Jehosaphat wants to ask Yahweh for his word. The prophets say Adonai, which means Lord, but is not the covenant name of the God of Israel, will give it into their hands.

Words mean things. Mark Twain once quipped that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

Sometimes you can hear something and think it carries a great deal more meaning than it does. I walked into a battalion’s Combat Operations Center about two hours before they were going to conduct artillery live fire training. To do this, they really only needed to talk to two other groups: the observers, who would look at the targets, and the artillery, who would shoot the targets. It’s a very simple setup.

I go find the CommO and ask, “Hey, how’s comm?” It’s a pretty open-ended question.

He gives me the thumbs up and confidently says, “We’re good. Comm’s up.”

Now, for those of you who know, “up” is a vague term. You always need to scratch a little deeper when someone says “up.”

So I ask. “CommO. Who are you up with?”

He pauses. Blinks. I can see the gears turning. Nothing. He says, “I need to go find out and get back to you on that.”

See, “Up” sounds good, but it doesn’t mean much at all! He meant his gear was turned on and the green blinking lights on the front of his radios made him feel good. He only had two people to talk to, and he had no idea who they were or if he was talking to them!

Words mean things.

Jehosaphat asks, “Can we inquire of Yahweh?” The prophets say, “Adonai says he will deliver it into your hands!”

At this point, Jehosaphat probably already knows who he’s dealing with. But the narrator doesn’t tell us that they started singing Hillsong and Jehosaphat began to get suspicious of them because the southern kingdom only sang psalms. The narrator just tips us off with the Yahweh-Adonai-Yahweh contrast. He doesn’t have to tell us everything.

Perhaps I’m pressing this word shift too hard. But Jehosaphat knows something’s off, and so he turns to Ahab and asks in verse 7, “Is there not here another prophet of Yahweh of whom we may inquire?” Jehosaphat’s getting specific. He wants to hear from YAHWEH. He’s asking politely, but he’s saying, “Hey, is there a real prophet of Yahweh we can talk to?”

This should always be our attitude about hearing God’s word. We should be insistent on hearing from God, not from man. That’s why correct preaching is so important. The role of the preacher is to say, “Thus says the Lord.”

Wicked king hates the righteous prophet

Turns out, Ahab knows exactly what Jehosaphat is talking about. Let’s look at his response to this in verse 8. “There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord, Miciah the son of Imlah, but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil.”

Isn’t that fascinating. The wicked king hates the true prophet because he hates the true prophet’s message.

English Puritan Stephen Charnock observed that “Men shun the thoughts of what they do not love. If we will not let truth in, which is a message from heaven, it is a sign we care not for the person from whom it comes.” (WSC5p500)

Ahab hates the messenger because he hates the message because he hates the God who sent it.

And isn’t it doubly fascinating when we consider the provision of the Lord for Ahab here. He hasn’t been cut off from the word of the Lord. He knows exactly who to talk to to hear it and exactly where to send his officials off to to go bring him.

God provides his word to Ahab FREELY, and Ahab rejects it because he rejects God. And yet God graciously still speaks to Ahab.

False prophets tell of certain success

The four hundred prophets he has in front of him through are telling him exactly what he wants to hear. Isn’t this always the way with false teachers?

2 Timothy 4:3 ESV

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions,

And the false prophet the narrator highlights out of these 400 false prophets is Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah. Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah makes horns out of iron and invokes the name of Yahweh. Remember our discussion on language? The prophets are now saying “Yahweh says.” They might have always been speaking on behalf of Yahweh, but from now on in the text they exclusively use God’s covenant name. It appears to me that they’ve changed their message to fit what Jehosaphat is asking for.

I once had the distinct pleasure of not being the guy briefing the safety policy. Why? Well, the CO stood up at the beginning of the 50+ slide brief, and announced that he hated the word “safety,” because nothing we do is safe. It’s all risky, but we manage the risks. So he announced that from now on nobody was allowed to say “safe” but instead had to use “risk management.”

The only problem was that every single slide had the word “Safe” or “Safety” on it, and that the briefer had to give the entire brief and do his best to say “risk management” every time the word “safety” was on a slide.

That’s basically what false prophets do. They match their message to your itching ears, and do not speak the word of the Lord.

2. The Expectation (v13-14)

English Standard Version Chapter 22

13 And the messenger who went to summon Micaiah said to him, “Behold, the words of the prophets with one accord are favorable to the king. Let your word be like the word of one of them, and speak favorably.” 14 But Micaiah said, “As the LORD lives, what the LORD says to me, that I will speak.”

True prophet under pressure to conform

Well, some things never change.

A friend of mine gave me a copy of the new book “Shepherds for Sale.” The principal contention being made in it is that a number of high-visibility evangelical leaders have sold out to left-wing ideology, quite literally. The author’s thesis is that money from the political left has bought these preachers for the left and made them push a leftist agenda from the pulpit.

Whether or not the author is right, she captures an important truth: the world is always trying to conform the gospel message to its tastes.

Here, we have the true prophet of the Lord under pressure to conform his message to agree with what Ahab wants to hear and what the other prophets are saying.

The messenger comes to get Micaiah and lets him know the situation. He may even think he’s doing Micaiah a favor here. “Look, Micaiah, let me update you so you can get out in front of this. There’s four hundred prophets telling Ahab that he’s going to be successful. Look, man, just be a team player and say the same stuff they’re saying.”

Maybe he has other reasons. In any case, he lets Micaiah know what everyone else is saying, and tells him that he should get with the program.

It’s easy to lose sight of how much pressure Micaiah is under because these two verses are so short. There’s political pressure, and there’s religious pressure. It’s a one-two punch.

Micaiah has just been summoned to come address not one, but two kings. And one of them, Ahab, has a wife who really doesn’t think her day is complete unless she’s killed at least one of the Lord’s prophets.

There are also four hundred prophets he’s got to consider. That’s not a small number. It’s hard enough to speak out when you’re on a team of five people and you know the other four are going to dog pile you if you say something they don’t like. But four hundred of them, and they were there first, and they’ve all been saying what Ahab wants to hear? It’s tough to imagine following that.

The author draws our attention to one of these false prophets in particular, who is also the first one to invoke the name of Yahweh in our text: Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah, who has made for himself iron horns as props to make his point clearer. We first have the displeasure of meeting him back in verse 11.

Dr. Dale Ralph Davis wrote an excellent commentary on the book of 1 Kings, and he does a good job of explaining the religious pressure Micaiah is facing here.

You see, Zedekiah’s horns and prophecy are probably actually tied to Deuteronomy 33:17. According to Dr. Davis, this means the false prophets are now using the prophetic formula, “Thus says Yahweh,” Zedekiah is claiming a scriptural promise is relevant to Ahab here, and there are four hundred other prophets behind him that keep agreeing with everything he’s saying.

Political and religious pressure can go hand in hand like that. Some things never change. At the Diet of Worms, Charles V, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, arrayed in all his splendor with representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in all their finery asked the reformer Martin Luther if he would recant or persist in his teachings that were contrary to those of the Roman Catholic Church.

Martin Luther’s answer to Charles V at the Diet of Worms sounds an awful lot like Micaiah’s answer here. “If I am not satisfied by the very text I have cited, and if my judgment is not in this way brought into subjection to God’s word, I neither can nor will retract anything; for it cannot be either safe or honest for a Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.”

So went Micaiah’s answer to this unnamed messenger: “As the Lord lives, what the Lord says to me, that I will speak.”

So must our dedication be to keeping the word of the Lord pure, and to speaking it clearly.

And that brings us to our final point,

The Prophet (v15-28)

Ask the Lord through True Prophet/True Prophet Gives Approval

So Micaiah is brought before Ahab, and shocks us with what he says in verse 15. “Go up and triumph, Yahweh will give it into the hand of the king.”

Wait, didn’t he just say in verse 14 he’d only tell Ahab what the Lord told him to say? Is he going back on that already?

Wicked King is Dissatisfied with False Message

Ahab’s answer helps us understand what’s going on here, if my tone didn’t already clue you in. “Micaiah, how many times shall I make you swear that you speak to me nothing but the truth in the name of Yahweh?”

This is a familiar routine to Ahab. Micaiah tells Ahab what he wants to hear, but Ahab knows he’s just telling him what he wants to hear. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Micaiah knows Ahab isn’t going to listen, but wants to drive home the point that Ahab already knows the answer. And Ahab already knows the answer. He knows that God’s word isn’t that God is going to bless his endeavors.

The prophets sometimes like setting up the person they’re prophesying to to make their point for them.

Remember when Nathan went in to David after David had murdered Uriah for his wife Bathsheba, and Nathan tells him the parable about the rich man who had many lambs but instead of eating one of them took the poor man’s one lamb to eat? And David gets angry, and says that the rich man should pay for his crime, to which Nathan says, “You are the man?”

Micaiah says, “Sure, Ahab, go take Ramoth-gilead. The Lord is with you.”

And this provokes the answer out of Ahab. “Look, tell me what God really says.”

In verse 17, Micaiah tells him: I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains, as sheep that have no shepherd. And the Lord said, ‘These have no master; let each return to his home in peace.”

The translation: After this battle, Israel will have no leader, and the army will go home in peace. And of course, in verse 18 Ahab throws up his hands in exasperation to Jehosaphat and says, “Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil?”

The word of the Lord is truth.

Sometimes the truth requires you to stand alone.

On the evening of March 5, 1770 an angry mob of three or four hundred people in the city of Boston had surrounded private Hugh White, who was on guard duty outside the Boston Custom House, and was yelling at him and throwing rocks and clubs and oysters and snowballs and what-have-you at him. Captain Thomas Preston rushed to his aid with eight other soldiers and formed a line to keep the colonials away from private White. The crowd kept throwing things at the soldiers and yelling at them to fire. Well, someone threw a club that hit one of the soldiers in the head, which made him lose his balance and discharge his weapon. Hearing the gunshot, the other soldiers all fired as well, killing five and wounding six more.

The people of Boston may have wanted the redcoats gone before, but now they wanted these redcoats executed for murder. Upwards of 10,000 people attended the funerals, which was over two-thirds of the population of Boston at the time.

And then John Adams, who would later become our second President, was asked to serve as defense counsel for the soldiers. Everyone wanted these soldiers convicted and executed. But John Adams knew what had really happened, and he was determined that the soldiers would get a fair trial and that he would make the truth known, no matter what it cost him personally.

He held his ground, and because he made sure the truth came out in their trial all of them were acquitted of murder. Two were convicted of manslaughter, but instead of execution they were only branded on one thumb. I’d take that trade.

Truth can be hard. Just because you’re a prophet of the Lord doesn’t give you an automatic bravery shield where nothing bothers you anymore. You’re still human. And for telling the truth and relaying God’s word faithfully, Micaiah gets ridiculed and slapped by Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah. The narrator calls out his name in full twice. He really wants you to know that Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah, C-h-e-n-a-a-n-a-h, was the false prophet who persecuted the true prophet of the Lord.

Then, Ahab has him shipped off to prison on meager bread and water rations until Ahab’s return. It’s hard, and there’s often a price to be paid for proclaiming the word of the Lord. And yet Micaiah, the prophet of the Lord, is as good as his word in verse 14. “What the Lord says to me, that will I speak.”

It’s the same with preaching today. The preacher is called to speak the word of God to the congregation. The church is called to proclaim the gospel, to know Jesus and to make him known. This isn’t an easy thing. Just as we saw in Paul’s letter earlier, in 2 Timothy 2:1-9, Paul was in chains because he’d proclaimed God’s word and he’d been thrown in prison for it. But like we also saw in Timothy, and like we see here, God’s word is not bound.

We’re not going to touch on the significance of the heavenly throne room scene today. That will come next week. But let’s just note God’s gracious provision for Micaiah in providing that vision. God has just shown Micaiah that he is sovereign and that he’s working out all things according to the purpose of his will. That knowledge didn’t make that slap sting any less or the days spent in prison on meager rations of bread and water shorter, but that’s the kind of knowledge you can hang your hope on.

And we, who have seen the fullness of God’s revelation in the person and work of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, have an even clearer foundation than Micaiah’s to hang our hope on.

Let’s pray.

Lord,

Keep us from tickling our ears with the words of false preachers who claim to speak in your name. Help us to resist the pressure of the world to conform our proclamation of your gospel to its expectations. And give us boldness through the sure foundation of Jesus Christ, our only hope in life and death, to proclaim your word, as we know Jesus and make him known, and use us to help bring in the fullness of your people.

Amen.