Divine Treachery
“The Lord said to him, ‘How?’ And he said, ‘I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ Then He said, ‘You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.’ Now therefore, behold, the Lord has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the Lord has proclaimed disaster against you.” 1 Kings 22:22-23 NASB
Go and do so– We serve a very strange God. At least that’s what seems to be the case when we read stories like this one about the prophet Micaiah. King Ahab wants to go to war with Aram, but he first inquires of the official prophets about the possibility of success. All of them tell him he will be victorious; all that is, except Micaiah. At first the king doesn’t even want to ask Micaiah because he hates Micaiah for constantly prophesying bad things. But he needs to know, so he summons Micaiah. Amazingly, Micaiah delivers a message of victory. The king can’t believe it, so he presses the point. Then Micaiah reveals the truth, and the truth is that God is tricking Ahab into listening to the other prophets so that Ahab will go into battle and be defeated. Lambert writes, “Oddly enough, Micaiah reveals this divine treachery to Ahab. He does not do so in an attempt to convince Ahab not to enter into battle; that would run against the divine plan.”[1] Micaiah has another purpose in mind. But the fact is that God wants to fool Ahab so that he will die on the battlefield.
What? Does this text say that God deliberately tricks Ahab into war so that Ahab will be killed? Yes, it does. Now wait a minute. God can’t really be like that. It must be the case that God simply allowed the false prophets to speak lies. No, I’m afraid not. Notice the words of the text. God said, “You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.” God is the active agent in the treachery. God uses the prophets as the emissaries of His deception. The fact that Ahab knows God is tricking him but he goes anyway is simply a sign of Ahab’s arrogance. It does not remove the fact that God enlisted the prophets to tell Ahab a lie.
Passages like this cause enormous difficulties for Western believers. We have grown up in a world where God is the perfect, infinite, all-knowing, completely moral projection of a human geopolitical and ethical utopia. We can’t even imagine a God who would lie to men. That simply isn’t the way God behaves. But the biblical text is not Western. It doesn’t think in Western categories. It doesn’t portray God with Western attributes. And it can’t be forced to say what it doesn’t say without eliminating stories like this one. As Lambert notes, the point of the prophet’s revelation is to demonstrate God’s total sovereignty over all the events, including the confusion, treachery and blindness of the human actors. The prophet’s purpose is to justify God’s action because it is God, not Ahab, who is really in charge. The story, told generations later, offers an explanation to the audience about why things don’t work out the way we want them to. We aren’t in control. In fact, sometimes God is working against us. Our Western problem is that we don’t want a God like this so we come up with ways to circumvent the implications. But it wasn’t a problem for ancient Israel. The men and women of that culture lived in a different world, a world where the power of the gods was a constant concern, and in that world, the God of Israel asserts His power over everything. Stories like these are not lessons in moral education. They are examples of YHVH demonstrating His absolute dominion over Man.
Get used to it!
Topical Index: treachery, lie, sovereignty, power, 1 Kings 22:22-23
This is so true. Psalm 18:26 David tells us.Depending on what translation you use , it can be shrewd,froward,perverse toward the wicked. Not only does God use deception, he allows others to do so and says they have great faith .Mentions them by name the midwives Shifra and Puah and Rahab. I myself have used it. Doing hospice care. In assisted living you can not assign 24 hour staff to sit with a dying pt.you have others to care for. Unless family can keep a 24 hour vigil or they can pay someone (which most can’t) family do not see the pain and struggle some go through when dying. If family was not there and they ask “did they struggle was it painful”,do I tell them the gruesome details NO I tell them disinformation they died peacefully. As far as God using deceit or disinformation to thwart evil who are we to tell him he can’t . I sure am careful not to use can’t in any reference to God.Note ,if we use it for our own gain than that’s another issue entirely.
This is so totally foreign to Western thought! This would go over like a lead balloon right along with some other recent posts!
I am continually amazed at how far the original gospel has been hijacked. I am intrigued by the tribal ways in relation to what you are pointing out regarding scripture these days.
I can see where our society (American) is much like Rome. Our government is fashioned after Rome. So to our legal system and the fact that our government regularly tosses “bread and circus” to its citizens who mostly just go right along.
So few seem to have the ability to think for themselves especially when it comes to religion/politics. If one doesn’t have some formal education then its assumed they know nothing.
Anyways, I digress. I like this passionate God of the Israelites. I never believed that God is neuter and benign about things. Why wouldn’t God do what He did with Ahab? Why would we think He has stopped being whom He is and transformed into this strange 3 in 1 creature that is preached today?
Sure doesn’t help me “fit in” any better than I did yesterday!
I am grateful for your thought provoking words. I feel more growing pains coming on!!
Thanks for the video!!!.We have markets here too but definitely not the flavor of making it a family event. Guess we westerners are to much in a hurry.
Ever felt you were in a divine headwind? The harder you tried to ‘do right’ the worse it got? That is a very carefully shaped wind: it is designed to sharpen and to winnow; to flatten and to wear you out, and you KNOW IT! But you can’t quit because your conscience won’t let you do other than what you believe is ‘right’. Well, come to find out, my intentions were the best I had, and the knowledge I was attempting to put into practice was the best I had been handed, but there were key pieces missing and vast errors that needed to be exposed, too. If I had not tried my best, I would not have been able to see either.
I have also prayed for such a wind (curses) to slow a wicked person down: to wear them out, too, and expose the truth to them, too, for the purposes of making them QUIT.
Blindness to error is CHOSEN, I am convinced, because I have observed that all who seek the truth and are willing to humble up enough to hear it, do. Truth is, truth is what we are all running from: not seeking out! Deception only works if we want to be deceived.
The wind is the same on all: whether it works to refine us or to confirm us in our fatal desires is determined by the direction WE choose to be going in.
“But to every mind there openeth,
A way, and way, and away,
A high soul climbs the highway,
And the low soul gropes the low,
And in between on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth,
A high way and a low,
And every mind decideth,
The way his soul shall go.
One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
‘Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.
Like the winds of the sea
Are the waves of time,
As we journey along through life,
‘Tis the set of the soul,
That determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.”
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
‘Deception only works if we want to be deceived.’
It’s hard to imagine what you are talking about without examples. I can’t say I agree. My first reaction to reading this sentence was how complicated the situation is. People are being poisoned and have been since around the mid 50’s (before then as well) on a regular basis. Brain damage is normal. That together with brainwashing makes it very difficult. Dr. Fallon, a neuroscientist, found out by accident that he was brain damaged. How many people do not know that they are? And how many people don’t know that others are too? Difficult people. Difficult relationships.
I totally agree on the poisoning! I have worked for some time with super sick people, and they all have been poisoned on multiple levels, including toxic relationships that opened the door to further vulnerability to poisonous mindsets and victimization, too. I used to believe that all people would want to be free of all that. I am afraid I don’t believe that any more. People grow used to the lack of responsibility that victimhood affords them, and they fear freedom that returns them to that responsibility. They would rather be sick!
I believe that God has the ability to keep us safe from deception and oppression, as well as their results (because He did that for me), as well as redeem us from those results, too; but only if we don’t want to go into sin by succumbing to the peculiar temptations of that deception and oppression. I now suspect that people embrace deception (and all the poisons in our environment, too) to the extent that they don’t want to face the ensuing return to responsibility that a return to function presupposes. Sin and sickness (consequences of sin) seduce by promising folks that they are not responsible (definition of a victim). We fall for that because we want to. (For example, realize that only SOME of us are being poisoned, even though the poisons themselves are ubiquitous.)
People can and do rise above every possible challenge IF they choose to, and that includes all the various poisons and byproducts of evil the devil can devise. God can and does meet us in every place we reach out to Him, and detox from sin and all its effects is what salvation consists of. If you aren’t completely free yet, don’t blame whatever; know that you are still falling for the seduction of self pity. There are over three thousand promises in the Word of God that assure us of the fact that poison of all kinds only works if we agree. Our bodies, minds and spirits were designed to overcome all challenges as long as we keep our relationship and obedience to God.
Just one more thought. We just had memorial day. I for one love history .Just think of the many good covert operations that were used to save thousands.We applaud men ,give medals and I for one am so grateful for the lives they saved. Yes they used deception,ruse,and untruths to do it . I could not look them in the eye and call them a bunch of liars for doing it and their human. In my humble opinion, I think God to be perfection in what I think of as a perfect covert operation to stop evil not just slow it down with Ahab.
We are living in those times much like ‘the days of Noah’ when whatsoever the human mind can conceive it can do ie our advanced technologies, experiments in transhumanism, AI, mind-control… we need to be reminded of these stories where YHWH demonstrates his absolute dominion over man. I can understand why the Israelites felt like grasshoppers after scouting the promised land inhabited by the warlike Anakims probably descendants of the Nephilims but reading David’s words to Goliath, “You come against me with sword & spear & javelin but I come against you in the name of the Lord, the God of the armies of Israel whom you have defied…today the whole world will know there is a God in Israel…for the battle is the Lord’s” puts some iron into my backbone! I am always amazed that there is nothing new that has not already been revealed in the Old & New Testament. I’m gratefully getting used to it ALL!
For for those of us who call ourselves Biblical Supernaturalists- those who believe in an unseen supernatural world of Spiritual entities (Angels and Demons, etc.) that intersects and actively interacts with our world, this passage is but one of many examples of their ubiquitous relationship with human beings (almost always hidden and unaware by us, except by revelation or contemplative hindsight). But even for those of us who already believe in a Supernatural realm and Divine sovereignty there are two striking difficulties in this passage; first it shows that YHWH is either VERY humble in restraining His Divine attributes in order to allow others to participate in ruling the Cosmos in a kind of Divine Democracy or He is not All Knowing and All Wise, in that He is taking advise from members of His Divine Council (see Psalm 83) on how to handle a particularly difficult situation involving King Ahab. If Omnipotent could He not strike the King dead in any number of terrible ways, by disease, a lighting bolt, a scorpion sting? Why ask subordinates? That He takes the advise of a Spirit to go and become a “lying spirit” in the mouth of all his prophets is the second notable problem in this passage. Is it that a “good” spirit takes upon itself “evil” qualities in order to achieve YHWH’s bidding or was it that a fallen evil spirit was being allowed to do what it naturally does? If so, what are fallen, evil spirits doing in heaven? Is YHWH in charge of ALL spirits, good and bad equally, and do they all have equal access to His Throne? I have always assumed a seperation of Kingdoms, an eternal enmity between good and evil, that Ha Satan was cast out of heaven, but either way, it proves that “His ways are not our ways”. If God is sovereign over ALL in the heavenly realm, as well as upon and under the earth and seas and everything, everyone in it, then it must include demons, fallen angels, and false gods for there is no other “place” to exist outside “all”. In light of this passage maybe the idiom “the devil is in the details” should not only be taken literally, but understood that it was YHWH who set him there!
Well said Michael just a slight correction I think you mean psalm 82.
Yes, of course. PSALM 82. Either the devil forgot to be in that detail or fat fingers. Thanks.