Bible Study - 2 Chronicles 18:12-16

Micaiah’s Prophecy Before Ahab and Jehoshaphat

All right, 2 Chronicles 18, we're looking at verses 12 through 16. I'll read 12 through 22. 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. But Micaiah said, As the Lord lives, what my God says, that I will speak. And when he had come to the king, the king said to him, Micaiah, shall we go to Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall I refrain?

And he answered, Go up and triumph, they will be given into your hand. But the king said to him, How many times shall I make you swear that you speak to me nothing but the truth and the name of the Lord?

And he said, 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. And the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy good concerning me, but evil?

And Micaiah said, Therefore, hear the word of the Lord. I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the hosts of heaven standing on his right hand and on his left. And the Lord said, Who will entice Ahab, the king of Israel, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?

And one said one thing, and another said another. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, I will entice him. And the Lord said to him, By what means? And he said, I will go out and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.

And he said, You are to entice him, and you shall succeed. Go out and do so. Now, therefore, behold, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of these your prophets. The Lord has declared disaster concerning you.

Amen. So as we see in the passage that we've read, though it's not the one we're going to be looking at tonight, there's a parallel scene going on in heaven with the one before Micaiah. Jehoshaphat and Ahab are sitting on thrones at a threshing floor.

They're surrounded by 400 prophets. And God in heaven is sitting on a throne. He's surrounded by a bunch of angels. And he's taking counsel from the angels, saying, How should I deal with this situation?

I'm going to move this a little bit forward, because I cannot see you all that well. There we go. All right, verse 12. And the messenger that went to call Micaiah spoke to him, saying, Behold, the words of the prophets declared good to the king with one mouth.

The Messenger’s Pressure to Conform

Okay, so they are speaking well of Ahab's plan, and they are unanimous. And he explains this to basically let him know that he's going to be expected to agree with all these others. It's not just that they're speaking favorably, but they're speaking unanimously, and they are speaking what is good, you know, meaning what is favorable to the king, not necessarily what is righteous.

So 12b. Please let your word, therefore, be like one of theirs and speak good. Now, he confirms and says what my God says, I will speak it. But first, yeah, it's very clear that the expectation is he's supposed to speak good.

Now, why is it that this messenger says this? I do think that it seems he may have the duty of swearing in the prophet. You know, Ahab says, How many times shall I have you swear? It may be that this is his role to tell him what he's supposed to do.

Yet at the same time, obviously, when he says, say what is good, he has a motivation. He wants this thing, whether it be because of national pride in Israel, because he wants to also go to Ramoth Gilead, or maybe it's just because he's aware of how much of a hissy fit Ahab throws when he doesn't get what he wants, like he did with Naboth's vineyard.

Could be any of those things. He, yeah, there's several things in this passage. You know, I asked about the differences between this passage and the one in 1 Kings. There are several different particles that are dropped here.

So that the, yeah, I'll just read what I wrote here. He moves the particle of entreaty before behold, translated either as now or listen. He adds a conjunction before be like, typically translated as therefore, more explicitly motivating the request by conformity.

The messenger also drops the explicit mention of their words and uses one as an indefinite pronoun, which also makes this motivation for conformity more direct, not regarding the antecedent worthy of a second explicit mention.

The antecedent being words there. Okay, so for those who are just tuning in, the first and second Chronicles uses a lot of different texts. Genesis, first, second Samuel, first, second Kings. And the framing is sometimes a little different intentionally.

And Kings, the purpose of this passage was to talk about Ahab and Ahab's sin. The purpose of this passage is to talk about Jehoshaphat's sin. Jehoshaphat, the one who has allied himself with Ahab. And so there's a lot of different framing for that reason.

This doesn't seem to necessarily be motivated by this, but there is this intense pleading. You know, therefore you do this thing. Less politeness about it just in the shortness of the presentation. Now, the Chronicler sometimes does shorten passages, but it seems that this is, you know, he's presenting this with a very imperative framing.

Micaiah needs to speak the way that they want him to. And Micaiah said, as Jehovah lives, but my God says I will speak it. All right, so as he says, the Lord lives or as Jehovah lives, that is an oath formula.

Oaths, Prophetic Authority, and Speaking Under Constraint

You know, he's saying, I swear it. So once again, like I was saying, this messenger could be swearing him in and Ahab is going to mention, how many times shall I have you swear? This may be him responding to the situation, knowing that he's being sworn into court.

So not just an arbitrary oath he's deciding to make, but maybe this is even protocol for testifying in the king's court prophetically. Our confession says that we ought to swear if it's required by a lawful authority.

I was asked about that recently. I forget in what context, but there is a situation where even Jesus does this. He's completely silent at his trial. And finally, the high priest says, I adjure you. Are you the son of God?

He says, you have said so. So Jesus speaks when he is put under oath, where before he was just being silent. So you see that even with Jesus, where he accepts oaths placed on him by authority. And that seems to be what may be going on here too.

Even though you would think, well, isn't the prophet above the king in a sense? Not really. It's still a, it's a different kind of authority that is over him. All right. And he says, as Jehovah lives, what my God says, I will speak it.

And kings, that is just what the Lord says. Once again, common change in Chronicles. A lot of times he will drop the divine name, you know, Jehovah or Yahweh and just say God. But here he doesn't just say God.

He says, my God. So that is a phrase that has been interesting in Chronicles because the whole book is really about whether or not the kings of Judah are going to hold on to their covenant that they have with the Lord.

And so the phrase, your God, or my God has come up in places where that is under question, whether or not the kings of Judah will uphold the matter. Remember that Micaiah as a prophet of Yahweh is only there because Jehoshaphat has insisted that a prophet of Yahweh arrive and he was not satisfied with the other prophets that were produced.

So it seems that once again, the emphasis is on Jehoshaphat. The statements before about my God, your God, whether or not these Judean kings are going to follow. Yeah, that's just pressed by this notion of having a duty to a God who is in a sense possessed, you know, my God.

All right, verse 14. And when he had come to the king, the king said to him, Micaiah, will we go to Ramoth Gilead to battle or will I forbear? And he said, go up and prosper and they will be delivered into your hand.

All right, so what king is saying this? This is Ahab who is speaking, and I believe that's a little more evident in first kings, but it is Ahab. And then what is the meaning of Micaiah's response? So it's a sarcastic response, but he's saying that it will be that his battle will be successful.

And other questions about the difference? This time, the question or the differences are a little more significant. So in kings, he asked, will we forbear? Here he asks, will I forbear? Yeah, clearly the situation is different, right?

Jehoshaphat’s Compromise and Ahab’s Self-Interest

The whole point of this narrative is so that we will, Jehoshaphat will be rebuked at the end, why did he bother? Allying himself with Ahab, getting involved in things that he shouldn't be involved in, things that are none of his business.

And here, before in kings, it was a matter of we, but here the chronicler has framed it as just a matter of I. Ahab is doing his own little thing and Jehoshaphat is just along for the ride and shouldn't be.

Right, and so that is kind of emphasized by him just making this between Ahab and Micaiah and making it clear that Ahab's the selfish guy who wants to decide whether or not he's going to go to battle and he's not really thinking about Jehoshaphat.

Okay, but of course, this is a sarcastic thing. So there's something about the way he's saying it, or maybe he just knows that Ahab already knows the answer. So Ahab recognizes that this is not a serious prophecy.

Micaiah is not speaking seriously, speaking sarcastically. This does answer some things that you might wonder. If you're a serious kind of person who really cares about following God's law, there are a lot of questions that you would ask about lying.

You know, there are people who ask whether or not it's okay to act at all. Well, and there's a lot of reasons why it might not be, but one of them is just, is it lying to even act in a play, right? Beyond all the questions about the content of plays, et cetera, right?

Or is it okay to tell a joke? Is it okay to speak in sarcasm? Things like this. Here you have a prophet who's just been sworn in, who says something blatantly false, and this is above board. It's understood that this does not count as a violation of the ninth commandment, because it's not meant to be taken as truth.

So these are false words that are not intended in any way to really deceive. They're intended to basically rebuke someone who doesn't want the truth. All right, verse 15. And the king said to him, how many times will I adjure you that you speak to me nothing but the truth in the name of Jehovah?

So see, clearly he knows. And when he says adjure, that is in what we read in the ESV, I think was make you swear, right, the word adjure, just meaning make you swear, just swear you went to court, that kind of thing.

All right, and he's upset because he understands that this is a sarcastic response or a not truth, a not, yeah, not the real prophecy. It's the opposite of it. And yeah, I've already answered all these things about how you're supposed to understand his intent here.

All right, verse 16. And he said, I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains as sheep that have no shepherd. All right, this means they're going to be destroyed on the mountains right there going up to Ramoth Gilead.

The Scattered Sheep and the Failure of Israel’s Shepherds

So that implies that they will be at mountains. Also mountains being a place of worship, the idea being that, you know, as they pursue objectives that are not God's objectives, they will be on the mountains of foreign gods, that kind of thing.

In the Bible, being gathered together means success. It means strength. And being scattered means the opposite. So they will be scattered. And the picture of sheep means that they're spiritually weak.

They're not just physically weak. They are spiritually weak, having no good spiritual leader. Emphasizing the need for one, right? David is the good shepherd that the people of Judah should have eventually.

Now, of course, these are all words that are spoken to Ahab, but Jehoshaphat, king of Judah is in the picture. Also for anybody who's not familiar at this point, Israel and Judah, Judah being one of the tribes of Israel, are in a civil war and they have separated, but now they are back together by an alliance that shouldn't have been formed.

That's why you have the king of Israel and the king of Judah working together here. Okay, and he sees this. How does he see this? Because he has been given a vision by God, a prophetic vision. And Jehovah said, these have no master.

Let them return every man to his house in peace. They have no master. They have no sound leader. Ahab is going to die, and Ahab, even if he didn't, is not a good leader. And then what does it mean for them to return to their houses in peace, right?

Not being at war. It doesn't really mean... Peace sounds like a good thing here. It means defeat. They're just going to stop fighting. Yeah, and why should they return to their homes? Because the Lord will not bless the attack on Ramoth and Gilead.

Speaking Hard Truths Instead of What People Want to Hear

Okay, the reflection questions here are, what pressure, what pressures, I guess, do people face to speak what people want to hear? What does this imply for the kinds of things you say? What does this imply for the kind of people you listen to?

Yeah, you should be listening to people who are going to be willing to say hard things. They're the ones that you could trust for the truth. And there are a lot of people who will take a posture of confidence and authority, but if you pay attention, you'll realize they're only...

I think I mentioned this last time, this phrase, fighting yesterday's battles, right? Kind of attacking things that aren't really controversial at all anymore, and acting brave about doing it. But that's not really courage.

And you shouldn't be someone who expects others to say what is good, that kind of thing. You know, say what is good or what is pleasing to someone. There have been times where I will, especially at times when I'm interacting with...

Maybe someone knows that I'm a pastor, right? I'm just like other people outside the church. Someone knows that I'm a pastor, has a friend they want me to talk to, but then coaches me on what to say, because they really want to make sure that I don't say anything that sounds too bad.

And that always gets me. It's like, what's my role here? Am I just a puppet that's got the label pastor and people are supposed to respect that? That's not how that works. I do find that's interesting how people will do that just like this messenger who says, Now they're all saying this.

You got to say this thing. Yeah. Okay, any questions or any thoughts on the reflection? Well, we know that based on the way Ahab responds. He's aware, right? Now it's possible that he just out of a guilty conscience already knows what the Lord's going to say, in which case there doesn't even need to be a sarcastic tone for Micaiah to know.

If he already knows that Ahab has a guilty conscience, he'll just say the thing. And but he's a true prophet. He's not trying to lie. He knows what all the false prophets are saying. The lying spirit is in their mouth.

So he's not saying this out of truth. He's also not saying it out of fear. He's clearly not someone who's afraid of the situation. Yeah, just kind of necessary conclusion from the context. Yes. Good question.

Yeah, it is good to think about how to use your speech. They're different. You know, there's time for everything. As Ecclesiastes 3 says, sometimes sarcasm is a great way of rebuking. They have 400 prophets and they're hearing what they want to hear and they're bringing him in.

What a great way of rebuking by just saying the same thing that they're saying, you know, sarcastically. It is a, I mean, that's much better than saying, well, actually, the truth is you're not going to succeed.

You know, that's not, it's not really a rebuke. That's just a, that's just a, oh, well, here's the other thing. You can weigh this out with the 400, you know. He, Ahab needs rebuke. Sarcasm is a good form of rebuke.

Yes.

Right, right. Yeah.

Biblical Sarcasm, Riddles, and Forceful Speech

Yeah, as you look in the Bible at proper speech, you will find that sarcasm is one of the most frequent tools Scripture uses to get serious points across. And that's not what models what most people think is proper or kind speech.

Well, sometimes it's not kind, kind, right? Like it's not intended to be nice. It's specifically intended to be hard to take as opposed to being just easy to hear. This is probably one of the harder things to analyze and to compare to your cultural sensitivities is, how does the Bible speak that's very different than the way that you've been taught how to speak?

I mentioned that in that recent sermon. Was it, I guess it was two weeks ago when I was talking about plagiarism and made the analogy to political correctness, right? There's a way that people so insist on giving credit for every little detail that they would rob.

They would move credit from pathos into ethos, where it's not just about appealing to authorities, but it becomes proving that you're a true person and aren't lying. Whereas in Scripture, see people copy each other's words all the time without any concern about it.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, they're not. Luke says something that he got it from sources, but Matthew and Mark aren't bothering saying that. And if they did explain all the sources, that wouldn't necessarily add anything to the biblical weight of the testimony.

So why would we demand for ourselves certain kinds of speech? Now, obviously there's a, like I mentioned a couple Sundays ago, if you are in an academic environment where there are credentials that you are trying to get, and you are trying to prove your capacity to say something original, it makes sense to have rules like that.

But just an ordinary speech, the requirement to give credit to absolutely every idea that you would borrow from someone where else ends up blunting speech in the same way, for example, political correctness does, right?

If someone says, okay, you have to be very careful how you say any of these things because you can't offend any of these certain groups that may not fit into that category, et cetera, et cetera, right?

You end up blunting speech because now you can't say things that are effective at maybe even sometimes a harsh word is needed. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, lots of sarcasm there about how the term I've heard used there is over-realized eschatology.

They feel like they've already made it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you look at Paul saying all cretins are liars. And that's racist kind of talk you can't say today, you know, or Jesus and a lot of his speech is designed to be a bit of a riddle that only a few people can figure out.

And of course he has like a prophetic role in doing it that way. Not everybody necessarily has a reason to do that, but a lot of the things he says have such punch because he's not sitting there making a thousand qualifications, right?

It's like an unjust judge and he doesn't sit there and explain that God is actually a just judge. So when I'm comparing him to an unjust judge, don't think that he's not really just, you know, or he says, cut off your hand, poke out your eye.

Now, I don't really mean cut off your hand. There's almost always something you can do instead of cutting off your hand. You know, he just says cut off your hand and it has force because he's saying that without making all the qualifications.

And if you analyze all the different speech that exists in scripture and see which speech is being upheld as good speech and compare it to the expectations that speakers, whether it be to peers or people who are speaking to those under them or whatever it may be, what speech is expected or required, you'll find a lot of times it does not match what biblical patterns of effective and powerful speech are.

The Divine Council and God’s Heavenly Kingship

Yes. Oh, you can go ahead. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good question. So it's in a lot of passages. Job talks about it. Psalm 82, which is right here, talks about it. Yeah, God taking counsel. The fact that he uses angels and even takes counsel from them, even though he does all things according to the counsel of his own will, right?

Scripture explicitly denies that he takes the counsel from others and yet he goes to the counsel of angels. It gives you pictures of things that you wouldn't have a picture of otherwise. Just like the question, why didn't God just create the whole world immediately?

Why did he do it over six days? Well, it illustrates things about this. Yeah, if he is a good king and we're supposed to think of him as a good king, then it makes sense that he would have excellent counsel, you know, and we just have this picture of this excellent counsel and he has this enemy that shows up occasionally, this lying spirit, I believe is Satan.

And just like in Job where Satan shows up at the council, same thing's happening here. Yeah, it gives you more of a picture of God as king than you would have otherwise. Same reason why he describes himself anthropomorphically at other times, saying that he protects us under his wing or he looks down from heaven even though he already knows everything.

He doesn't look, he doesn't have eyes. You know, talks about his hand, that kind of things. Those are just pictures to help us. And even him going through the, I don't want to say charade as though it's totally meaningless or anything, but even going through the motions of having an angelic counsel shows us the quality of him as a king above all.

It seems to be bigger things. It seems that sometimes he holds counsel with them as opposed to like a constantly ongoing thing. And I would say as far as the health of it, scripture tells us about it.

So it is something we're supposed to understand. I do think we're supposed to engage in healthy speculation about matters. We're not supposed to go beyond what God has told us, but at the same time, if there are implications for what he's told us, that's good.

If it causes us to wonder about the goodness of heaven, that is a good thing, right? There's those details. I think a good example of going too far would be Michael Heisser. If you've never read his book, The Unseen Realm, it's a helpful book if you never thought about this stuff before.

He approaches this like the divine counsel stuff as though nobody had ever heard of this before. And he kind of takes out his license to just go run with it. And he ends up saying stuff like, well, when God says, let us make man in our own image, that's God talking to the angels.

And yeah, that's not good. You're making the angels creators with God and stuff like that. No, I think it's very healthy to see it as a picture of the Trinity. Let us. But no, he is. But he's just pretty eager to see.

He's eager to see this in a lot of places. Partly because I don't know if this is me misreading him, but I get the impression he feels like nobody else ever saw this. And so he doesn't feel like, he didn't feel like he had examples to go by.

That's me putting words in his mouth. But I see this with a lot of people who don't seem very versed in older writers, impuritans or whatever, right? They'll find something that is a well-established older thought and they don't think anybody else has it.

And that gives them creative freedom, right? For example, Francis Chan, I forget the name of his church, but he's got that whole house church network in San Francisco, right? And his thing was, he's in this mega church.

He's like, this isn't what church looks like in Scripture. We've got to just start over from scratch and go back to the Bible. And so that gives him license to come up with this crazy model, right? Where now they have deacons, but originally they didn't.

And like all kinds of, you know, where they have to, they were forcing splits every two years. I think now it's more flexible, but they were saying, all right, like by two years, we've got to have four pastors and then we split these little house churches.

Yeah. And all this has license because if you really think nobody else has looked at this before, then you are the trailblazer and that gives you a little permission to make some mistakes, right? But that's, but if you haven't done the work to see if anybody has thought about this,.

And a lot of people have written about what the church should look like. Yeah, that is a,.

Yeah, well, if you mean particular age lasting for 150 years, yeah, yeah, I do. Yeah, there's a certain, well, there's an arrogance that came after the enlightenment. Yeah, exactly. Right, where the value of the past is not as great because we're kind of venturing on to new things as opposed to trying to build on what came before as much.

Learning from Past Generations and Earlier Christian Writers

Yeah, let me read a couple of verses. Deuteronomy 32, seven. Remember the days of old and consider the generations past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders and they will inform you. Also, build dad speaking to Job in Job eight through 10.

Please inquire of past generations and consider the discoveries of their fathers. For we were born yesterday and know nothing. Our days on earth are but a shadow. Will they not teach you and tell you and speak from their understanding?

Those are both things that I have, that I quote in the book that's upcoming. I am done with that now. Praise God. That's a prayer of praise for tonight. But the point there being that whether it be church, whether it be whatever the other, oh, the angelic council, whether it be simony and selling spiritual things, there's an obligation to go back and look at what questions were people asking?

What answers were they giving? And if you don't do that work, you are going to end up in weird places. And before I was not able to do that work because all the Latin sources remained so inaccessible.

Now they're much more accessible. So we're able to do that work. And yeah, we're being diligent to do it. All right, any other questions about this passage?

Yes, right.

Right, yeah. And Abraham's prayer, you know, if there are only 10 left in the city, et cetera, those are all real interactions. Yeah, okay. One more thing, since this is a passage that talks about so directly about lying.

Truth, Deception, and the Ethics of Lying

Okay, so just a few thoughts on lies. Yeah, speaking untrue things without an intent to deceive, as we see here, even under oath, et cetera. It's not forbidden. It is also not forbidden to speak true things with an intent to deceive if someone is not owed the truth.

You see that number of times you see the Lord counsel Samuel to say that he's taking a sacrifice. And that's why Saul lets him go, even though he, even though actually, in addition to taking a sacrifice, which was a true thing, the real reason that Samuel was going was to anoint one of the sons of Jesse as king instead of Saul.

So God even instructs Samuel how to misdirect. And then you see this with Jesus also. Jesus pretended like he was going to, he acted like he was going to continue on the road at Emmaus, and then they kept him.

So he kind of maintains his false identity by misdirecting. But then it would be a lie to withhold truth or to speak lies to someone who is owed it. And it's also to withhold truth from someone who is owed it, right?

Either by misdirection or whatever the case may be. And then anytime that you say something false with an intent to deceive, that is a lie. So I do not think that Rahab did what is right in that case, even though her actions overall were right, the specific means that she chose was not right.

And you can see that countless times where God praises people who were doing clearly sinful things, I think Judah and Tamar is intended to be a parallel to that, right? Tamar pretends to be a prostitute, sleeps with Judah.

And then she ends up praised in the end and being part of the bloodline of Jesus, just like Rahab, right? A prostitute who ends up, who lies, et cetera. So given that Tamar seems to be held up highly and she's prostituting herself out, right, this is not a...

The fact that she's praised does not mean that God approves of the means. It just means he approved of the desire to be part of the blessing, right? Okay, let's go ahead and end their prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word.

We ask that you would lead us now in prayer. We pray that you would make us a people of your word who care about it, who desire to follow it in all things, even the way we would speak with one another and to the world.

And we ask that you would give us boldness as we go to you and ask for the work of your spirit. In Jesus' name, amen.