1 Kings 22:6-8

DIVINE ENLIGHTENMENT AND GUIDANCE NEEDED

‘Then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred men, and said unto them, Shall I go against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall I forbear?’ etc.

1 Kings 22:6

As against Benhadad, Ahab was in the right when he sought to capture Ramoth-gilead. But he had also to reckon with God. Face to face with God, Ahab’s real position at this period of his life was that of a condemned criminal, and he therefore was not in a moral position to represent and act on behalf of the rights of Israel. Ahab’s mind at this the last crisis of his sad and eventful life is seen in two respects: in his willingness to consult the prophets of the calves; in his prejudice against Micaiah. They are the two sides of a disposition towards religion, which in its principle is one and the same. It is not downright, contemptuous, bitter opposition; still less is it the loyalty of faith and love. It is a willingness to welcome religion, if religion will only sanction the views, projects, and passions of its patrons.

Ahab welcomed the four hundred because he knew exactly what the four hundred would say. He disobeyed a voice which he could not silence, which willingly he would not have heard. He took his own way, and his tragical end was the consequence of his doing so.

Let us learn two lessons from this story.

I. The first is a principle of Church polity: the importance of making religious teachers, if you can, independent of those whom they have to teach.—The clergyman who, with a number of children depending on him, has to think from the first day of the year about the collection that will be made for him at the end of it, must be heroic if he never yields to the softening down of a truth which will be unwelcome to his paymasters or the extenuating a fault which is notoriously popular among them. It is the laity who suffer much more by a dependent clergy than the clergy themselves.

II. Notice here a lesson of religious practice.—They who do not seek false teachers may yet take only so much of true teaching as falls in with their true inclinations. If God will only say what His creature approves of, His creature will be well content; but if the Gospel or the Creed, like Micaiah of old, has its warning clauses, so much the worse for Creed or Gospel when Ahab has made up his mind, come what may, to go to Ramoth-gilead. In the last contest with death, which is before every one of us, we shall know that He Who spoke by Micaiah was surely right.

—Canon Liddon.

Illustration

‘Ahab goes out to meet his fate, hoping against hope; determined to do his utmost to avoid his doom, and yet inwardly knowing he could not. Probably he went out to battle with the same feeling as that other who, haunted by the unquenchable remembrance of an evil life, met his doom saying—

“I ’gin to be a weary of the sun,

And wish the estate o’ the world were now undone,

Blow, wind! come wrack

At least we’ll die with harness on our back.”

The end of Ahab seems intended to show us how impossible it is for a man to evade his fate when his time has come.’