Today, I am reading and commenting on  1 Kings 20-22.

Like yesterday, there are more things I would enjoy writing about in today’s passage than I have time to go into.  Today I am going to write about what happened when King Ahab invited King Jehoshaphat of Judah in going to war to reclaim Ramoth Gilead from Aram.  Jehoshaphat was agreeable, but asked Ahab to seek the Lord’s counsel first.  So, Ahab summoned about 400 prophets.  Now this is an amazingly similar number to the number of the prophets of Baal whom Elijah challenged on Mount Carmel.  Which leads me to believe that these were also prophets of Baal.  This idea is supported by the fact that after these 400 prophets told Ahab the Lord would give Ramoth Gilead into his hands, Jehoshaphat asked if there wasn’t a prophet of the Lord whom they could consult.  So, Ahab reluctantly summoned Micaiah in order to consult what God told him.  The messenger whom Ahab sent to Micaiah told him that all of the other prophets had told Ahab that he would be successful, and Micaiah should be sure to say the same thing.  So, Micaiah told Ahab the same thing all of the other prophets said.  Ahab immediately realized that when Micaiah said that, it was not what God had told him.

I could go on to summarize the rest of the story, but that gets us to what I want to write about today.  First, Ahab tried to pass off the prophets of Baal as being prophets of God.  He pretended like he didn’t know there was a difference between Baal and God.  Yet when Jehoshaphat pushed the issue, he acknowledged that he did indeed know the difference.  Then when Micaiah told Ahab what he had been told to say, which was the same as what the other prophets had told him, Ahab knew he wasn’t giving a truthful answer.  Which tells us that Ahab knew the prophets of Baal were only telling him what he wanted to hear, and that he knew that God had a different message for him.   Yet, despite knowing that, Ahab chose to follow the message which the prophets of Baal gave him, to his on detriment.  Do we listen to the advice that is merely what we want to hear, when we know God has a different message for us?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.