When Truth is Tested

--- Welcome to our women's Bible study on 1st and 2nd Kings, which we've titled Learning from Leaders. Today we're going to cover 1st Kings chapters 20 through 22, which takes us to the end of 1st Kings. And we're going to be learning from King Ahab and his queen Jezebel. And so far the important things that we have learned about God in this series have been He does what he says he's going to do. And also he wants to rescue people from deception. The deception in focus here is this house of Baal that Ahab had constructed in Samaria. And God's rescue plan began last week. It's continuing through week four, through week five, and through week six before it is finished. That's the big picture that we're looking at. Let's call it the macro picture going on in 1st Kings. But then there are micro pictures going on. And as we look at Ahab, and as we look at Jezebel, we're going to see the micro picture. We're going to ask, what do we learn from these leaders? Because when a country has rotten leaders, when a country has unstable leaders, deceived leaders, one thing we learn is God is not wringing his hands over that. God's plan is still moving forward. And this should be a great comfort to us. Because from time to time, we get rotten leaders. And we get deceived leaders. And we get unstable leaders. And yet God's plan is still moving forward. Those leaders do not trump God's plan. Okay. I didn't intend to use that word. Now I kind of want to laugh about it a little bit. Okay. Anyway. So let's put up the, let's put up our Kings for this week. It looks very much like last week's with the addition of Ahaziah at the end, because Ahab will die at the end and his son will take over. And so I'll just let you have that for a minute. The important concept that we learn this week is that God is patient to carry out his plan. And so even though today's lesson is primarily a character study on Ahab and Jezebel, the whole lesson that we have is like an Oreo cookie, right? There's a cookie on the top, there's a cookie on the bottom, and there's a creamy filling in the middle. Chapters 20, 22, and 21 are like that, in that the first chapter, 21, we have war with Syria, war with Syria, disobedience with Syria. And then on the bottom part of the cookie, we have war with Syria and Ahab dies. And then the creamy filling, which is sweet in an Oreo, it's not sweet here, is this, is what we see with Ahab and Jezebel's corruption with Naboth. Now, if I were to read straight through the three chapters, it would take 40 minutes to read that. So clearly we're not going to do that. I'm going to have to summarize a lot. And that's what I love about our method. We have a study guide. You presumably went through all of those verses and the Lord showed you something and you got some understanding. I'm just going to come and pick out some things that I want to. So let's start with chapter 20, these battles with Syria. What is notable there? Well, first notable thing is that for some reason, God has chosen to use Syria in his rescue plan. He's been doing it. He's going to continue to do that. This rescue plan from the deception of Baal worship. You might remember from two weeks ago that Ben-Hadad, the king of Syria, he was the guy that Asa sent some silver and some gold to and said, could these resources perhaps persuade you to break your covenant with Israel, make a covenant with me down in Judah, not fight me in Judah, and go and fight Baasha up in Israel? And Ben-Hadad said, why yes, your money is good with me. Let's do that. And he's still at it because this chapter opens with saying he went up and closed in on Samaria. Okay. But in this chapter, we realized that for some reason God had decided to come to the aid of Israel, not once, but twice. God fought for them and he wanted Ahab to know that he was the one bringing victory. It wasn't because Ahab was so smart in battles. It was the Lord. So when God wants people to know things, he sends a prophet. And if we go down to verse 28 in the middle, we'll see what God said to Ahab. I will give all of this great multitude into your hand and you shall know that I am the Lord. Now, when God goes to great lengths to deliver our enemy into our hands, it is very bad form to turn around and make friends with said enemy. But that is exactly what Ahab did in this situation. Here's how it happened. They were battling with Syria. Ben-Hadad found an escape route with some of his advisors. He got into the city and he hid himself. And so let's see what happens starting in verse 32. They decided to plead for their lives. And it says, so they tied sackcloth around their waist and they put ropes on their heads as a sign of surrender. That would be like, we are your prisoners, right? And they went to the king of Israel and said, your servant Ben-Hadad says, please let me live. And Ahab said, does he still live? He's my brother. And we read that and we go, what? What are you talking about? Now the men were watching for a sign and they quickly took it up from him and said, yes, yes, your brother Ben-Hadad. And then he said, go and bring him to me. And then Ben-Hadad came out to him and he caused him to come up into his chariot. And Ben-Hadad began to negotiate with Ahab. And he said, the cities that my father took from your father, I will restore. You can build a mall. Actually, you can establish bazaars for yourself in Damascus as my father did in Samaria. And Ahab said, yeah, I'll let you go on these terms. And so he made a covenant with him and he let him go. And you could say, they decided to go into business together. So in our study guide, we pointed out the effects of instability in people's lives. For Ahab, first rejecting God, building the house of Baal was his first giant leap into instability. But now we see that instability growing with his decisions and how he handles life. When Ahab said of Ben-Hadad, he's my brother, we're thinking to ourselves, what agreement can there be with the leader of God's people and the leader of a pagan nation? Certainly no spiritual agreement, no spiritual common ground, but the common ground that Ahab saw was business. And that was the common ground that he had with Ben-Hadad. So in our lives, I want to handle this for just a minute, because it's always a very bad day when God delivers us from something and we turn around and find common ground with that thing. So let's call it a temptation, okay? Your temptations are different than my temptations. We all have our own unique sets of temptations in life. And God is always moving us forward in our life to be conformed into the image of Christ. And so he is often convicting us of these areas of temptation that we have. And God also provides a way out for our temptations very often. And so it's a very bad form for us when God provides a way out from a particular temptation that we are facing. Maybe it's keeping our mouth shut. Maybe it's social drinking. Maybe it's social media. Maybe it's something else social. But, you know, we have this temptation and God provides a way out, and all we do is turn around and find common ground with that same thing that God just gave us victory over. And that's something we can definitely take away from what we see in Ahab's life. And so how the story goes here is in a dramatization that's similar to what we had with Nathan and King David quite a while ago. One of the prophets got himself beat up, and he dramatized this story and trapped the king in his own words and in his disobedience. And in verse 42, God told Ahab what he would do. Thus says the Lord, because you have let go out of your hand of the man whom I devoted to destruction, referring to the king of Syria, Ben-Hadad, therefore your life shall be for his life and your people for his people. And the king of Israel went to his house vexed and sullen, and he came to Syria, or excuse me, Samaria. So God's instructions with Israel's enemies had been very clear. God kept his promise. He triumphed. He enabled Israel to triumph over Syria, only to have Ahab turn around and bring him in again, and make friends with him to find common ground. But because God's very good at poetic justice, and because he says, He does what he says he's gonna do. Ahab knew that this sentence that he heard from the Prophet, he knew that was gonna stick and that's why he was vexed and sullen. In our study guide we said that unstable people have unstable emotions and that's true. They have difficulty admitting fault and they're given to pouting when things don't go their way or when someone calls them out on their disobedience. It's clearly described Ahab. He was pouting in this moment. Vexed and sullen. Now last week we talked about Elijah and remember the emotional life cycles that we saw there with with Elijah. We called it discouraged. Elijah was discouraged. Maybe it's not terribly different than sullen and we get discouraged in life. This is even every Christian will get discouraged at some point in their life but I want to point out the differences between what Elijah, the emotions that Elijah was experiencing and the emotions that Ahab is experiencing because Elijah was discouraged about what how his life had turned out. He was kind of discouraged with God's plan in a way and it brought him into this disappointed state. Ahab on the other hand is in a disappointed state because of his disobedience. It's a completely different thing and so when we are experiencing a downturn of emotions, which we all do, it is a good idea for us to stop for just a minute and you're probably not going to remember the Elijah and the Ahab but to stop for a minute and say is there any part of this that I brought on myself? Is there any part of this downturn in my emotions that is because of disobedience? It is a good thing for us to handle because disobedience, I could have made a cycle of disobedience, but disobedience wants to move toward instability and if we stay in a state of disobedience eventually we will move into a state of instability and we do not want to be the unstable person because instability affects not only us but affects others in our path and unfortunately in the very next chapter the person in Ahab's path was Naboth. So let's start in chapter 21 verse 1. Now Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard in Jezreel beside the palace of Ahab king of Samaria and after this Ahab said to Naboth give me your vineyard that I may have it for a vegetable garden because it's near my house. It was probably like a summer palace because we have Samaria but this is Jezreel so he probably had multiple places and I will give you a better vineyard for it or if it seems good to you I will give you its value in money but Naboth said to Ahab the Lord forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my father's and Ahab went into his house vexed and sullen because of what Naboth the Jezreelite had said to him and he laid down on his bed and he turned his face and he would eat no food. I think the repetition of vexed and sullen two times here is intentional for us to get this into our minds. He pouted first time when God called him out on his disobedience and now he pouts when he doesn't get his way and that's what unstable people do is they're given to pouting. What he wanted from Naboth was actually illegal and you say how was that illegal? Well every Israelite knew or should have known that the land that they enjoy really belonged to the Lord. It was the Lord's land. It was given to them doled out tribe by tribe by Joshua when they entered into the promised land and it was to be it was to remain in their family group. Okay Leviticus 25 teaches us about this. They were never to sell their land permanently outside of their family. Now they could sell their land but when the year Jubilee came around it came right back to them anyway so it was kind of like only renting out their land and that was a good law. It was a very good law because it prevented a wealthy few from gobbling up land and lording it over the others so it was a very good thing but Ahab cared nothing for God's laws. Ahab was a law unto himself and he wanted what he wanted but he didn't seem to be ambitious enough to actually grab what he wanted. Enter Jezebel who has no lack of ambition and seems to be annoyed at Ahab's lack of ambition. Now let's remember something about Jezebel. We learned on Mount Carmel that she sort of owned 400 prophets of Asherah. It says they ate at her table. That's either employment or slavery whatever way you want to look at it but they belonged to her okay and so she was heavily invested in this worship of Asherah. Jezebel was seductive, she was dominant, and she was manipulative. So she was a very good human representative of the goddess Asherah herself who was also seductive and dominant and manipulative and that is what the goddess in there the demon God let's say tend to want to seduce men to dominate them and to discard them. So let's listen to what Jezebel does. Verse five, Jezebel his wife came to him and said to him, why is your spirit so vexed that you eat no food? And he said to her, because I spoke to Naboth the Jezreelite and I said to him, give me your vineyard for money or else if it please you I will give you another vineyard for it. And he answered, I will not give you my vineyard. And Jezebel his wife said to him, you are so worthless. You pretend to be the king of Israel and you don't even know how to snatch a little garden to plant your peas. Basically is what she said. She goes, arise, eat bread, let your heart be cheerful. I will give you the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite. And so she treated him like a child. You just eat your cake and drink your milk and enjoy your party. Mommy will take care of this for you. And every married woman in the room, on the outside is smiling at me, but on the inside there's a little wince of like, I've done that? Because if you've been married for longer than a week, at some point in your marriage you have either thought or probably said things that have treated your husband like a child. Okay? You're thinking, oh for heaven's sake, just let me do that. Right? It's dreadful to admit, but if we're honest, we can admit, yeah, yeah, that's part of marriage. That is what goes on sometimes. Now for Jezebel, I'll give her two starting points here. First of all, Ahab is a powder. No one wants to be married to a powder. So I'll give her that. Second thing is that men in general are difficult to live with. But women are difficult to live with. So I'm taking that point back. She only gets one. She only gets the pouting point. But as we process this marriage dynamic, things get complicated in our minds because we want to be Christian women who love the Lord and honor the Lord. And we say to ourselves, but wait, doesn't the Bible say I'm supposed to be a helpmate to my husband? Yes, we are supposed to be a helpmate. So then the question, the very thoughtful question arises for us. This is important. We should answer this. How do I be a helpmate without dominating him? And that is what we have to figure out in life. That is a good question to answer. In general, God has made women, God created women sturdy. Like we can do a lot. We can handle a lot of information. You know, as women in our younger years, we can prep dinner, we can correct the math problems, we can put on a band-aid, we can change the Spotify channel, all while nursing the baby. We just can. We're built that way. In general, God has made men very occupational. And I'm going to say, in general, their path is a little bit more narrow but deeper. And they can stay at a task for a longer period of time, like 35 years sometimes, you know, doing their task. And so we're very different. God has made us very different. And sometimes the way God designed men paralyzes them with fear. If they haven't done something before, they're kind of afraid, you know, to do it. Anybody old enough to remember the movie Hook from the 90s, okay? Peter Pan story, Robin Williams. He's an accountant and, you know, his children are stolen off to Neverland. He doesn't know he's Peter Pan yet. So he goes, and the pirates have his children, and they're all tied up in a net. And they kind of coerce him, you know, well, save your kids. Save your kids. And the little girl, she's so sweet. She's dangling her little fingers. She goes, daddy, daddy, mommy could do it. There's such a classic statement. Well, Jezebel could do it. Look at verse 8. She wrote letters in Ahab's name, and she sealed them with her seal. And she sent the letters to the elders and leaders who lived with Naboth in his city. And she wrote in the letters, proclaim a fast and set Naboth at the head of the people. And set two worthless men opposite him, and let them bring a charge against him, saying, you have cursed God and the king. And then take him out and stone him to death. And the men of the city, the elders and the leaders who lived in the city, did as Jezebel had sent word to them. Verse 14, and then they sent to Jezebel, saying, Naboth has been stoned and is dead. And we sort of wonder, why did the men of the city obey her so quickly? That seems a little odd to me. But first of all, they may have feared the retribution of the king. I mean, this is his wife saying to do this. But also, I wonder if this goddess effect had cast a big shadow. I wonder if this effect of to seduce and dominate and the fear of the female had cast a pretty big shadow, even over them. But verse 15 says, as soon as Jezebel heard that Naboth had been stoned and was dead, Jezebel said to Ahab, arise, take possession of the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite, which he refused to give you for money, for Naboth is not alive, but dead. And as soon as Ahab heard that Naboth was dead, Ahab rose to go down to the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite to take possession of it. Now, Jezebel will receive her sentencing for this here in just a minute in our lesson. But I want to go back to the question that we asked. How does a wife be a helpmate without dominating her husband? And so I want to bring you three things that I see that are helpful to us. The first thing, almost the first thing in every question we ever have in our Christian life centers on the word of God. And that is number one, the word of God. We recently, just last fall, our last session was in Ephesians 5, where we learned the created order.

And as we studied that passage, we learned that we discussed the boundaries of that. Because submission does have boundaries. The boundaries are it stops at being illegal, immoral, or unbiblical. Because neither, none of those things would be as unto the Lord. And so we learned there are safeguards. There are boundaries to that. But one of the things that helps us to be a helpmate rather than a dominant wife is to be invested in the word of God. Hey, look, what we're reading today is helpful. Although, here's point number two, positive examples. What we're reading today is a negative example. So we need positive examples. Maybe you grew up with a positive example. Maybe you had friends or sisters or aunties or someone in your life that showed you a positive example of being a helpmate without dominating. Maybe you didn't. When the apostle Peter wrote his letter, he referred to Sarah, Abraham's wife, as a positive example of exactly what we're talking about. With Sarah and Abraham, God had enabled her to sort of just let him make his decisions, which weren't always all great. So Sarah let her husband make a decision, which ended up being a bad decision. But what did God do? He came in, and he covered it up and blessed them both. That is a great positive example for us. Now, I'm not saying at all, as you look at the example of Sarah, that we have to take it to the extreme and say, so I shut my mouth all the time. I never say a word. No, there is room for discussing things, absolutely. If Jezebel had not been Jezebel, when Ahab said, Naboth won't sell me his vineyard, she could have said, oh, well, that makes sense because it stays in the family. He's from the line of Issachar, so that makes sense. Hey, why don't you get the pickup fired up? Let's go drive around, and let's see what we can find, see if we can find a place to plant your peas. So there's always a way. There's room for discussion here. But then the third thing that I want to point out here, to be a helpmate and not dominate, is just the simple word, awareness. We need to have an awareness that every person in this room has two strikes against us going into this. The first strike against us is our sinful nature. Because if we were to go back and study Genesis chapter 3, we find out that our sinful nature wants to rule over and wants to dominate. All of us have this in common. The second strike we have against us is we live in a culture that is permeated with the spirit of the goddess. Female dominance is all around us. Now, look, my grandmother did not deal with that. My great-grandmother did not live in a culture permeated with the spirit of the goddess. We do, all of us in this room. The spirit of the goddess is to seduce, to dominate, and to discard. We now live in a female-dominated culture. And we can't even make a superhero movie anymore without making sure it is a female that's doing the saving, okay? It's gotten pretty weird. So the awareness that what we see around us is in opposition to what the word of God is teaching us. When we're aware, don't we usually say with problems, being aware, being able to admit it, it's 50% of solving the problem. So awareness is good. And I'll leave you with all the other details of how not to be a Jezebel to discuss in your discussion groups. But we wanna move on because Elijah is back on the scene. In verse 17, the word of the Lord came to Elijah, the Tishbite, saying, "Arise, go down to meet Ahab, king of Israel." And Elijah went. And in verse 20, Ahab said to Elijah, "Have you found me, O my enemy?" And he answered, "I have found you because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord." And then he's speaking for God here. "Behold, I will bring disaster upon you. I will utterly burn you up, and I will cut off from Ahab every male, bond or free, in Israel. And I will make your house like the house of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, and like the house of Baasha, the son of Ahijah, for the anger to which you have provoked me, because you have made Israel to sin.' And of Jezebel, the Lord said," and here comes her prophecy of doom, "The dogs shall eat Jezebel within the walls of Jezreel. 'Anyone belonging to Ahab who dies in the city, the dogs shall eat. Anyone who dies in the open country, the birds of the heavens shall eat.' In verse 27, when Ahab heard those words, he tore his clothes. He put sackcloth on his flesh. He fasted. Now he's not eating food for a different reason. He lay in sackcloth, and he went about dejectedly. And we're really bugged, because we have Ahab in a category. We have him in a box, and we want him to stay in that box. We don't like you, Ahab. You're the troubler of Israel. Just stay there. But look, he jumped out of the box. He is, he's repenting, if you will. We don't wanna give him any room, but that's not how God treats people. Look at this. Apparently, God saw something. Verse 28, the word of the Lord came to Elijah, the Tishbite. God says, have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself? Now, God doesn't say anything that's not true. So there was a genuine humbling going on. Because he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring disaster in his days, but in his son's days, I will bring the disaster upon his house. And we learn from this that God has a much longer fuse with people that we've already made a decision about. We have categorized them. We have colored them a certain way. But God holds people with open hands. And even someone like Ahab, he notices, and he said, you know what? I'm not gonna bring the disaster in your day. I'm gonna let you have one more generation in your dynasty, and then the disaster will come. God did not back up on what he said he was gonna do, but he did give Ahab the benefit of what he saw here. So we're gonna turn to chapter 22 now, which is the other crispy cookie on the bottom, battle with Syria, death of Ahab. It starts this way, verse one. For three years, Syria and Israel continued without war, but in the third year, Jehoshaphat. The king of Judah came down to the king of Israel. And Ahab asked Jehoshaphat if he would partner with him against Ben-Hadad, Syria. And Jehoshaphat said, yes, I will do that. Well, why? Why? He'd already, his dad, Asa, is that his dad? Forget how many generations. He had already, they'd already made a compact. Why is he agreeing to this? Well, maybe Ahab's humbling is more than what we even knew, number one. But also, Jehoshaphat had made a marriage alliance, we find out in 2 Chronicles, with the house of Ahab. So when Ahab asked him in verse 4, Jehoshaphat said, I am as you are. My people as your people. My horses as your horses. But then he qualified this by saying in verse 5, but first let's inquire of the Lord. Verse 6, then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about 400 men. And like I said in the study guide, I am suspicious about that number, 400 men, because we knew on Mount Carmel that Jezebel had 400 prophets of Asherah. We also knew that only the prophets of Baal seemed to have been destroyed. So it seems like these are not godly prophets. These are, in fact, Jezebel's prophets of Asherah. And so we're pretty sure they're not godly. And he asked them, shall I go to battle or shall I refrain? And they said, go up, for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king. And now, Jehoshaphat was a pretty smart guy, and he looked at these prophets, and he said to the king in verse 7, is there not here another prophet of the Lord of Yahweh of whom we may inquire? And the king said, there is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord, Micaiah, the son of Imlah, but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil. And you studied the text, they found him, they gave him a politically corrupt script from which to follow, and so he followed it, and he says, yeah, go, you're going to win. And Ahab, smarter than that, knew he was being patronized, and he goes, tell me the truth, right? And that's when Micaiah pronounced doom for Israel's army in general and for Ahab in particular. So what reward did he get for the truth? He finally told the truth, what reward did he receive? Verse 27, put this fellow in prison and feed him with meager rations, with bread and water, until I come in peace. And Micaiah said, if you return in peace, the Lord has not spoken by me. And so they prepared for battle. In verse 30, the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, I will disguise myself and go into battle, but you wear your robes. And the king of Israel disguised himself and went into battle. Now, this seems like a no-brainer, not to dress like the king that's going to have the biggest target on his back, but I guess Jehoshaphat, he seems like such a nice guy, but I think he's a little simple. And so he does it that way. And we learn that God's in the business of protecting the naive and also those who are loyal to him. I want to read, I'll put up on the screen, I want to read what happened from 2 Chronicles because it just adds a few more words that I love. There's the passage. As soon as the captains of the chariots saw Jehoshaphat, they said, it's the king of Israel. And so they turned to fight against him and Jehoshaphat cried out and the Lord helped him. And God drew them away from him. This is a verse I have in a box in my Bible. And the reason is when I make a dumb mistake in life, I want to remember that I can still cry out to the Lord. It's in my nature and probably in yours too, that when you make a dumb mistake, your first response is, I got myself into this. I better get myself out of it before God notices the dumb thing that I did. But Jehoshaphat did a kind of a dumb thing, but look what he chooses to do. It doesn't say he cries out to the Lord, but the implication there is he cried out to the Lord and God answered him. And so again, God is in the business of sparing people that sincerely cry out to him. Verse 33, when the captains of the chariots saw that it was not the king of Israel, they turned back from pursuing him. But a certain man drew his bow at random and struck the king of Israel between the scale armor and the breastplate, which reminds that we cannot disguise ourselves and hide from God. Therefore, he said to the driver of his chariot, turn around and carry me out of the battle for I'm wounded. And the battle continued that day and the king was propped up in his chariot facing the Syrians until the evening he died and the blood of the wound flowed into the bottom of the chariot. Verse 37, so the king died and was brought to Samaria and they buried the king in Samaria. And when they washed the chariot by the pool of Samaria and the dogs licked up his blood and the prostitutes washed themselves in it according to the word of the Lord that he had spoken. And again, we're reminded that God does what he says he's going to do. And the rest of the chapter is just a bit of record keeping about both Jehoshaphat and Ahaziah. We'll put our image back up for our kings for this week. About Jehoshaphat, we learn that he reigned 25 years. He was a relatively good king. It says that he walked in the way of Asa, his father, doing what was right in the sight of the Lord. And about Ahaziah, the son of Ahab, we learn that he only reigned two years and he continued in the ways of Ahab and the worship of Baal. He continued to plunge his people into the deception of pagan worship. He continued to provoke the Lord to anger, which continued God's rescue mission for the next 10 chapters into 2 Kings. So next week, we're going to start 2 Kings, mostly learning from Elisha. All right, let's pray. Father, I just thank you so much for these lessons that we learn from leaders. We can learn a lot even from corrupt leaders and from those who are not honoring to you. And Lord, in particular, I pray that you would help us to resist the temptation that lives, dwells within us. For each of us who are married, Lord, enable us to resist the temptation to dominate. And help teach us, Lord God, how we can be a help to our husbands, a help to our family, a help in our church body, a help in our community without putting on this persona of Jezebel, which wants to seduce, to dominate, and to discard. Lord, help us to be wise about the things going on in our culture. Help us to defend in our own lives and hearts what your scripture is showing us, Lord. And may we be women who really show others the character of Christ instead. I pray in Jesus' name, amen. ---