The death of King Ahab is a lesson for us. Although Ahab knew the prophetic word of God, Ahab never submitted himself fully to the authority of God’s word. All of us have made mistakes, but we need to learn from our mistakes. The only safe course of action is obedience to the word of God and to trust God in whatever may lie ahead. Passages: 1 Kings 22:26-40; 1 Kings 21:17-19; Galatians 6:7-8; 1 Kings 20; 1 Kings 22:1-25; 1 Corinthians 15:9; 1 Timothy 1:12-15; 1 Kings 21:1-16.
Transcript
He is 22, but we want to read, for the purpose of review, three verses in 1 Kings 21. They are verses 17 and 19. These verses constitute part of the last appearance of an idea to King Ahab. The last appearance of Elijah so far as the biblical account is concerned. Let me then read 1 Kings 21:17.
Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah the Tishbite, saying, “Arise, go down to meet Ahab king of Israel, who lives in Samaria. There he is, in the vineyard of Naboth, where he has gone down to take possession of it. You shall speak to him, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord. Have you murdered and also taken possession?’” And you shall speak to him, saying, ‘Thus says the Lord. In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth, there dogs shall lick your blood, even yours.’”
Now move over to 1 Kings 22. Our text for today begins with verse 29, but for a connection I want to begin reading with verse 26. We will read from 1 Kings 22 verse 26.
Then the king of Israel said, “Take Micaiah and return him to Amon the governor of the city and to Joash the king’s son, and say, ‘Thus says the king. Put this fellow in prison and feed him with bread of affliction and water of affliction until I come in peace.’”
Then Micaiah said, “If you ever return in peace, the Lord has not spoken by me.” And he said, “Take heed, all you people!”
So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat the king of Judah went up to Ramoth-Gilead. And the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, “I will disguise myself and go into battle, but you put on your robes.” So the king of Israel disguised himself and went into battle.
Now the king of Syria had commanded the thirty-two captains of his chariots, saying, “Fight with no one small or great, but only with the king of Israel.”
So it was, when the captains of the chariots saw Jehoshaphat, that they said, “Truly it is the king of Israel!” Therefore they turned aside to fight against him, and Jehoshaphat cried out. And it happened, when the captains of the chariots saw that it was not the king of Israel, that they turned back from pursuing him.
Now a certain man drew a bow at random, and struck the king of Israel between the joints of his armor. So he said to the driver of his chariot, “Turn around and take me out of the battle, for I am wounded.”
The battle intensified that day, and the king was propped up in his chariot facing the Syrians, and died at evening. The blood ran out from the wound onto the floor of the chariot. Then as the sun was going down, a shout went throughout the army, saying, “Every man to his city, and every man to his own country!”
So the king died, and was brought to Samaria. And they buried the king in Samaria. Then someone washed the chariot at a pool in Samaria, and the dogs licked up his blood while the harlots bathed, according to the word of the Lord which He had spoken.
Now the rest of the acts of Ahab, and all that he did, the ivory house which he built and all the cities that he built, are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the kings of Israel?
So Ahab rested with his fathers. Then Ahaziah his son reigned in his place.
The title of my message or talk this afternoon is You can’t dodge God’s arrow. I want to make sure we all heard that. You can’t dodge God’s arrow.
I think everybody at this table will agree that Victor Street Bible Chapel is a grace church. And that it is a tremendous privilege to preach the simple gospel of salvation by faith in Christ alone. We love to proclaim,
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved.
We all understand this. We would agree with the young man I heard in a northern Baptist church many years ago who had drifted away from the Lord. But in his testimony to the church he said he never doubted his salvation because he understood that you couldn’t do anything to earn it. And you couldn’t do anything to lose it, as he said. And I think we all understand that.
Most of us would also agree that if a Christian walks away from the Lord, if they turn away from his paths and live in sin, the chances are very high that God will intervene in that Christian’s life with parental discipline, or chastening as we might call it. He will bring them troubles with the intention of straightening them out and turning them back to himself. And most of us understand that, I think, pretty clearly.
However, many Christians have a problem with another facet of Scripture which I would like to put this way. Suppose we have indeed turned back to the Lord. Suppose that we have in fact confessed our sins and our sins have been forgiven. We’ve been restored to fellowship with God. And we’re walking with God and we’re attending church and reading our Bibles and praying. Our friend, many Christians feel that that is true. Then the sins which they committed before they turned back to God are kind of shoved under the rug by God. And that they don’t crop up to bother us anymore.
Now it’s wonderfully true, of course, that when God forgives he really forgets. And he restores us to fellowship with himself. When we’re saved we’re given a perfect righteousness in Christ. But it is not true that there are no consequences to the things that we have done in the past. Whether or not we have been forgiven for them.
How do I know that? Because the Bible tells me so. Remember Galatians 6:7 and 8.
Be not deceived. God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap.
Please notice that that statement does not say whatever a man sows there is a good chance he will also reap. Neither does the statement say whatever a man sows there is a high probability that he will reap. No, this is a law that God has built into nature and experience.
Be not deceived. God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap. For he who sows to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.
It’s like the farmer who goes out into the field and he plants wheat seed. He expects, and in fact he gets, a wheat crop. Or he plants tomato seed and he expects, and he gets, a tomato crop. And if we sow the seed of sin we can expect the crop of corruption.
Now that’s very hard for us to accept sometimes. And when we are walking with God and these consequences crop up in our lives we are tempted to think that God is being unfair with us. And we forget that this is a principle of God.
It seems to me that in 1 Kings, and particularly at the death of Ahab, we meet a man who really didn’t believe in the consequences of doing something that God had told him not to do.
You remember that Jehoshaphat was visiting him at Samaria. And remember also that Ahab has had a very good run of military successes. He’s beaten the Syrians two or three times in warfare, as we know. The Bible doesn’t tell us about it. Apparently he was one of the major kings in an alliance of kings that fought the Assyrians from Mesopotamia to a standstill at the battle of Qarqar. He had more than half of the chariots, according to a description by one of the Assyrian kings. He had more than half the chariots in that battle. He was on a roll, folks, militarily speaking. And apparently he has become one of the major powers in that part of the world. And he is very, very confident that they can engage in war at Ramoth-Gilead and get the city back from the king of Syria.
Understand that Syria is different than Assyria. Syria was right to the north of Israel. And Jehoshaphat asks for advice from the prophets of God. Ahab, remember, collects 400 of them, all of whom encouraged him to go. And Ahab’s not completely comfortable with that. He says, “Could we possibly find somebody else to ask about this?” And they bring Micaiah the son of Imlah, whom Ahab regarded as bad news there, because Micaiah never said anything good. And you recall the story that Micaiah said, “If you go to battle, you will not come back alive. If you go to battle, you will not come back alive.”
Now I submit to you that Ahab didn’t believe that. How do I know he didn’t believe it? Two things. Number one, he went to battle. If you really believe that this is your last battle and you could stay alive by staying away from the battle, you don’t go to battle, right? So Ahab went to battle. And also it is apparent that Ahab took a few precautions to be careful that he survive this battle.
And apparently when they got up to Ramoth-Gilead he turned to King Jehoshaphat, the godly king who had become his partner in this war, and he said, “Look,” he said, “I’m gonna disguise myself and,” he says, “you put on your royal robes and go into battle.”
Now when we first hear this we say, “Dumb, dumb, dumb.” You know, why does Ahab do that? All through them. But the first question is why is Ahab doing it? I don’t know exactly. But remember that when he had executed the treaty with the king of Syria the king of Syria had given him space in the market at Damascus where he could send his merchants. And kings being what they are, I suspect that some of the men who went up there undercover being merchants were actually spies. And it’s pretty obvious that Ahab probably tried to collect all the intelligence that he could about the intentions of the Syrians, about his military power. And it looks to me as if he has some inkling of the fact that the king of Syria has decided that in this war the king’s objective will be to kill the king of Israel. And the king of Syria believes that if he can kill Ahab that will deflate the balloon and that it will repel the attack. And as a matter of fact that’s exactly what happens, although not in the way the king of Syria was planning it.
So I think that Ahab probably had some intelligence of the fact that he was going to be a focus in this bout. Now what in the world he said to Jehoshaphat I don’t know exactly. It was not too unusual for a king to go into battle on a royal chariot. But he may have said to Jehoshaphat something like, “My spies tell me that the king of Syria is only interested in me. You go into battle and you’ll be perfectly safe.” I don’t know what exactly he said to him, but it looks like he’s using Jehoshaphat as a decoy, right? And that’s what Jehoshaphat almost became, because the king of Syria had given command to his thirty-two captains of his chariot forces. Fight with no one but the king of Israel. And they attacked Jehoshaphat thinking that he’s the king of Israel. He cries out. And somehow they discover this is not the king of Israel. Maybe he has a Judean accent, I don’t know. Or maybe he says something when he cries out that reveals that he’s not the king of Israel. But as soon as they discovered he wasn’t the king of Israel the captains of the chariots withdrew from him.
Meanwhile Ahab is in the battle in disguise. And the Syrians have not the remotest idea where he is, even though he was the focus of their campaign. He has gone into the battle in disguise, obviously thinking, “I’m going to come back to my country because they’re not going to find me anyway.”
One thing. Before he went after him, when he said to Micaiah—earlier he said to his servant, “See to it, take this man, put him in prison and feed him with bread of affliction, water of affliction, until I return in peace.” And he is saying in effect to Micaiah, “The next food meal he’s going to have is when I come back. You will be so glad to see me when I come back in peace because that will be the end of your starvation diet.”
So this is a man who thinks that he’s got all the bases covered, right? He doesn’t believe that he’s gonna fall in battle here. And he believes that his disguise will be effective and that he will survive.
I just want to pause here to make an application. You know, it really does seem to me that sometimes you and I as Christians do what amounts to putting on a disguise, kind of thinking that that will help us to avoid the consequences of the past. I’m not talking about, you know, putting on the church personality when you come to church on Sunday morning and be something else at home. But I mean once we’ve turned back to the Lord, once we’ve begun to follow the Lord, we kind of would like to forget about what we have been in the past. We kind of would like to deny the way that those things really pertain to us anymore. That’s not the kind of person that I am. I’m this kind of a person. And we kind of carry that mentality into our experience of problems. And we think if God causes those problems now, now that I am this kind of a person, that’s not right.
Remember what Paul said. Paul said,
I am the least of the apostles, not worthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.
Paul says, “I know who I am. I’m an apostle, but I don’t deserve to be an apostle because in fact I was a persecutor of the Christian church.” He never forgot that to the end of his life. When he’s writing 1 Timothy he said,
This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.
I notice those words. Not “of whom I was chief” or “used to be chief.” “I am chief.”
Now if you look at the context of that passage you’ll find once again he’s thinking about the period of time where he was a blasphemer of the Christian faith, where he persecuted the Christian faith. And he’s presenting himself as a marvel of the grace of God. “I’m number one on the list of sinners,” he says. “If God can save me he can save anybody at all.” But notice that Paul’s sense of who he was was not separate from the reality of his past. In fact it was the recognition of the reality of his past that made the grace of God seem so wonderful, so marvelous, so infinite.
What happens to us as Christians is we forget what we’ve been. Five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago. Well, me, much longer ago than that. My mind doesn’t go back that far. I think about what I am now and therefore I think about what I deserve from God now. And I forget that what has brought me to this place out of all of the ashes of my mistakes and failures and sins is the triumphant grace of God.
Well now, what am I saying? When we disguise ourselves we kind of pretend to be somebody that we’re not. Who are we really? Who are we really? We are the person who has done all the things that we have done and said all the things that we have said. I mean, to make that personal, Zane Hodges is the guy who has done all the things that Zane Hodges has done and said all the things that Zane Hodges has said. I’m glad most of you don’t know a lot of these things, but God does. And we’re disguising ourselves if we don’t admit that to ourselves. And we are fooling ourselves if we think that the things that I did in the past have no consequences whatsoever, that God will sweep them under the rug and that Galatians 6:7 and 8 will not apply. That’s a mistake, because the simple point is that you can’t dodge God’s arrow.
Now the story of Ahab’s death is a very remarkable one. Understand he’s got everybody in the Syrian army fooled, right? Nobody has the slightest notion where Ahab is. So a Syrian archer is drawing his bow. He’s not aiming at Ahab. He hasn’t the foggiest notion where he’s aiming at. You know, there’s all these Israelites out here and he hopes it hits something. He doesn’t know what. He pulls back the bow and lets the arrow go. And the arrow takes off and it flies and guess what? It finds a target. And guess what, folks? It not only finds Ahab’s chariot, but it finds a break in the armor. It strikes Ahab in the joint between two pieces of armor. If it had bounced off the armor he would have suffered no damage.
Do you see this? This has nothing whatsoever to do with the planning of the king of Syria. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the activity of the thirty-two captains. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the intentions of the Syrian archer. This is God’s arrow. And it landed exactly where it was supposed to.
And when we disguise ourselves and don’t quite admit that we are the people who have done and said all the things we have done, in fact we are sometimes very surprised when the arrow strikes. Very surprised when the arrow strikes.
Let me try to bring this down to where we are as the Christian church. Now I’ve done a lot of thinking about this and I just want you to think about it with me. We have a prayer meeting in which we are praying for our children who have gone astray. And one of the remarkable things is that there’s not a regular family in the entire church who doesn’t have a child to pray for. Isn’t that interesting? Every single person who has been a long-term member of this church has somebody that they need to pray for within their own household, among their children. Should this surprise us? I don’t think so. You see, much of what we experience in life is the fruit of what has gone before.
And you know I’m going to get personal here but not in an individual way. And I’m fortunately insulated from this because I don’t have any children, okay? And so maybe it’s not quite fair but here I go anyway. I’ve been here for forty-five plus years and I knew many of you, most of you, before you were married. And over the years I haven’t been in your home so I don’t know a lot of things that went on in your home. But I know some of the things that had gone on in most of the homes in our church because in a little church like this word gets around and people talk, you know. And I can truthfully say to you that in a lot of our homes a lot of things as well. A lot of things that the dynamics between the husband and wife and the commitment of one part or the other has been superficial or shallow or nonexistent. The way we deal with problems in the home has been in many cases. For you know your home better than I do, of course, by a long shot. But one of the things we have to keep in mind is that during the youngest years of our children we make impressions on them that are only with the greatest difficulty and by the power of God reversed. They see things in the home that they should never see between a husband and wife. They hear things in the home that they should never hear. Husbands, the people who attend church with you don’t know how real your Christianity is, whether you were consistent with your Christian faith or whether you’re not, whether you’re deeply committed to God or whether you’re not, whether you act like you mean business with God or whether you just go to church and come home and your whole self begins on other plans at home. And we should not be surprised if there are consequences that we begin to reap in our children because you can’t dodge God’s arrow.
Now you probably are sick and tired of me talking about my dad and so I’m not going. I’m gonna get very brief here. My dad is my spiritual hero. And the reason he’s my spiritual hero, there are a number of reasons. And one is that David and I never for a single moment that I know of doubted the sincerity of my dad’s commitment to God. I don’t ever remember my dad missing church and staying home for any reason other than sickness. He didn’t stay home to read the morning paper or to listen to the Washington on the radio. We didn’t have television. He didn’t stay home because he wanted to go fishing. He took us to church. And he raised two boys that never got away from church.
Now he didn’t raise two angels. And my brother was a lot more of an angel than I am. And I won’t bore you with all the ways in which I’m not an angel. But we neither one of us ever got away from church because our dad’s example was that church had a very, very high priority.
My dad, as I’ve also said, was the most genuinely unselfish person I had ever known. I cannot remember a single decision that he made that I thought was selfish. Oh, maybe he made some that I didn’t notice. He probably did. He was human, okay. But he was genuinely, genuinely unselfish. And you know what you want to make an impression on your kid? Be unselfish. Be unselfish.
Another thing was that my dad always treated my mother beautifully. He never raised his hand to her. He never raised his voice to her in all the years that I can remember. We knew that my father loved my mother deeply. And he showed it by the way he related to her. I’m not saying they didn’t have arguments, but even in an argument my dad was never threatening and blustering. What the kids see us do and say, what they see happening, is part of the reason that we have problems later on.
And one of the best things that we can possibly do as adults is to accept that as a fact. You and I can’t go back and change what we’ve done, isn’t that true? We can get God’s forgiveness. We can get God’s grace to handle the problems that have arisen. But we can’t go back and undo it. So let’s accept the fact that we are who we are and that we will reap whatever consequences God deems appropriate for us to reap. But that we can use the experience of reaping these consequences as an occasion for obeying God, trusting God, and getting to know him better.
I have great hope that if our parents stick together and pray for their children a lot of these children will return to the Lord. I’m not going to make a prediction as to when it will happen, but I believe it will happen because God is able to do the healing work that we need to have done even when we’ve made serious mistakes.
But Ahab is a very potent lesson to us. Did you notice that he props himself up in his chariot because he doesn’t want to leave the battle yet? He goes. He knows if he does leave the battle the battle will be lost. And he was right about that. And little does he know, folks, little does he know that while he’s bleeding onto the floor of the chariot he is preparing for the fulfillment of God’s word. He goes out of blood. Well, nothing. When he finally does die the whole army goes home. Ahab is buried. And then they take Ahab’s chariot out to a pool to wash the blood out. And apparently it was some pool near this pool that Naboth had been murdered. You know, the murder that Jezebel had arranged so Ahab could get the vineyard he wanted. And the dogs licked the blood.
But what is also very striking here is that this was a pool where the harlots bathed, the prostitutes. What a comment this is upon the moral condition of Ahab’s kingdom. We have prostitutes and I don’t know that we have a public pool where they take off their clothes and bathe in public. And you can be pretty sure there were lots of men gathered at this pool and were deciding which of these prostitutes they wanted to be with. And there was a shame and a disgrace in having your blood vindicated there.
But notice the place that God chooses for this to happen to Ahab. By a pool where Naboth apparently had been murdered and by a pool that was a symbol of the lack of moral authority that Ahab had exercised in his life. What a dreadful end!
And what is the lesson in Ahab? It is that although Ahab knew the power of the prophetic word of God. He had seen it in the miracles of Elijah. He had seen it in the victories God had given. He never submitted himself fully to the authority of God’s word. And he dies because he didn’t believe what God told him would happen if he went into battle.
I was interested by the fact that although the author of Kings tells us about washing the blood out of the chariot, that he tells us, he says something about the ivory house that Ahab built and the cities that he built. Apparently Ahab presided over a fairly prosperous kingdom at this point. He built himself a splendid ivory palace. Archaeological expeditions have found ivory objects from this period because the country was doing well economically. And just as if the author of Kings says, “Oh yeah, by the way, you might be asking why I didn’t mention the ivory house, why I didn’t mention the cities that he built. Well, they’re written in the chronicles of the kings of Israel. That’s not my business. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a man who died by disobeying the word.”
What should we decide to do? We’ve all made mistakes. And I look at you with embarrassment because I could embarrass myself badly by telling you about some of mine. But the point is we have to learn from this. And we have to learn that the only safe course of action is a course of obedience to the word of God. And then whatever the mistakes may be in the past, God is able to handle the problems that arise from those. There is no point in multiplying our problems down the road or increasing the difficulties that now it’s the time to be fully committed to follow the instruction in the word, to trust the Lord, or whatever they want.