Transcript
If I were giving a title to the story that we have just read, I would be tempted to call it the narrative of the nameless prophets. Now that may sound a little bit more to you like the title of a Perry Mason episode on TV. That’s the kind of titles the Perry Mason episodes usually have. But it’s an appropriate title, the narrative of the nameless prophets.
Do you realize that the prophets that we have met so far in the book of Kings have all had a name? We met Nathan the prophet in chapter 1. Ahijah the Shilonite was the prophet who announced to Jeroboam that he would rule the ten tribes to the north in Israel. Shemaiah the man of God was the man who told Rehoboam not to go to war with the tribes of Israel.
But when we come to this chapter, we have two prophets, and neither of them gets a name. I’m going to suggest to you later on that that is a significant fact. This is a story told about two nameless prophets. But I’m torn between that title and another title that I have for this passage, which would be the story of the guileful prophet and the gullible prophet.
Now as you know, guileful means deceitful, and gullible means easily deceived. One of these prophets was a deceiver, and the other was deceived. So we could call this the story of the guileful prophet and the gullible prophet.
I want to suggest to you that one of the great flaws in the Christian church today is gullibility, and gullibility in religious matters. Many, many Christians who ought to know better are taken in by religious ideas and by religious promoters whom they ought not to put any trust in at all. So this is a story about a prophet who got taken in by a prophet who was guileful.
Now the first of these two nameless prophets kind of streaks across the sky like a shooting star, coming out of nowhere, going to nowhere. He comes from Judah. We’re not even told what place he comes from. But he goes to Bethel, and at Bethel he finds Jeroboam involved in the process of offering sacrifice at this city, which was one of these centers of the new religion that Jeroboam had started for the northern kingdom, to keep the people from going down to the house of God at Jerusalem.
And speaking by the word of the Lord, this prophet cries out against the altar, and he announces that a future king of Israel by the name of Josiah would actually kill the priests that had offered sacrifice and burned incense at this altar. He would defile the altar by burning dead men’s bones on top of it. And then this prophet says that the sign that this will come true will be indicated by the fact that the altar will split apart and the ashes that are on top of it would be poured on the ground.
Needless to say, King Jeroboam was not amused by this sudden intrusion into his religious ceremony. And as soon as the prophet has uttered his prophecy, Jeroboam stretches forth his hand and he says, “Arrest him.” But no sooner does he stretch forth his hand than God smites his hand. It’s paralyzed. It’s withered. You’ve seen people with atrophied hands that they can’t use at all. And he can’t even bring his hand back to his body.
His attitude dramatically changes, and he begs the prophet, “Please pray for me that God will restore my hand.” And the prophet graciously does that, and Jeroboam’s hand is restored so that it’s well again.
And now Jeroboam, in what may have been a very sincere expression of appreciation, says, “Please come back to my house,” to his palace probably. “Come back to my house and refresh yourself. I’ll feed you, and I’ll give you a reward.”
Now the average person would have been delighted with it. To the king’s house! If I had been invited to the White House to dinner, and the king could certainly make you rich, and this might have been a tempting offer. But the man of God now reveals some instructions that God has given him pertaining to this.
And so the man of God who had come to Bethel said, “Even if you were to give me half of your house, I wouldn’t go home with you, and I wouldn’t eat bread, and I wouldn’t drink water in this place. Because it was commanded to me by the word of the Lord, ‘You shall not eat bread or drink water in this place, and you shall not return by the way on which you came.’”
Now that may strike us as a rather unusual piece of instruction for God to give to His prophet. But once we stop and think of that, I think we’ll see that it makes sense. God wanted somebody to bear testimony to the northern kingdom who didn’t even come from the northern kingdom, who had nothing to do with the northern kingdom, who wouldn’t even eat bread there, who wouldn’t even drink water there.
He was to play the role of a foreigner in a foreign land. And he was not even allowed to get familiar with the route by which he’d come up, because he was commanded to travel another way. He was to be a stranger in Israel, testifying against Israel’s religion.
The reason, I think, for this is that God had become virtually a stranger in Israel. The religion that Jeroboam had set up had nothing to do really with the will of God or the worship of God. And God sends a messenger to him who is to play the role of a stranger in a strange land.
Now you say, “Does that relate to us in any way?” I think it does. Do you realize that we have similar instructions from God? Remember the words of the apostle Peter in 1 Peter chapter 2. He says,
Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against your soul.
We are strangers and pilgrims in the world. The Bible reminds us that our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we look for a Savior. The Bible reminds us that we seek a city that is to come, that here we have no continuing city.
And I want to suggest to you that your effectiveness in the world as a witness for God will be measured to some extent by the degree to which you are really an outsider in this world, the degree to which you really and truly are a pilgrim and a stranger.
Test it. Do your unsaved friends and acquaintances regard you as an insider or an outsider? Do they feel perfectly comfortable telling their dirty jokes in front of you? When they open a can of beer, do they expect you to open a can of beer with them? Do they expect you to go where they go and do what they do and think the way they think? Or is there something about your lifestyle and your commitment to God that sets you apart, that makes you a kind of a foreigner in the midst of the lifestyle of America in the 1990s?
And I want to suggest that as people think of you as just one of them, they’re not going to listen very closely to your testimony. But if they think of you as someone who is distinctly different from them, if you maintain the character of a pilgrim, then you are more likely to have an impact for God.
So this prophet from Judah plays his role as a stranger, and he starts home. But now we’re introduced to nameless prophet number two. Now this nameless prophet is an old prophet, and he’s not a stranger to the northern team. In fact he lives smack dab in Bethel. And his sons come back, and they tell him the things that this prophet has done. And they say how the prophet turned down the invitation the king gave him.
And the old prophet says, “Saddle my donkey. I’m gonna go after this prophet.” And believe it or not, this is where the story gets even stranger. Believe it or not, his intention in going after the prophet was to get him to disobey the word of the Lord.
Now you say, “Wait a minute. Why would he do that?” Well, we’re not told the reason here, but it’s not very hard to guess what the reason must have been. May I suggest this is probably a case of professional jealousy? Have you ever heard of preachers being jealous of other preachers? “So-and-so has a bigger church down the road. So-and-so gets more money than our church does.”
Yet there are preachers, who hopefully none of them are here, but there are preachers who get jealous like that. And put yourself in the case of this prophet. He lived in Bethel, and he could have said to himself, “Why didn’t God send me to do that? Why couldn’t I have confronted Jeroboam? Why couldn’t I have performed this miracle?”
And maybe he even kind of got the point of the instructions God had given to the prophet from Judah, that he wasn’t to have any part of the northern kingdom. This is a man who lived there, who was at home there. So whatever his motives were, he starts out after the prophet from Judah and catches up with him.
And he says to the prophet from Judah, “Are you the prophet that came from Judah?” The prophet said, “Yes, I am.” And he says, “Well, come back and eat bread at my house and drink water with me.”
And the prophet says, “I can’t do that, because I was told by the word of the Lord that I was not to eat any bread or drink any water in this place and not to go back by the way that I came.” And the old prophet says, “You can forget that, because I’m a prophet too. I also am a prophet, and an angel of the Lord told me, ‘Go get this man and bring him back to eat bread and drink water with you.’ Bring him home.”
And the Bible, in a very simple and dramatic statement, says, “But he lied to him.”
And tragically, my friends, the prophet that came from Judah, who knew what God had said to him, did what the lying prophet told him to do. And he went back and ate bread with him.
Well, you say, “Is this relevant to us? Okay, we’re not prophets, right?” But let me suggest to you that America is filled with people who profess to speak for God. And I remember the words of the Lord Jesus Christ. He says,
Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.
Beware of people like that.
And in 1 John chapter 4 we read,
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits whether they are of God or not. For many false prophets have gone out into the world.
Would you like to find some false prophets? Turn your TV on. Watch some of the things that are said and done on TV.
Quite a number of years ago, when Kathryn Kuhlman was a very famous female faith healer at the peak of her ministry, a doctor tried to follow up some of the cases where people had professedly been healed at her meetings. And apparently this doctor was not able to find even one case that he could really verify as a case of miraculous healing.
More recently Jimmy Swaggart used to be listened to by thousands upon thousands of people until it was revealed that he consorted with prostitutes. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had a very affluent and very smooth and sophisticated television program until Bakker was convicted of fraud and sent to prison, and Tammy Faye divorced him and married somebody else. Bakker’s out of prison now, and I hope he’s learned something from the experience that he had.
My favorite story along these lines is one that some of you have heard, but I know that a number of you have not heard it. And so I crave the patience and endurance of those who have heard it while I tell it again.
When I was a student at seminary, I attended the tent meeting of a well-known traveling preacher by the name of A. A. Allen. A fellow seminary student of mine by the name of Bob went with me. I remember going to his tent meeting out in Oak Cliff. And he was up on the platform pacing back and forth and preaching about suicide demons.
Now there might be a shred of contact with the Bible in that, but the Bible of course doesn’t talk about suicide demons. And on two different occasions during the course of his message, he stopped and he says, “There’s somebody in here that has a suicide demon.” And he begins to describe the person. Then the person pops up.
First it was a white lady, and she went forward, and she confessed that she had a suicide demon, that she tried to commit suicide repeatedly. He prayed over her and cast the demon out. Then he goes back to preaching again. And after a little while, “Somebody else in here with a suicide demon.” But this time it was a black lady on the other side of the auditorium. The tent. She comes up.
Now mind you, she’s supposed to have been caught unawares by this, but she’s perfectly calm. She goes through her recitation about how all the time she’s tried to commit suicide. And so he prays over her and casts the demons out of her.
And I was watching this scam. And every time he cast the demons out, the people would raise their hands like this: “Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! Hallelujah!” An awful thought crossed my mind. This is the same type of audience that goes down at the Sportatorium and thinks the wrestling matches are real.
And when we came out of the tent, I said to my friend Bob, “He’s a crook.” And Bob said to me, “Oh, Zane, we ought not to talk like that. We ought not to pass judgment like that.”
But a certain period of time later, I don’t remember whether it was weeks or months, I was in my dormitory room at the seminary one Sunday morning recovering from a sickness. And I had my radio on. And who should come on but A. A. Allen? And he said, “Are you sick?” And he said, “If you’re sick, it’s probably because you’ve sinned. And if you’ve sinned, it may be because you haven’t paid your tithe. And if you haven’t paid your tithe, you can send it to A. A. Allen at the following address.”
And every time I’ve told this story, I’ve always said I didn’t send him a penny, but I recovered.
And you know, the tragic part of this whole story is this. At some time later I saw a notice in the newspaper that A. A. Allen had died. You know what he died of? Acute alcoholism. He was a drunkard. The only suicide demon that he knew anything about was the demon alcohol, and he was using it to kill himself.
And it occurred to me just recently, his initials were A. A. He would have been a lot better off in Alcoholics Anonymous than he would have been up on the stage speaking lies in the name of the Lord.
And you know what shocks me? What shocks me is that people turn on the television screen, and they see some well-dressed man or woman speaking in obviously religious tones. And they tell about the dreams and the visions or the miracles or the answers to prayer that they’ve experienced. And the person who’s watching them doesn’t know one single thing about that person. And more often than not they will believe what they say. It sounds so wonderful. Who would question that? And they have no idea whether they’re listening to a con man or to a real servant of God.
Now mind you, this prophet here, he didn’t know this other man. That man had to explain to him. He says, “I’m a prophet too.” Why should he take his word for that? He wasn’t back to the prophet. But why should he take his word for that? And he said, “An angel has told me to bring you back.” That was directly contrary to the word that God had spoken to him.
How dare he take the word of a man over the word of God? That was foolish. That was idiotic. And it led to his death.
Listen to me. If you do not test what you hear on the TV screen, over the radio, or in public meetings, if you do not test it by the word of God, you deserve to be fooled. And if you’re foolish enough to send money to people you don’t really know anything about, you’re not being a good steward of the money that God has put in your keeping.
This is a tragic story about a real prophet who lied to a real prophet, and the prophet who should have known better did it.
Now we need a surprise. They go home to this man’s house. And then the old prophet, mind you, the old prophet who had deceived him, he gets a real message from the Lord. And he says to the prophet that he had brought back, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘Because you have disobeyed the word of the Lord and you have done what God commanded you not to do, and you’ve come back and eaten bread and drunk water in this place, your corpse is not going to go into your grave, the grave that you were planning to have it buried in.’”
And pretty soon the prophet from Judah gets up on his donkey, and he rides away. And guess what happens? He meets a lion. The lion kills him. But this is obviously an intervention of God, because then the donkey just stands there next to the corpse. Lions kill for food. The donkey stands there. He doesn’t tear up the man’s corpse. He doesn’t attack the donkey. This is a judgment of God in fulfillment of the word of God which the old prophet had now spoken to him.
Well, the word gets back to the village where the old prophet is. And he says to his sons, his sons are busy beavers here, he says, “Saddle a donkey.” And he goes out after the prophet who has died on the road at the hands of the lion. He puts the corpse on the prophet’s donkey and brings him back and buries him and laments for him. No doubt his sons accompanied him.
And this, and then he says to his sons, he says, “When I die, place my bones next to the bones of this prophet.” Say, “Why?” Say, “Well, Mr. Prophet, this is the guy that you lied to. This is the guy whose death you are partly responsible for. And you want to be buried next to this guy? What in the world is in your mind?”
But we don’t have to guess what was in his mind this time, because his reason for wanting to be buried next to this prophet is very simple. He says, “Because the saying that he cried by the word of the Lord against the altar at Bethel and against all of the high places in Samaria shall surely come to pass. He spoke the word of God, and I want to be buried next to him because the word of God is true.”
What’s the bottom line of this story? I think the bottom line is very simply this: that the word of God is true even when the servants who bear it are fallible. The word of God will come true even if the servants of God who bear it failed Him significantly.
Let me try to bring this down to where we are. I’ve preached here for what, 44 plus years, going on 45. Let’s suppose that after preaching to you for 45 years, I go out and commit a terrible sin. Where the Lord give me grace not to do it. But suppose it happened. Suppose I disgrace myself totally as a servant of God. Will that mean that the word of God that I had preached to you is not true? Not for a moment.
Insofar as I have given you the word of God, insofar as you can check what I have said to you from the pages of God’s word, insofar as I have done that, the word of God is true even if I fail miserably.
And one of the sad facts in the Christian world today is that there are many true servants of God who are trying to give the truth, who fall into personal sin, and they bring disgrace upon themselves, and they bring disgrace upon the cause of Christ. And many people say when they see a case like this, “Well, I guess what he told us wasn’t true because he failed.”
But as a matter of fact, my friend, so long as a person preaches to you the word of God, it no longer matters what he’s like. It’s the word of God that stands firm.
I mean, I suggest that’s the reason why these prophets don’t get a name in this passage. Because the name of the person who preaches the word of God is not important. It’s the word of God that is important.
Really, in the final analysis, all of us are nameless. We are simply channels. We are simply vehicles through whom God wishes to communicate His truth to men.
And what we have to learn from this chapter is that we listen to the word of God and not to the voice of men. Let me repeat that. We listen to the word of God and not to the voice of men.
The more the songwriter said, “The Bible stands like a rock undaunted by the raging storms of time. Its pages burn with the truth eternal, and it will survive the night. The Bible stands though the hills may tumble. It will firmly stand when the earth shall crumble. I will plant my feet on its firm foundation, for the Bible stands, not the word of men, for the Bible stands.”