Bad Theology

Text for today: I Kings 20 xxxv-xlii; II Chronicles 18 xxxiii-xxxiv

Having defeated him twice in battle, King Ahab accepts the terms offered by the king of Syria and makes peace. God commands a prophet, who goes up to another man and asks the man to strike him. The man refuses, whereupon the prophet condemns him to be immediately killed by a passing lion. Obtaining his desired wound from someone more obliging, the prophet disguises himself with a bandage and confronts the king with the inexcusable crime of having shown mercy when sacrifice was desired. The prophet relays God's word that Ahab's life will answer for the Syrian king's life, and Ahab's people for the Syrian king's people. Eventually Ahab is killed in battle by a random shot from a Syrian archer.

God's servant in this incident makes a pitiful figure. Although he is apparently descended from other prophets (such men were evidently not averse to sojourning with widows or spreading themselves over young girls), the prophet's name is never given; and rather than confronting the king face to face, as Elijah and others did regularly, he resorts to the shirker's trick of getting himself a light wound so that he can pass as a soldier honourably injured in battle: a disguise which would enable him to blend into the ranks should the king order his insolence punished. The man who refuses to aid the prophet in his deception is immediately struck down, while the impiously diplomatic king is spared only for as long as God takes to arrange his death by means of the same people to whose king he showed unauthorised mercy. God and His prophets do not rejoice in the truth, but tolerate only the most abject obedience.