Today’s reading: 1 Kings 13; 2 Thessalonians 3
1 Kings 13 is a really weird story if you assume that all of God’s prophets cared about being faithful to Him.
If you’re like me, even knowing what I am writing about in this post today, when you think of the prophets of God in the Old Testament you think of men like Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. My first thought is always these prophets who loved the Lord and were willing to stand against the tide of culture and the pressure from the people around them, to call Israel back to faithfulness to Yahweh. On the one hand, it is easy for me to forget that these prophets were just men, not spiritual automatons who blindly followed whatever the Lord told them to do. They were fallen, sinful men, just like the rest of us, even if their lives were generally characterized by obedience and faithfulness. But on the other hand, it is also easy for me to forget that for all the examples of faithful and obedient prophets, we also have plenty of examples of prophets like Balaam or Jonah who had no qualms turning from the Lord, and yet were used by Him as His mouthpieces nonetheless.
I don't know God's criteria for the people He picked to be His prophets, but we can say for sure that it was not always the most faithful and righteous people that He would select. In 1 Kings 22, for example, we find the story of Ahab seeking counsel from his court prophets, and their counsel being opposed to the ultimate counsel of God. What's interesting though is that the prophet Micaiah shows up and tells us that an angel went forth from the Lord to be a lying spirit in the mouths of Ahab's prophets in order to lead him to his death. What that tells us is that these prophets were not simply making up what they prophesied, but were truly receiving divine revelation of some sort. Their allegiance was clearly to Ahab over Yahweh, but they were legitimate prophets.
So when we run into the old prophet in Bethel, we shouldn't assume that just because he is a prophet, he actually cares about or prioritizes the Lord's purposes. In fact, I think we get an indication to the contrary from the text. We are told that the man's sons told him all that had happened with Jeroboam, which means they were present there with him. And where was Jeroboam? He was at his false altar making offerings to one of the gods he had crafted. More than likely the prophet's sons did not just happen to be walking by when the man of God came from Judah, but were instead there with Jeroboam participating in and/or facilitating the false worship. And while it is certainly possible that the prophet's sons had simply gone astray, his actions following their report also show his hand that he is really just not that concerned about what God thinks. He knows he is lying to the man of God, and therefore knows that he is actively leading him astray from the will of the Lord, but he seems to have no qualms doing so.
Did God ultimately speak through the prophet to the man of God? Yes, He did. But does that mean that anything else the prophet did aligned with the will of God in any way? Not at all.
It's important to remember that just because God uses someone as His mouthpiece at some point in time does not mean He is directing or condoning the rest of their actions, or that their drives and motivations have anything to do with the Lord. So we don't need to try to figure out why God would want the prophet to deceive the man of God or anything like that when we read a story like this. If anything, the point of the story is exactly the opposite, that the spiritual state of the northern kingdom had degraded so much that even the prophets of God are following Jeroboam and his false gods over Yahweh...
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