Thoughts on 1 Kings 22

Today’s reading: 1 Kings 22; Titus 3

I have already referenced 1 Kings 22 quite a bit on this blog because it is such an important and helpful piece of Scripture for understanding so many things more clearly and easily. So we aren’t going to try to dive into everything, but I do want to talk about a couple of the big implications of this chapter that I personally find most impactful to my thinking about the Bible and about the Christian life in general.

The piece of 1 Kings 22 that I am referring to specifically is where Micaiah reveals the vision of the Lord on His throne taking counsel. Micaiah tells us that the Lord was on His throne with the host of heaven gathered around him. The Lord declared what He wanted to see happen, Ahab going to war and dying at Ramoth-gilead, and then asked who would accomplish it for Him. Multiple spirits came forward, putting forth various ideas, until one ultimately came forward with the suggestion that he would be a lying spirit in the mouths of Ahab’s prophets. The Lord then agreed to that plan and sent him off to carry it out.

The two things I want to talk about from this this morning are (1) the way God can declare beforehand what will happen, and (2) the freedom/latitude there is in how God’s agents accomplish His purposes.

How God can declare the future

The first question this passage reshapes the answer to, in my mind at least, is how God can declare the future. I was taught, as a young Christian, that God can declare what will happen because He has already seen it; that God is outside of time and therefore can see the past, present, and future all simultaneously, so when it looks like He is predicting the future, really He is just telling us what He has already seen will come to pass. While I always grant this is possible, we have talked before about the issues I see with this position theologically and philosophically, so I won’t rehash them all here. Instead, I want to point out how this passage may give us a different way to think about the mechanics of this.

Instead of God declaring here what He already knows is going to happen, we see God declare what He desires to see happen and then open the floor to His heavenly council for ideas as to how it will be done. We will talk more about that part of it in a second, but for now I just want to point out that God doesn’t say, “I saw that Ahab will die at Ramoth-gilead, and this is how it went down, so you there, go do these things to make it happen.” Instead of thinking of God as just knowing the future already and so declaring what is already pre-ordained to happen, we could think of God like a chess-master, knowing what victory looks like, and planning the moves He is going to make to arrive at that victory, and step-by-step making His moves, all while the spiritual forces arrayed against Him are trying to thwart His purposes and bring about their own.

This would mean that when God says He is the unique One who can declare the end from the beginning, He is not saying that He is the only being who can see the future, but is instead saying that He is the unique One whom no one else can thwart. He will bring His purposes to pass and no opposition to Him will ever succeed in stopping what He intends to bring to pass.

Freedom in accomplishing God’s purposes

The second big thing this passage helps me understand better is the freedom/latitude that exists within God’s will.

It is easy to conceive of the will of God as a very tightly defined path, and if you deviate from that path, you are out of God’s will. Some decisions might fall easily into this scheme, like if you are deciding between active sin and obedience, but other decisions are significantly less clear, like whether you should take that new job opportunity or stay where you are now. This is again something we have talked about before, but one of the implications of this that you see from people is often a paralyzing fear of making the wrong decision between two seemingly good/godly decisions because only one of them can be the “proper” will of God.

But this is not the picture we see here in 1 Kings 22. God has the work He desires to see accomplished, but then He leaves how it is accomplished up to those carrying out the work for Him. I don’t think we should assume He operates all that differently with us. He has revealed to us what His will is that He desires us to accomplish generally, and at times He will reveal to us specific works that He desires from us as individuals or communities, but then how it is accomplished He leaves, in large part, up to us, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. What that means, in part, is that we don’t have to fret so much about whether a given choice is specifically God’s will or not. If we are praying, seeking counsel, etc, and God is not making one choice clear over another, it is generally a safe assumption that God is allowing His free-will agent to exercise free will in accomplishing His purposes.

Neither of these things is particularly groundbreaking or unique to this passage, but the way it is framed helps me think a little more clearly about how the same things play out throughout the rest of Scripture.