Embracing Micaiah

Over the last several days, the same story has kept coming to me. It’s a story that makes a person chuckle one moment and say “ouch” another. I’m going to provide a synopsis for brevity reasons:

There were two allied Kings trying to decide whether they should go into battle with their enemies. They were “religious” men, so they called their “trusted” counselors and asked them whether God was in favor of, or against, them going into battle. There were over 400 of these trusted counselors and all of them told them to go into battle because they would win. One of the Kings asked the other King, “Is there not anyone else that we could ask?” Even after 400 “yes” answers, this King was still not convinced. The other King said, “There is another man. His name is Micaiah, but I hate him because he never says anything positive about me.” So, the first King asked the second King to have Micaiah brought in. Micaiah was already in prison because he had told the second King the truth in another situation and the second King didn’t like it. When they brought Micaiah in, at first, he told them to go to battle because they would win. The second King realized Micaiah was lying so he told him to tell the truth. At that point, Micaiah told them that the second King would die in battle. The second King told the first King, “I told you he wouldn’t say anything positive about me.” The second King had Micaiah put into prison until his return from battle. The second King died in battle. We don’t know much about what happened to Micaiah after that, although some speculate that he could be an “unnamed” prophet mentioned later on. We just don’t know for sure.

I kind of laugh every time I think about this story because I can picture the second King, the King of Israel, saying this with a whine in his voice, “There is another man. His name is Micaiah, but I hate him because he never says anything positive about me.”  But I am also amazed by the fact that the King of Israel realized that Micaiah was lying to him, at first, heard the actual prophesy, and still went into battle.

There are several lessons in this. For sake of the discussion that follows, lets pretend that God’s perfect will can be measured by a compass and that God’s perfect will is “north” and that anything else is not God’s perfect will.

The Kings are representative of people in leadership positions who are trying to make decisions. This could be church leaders, parents, people who are supervisors at their jobs or a myriad of other scenarios. Micaiah is representative of Christians who want to please God, but sometimes slip and fall. At first, he lied to the Kings because of fear. Micaiah was human and he allowed situations to affect the direction his moral compass pointed. In order to save his own neck, he was willing to deliberately advise the Kings to do something that he knew was wrong. The lesson here, even Christians are human and make mistakes. It’s how we correct our mistakes, and get back on course, that matters the most in the end. It occurred to me that sometimes a Micaiah may need another Micaiah in their life to get them back on course.

Most leaders find a Micaiah type person a little hard to embrace. As leaders, we don’t want to hear messages that question our decision making.  Sometimes Christian leaders seek counsel from trusted others and get the answer that they believe God has for them and then Micaiah shows up. He contradicts what the “trusted” others said. How do we know then what God wants us to do? I learned the following from a study I was doing with the young adult’s class and wanted to share it here.

First, we have to acknowledge that we don’t know everything. We have to be willing to listen to others. It’s possible for us to deceive ourselves. Our heart can mislead us, lie to us and misguide us. Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.”

Second, we have to be willing to seek and surrender to God’s will. That is, seek God’s perfect will above all other earthly pursuits, and surrender to it completely before we know what it is. We accomplish this by reading, studying and meditating on the Bible and walking with God in prayer. Matthew 6:33 says, “But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.”

Third, we have to pray about our decisions. As we pray, we will have competing voices in our head with the sole purpose of distracting us. They will represent things we could do, opportunities that could open up to us, and influences that will try to persuade us to choose one way over another. These voices can drown out God’s voice because he waits patiently and silently. We must silence all those voices and concentrate on God. God primarily speaks to His Children through His word and through His indwelling Holy Spirit in our heart. Jeremiah 33:3 says, “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.” But heed this warning, the Holy Spirit will NEVER tell you something that contradicts the Word of God.

Last, but definitely not least, we need to seek godly counsel. We need to understand that this is the key step in getting assurance that what we are wanting to do is the right thing to do. It’s the “safety net” that God has given us to undergird our decisions. It’s the system of checks and balances to verify that our heart is pure and that our direction is truly biblical. To make sure that you get the most from those counselors, we need to keep a few things in mind. Initially our counselors may try to talk sense into us if they disagree with the direction that we want to go, but at some point, they will eventually choose to “support” our decision and hope for the best if we are persistent enough. We need to make sure that all counselors we seek advice from are godly and that they will approach giving us advice with fear and trembling. This needs to be counselors who would literally be absolutely terrified of counseling us with anything but biblical, Christ-centered advice. We need to listen with an open heart and don’t go in with our mind already made up. We are looking for either confirmation or contradiction to our decision and we want to seek the counsel of multiple godly counselors who meet the above criteria. Proverbs 11:14 says, “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counselors there is safety” and Proverbs 12:15 says, “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established.”

As a leader, I must admit that I haven’t always embraced the Micaiahs in my life. I only saw them as “negative” and not supporting of my decisions. Then I began to realize that I wasn’t “reading” things correctly. I began to recognize that my Micaiahs only verbalized things when they were concerned that my decisions may be less than the best, and the rest of the time they “positively” supported me in their unspoken actions. They taught classes that I wanted them to teach, they brought “gifts” of appreciation and so many other things. I just had to learn to recognize their love language to understand them…but that’s a whole other topic.