As against Benhadad, Ahab was in the right when he sought to capture Ramoth-gilead. But he had also to reckon with God. Face to face with God, Ahab's real position at this period of his life was that of a condemned criminal, and he therefore was not in a moral position to represent and act on behalf of the rights of Israel.
The four hundred prophets whom Ahab consulted would seem to have been prophets of Jehovah, worshipped illegally under the symbol of a calf, an order of men who had arisen in the reign of Jeroboam, who practised prophecy as a trade without any true call from God, and who at the present time were in the pay, or at least under the influence, of the court of Samaria. Ahab's tragical fate was the immediate consequence of preferring his own will, backed up by the advice of the four hundred, to the revelations of Micaiah. His mind at this the last crisis of his sad and eventful life is seen in two respects: in his willingness to consult the prophets of the calves; in his prejudice against Micaiah. They are the two sides of a disposition towards religion which in its principle is one and the same. It is not downright, contemptuous, bitter opposition; still less is it the loyalty of faith and love. It is a willingness to welcome religion if religion will only sanction the views, projects, and passions of its patrons.
Ahab welcomed the four hundred because he knew exactly what the four hundred would say. He disobeyed a voice which he could not silence, which willingly he would not have heard. He took his own way, and his tragical end was the consequence of his doing so.
Let us learn two lessons from this story.
I. The first is a principle of Church polity: the importance of making religious teachers, if you can, independent of those whom they have to teach. The clergyman who, with a number of children depending on him, has to think from the first day of the year about the collection that will be made for him at the end of it, must be heroic if he never yields to the softening down of a truth which will be unwelcome to his paymasters or the extenuating a fault which is notoriously popular among them. It is the laity who suffer much more by a dependent clergy than the clergy themselves.
II. Notice here a lesson of religious practice. They who do not seek false teachers may yet take only so much of true teaching as falls in with their own inclinations. If God will only say what His creature approves of, His creature will be well content; but if the Gospel or the Creed, like Micaiah of old, has its warning clauses, so much the worse for Creed or Gospel when Ahab has made up his mind, come what may, to go to Ramoth-gilead. In the last contest with death, which is before every one of us, we shall know that He who spoke by Micaiah was surely right.
H. P. Liddon, Penny Pulpit,No. 598 (see also Church Sermons,vol. ii., p. 401).
References: 1 Kings 22:8. J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College,vol. ii., p. 132; Homiletic Magazine,vol. vi., p. 78; C. Girdlestone, Course of Sermons for the Year,vol. ii., p. 237; Plain Sermons by Contributors to "Tracts for the Times," vol. i., p. 196; J. Keble, Sermons for the Christian Year: Sundays after Trinity,Part I., p. 428; J. E. Vaux, Sermon Notes,2nd series, p. 24.