I Hate Him

In today's reading, we read about a war between Israel, Judah and Aram. David's post describes how this battle ends, but I was more intrigued by 1 Kings 22:8:

"There is still one prophet through whom we can inquire of the LORD,"

That's the beginning of the verse, but not the part I liked--that would be this part:

"...but I hate him because he never prophesies anything good about me, but always bad."

That just cracked me up. Imagine if you're the king of Israel (and the Chronicles version states it was Ahab), and you have a court full of toadies who spend their every waking minute telling you what you want to hear, and yet one person continually tells you the opposite. If you're confident in your ways, you ignore that person, but if you have doubts and harbor deep-down thoughts that you're not going down the right road, you get irritated. Why change a perfectly good life of evil just because one prophet is a thorn in your side?

It's really no different today. We don't talk about the Law too much in church, content to tell ourselves that Jesus' death and resurrection freed us from the strictures of the law, but that doesn't change the fact that we still sin, or that the wages of sin is still death. We like hearing the Gospel and how we are saved, but don't consider the fact that it was our own sin that necessitated salvation in the first place. We celebrate Christmas joyously every year, but do we stop to think that the only reason Christ was born was to be the payment for our sin? No, that doesn't make for happy church services...

We still need Micaiahs in our church today to remind us that we are sinners with absolutely no recourse except through the redemption of Christ. The fact we might not like the message doesn't mean we don't need to hear it and live it. Our goal should be to thank the Michaiahs in our lives for pointing out our shortcomings. Mirrors are just as important in bad times as in good.

Scott