1 Kings 20 is an account of the relations between Ahab, king of Israel at Samaria, and Ben-hadad, king of Aram at Damascus. One necessary piece of background information is that neither of these kings was a follower of Yahweh, but even in his disobedient and unbelieving state, Ahab was an Israelite and therefore party to the covenants God had made with the patriarchs. At the beginning of the chapter Ben-hadad marched his army – an alliance representing thirty-two kings – against Israel and besieged its capitol. Ahab knew that he could not muster a force large enough to fight off those of the Arameans, so he quickly agreed to terms of surrender and service. He acknowledged that he and everything he owned now belonged to Ben-hadad.
Maybe you’ve had a negotiation where the other side seemed to agree too quickly to the terms you offered. You realized, too late, that you should have asked for more. That seems to be the case with the king of Aram when Ahab surrendered almost immediately to his demands. So he sent other messengers to Ahab telling him that he planned to ransack the palace and the homes of all of his officials to take anything of value. This alarmed Ahab and the elders of Israel, so he tried to gently push back, saying that he would hold up his end of the original surrender, but he could not agree to these much more invasive tactics.
Of course, Ben-hadad was not happy about this, and he threatened to completely destroy the capitol. “May the gods punish me,” he said, “and do so severely if Samaria’s dust amounts to a handful for each of the people who follow me” (1 Kings 20:10). To this Ahab responded gamely: “Don’t let the one who puts on his armor boast like the one who takes it off.” He had been pushed too far; in spite of their imbalance of forces, Israel was now going to war with Aram.
God brought himself down to man, so that the man would come to know the One who reigns over all.
Before Ben-hadad could attack Samaria – in fact his allies were all drinking in their tents (v.12) – an unnamed prophet of Yahweh gave Ahab this assurance: “Do you see this whole huge army? Watch, I am handing it over to you today so that you may know that I am Yahweh” (v.13). What a work of grace this was, to grant deliverance to wicked Ahab, Israel’s unbelieving and idolatrous king! God brought himself down to man, so that the man might come to know the One who reigns over all. The prophet told Ahab to lead his own forces into battle, and he would be victorious.
And this is exactly how things played out. Ahab and his army of just over 7,000 men routed the Arameans and won a great victory, just as the Lord had promised through his prophet. The prophet returned to Ahab after the battle and warned him that Ben-hadad, who had escaped during the conflict, would return the next spring to attack Ahab once more. Remember the purpose for God granting this deliverance was that Ahab would come to know and trust the Lord. This reprieve from the oppressive Aramean king gave Ahab the chance to adjust his own perspective, i.e. to learn to trust in Yahweh. [We could also say that this experience provided Ben-hadad with an opportunity to learn the futility of oppressing the children of Israel and dismissing Yahweh’s power to grant victory without regard to the relative size of the forces involved. More on that point later.]
When Ben-hadad returned the next year, he brought an even greater army than before. The text describes the contrast vividly: “The Israelites camped in front of them like two little flocks of goats, while the Arameans filled the landscape” (v.27). And once again the unnamed prophet of Yahweh approached Ahab with a hopeful message. He said that due to the arrogance and blasphemy of the men of Aram, the Lord would again grant victory to Ahab and his meager force. In fact, he promised to give Ben-hadad’s whole army over to Ahab, so that “you will know that I am Yahweh” (v.28).
Again the battle turned out exactly as the Lord’s prophet had predicted, and the Arameans were utterly defeated. Those who ran from the battle and hid in the city of Aphek were killed when the wall of that city fell on them (v.30). God was keeping his promise to Ahab! With his army completely destroyed, Ben-hadad ran and hid, hoping to escape death somehow. His servants proposed a scheme where they would surrender to Ahab based on a rumor that “the kings of the house of Israel are merciful kings” (v.31).
So Ben-hadad surrendered to Ahab. The scene is almost comical in its description. Here is the proud king of Aram who boasted an army that numbered more than 100,000 men dressed in sackcloth and rushing to offer terms of peace in the hope that Ahab would accept. He says to Ahab, “I restore to you the cities that my father took form your father, and you may set up marketplaces for yourself in Damascus, like my father set up in Samaria” (v.34). Always the shrewd negotiator, Ahab immediately accepts these terms and released Ben-hadad to return to his throne in Damascus.
Now this story is followed up by a rather strange account of some happenings with the prophets-in-training. One of the young men received a message from the Lord leading him to tell another of the young prophets to strike him. This young man refused, and the first one said that, because he did not obey the voice of Yahweh, the second young man would be attacked and killed by a lion. The young man left and was immediately killed by a lion. If that was not strange enough, the first young man went to find another and gave him the same message, “Strike me!” That man obeyed and struck a blow that injured the first young prophet. So now we have a young prophet-in-training with an injury that he received at his own insistence from another young man. This was all somehow a work of God.
Well, that young man went to king Ahab and used his injury as a pretext to tell a story from the battle with the Arameans. He claimed that during the battle he was charged with watching over a prisoner and told that if he failed to guard him he would pay with his own life or the massive sum of seventy-five pounds of silver.
The young man confessed to Ahab that he had become distracted during the battle, lost track of the prisoner, and the man escaped. [Note: I have no idea if the story itself is true, or if the young prophet made it up as a rhetorical device in order to make the point he was trying to convey to Ahab. In the end I suppose it does not matter, but the lack of corroboration simply adds to the overall uniqueness of this account.] Ahab, for his part, quickly recognized that the young man who stood before him was guilty of letting the prisoner – an enemy of Israel – go free, and therefore he deserved to pay the penalty for his actions. “That will be your sentence,” he said, “you yourself have decided it” (v.40).
Here’s where the story comes back around, and we see the purpose of this whole exchange with the young prophet-in-training. Removing the bandage he had used to cover his face and disguise him from Ahab, the young prophet declared, “This is what Yahweh says: ‘Because you released from your hand the man I had set apart for destruction, it will be your life in place of his life and your people in place of his people’” (v.42).
God had revealed himself to Ahab by twice giving him victory over a superior force. The second time he had even told Ahab that it was to be judgment against Ben-hadad for his blasphemy and scorn in saying that Yahweh was merely a territorial god and not the Almighty, ruling over heaven and earth. If Ahab had believed God, he would have recognized that the Lord delivered Ben-hadad into his hand so that he would destroy him. The Lord meant for Ahab to be his instrument of justice, not to let the enemy of Israel go free.
We are foolish to think we can be kinder than God.
This en.tire story has the potential to make us uncomfortable, especially as modern westerners. I think this is due in part to a foolish idea that has taken hold of many today, even professing Christians. That is, we think there is some virtue in being kinder than God. This comes up in debates over the death penalty and whether it is right for states to execute someone convicted of an especially heinous crime. We’ll make statements like this one from Gary Peterson, quoted in Rebecca Nagle’s book By the Fire We Carry, “I think us humans aren’t smart enough to decide whether other humans should live or die. I think that’s almost a divine thing; when humans try to make those decisions, they mess it up.”
Of course, life-and-death decisions should be made with the utmost sobriety and care, but the idea that it is somehow virtuous to allow a murderer to live is a great evil. It is neither kindness nor humility to refuse to practice a responsibility which God has given mankind, rather it is a terrible cruelty to victims and arrogant unbelief directed at God. This misplaced “kindness” also does a disservice to the guilty ones by failing to teach them the gravity of their crimes and to warn them about the even greater judgment that awaits them, if they continue to rebel against God.
Ahab’s display of mercy was an act of selfishness and pride, evidence that he had not received the message Yahweh sent through his prophet. Ahab rejected God’s moral judgment and replaced it with his own. Instead of doing justice and upholding righteousness, he sought personal gain and an ongoing relationship with the immoral and corrupt king of Aram. Ben-hadad, for his part, failed to learn from his first encounter with the armies of Israel and the power of Israel’s God. Being soundly defeated by an inferior force did not dissuade him; he returned the next year to his own destruction.
But this failing is not exclusive to death penalty decisions or matters of state. Parents fall prey to the same kind of thinking, when we do not discipline our sinning children. It may seem like kindness to show mercy rather than justice – mercy is indeed appropriate at times – but we must be careful never to condone what God condemns. Again, it is foolish to think we can or should be kinder than God. Teachers, coaches, law-enforcement officials, and anyone else in a position of authority can fall into this same trap, believing that showing mercy is always better than meting out justice.
The prophet’s final words to Ahab ought to ring in our ears: because of his failure to do justice, God would take Ahab’s life in the place of Ben-hadad’s and Ahab’s citizens instead of the Arameans. This passage isn’t necessarily teaching the retaliatory principle of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, as if God has promised to punish you and me with equal measure as he did Ahab, but we need to recognize Ahab’s failure and be careful that we do not follow the same trajectory of unbelief and self-deception. We can’t outdo God in showing mercy by pardoning the guilty.
God’s mercy is even more powerful when seen in the light of his absolute justice. This is what makes the gospel such good news. Instead of setting aside justice, the Lord executed perfect judgment on every sin and every sinner by putting his own Son to death on the cross. Jesus bore our sins in his own body, so that his death would satisfy the debt we owe, and he rose from the grave to secure forgiveness and life to every one who trusts in him. God never offers mercy at the expense of justice; he shows mercy by satisfying the demands of justice himself. This is a lesson Ahab desperately needed but failed to receive. Humble faith accepts God’s righteous standard of judgment and the role he has given those in authority to administer justice; only then is mercy truly merciful.
