Uniformly Favorable
Last night at a get-together, my buddy Craig asked me about the meaning of the name “Micaiah,” our 10-month-old son. After I explained it, I was reminded of its significance and the reason why we named him that.
In 1 Kings 22, wicked King of Ahab of Israel and Jehoshaphat King of Judah decided to try for a third time to go to battle against Ramoth-Gilead. After consulting 400 of the nation’s prophets and receiving a unanimous “go ahead,” Jehoshaphat still felt that they needed one last opinion. So they called for Micaiah, the son of Imlah, a genuine prophet of God.
When Micaiah arrived, he was debriefed by a messenger who said to him,
“Behold now, the words of the prophets are uniformly favorable to the king. Please let your word be like the word of one of them, and speak favorably.” But Micaiah said, “As the LORD lives, what the LORD says to me, that I shall speak.” (1 Kings 22:13-14)
When I read this passage again this morning, that one phrase, “uniformly favorable”, seemed to just jump off the page in front of me. And the Lord impressed upon my heart that the current climate and temperature of the culture in which you and I now live can be easily described using these same two words, uniformly favorable. And anytime a child of God stands up for the truths of the Gospel message, it is not uniformly favorable. Anytime a follower of Christ stands up and calls sin what it is, it is not uniformly favorable. Anytime, moral relativism is called on the carpet or put under the microscope of scrutiny, it is not uniformly favorable. This is the world in which we live, not very much unlike what Micaiah faced when he stood before the King of Israel and proclaimed the truth of what God had actually said—that the battle would not go well for the king.
In a culture that values subjective truth and a myriad of belief systems (so long as it’s not the Judeo-Christian belief system), it’s time for the people of God to stand up in the face of criticism, judgment, persecution, and perhaps death, and say like Micaiah, “What the Lord says to me, that I shall speak.” This is the prayer that I pray for my youngest son almost daily (all 3 of my kids, actually)—that the power of the risen Christ would give him the boldness to proclaim the truth of the Gospel in the face of criticism—that Almighty God would empower him to stand for truth whether it’s convenient or not—and that the Holy Spirit would give him words of veracity in the midst of words of subjective, favorable uniformity. May God help us all to speak His words while the world sugar-coats everything to be uniformly favorable.