I suspect you have at least one master of misdirection in your life.

I suspect you don’t know it.

Masters of misdirection are sleight-of-mind artists. They’re similar in some ways to the folks who do magic acts. But they do not announce, “I’m here to try to get away with fooling you.” Instead, they use cunning and skill you may never dream they have, to pursue motives you may find impossible to believe.

Masters of misdirection spend their lives using anyone, everyone, to get whatever they want. They do it so subtly, so skillfully, that the exploited ones usually do not know they’re being used.

We can learn something about masters of misdirection from an ancient king named Ahab. But first, we’ll have to step back, clear the fog and give ourselves permission to recognize we’ve been duped. Because Ahab was so successful at misdirecting, he’s still doing it today.

I discovered King Ahab’s duplicity only a few years ago, as I studied the life of Elijah, the prophet who confronted him. I’ve written about it in depth in The Elijah Blessing: An Undivided Heart. Here’s an excerpt, uncovering what masters of misdirection do not want us to see.

The king we thought we knew

If we love to hate Jezebel, we love to dismiss Ahab. In our view, he’s her henchman, her patsy, the wimpy sidekick to the really evil one of the pair. She’s active; he’s passive. She wields his authority while he sits helplessly by.

That may be the picture we see in a casual reading of the story of Naboth’s vineyard.¹ But it is not the picture the whole of Scripture paints.

Ahab is mentioned by name 83 times in the Bible, nearly four times more often than Jezebel. He ruled Israel during the days when the twelve tribes were divided into two nations, Israel and Judah. While most of Israel’s kings during this period rated little more than a paragraph, Ahab’s reign fills nine-plus chapters in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles.²

King Ahab is a major player in the Old Testament, yet we’ve considered him a minor one. The Bible describes him, not as a gutless wonder who lets his wife lead him around by the nose, but as actively evil:

Ahab son of Omri did even more open evil before God than anyone yet – a new champion in evil! (1 Kings 16:30 MSG)

There was no one else who had devoted himself so completely to doing wrong in the Lord’s sight as Ahab. (1 Kings 21:25 GNT)

Ahab devoted himself completely to do evil. Jezebel urged him on.

Yet when we read the accounts of Ahab’s reign, we have trouble seeing the depth of the evil these verses attribute to him.

• Ahab lets Elijah announce prophecies of doom and then just walk away.
• Ahab lets Elijah order him around.
• Ahab lets Elijah put 850 false prophets to death. Afterward, Ahab runs to tell Jezebel what Elijah has done.
• Ahab lets a lowly vineyard owner refuse him and a Syrian king intimidate him.
• Yet Ahab also goes out to fight valiantly and to win major victories.
• Several times, he obeys God’s prophets.
• At one point, he even repents and stays a changed man for three years.

So is Ahab pitiful – or is he masterful? If we read the biblical stories apart from the terse descriptions of Ahab as evil, he appears wishy-washy, confusing and at times almost likable.

Yet if we begin with those brief descriptions – if we assume they accurately assess Ahab’s character and we read the stories of his reign in that light – a different picture begins to emerge.

Murky at first, the picture becomes startlingly clear if we ask two questions as we read each chapter in Ahab’s life:

What did Ahab want?

How did he seek to get it?

The truth we did not see

An old song says, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.” Until judgment fell, the same could be said of Ahab: Whatever he wanted, he got.

Typically, he used someone else to do the dirty work.

• Ahab used Elijah to get rain. (No matter that 850 of Jezebel’s prophets died in the process.)
• Ahab used Jezebel to try to get rid of Elijah. (“He murdered all your prophets, dear! I was there. I saw it!”)
• Ahab used Jezebel to murder a man named Naboth. (“Poor me! Poor, poor me! That bad man Naboth wouldn’t give me the one piece of land I just had to have!”)
• Ahab conned the city leaders of Samaria into taking responsibility when he wanted to lead Israel into war with the Syrian king Ben-Hadad.
• Ahab used the defeated Ben-Hadad to get himself a favorable treaty.

And then, well, here’s how Ahab’s final ploy played out:

Ahab did not want to die violently, according to the warning Elijah had given him from God. So for three years, Ahab stopped using people and going to war.

Ah, but Ben-Hadad reneged on his treaty. And Ahab really wanted a certain city that Ben-Hadad had promised to turn over to Israel, but had not.

Ultimately, Ahab figured out a plan to get the victory he wanted and avoid the violent death he did not. He would attack the Syrian king Ben-hadad – and exploit Judah’s godly king Jehoshaphat.  

So Ahab invited Jehoshaphat to go to war with him against Syria. When Jehoshaphat agreed, Ahab proposed:

I will enter the battle in disguise, but you wear your royal robes. (1 Kings 22:30)

That’s Ahab in a nutshell! Instigating the attack, then hiding himself and misdirecting attention so that someone else appears to lead the charge. The incredibly telling thing is: Jehoshaphat fell for it!

• Jehoshaphat had no beef with Syria and its king, but he ignored that.
• He had nothing to gain, and a whole lot to lose, from allying with Ahab, but he ignored that.
• He knew Ahab to be evil, but he ignored that.
• After Jehoshaphat agreed to send his troops, alongside Ahab’s, into a senseless battle, he called in a prophet and asked him what to do. Then, when Ahab dismissed the prophet’s dire warning, Jehoshaphat did too.
• Most amazing of all, Jehoshaphat blindly agreed to be the decoy in Ahab’s trap.

Scripture tells us King Jehoshaphat’s “heart was devoted to the ways of the Lord” (2 Chron. 17:6). He had ears to hear God’s voice. But step by step, he ignored the warning signs and allowed himself to be hoodwinked.

If King Jehoshaphat could be fooled by a master of misdirection, so can we.

But God cannot.

Ben-Hadad’s sole tactic in the battle with Israel and Judah was this: Kill Ahab. To that end, the Syrians watched for the guy in the royal robes and “turned to attack” him. They realized just in time: He was the wrong guy.

Meanwhile, a random arrow hit the disguised Ahab “between the breastplate and the scale armor,” his one unprotected spot. And thus Ahab died violently, as God had said he would, in the very act of trying to get someone else killed in his place.³

Ahab was a leader, a person with power, who spent his life directing attention away from himself. Relentlessly, masterfully, he hid the fact that he was pulling everyone else’s strings, for the sole purpose of getting his way. God called that: being completely devoted to evil.

So too with other masters of misdirection. Whatever they want, they use someone else to get.

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Image by kai kalhh from Pixabay

See also

• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Spiritual schizophrenia and the two-headed snake
• How Ahab and Jezebel outsmart us
• Is the SBC capable of Caring Well?
• Witchcraft in the church

Footnotes

1. See 1 Kings 21. ↩︎
2. Ahab is introduced at the end of 1 Kings 16 and is featured in chapters 17-22. He also appears in 2 Chronicles 18, 21 and 22, even though Chronicles recounts the reigns of the kings of Judah, not Israel. ↩︎
3. See 1 Kings 22. ↩︎