Four Hundred to One

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: four hundred to one — the lone honest voice in a room of paid agreement.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

Twice now we have circled this ground. First the mandate — whether the man of God speaks to power at all. Then the manner — the temper of the tongue when the subject is public and the room is divided. Tonight the third question, which is the one that actually decides the other two: what it costs, and what a man becomes when he decides it costs too much.

The case is old and it is told at length, so we will hear it at length. From the first book of the Kings:

And they continued three years without war between Syria and Israel. And it came to pass in the third year, that Jehoshaphat the king of Judah came down to the king of Israel. And the king of Israel said unto his servants, Know ye that Ramoth in Gilead is ours, and we be still, and take it not out of the hand of the king of Syria? And he said unto Jehoshaphat, Wilt thou go with me to battle to Ramoth-gilead? And Jehoshaphat said to the king of Israel, I am as thou art, my people as thy people, my horses as thy horses.

And Jehoshaphat said unto the king of Israel, Enquire, I pray thee, at the word of the LORD to day.

Then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred men, and said unto them, Shall I go against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall I forbear? And they said, Go up; for the Lord shall deliver it into the hand of the king.

And Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD besides, that we might enquire of him?

Note the question. There are four hundred prophets in the room and Jehoshaphat asks whether there is a prophet. He has heard the answer already and he does not believe he has heard anything. Four hundred men have spoken with one voice and the effect of it is silence.

The reply is one of the most self-revealing sentences a ruler ever spoke:

And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, There is yet one man, Micaiah the son of Imlah, by whom we may enquire of the LORD: but I hate him; for he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil. And Jehoshaphat said, Let not the king say so.

He does not say Micaiah is false. He says Micaiah is unpleasant. The charge against the man is that his messages have a pattern, and the pattern is not flattering. That is the whole indictment, and the king states it without embarrassment, because in that room it was not an embarrassing thing to say.

Then the king of Israel called an officer, and said, Hasten hither Micaiah the son of Imlah.

And the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat the king of Judah sat each on his throne, having put on their robes, in a void place in the entrance of the gate of Samaria; and all the prophets prophesied before them. And Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah made him horns of iron: and he said, Thus saith the LORD, With these shalt thou push the Syrians, until thou have consumed them. And all the prophets prophesied so, saying, Go up to Ramoth-gilead, and prosper: for the LORD shall deliver it into the king's hand.

The thrones, the robes, the open place by the gate, the iron horns — this is staged. Zedekiah has gone to the trouble of having props made. It is not enough to agree; the agreement must be visible, and it must be more vivid than the next man's agreement. That is what a court of prophets becomes when the market for its product is a single buyer.

And on the road, the messenger coaches him:

And the messenger that was gone to call Micaiah spake unto him, saying, Behold now, the words of the prophets declare good unto the king with one mouth: let thy word, I pray thee, be like the word of one of them, and speak that which is good.

And Micaiah said, As the LORD liveth, what the LORD saith unto me, that will I speak.

Then the strangest exchange in the account:

So he came to the king. And the king said unto him, Micaiah, shall we go against Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall we forbear? And he answered him, Go, and prosper: for the LORD shall deliver it into the hand of the king.

And the king said unto him, How many times shall I adjure thee that thou tell me nothing but that which is true in the name of the LORD?

Micaiah gives him the house answer, word for word, and the king hears it and knows instantly that he is being mocked. He recognizes the sound of what everyone has been telling him all afternoon, and the moment it comes out of a mouth he cannot buy, it registers as a lie. He has been listening to it for years without noticing. He notices now.

So Micaiah answers him plainly:

And he said, I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd: and the LORD said, These have no master: let them return every man to his house in peace.

And the king of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, Did I not tell thee that he would prophesy no good concerning me, but evil?

He goes on:

And he said, Hear thou therefore the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on his right hand and on his left. And the LORD said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead? And one said on this manner, and another said on that manner. And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the LORD, and said, I will persuade him. And the LORD said unto him, Wherewith? And he said, I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so. Now therefore, behold, the LORD hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the LORD hath spoken evil concerning thee.

We will let that stand as it stands. It is not a passage to be smoothed over at the end of a day, and the men who have written most carefully about it have generally written at length. Set beside it only this: the king was told, out loud, in front of witnesses, that the unanimity he was enjoying was itself the judgment. Everyone agreeing with him was the punishment. He was not deceived against his will. He was given exactly the counsel he had spent his reign purchasing.

The room answers as rooms do:

But Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah went near, and smote Micaiah on the cheek, and said, Which way went the Spirit of the LORD from me to speak unto thee?

And Micaiah said, Behold, thou shalt see in that day, when thou shalt go into an inner chamber to hide thyself.

And the king of Israel said, Take Micaiah, and carry him back unto Amon the governor of the city, and to Joash the king's son; and say, Thus saith the king, Put this fellow in the prison, and feed him with bread of affliction and with water of affliction, until I come in peace.

And Micaiah said, If thou return at all in peace, the LORD hath not spoken by me. And he said, Hearken, O people, every one of you.

That last line is easy to read past. The prophet is being led away to a cell, and on his way out he turns to the crowd standing at the gate and tells them to remember what they have just heard. He is not appealing the sentence. He is entering the thing into the record. He has no power to stop the war and he knows it; what he has is witnesses, and he uses them.

The king went to Ramoth-gilead. He went in disguise, having asked Jehoshaphat to wear his own robes into the battle. He was killed there, by an arrow shot at random, and everything Micaiah had said was fulfilled to the letter, including the details he had not been told. Micaiah's release from prison is not recorded.

Bread of affliction and water of affliction until I come in peace. The king's own sentence assumed his return. It is the last confident thing he says.

The four hundred are the point of the story, not Micaiah. Micaiah is rare and there is not much to say about how to become him except to do it. The four hundred are common, and they are the thing worth studying, because no one in that room set out to become a court prophet. Each of them was, at some earlier point, a man who intended to say what he was given to say.

The prophet Amos met the same office in a different form. He was not a professional; he kept livestock and tended fig trees, and he came north to say something the northern court did not want said. The priest of the royal sanctuary handled him the way institutions handle such men — not by argument, but by jurisdiction:

Then Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent to Jeroboam king of Israel, saying, Amos hath conspired against thee in the midst of the house of Israel: the land is not able to bear all his words.

Also Amaziah said unto Amos, O thou seer, go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there: but prophesy not again any more at Bethel: for it is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court.

There eat bread. The priest assumes that the prophet's mouth follows the prophet's meals, because his own does. He is not accusing Amos of anything he considers shameful. He is explaining the arrangement — go be paid somewhere else, this is the king's chapel — and he cannot conceive of a man who is not on somebody's payroll.

The answer:

Then answered Amos, and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son; but I was an herdman, and a gatherer of sycomore fruit: and the LORD took me as I followed the flock, and the LORD said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.

Now therefore hear thou the word of the LORD: Thou sayest, Prophesy not against Israel, and drop not thy word against the house of Isaac.

What follows is a sentence of judgment on the priest and his household, and it is severe; we will leave it in the text rather than read it here.

I was no prophet. He has no guild to defend and no bread to lose, and that is exactly why he is standing there. It is not a boast. It is an explanation of how such a man was available at all.

Jeremiah, who spent his life among such men, gives the fullest description we have of the trade. From the prophet Jeremiah:

Thus saith the LORD of hosts, Hearken not unto the words of the prophets that prophesy unto you: they make you vain: they speak a vision of their own heart, and not out of the mouth of the LORD. They say still unto them that despise me, The LORD hath said, Ye shall have peace; and they say unto every one that walketh after the imagination of his own heart, No evil shall come upon you.

For who hath stood in the counsel of the LORD, and hath perceived and heard his word? who hath marked his word, and heard it?

He goes on:

I have not sent these prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesied. But if they had stood in my counsel, and had caused my people to hear my words, then they should have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their doings.

And:

The prophet that hath a dream, let him tell a dream; and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat? saith the LORD. Is not my word like as a fire? saith the LORD; and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?

Therefore, behold, I am against the prophets, saith the LORD, that steal my words every one from his neighbour. Behold, I am against the prophets, saith the LORD, that use their tongues, and say, He saith.

That is the sharpest line in the passage and the easiest to miss. They steal the words from each other. The false prophet is not primarily an inventor; he is a copyist. He listens to what is being said, learns the cadence, and repeats it with confidence. This is why they had one mouth in Samaria. Nobody had to organize it. It is what men do when the reward for agreement is certain and the cost of dissent is a cell.

They say still unto them that despise me, Ye shall have peace. The falsehood is not in the vocabulary; every word of it is pious. The falsehood is that it is addressed to people who need to hear something else, and it is chosen because it is what they will pay to hear.

There is a psalm that turns the whole scene around and puts the court itself on trial. It is short, and it is one of the strangest things in the book. From the Psalms:

God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods. How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.

Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy. Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.

They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.

I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.

Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.

The psalm addresses judges. It grants them an extraordinary title and then, in the same breath, reminds them that they are mortal. Both halves are meant. The dignity is real — this is not sarcasm — and so is the funeral. And the standard by which the whole assembly is measured turns out not to be doctrine or ceremony but the disposal of the poor and the fatherless: whether the weak got justice from the men who had the power to give it. All the foundations of the earth are out of course. That is the diagnosis when they do not.

And there is the other psalm, the one the church prayed at the government when the government first told it to be quiet:

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure. Yet have I set my king upon my holy hill of Zion.

I will declare the decree: the LORD hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

Spurgeon gathered a great deal of older comment on that psalm, and some of it belongs to tonight. From Spurgeon:

The Psalm begins abruptly with an angry interrogation; and well it may: it is surely but little to be wondered at, that the sight of creatures in arms against their God, should amaze the psalmist's mind.

On the same verses he sets down a warning that reads like a summary of the scene at the gate of Samaria:

These verses show that all trust in man in the service of God is vain. Inasmuch as men oppose Christ, it is not good to hang our trust upon the multitude for their number, the earnest for their zeal, the mighty for their countenance, or the wise for their counsel, since all these are far oftener against Christ than for him.

Not the multitude for their number. Four hundred was a number. It was, in that room, the only argument anyone made.

He quotes Thomas Adams on the laughter of heaven:

They scoff at us — but God laughs at them. Laugh? This seems like a harsh word at the first view. But are the injuries of his saints, the cruelties of their enemies, the derision, the persecution of all that are round about us — no more but matter of laughter? He laughs — but it is in scorn; he scorns — but it is with vengeance. Short is the joy of the wicked!

And Matthew Henry, in one line:

Sinners' follies are the righteous sport of God's infinite wisdom and power; and those attempts of the kingdom of Satan, which in our eyes are formidable, in God's eyes are despicable.

And on the charge to the kings at the end of the psalm, Spurgeon says the thing this lane exists to say, and says it without softening:

As Jesus is King of kings and Judge of judges, so the gospel is the teacher of the greatest and wisest. If any are so great as to spurn its admonitions, God will make little of them; and if they are so wise as to despise its teachings, their fancied wisdom shall make fools of them. The gospel takes a high tone before the rulers of the earth, and they who preach it should magnify their office by bold rebukes and manly utterances even in the royal presence. A clerical sycophant is only fit to be a scullion in the devil's kitchen.

A clerical sycophant. He has a word for it, and the word assumes the thing is common enough to need one.

The moralists have circled this for centuries, mostly under the heading of flattery, and they are worth hearing in a row.

From Raleigh:

Flatterers are the worst kind of traitors, for they will strengthen thy imperfections, encourage thee in all evils, correct thee in nothing, but so shadow and paint thy follies and vices as thou shalt never, by their will, discover good from evil, or vice from virtue.

From William Penn:

Avoid flatterers, for they are thieves in disguise; their praise is costly, designing to get by those they bespeak; they are the worst of creatures; they lie to flatter, and flatter to cheat; and which is worse, if you believe them, you cheat yourselves most dangerously.

From Chesterfield, who is describing a court from the inside and does not seem troubled by it:

Flattery, though a base coin, is the necessary pocket-money at court; where, by custom and consent, it has obtained such a currency that it is no longer a fraudulent, but a legal payment.

From Sir Philip Sidney:

The most servile flattery is lodged the most easily in the grossest capacity; for their ordinary conceit draweth a yielding to their greaters.

And from Samuel Johnson, who understood the buyer as well as the seller:

To be flattered is grateful, even when we know that our praises are not believed by those who pronounce them; for they prove at least our power, and show that our favor is valued, since it is purchased by the meanness of falsehood.

That is the mechanism laid bare. The king does not need to believe the four hundred. Their agreement is not evidence about Ramoth-gilead; it is evidence about him. It proves he can buy four hundred men. That is the commodity he is actually purchasing, and it is why the flattery works even on those clear-eyed enough to see through it.

Under the heading of the majority, the same compiler sets down four sentences that will not agree with each other, and that is the honest state of the question.

From Beecher:

A man in the right, with God on his side, is in the majority, though he be alone, for God is multitudinous above all populations of the earth.

From Bovee:

A better principle than this, that the majority shall rule, is this other, that justice shall rule.

From Horace Mann, drily:

We go by the major vote, and if the majority are insane, the sane must go to the hospital.

And then, set beside them without comment, the sentence that every one of the four hundred would have recognized as his own:

It is better to be wrong with the majority than right with the minority.

Nobody says that out loud. Everyone who has ever sat quiet in a room where something false was being agreed to has said it inwardly, and it is a great mercy to see it written down in plain words, because in plain words it is unbearable.

On courage, from Colton:

Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another. The former would seem most necessary for the camp, the latter for council; but to constitute a great man, both are necessary.

And Chapin, who keeps the whole thing from curdling:

Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admirable when it sparkles in the setting of a modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.

That is the guard rail. Last week's episode was about the temper of the dispute, and everything in it stands under tonight's. The man who will not flatter is one short step from the man who enjoys not flattering, and the second man is no use to anybody.

Two more, on conscience. From Jean Gerson:

To what purpose have I a conscience of my own, if I must live and die according to the conscience of another man?

And from Philip Henry:

He that hath a blind conscience which sees nothing, a dead conscience which says nothing, is in as miserable a condition as a man can be on this side of hell.

Thomas Watson puts the positive form of it, on truth in speech:

Truth in our words is opposed to all deceit. The heart and tongue should go together, as the dial goes exactly with the sun. To speak fair to one's face, and not to mean what one speaks, is no better than a lie. Some have an art to flatter and deceive. Falsehood in friendship is a lie. Counterfeiting friendship is worse than counterfeiting money.

The dial and the sun. Not the dial and the crowd, and not the dial and the king.

One line from Hoyt's collection, of Milton's loyal angel standing alone in a rebel host:

So spake the seraph Abdiel, faithful found, among the faithless faithful only he.

And one from Lowell, which is the shortest statement of tonight's subject anyone has managed:

They are slaves who fear to speak for the fallen and the weak.

So: what is to be done with all this on an ordinary Wednesday, by a man who is not being asked to prophesy against a king and is only being asked, in a hundred small ways, to be agreeable?

Only the plain thing. Notice who is paying. Notice what you are rewarded for saying and whether you have begun to enjoy saying it. Notice whether your positions have lately required anything of you — because a set of convictions that has never cost you a friendship, a donor, an invitation, or an hour of sleep is not a set of convictions; it is a weather report on the room you are standing in. Micaiah's guild had four hundred members and one job, and the job was not lying. The job was listening carefully to what was wanted and then providing it. Any of us can do that job without ever once saying a sentence we believe to be false.

And notice, finally, that the story does not end with the prophet vindicated in the hearing of the court. He is in a cell when the arrow finds the king. The reward for being right was not applause; there is no record that anyone ever came back and told him he had been right. That is the ordinary case. Hearken, O people, every one of you — he says it to a crowd that is about to go home and forget, and he says it anyway, because the record is worth entering even when no one is keeping it.

Three last stones, on the holding of opinions, because the cure for the four hundred is not stubbornness.

From Whately:

We must always think our opinions are right, but not think our opinions are always right.

From Robert Venning:

Men do not care so much for the opinions they hold, as for what they hold by their opinions.

That is the knife. What do you hold by them — what comes to you on account of them? Standing, income, a seat in the room, the affection of people whose affection you want. And from Sir Philip Sidney once more, so that none of this hardens into a license to quarrel:

Among the best men are diversities of opinions; which are no more, in true reason, to breed hatred, than one that loves black should be angry with him that is clothed in white; for thoughts are the very apparel of the mind.

The point was never to be the difficult man. Micaiah did not go looking for the gate at Samaria; he was summoned there, and he had already been in prison, and he answered the question he was asked. There is no evidence he enjoyed a minute of it. That is what makes him usable as an example. The court prophet and the contrarian are both selling something. Only one man in that account was simply telling the truth to the person who had asked him for it, at the price the truth happened to cost that day.

We close with Lowell, from The Present Crisis:

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight, Parts the goats upon the left hand, and the sheep upon the right, And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Careless seems the great Avenger; history's pages but record One death-grapple in the darkness 'twixt old systems and the Word; Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified, And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes — they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

You are probably not being asked for anything heroic tomorrow. You are being asked to be honest in a small room with people who would rather you weren't.

Good night.