November 21, 2013 – 2 Chronicles 18

Stories like this always make me wonder about what we hear we are to do or not do in the world.  400 prophets were telling the king to go to war, one was saying stop.  One was always telling him things were going to go badly, 400 were always telling him what he wanted to hear.  But, how was he to know that the one voice was the right one.  We obviously know from the story and can see it coming, but if you were in the king’s shoes, how do you know.  What makes the one’s voice persuasive?  It is always talked about when someone is in power, people advice them in a way that you tell them what they want to hear, and it is cliché that they say they want to hear from the other side, but I don’t think that is the case.  People want people to say “you are right”.

But, how is Ahab to understand that he is always wrong.  He goes to his prophets for advise and is given the wrong advise over and over.  It reminds me of the situation with George W and WMD’s in Iraq.  Or, if you buy it at all, maybe Obama and the Health Care Reform.  People are telling you that this is going to work and you want to hear it because you want it to happen and so you just ignore anything negative.  Since it is being talked about it a lot, the JFK thing might have been 25 people telling JFK to ride with the top down and a couple people saying to have the top up.  People make themselves very powerful and move up the ranks by telling people what they want to hear.  You can probably trace a lot of what is wrong with the world going back and people not listening to the voice saying “don’t do it” among the shouts of “do it”.