The man of God who spoke to Ahab, king of Israel
Text: 1 Kings 20:28 And there came a man of God (identity unknown), and spake unto the king of Israel, and said, Thus saith the LORD, Because the Syrians have said, The LORD is God of the hills, but he is not God of the valleys, therefore will I deliver all this great multitude into thine hand, and ye shall know that I am the LORD.
Thoughts: Ahab was the king of Israel’s ten northern tribes when this event took place. 1 Kings 20 has a record of conquest and re-conquest along with various diplomatic (?) messages between Ahab and Ben-Hadad, king of Syria (Aram) at the time. The nations of Syria and Israel were once again at war, and Israel seemed to be at a great disadvantage! Verse 27 states that not only was Israel’s army like “two little flocks of kids (of the goats)” but also that the Syrian forces “filled the country”. To say the least, Israel seemed to be outnumbered by a large margin!
The text does not indicate if Ahab prayed to any god or deity. He had known about the True God, the God of Israel but Ahab seldom had any dealings with the True God. Ahab most likely gave his first religious allegiance to the golden calves of Jeroboam (1 Kings 12-13) and, after he married Jezebel from Sidon, he worshiped Baal, Jezebel’s god (1 Kings 16:31).
The text, for reasons not disclosed, does not speak to anything Ahab did during this time. But verse 27 also says that the Israelite army left Samaria (the capital at the time) and camped before the Syrians at Aphek (verse 26, location uncertain). Now all the Israelite soldiers could do was wait for the battle to begin.
And then a man of God came to Ahab.
Like several men of God, Scripture tells us nothing about him: his name, hometown, tribe, education, what if anything else he did for a living, family if any, and maybe even more information is withheld by God’s own purpose. Whoever he was, he made his way to Ahab and gave him one of the shortest prophecies or sermons in the Bible. His message had two parts: first, he quoted what the Syrians were saying. That message was. Israel’s God is the God of the hills but not the valleys, implying Aphek may well have been in a valley. Another implication was that the God of Israel couldn’t defeat the gods or deities of Syria when battles or armed conflict took place in a valley.
The second part of the message to Ahab was an encouragement: God first told Ahab, through this man of God, that The True God of Israel was going to deliver all the enemy soldiers into Ahab’s hands. The second was both a word of encouragement and a word of rebuke—God told Ahab, “You will know that I am the LORD”. Ahab may have seen God’s power in any number of situations but whether or not he rejected his idols is not known. What is known is that an unknown man of God brought a word from the LORD to a king, when it was needed the most.
Scripture quotations taken from the King James Version of the Bible (KJV).