Comparing Kings 22 And Isaiah 6

After reading through and examining Kings 22 and Isaiah 6, I was completely shocked from reading the Bible for the first time. I was so shocked because it was the first time in my life that God was presented to me as a being that lies. What this lead me to think about was whether or not God actually lied or if the prophets were “making things up” or “telling the king what he wants to hear”. In order to determine what actually happened a closer look must be given to the text.

A closer look must first be given to 1 Kings 22 because this is where the lie/epistemological problem becomes very evident. When the text says,” Then the King of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred of them,” Shall I go to battle against Ramothgilead, or shall I refrain?” They said, “Go up; for the lord …show more content…
“I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. Then the Lord said, ’You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do it.’ So you see the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets;” (1 Kings 22:22-23) From this it becomes obvious that God indirectly lied to 400 prophets and only he himself spoke the truth to Micaiah. The result of this situation leads you to wonder whether or not you can trust what a prophet says. This problem is also known as the epistemological problem. The biggest issue with this problem is that there really is no way to tell whether or not what a prophet prophesizes is true until what they prophesize does or does not happen. Also, now since we have seen that God “lies”, who is tell whether a lying spirit has been sent to that prophet making everything he says false and untrue. This means that anything a prophet says from this point on may or may not be true, which in turn really just takes away all meaning and importance from anything they say in my