SERMON: Wisdom And The Voices You Listen To

Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherd's Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon. And we pray that as we declare the word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith and you would catch a greater vision of who Christ is.

May you be blessed in the hearing of God's word and may the Lord be with you. Three weeks ago, we were told by Solomon that fearing the Lord is what will actually give us wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of the wisdom.

Fearing the Lord is what opens and awakens in us wisdom. We saw three weeks ago that wisdom, when we have it, it will open up our eyes and that open eyes will allow us to love God and follow Him in every aspect of life.

Simple, right? But then, last week we saw that the opening of the eyes is a divine, miraculous event that we cannot manufacture on our own. A resurrecting God has to bring light into the darkness, has to bring life into those things that was once dead.

And what we saw underneath all of that was a warning that even though God must open up the eyes, we saw a warning on how it's possible for our eyes to even lie to us. We saw how it's possible for us to think that we have wisdom, to think that we have sight, to think that we know the way that seems right to us and yet to be on the way that leads to death.

We saw how the believer and the one who is wise in their own eyes will say the exact same thing, I can see. We saw how the one who has a profession of faith and the one who is absolutely lost will say the same thing, I can see, I know where I'm going, I am on the right path.

One of those professions is based on God miraculously giving sight, the other is based upon that man being wise in his own eyes. One leads to temporal ruin and eternal devastation, one leads to eternal life.

And if you understand the dilemma correctly, you will remember how scary that is because the one who is wise in their own eyes doesn't find out that they actually didn't have Holy Spirit-given sight until the end when they go barreling over the cliff's edge.

And that of course begs the question, have you and I been deceived? Do we actually have sight or will we be one of the ones who are going over the waterfall on a barrel? Are we one of the ones who are gonna find out too late that we've been deluded in our own foolishness only to be plunged in the fires of hell?

That was the dilemma that we looked at last week, like a spider hanging delicately over a fire, like a man walking across a rope bridge with rotten ropes, like a climber without hooks, without carabiners and ropes hanging free solo over a cliff and over a valley below him.

Have we trusted in ourselves to our own ruin or have we been given sight by God? That was the dilemma, the sobering truth that we had to consider last week. And one of the things that we saw is that our love for God versus hate for consequences will determine which path we're on.

If we hate the consequences that God gives us, if we hate God, question God because of those things, we're not on the path. But if even in our pain, even in our toil, even our sorrow, we love God and we praise him, it's a good evidence that God has given you sight.

It's one way you can determine it. Now, in that, the most appropriate posture as we talked about last week that we should have based on the first two sermons in this wisdom series, and by the way, wisdom is all throughout the book of Proverbs, so it's really difficult to just nail it down to one mini series, but we're doing our best.

The thing that I hope you remember from those first two sermons is do not follow your heart. Do not trust your gut. Do not revel in your own opinions. Do not trust your natural eyes or your carnal mind because they lead us astray.

Jeremiah says they're desperately sick. Who can even know them? We must have God giving us vision or we will perish. Now, if God opens the eyes, both the fool and the believer sincerely believe their eyes are open, how can we know whether or not that we are deceived?

Are we supposed to fondle our way through life, tapping the ground with a walking stick like a blind man crossing traffic in Manhattan? Or do we have some reliable aid in addition to what we just talked about that will help us, that will speak to us, that will give direction to us, that will give us counsel, that will aid us in our journey?

For all of us who are Christians, what has God provided to you? What are the means of grace that God has given you to aid you because you can't trust your eyes, because you can't trust your mind, you can't trust your thoughts?

We have not been made lone ranger Christians who get to sit in a room by ourself and determine our way because there is a way that seems right to the man, but it leads to destruction. What has God given us?

God Gives His People Counsel Through the Church

That's what we're gonna be asking this week, to help us in the journey. And today, I want us to look at that God has given us counselors. God has given us people. God has given us believers, other Christians, to be our counselors, to be our guides, to speak into our life.

If we can't trust ourselves, we need to have external feedback coming in so that we can actually know which way we're to go. God has given us a measure of grace and given you brothers and given you sisters and given you fathers and given you mothers to speak into you.

The importance of this is so massive because we live in a culture that has so much connectivity and is so alone. So much social media and yet so little actually being known. We have all become sort of functional isolationist, haven't we?

Especially in a place like New England where our friend group is small. How much people know of us is even smaller. It's a dangerous endeavor to walk through life unknown because if you can't trust you and you've walled off other people from being around you to help you and support you, what are you?

But walking through a minefield in North Korea. And here's the thing, if you surround yourself with no one, that's dangerous. But it's also dangerous to surround yourself with the wrong people. If you surround yourself with fools, will you not eventually join them in their folly?

If you surround yourself with misers, won't you eventually join them in their cheating, stealing? If you surround yourself with scoffers, will you not eventually join them in grumbling? I don't know if you've had this happen to you, but I was a very clean spoken young lad until I joined the army.

And then I was around a group of people who had more colorful language. And then all of a sudden, my language was fairly colored as a young man. The company that we keep actually leads us more than we realize for good or for ill.

And Solomon's gonna point this out, that all of us have a court of advisors and all of us who are healthily skeptical of ourself need a cabinet of people around us who've been appointed, who've been asked and invited to speak into our life.

The question that we have to wrestle with this morning is have you employed the right advisors? Do you have the right kind of friends, family and people speaking into your life? Have you employed godly men who are further along in the faith than you to speak to you, to grab you by the collar and say, you're not living right, you're not going right.

People who have the courage to actually rebuke you. Have you asked mature, wise, matriarchal women who will come alongside of you and say, sister, you need to repent of this, sister, you need to do this.

Or have you consorted with people who prop up your ego and make you feel better and congratulate you in your sin? The scoundrel, the swines, the dogs, the ones who go to the same moral vomit to lap it up again and again, are those the people that you've invited to be your counselors, to advise you in the way that you should go?

Few questions actually could be more pressing. Who are your advisors? What is the company you keep? Are they building you up? Are they gonna tear you down? That's the question we need to answer this morning.

So after two sermons in this series, God opens the eyes, don't trust your eyes. Now we need to figure out the ears. Who is it that we're supposed to listen to? Who will actually help us and aid us in our journey of having wisdom, obeying and loving God?

So if you will, we're gonna look at that in four different ways today. We're gonna ignore three ways that we do this wrongly and one way we must do it, we must do it. First is we ignore wise counsel. The second thing we do is we surround ourself with yes men.

The third thing that we do is we only like the counsel that we like. And then the fourth thing is for us to see and behold the only counsel that actually will help us. And we will do that together. Now, I'm gonna read a few verses and then we will pray and then we will begin.

Proverbs 15 .22 says, "'Without counsel, plans go awry, but in the multitude of counselors, they are established.'". Proverbs 18 .1, "'A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire. He rages against all wise judgment.'".

Proverbs 19 .20, "'Listen to counsel and receive instruction that you may be wise in your latter days.'". Proverbs 20 .5, "'Counsel in the heart of a man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out.'".

Proverbs 20 .18, "'Plans are established by counsel, but by wise counsel wage war.'". And then Proverbs 24, five through six, "'A wise man is strong. Yes, a man of knowledge increases strength, for by wise counsel, you will wage war.

And in a multitude of counselors, there is safety.'". So counsel is a big deal. What counsel do we have? Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for this word, these passages that have to do with the counselors that we've surrounded ourself with, the court of people who we have given a right to speak into our life, the people who have our ear.

Lord, I pray that as we think through those names and as we think through those faces and as we think through those relationships, I want us to think, Lord, are they the kind of people who build me up in my faith, who push me and challenge me and correct me and rebuke me and who encourage me, or are they the kind of people who are happy to make me feel good in my sin, who are happy to caress and massage my ego so that they don't offend me?

Rejecting Wise Counsel Through Isolation

Are they a real friend to me or not? Lord, help us as we consider these things, the importance of these things. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Now, when we're developing a theology about the types of voices that we should be listening to, if we want to have wisdom, then we have to actually consider how as fallen human beings we don't get this right.

And there's several reasons that we don't get this right. And the first reason is that we just flat out ignore it. We ignore wise counsel. We isolate ourself from wisdom. As we said last week, why do we do that?

Because we love it. Notice what Proverbs 18 .1, notice what Solomon says there. A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire and he rages against wise judgment. Now, first of all, we have to understand something that Solomon is not saying.

When he uses this term isolation, he is not talking about a healthy and restful solitude that we need from time to time in order just to be healthy. He's not talking about quiet time. He's not talking about the kind of alone time that allows you to recharge your batteries.

He's not talking to all of us who are introverted, who need time to process before we actually open our mouth and speak. I mean, think even of Jesus. Jesus went away into the wilderness by himself for long extended periods of time.

He went up on the mountain by himself. This is not talking about that kind of isolation, that kind of solitude. Jesus did not lack wisdom because he sought solitude. That's not the point of this passage.

The word Solomon uses here is actually nephrod, which is very fascinating because it's a reflexive verb. How many remember what reflexive verbs are from grammar school? I don't even think they teach it anymore.

A reflexive verb is a verb where the action is you doing the action unto yourself. It's you acting upon yourself. It's you isolating you. That's what it means. So this is not a person who's going into solitude to spend time with God, not a person who's going into quiet time in order to recharge.

This is a man or a woman who is intentionally isolating himself, cutting himself off from people, cutting himself off from counsel, insulating himself from accountability. This is the kind of man that no one abandoned.

He's the one who left. He's the one who left on purpose. He checked out, stopped participating in a meaningful community for a reason. And if you watch, you'll see exactly why. Solomon tells us that he isolates himself.

Why? So that he can seek his own desire because if he doesn't isolate himself, someone's gonna tell him, no, no, don't do that. But when he isolates himself, he's like, finally, no accountability, I can do what I want.

Solomon tells us that isolation is really not the goal. Isolation is the method by which he can do what he wills. Let me give you an example of this. The examples are of legion. We live in a culture that isolates ourself all the time from accountability.

We don't like accountability. Someone's in my business. It makes me frustrated, right? How dare you say that? That's the culture we live in. We don't like to be known, so we hide. I would be very surprised if anyone in this room has not isolated themself in some way, for some reason.

We all do it. Here's an example, a example among many. I want you to imagine a man who's unhappy in his marriage for more than a couple of years now. He's not abused. He's not endangered in any way. His wife's not a mortal combat fighter who's gonna finish him.

He's just a man who's unhappy. And by unhappy, I mean in the extremely ordinary way of grinding out life with another sinner where things can become tense and without godly repentance to cover over and love to cover over those things, the grind that keeps going.

That's the unhappiness I'm talking about. Now, how does this man isolate himself? Well, I want you to imagine that he ends up you know, talking to himself and saying things like, well, I just, I need to shoulder this.

I need to make myself a little bit more private. I don't wanna let people know what this is because if I do, they're gonna judge me. That's the beginning of it. If I tell people that I'm struggling in my marriage, they're gonna think less of me.

If I tell people that I don't like my wife in these days, then they're gonna think I'm terrible. And then that embarrassment and that shame causes you to do what Adam did and run to hide. So then you shoulder the burden alone.

You don't tell anyone, you don't tell your friends, you don't tell a neighbor, you don't tell your elder, you don't tell your pastor, you don't talk about it. You don't disclose it with godly friends and you just sit around and ruminate on it.

Maybe you tell one or two people who you purposely curated who will tell you that you're right, but you don't tell anyone at all that would tell you that you're wrong. You don't tell anyone at all that would tell you to repent.

You don't tell anyone at all who will call you out for your stupidity. And then somewhere around month eight or nine of you sitting and stewing to yourself, you stop praying about it. You start narrating the world around you as you're the good guy, you're the one who's innocent, you're the victim, they're the perpetrator.

You deserve to be happy. Those are questions you ask, right? You deserve to be happy, right? She doesn't understand you. You should be understood. You should want to be understood, right? She doesn't understand you.

It's her fault. I mean, how am I supposed to continue in something like this? Look at the burden I'm bearing. Look at the cross I'm bearing. Look at all that I've gone through in this. You start asking those questions because you failed to talk to someone.

You failed to let someone in and in the darkness, you're sin festered. On and on, rehearsing your case in the shower, rehearsing the evidence in the exhibit A and exhibit B on your car ride to work, thinking, ruminating, introspecting over your supreme rightness and her villainy.

And by month 14 or 15, after a thorough going habit of morbid introspection, you call it discernment. You call it wisdom. You start planning. And then before long, you've packed your bags and you're planning to leave.

Maybe even pray prayers like Donald Trump. Lord, you know, I've been praying some big, beautiful prayers, probably more than anyone else, quite frankly. And some ways you may not be wrong. Maybe you are praying, but you're praying to a false God who supports you in your sin instead of the one who would actually call you to account.

After months and months of polluted counsel, you hire a lawyer, you intentionally remove yourself from your family, you burn it down because you did not open up and let someone tell you, you are wrong.

She's wrong too, but you are too. You see how dangerous it is for you to live inside of your own counsel? Because before long, you are the hero in your story. That's what we all do. There's cowboys and Indians, there's cops and robbers, and we're always apparently on the side of right.

I've mentioned this before. When someone cuts me off, they're Hitler. When I cut them off, I had a good reason. I was being judicious. I had somewhere that I really needed to go. It was more important than them.

We always tell the story of us being either the victim or the hero and someone else being the tyrant. And if you live inside of that narrative for too long, if you live with that chatterbox for too long, and you do not let anyone else in to see that stewing, festering, moldy darkness, you will do things to sabotage your life because you can't trust you.

Solomon says, a man who isolates himself seeks his own desire. And because his desires are polluted like all of ours, he rages against all wise judgment. That's the transition. That's the slippery slope.

You isolate yourself, you live in your desire, you hate wisdom. That's the slope. And all of us do this to one degree or another. And it's not because we're stupid. There's other reasons for that, as Agger says in Psalms or in Proverbs.

It's because in whatever sin that you and I nurse, whatever sin that you and I pet, whatever sin that you and I treat with kid gloves, there's some part of us that already knows that that sin is wrong.

We already know that if we asked someone who is more mature, wiser than us, smarter than us, more godly than us, we know what they would say about it. We know, so we don't ask. And since we know what they're gonna say, we naturally start building up some isolation tendencies.

We naturally start pulling away. Every time that we pull away from community, we are nursing something underneath that we want to stay hidden. We start naturally building up an iron dome around our life against all counsel that you and I have predetermined that someone would give us that would cause us to repent.

And we want to avoid it like Adam. Underneath every heart and soul in this room this morning is the same handful of fears. I will tell you this. I've only done ministry for 10 years, which is not enough to speak authoritatively or definitively.

You don't have unique things you're struggling with. You don't. Everyone has the same stuff. Every marriage struggles with the same things. Every person struggles with the same things. You are not unique.

And yet when we start thinking that way, no one could understand me. No one can understand what I'm going through. And we start isolating ourself. That's where the downfall begins. Because if people knew what I was thinking, people knew what was in my heart, if people saw the things that I see in my head whenever I'm daydreaming, if they knew those things, they would not like me.

They would reject me. They would throw me away. And instead of that fear, Solomon would actually challenge us and tell us, that's not true. Some will, maybe. But isolating is actually a guarantee to ruin.

He would say that, run towards community. Run towards men and women who will correct you. Run towards people who can see that you're in error and actually tell you about it. One of the definitions of a friend in the Bible is someone who will actually offend you on purpose because they love you.

We don't know what friendship is in this country. We think friendship is the one to make me feel good and support me and encourage me always. I don't want that as much as I hate when someone grabs me and tells me you're an idiot.

I hate it. My flesh hates it. I despise it. I know you do too. But that's what's good for me. I heard a long time ago that in every single accusation that someone makes about you, even if there's only 1 of it that's true, you can't discount it.

You have to deal with it. We have this mentality of throwing away counsel, throwing away feedback, living in isolation that's killing us, that's poisoning us. And we have to remember that feedback, counsel, counselors is God's mercy to you.

Because the best way to do something completely stupid is to follow yourself without any intervention and to do it long enough to where it causes you pain, grief, and ruin. And the saddest part about all of this to me is that maybe there's someone in this very room today who's currently living isolated from other people.

And it's not because someone else put you there, you put you there. You crawled into a dungeon of your own making, trying to insulate yourself from opinions that would correct you because you're afraid, because you're scared, because you don't want someone to think poorly of you.

You've crawled into a hole that you made because correction you think would confirm who you already think you are. Not lovable, not enough, not disciplined, not capable, whatever it is, whatever lie you're believing, you've isolated yourself to protect you from that.

And a wise person's word in your life, no matter how gently it was spoken, sounds like a stab to you instead of a scalpel to you. A stab hurts you, a scalpel heals you, but you don't see it that way anymore because you're so afraid that in being exposed, you'd be thrown away.

Maybe some of you are isolated for different reasons because you've been confused, because you've confused being loved and accepted as the same thing. Someone agreeing with you means they love you. Someone disagreeing with you means that they don't love you.

That's not true. Some of you may be isolated for other reasons because the misery that you are familiar with has become more comfortable than the freedom you don't understand. Some of us have lived in slavery and bondage to sin for so long, we don't even know what it's like to live in freedom.

That's why felons, I worked in the prison system, that's why felons often find it harder to live in freedom than in cages. I remember one day, there was this man who, it was cold outside in North Carolina, which really is not cold, but we are babies in the South.

There was this man who walked into a gas station, stole some food, walked right up to a police car and drank it and ate it in front of them and then threw it on the ground at the officer's feet. The officer obviously arrested him.

He came back to the jail. We booked him in and he said, I couldn't live on the streets anymore, I'm cold. He couldn't imagine freedom, so he had to live in his cage. He becomes so comfortable with it, he was institutionalized in it that he couldn't actually live in freedom.

That's true of Israel, isn't it? For weeks, Israel wept for leeks and cucumbers and garlic while miraculous manna was falling from heaven. A one-time miracle in human history is happening, God is raining down bread from heaven and they're like, I think I want cucumbers.

And the reason that they detested this sweet blessing from God is because they were more familiar with the food of their enslavement than they were with the meal that he had given them for their freedom.

They knew how to live in chains, they knew what it meant like to have whips on their back, they knew what it meant like to be yelled at and screamed at and mistreated and for some strange reason over time, that became more comfortable to them than the freedom they did not know because the unknown was scary.

You could say it this way, you could take the slave out of Egypt but not the Egypt out of the slave. We do the same thing as well, we become accustomed to the chains that we've been walking with and we become afraid of the freedom Christ has offered so we live in the dysfunction that we've always known, repeating the same sins that our fathers did, repeating the same sins that our mothers did because we do not know what it would be like to live anything differently so we isolate ourselves into that.

Some of you are isolated for a different reason, maybe it's the plainest reason of all that Solomon gave us, you seek your own desire, you want what you want, deep in the underground caverns of the carnal soul, far removed from any watching eye or any counsel or any other wisdom, we've protected ourself by building a wall around ourself so that we can live like Gollum, happily in a cave stroking his precious.

Proverbs 18, one says, a man who isolates himself seeks his own desire, he rages against all wise judgment and then in 20, Proverbs 20, verse five, he says, the counsel in the heart of man is like deep water, but a man of understanding will draw it out, it's interesting that he juxtaposes those two things together because what does that mean?

A man, the heart of man is like deep water, sounds nice, sounds restful, sounds like a nice little well in the middle of a spring with little birds chirping in the background, what does that mean? It's not good actually, because depth here is not when someone says, yeah, that was deep, bruh, that's not good, here, depth means depravity, here, depth means sin, here, depth means abyss, here is a polluted pool that exists within our heart deep under the surface, something that this person, the heart of the man is like deep water, the heart of the man is like polluted pools deep inside of us and this man does not draw it out, the man of understanding draws it out, what does that mean?

The man of understanding pulls out what is inside of his heart and shows it to someone, when you're in a well, you actually have to put the bucket down and draw it out, not leave it in there, the man of understanding will draw out what's in his heart so that someone else can say, that's polluted, that's ugly, that's wrong, but the man who lacks understanding will grab the scuba tank and say, now, let me live here, let me swim here, let me bathe here, let me soak here, man of wisdom draws out what's in his heart because it's not good, I need people to look at me and say, you're not right, you're wrong, a foolish man lives inside of his heart, soaking in his own pools, polluted waters, bathing in his own counsel, that's point one that I want you to understand, to avoid godly wisdom is to isolate ourself from counsel, for a variety of different reasons, whatever we tell ourself, it's to live in those underwater pools without pulling it out and having feedback and people show us what it is, we do it because we wanna live in our own desires, we don't want people to tell us what they think, we don't want people to say, you shouldn't do that, so we live in that, we fester in that, that's the first reason that we do this wrong, the second reason is that we surround ourself with yes men, we surround ourself with yes men, isolation is when we cut off all the voices in our life, insulation on the other hand is when we surround ourself with voices who always agree with us, who cheer for us, who affirm us, but never correct or convince us, and in some ways this is even more dangerous because it allows the man or woman who does this to have this idea that, no, no, no, I'm not isolated, I have counsel, I have people around me who speak into my life, they just always agree with me because I'm that right, but I have people, they think they're not hiding because they've amassed a gaggle of people who say, oh, you're great, keep doing you, isolation hides you from counsel, insulation hides you from counsel as well, but it only lets the friendly voices in, and we do it because it feels good to us, it strokes our ego, it feels good to our flesh because we desperately wanna protect who we are from being known, so we surround ourself with people who agree with us because there's usually some fear or insecurity or sin underneath it that we're trying to hide or cover so that when people come along and affirm us instead of afflicting us, who celebrate us instead of correcting us, we can outsource responsibility to them, hey, they said it was good, why do I need to repent?

They thought it was right, isolation is you being the judge, insulation, having yes men in your life is saying, I'm outsourcing it to them, they're gonna tell me whether I'm right or wrong, and just so happens I picked them specifically to tell me that I'm right, so really, the whole thing is flawed, and you're not honestly seeking counsel when you do that, you're only recruiting allies and accomplices, you're just gathering enough yeses to silence the echo in your own conscience that you're in sin or you're wrong, I need someone to help me out here, oh no, I'm right, okay, good, I'm right, I thought for a moment that was sin, thank you, thank you for helping me, and then you can live in the blissful ignorance of resting in yeses instead of resting in truth, for some we do this out of fear, out of fear of what?

Maybe out of being ordinary, not exceptional, we live in a participation trophy world, so maybe being ordinary threatens our fragile ego, and an honest word that would tell you you're not that special, what, me, I'm not special?

I'm beautiful, I'm wonderful, I want people around me who will tell me that if they don't, you're not fired, I know that sometimes I've done this, fast Shannon questions, I think I'm strong, why do I ask that, because I'm afraid of being weak, wife who asked her husband, do you think I'm pretty, of course, why she asked that, because she's afraid of being something else, the questions that we ask, if we're only asking them in order to hear a yes, the only reason that we wanna know the answer so that we can be affirmed, to boost our confidence and assuage our fears, then all you've done is asked people to be your yes man, that's all you've done, if you actually don't want an answer, if you actually don't want the truth, you just want people to affirm you, all you've done is you've just collected people who will just say yes, maybe some of you, it's older than that, lingers underneath everything, it was a parent who didn't love you, a parent who didn't approve you, a parent who spoke harshly to you, and you walk through life constantly believing that you are not good, you are not acceptable, you are worthy of being thrown away, and now you seek voices who will affirm you to quiet down that fear, so that you don't have to face it, some of us it's even simpler and rawer than that, it's a plain fear of being wrong, because somewhere along the way, we've convinced ourself that being wrong equals being broken, worthless, and stupid, and if you're wrong, then people may reject you, so you surround yourself in an echo chamber of yeses to protect you from the terror of facing the fact that you're not omniscient.

Why do we do this? Solomon even tells us, Proverbs 19 .20, listen to counsel and receive instruction that you may be wise in your latter days, we should listen to counsel so that we'll be wise in our latter days, but we don't, and we don't because we think we're wrong, and we think we're broken, and we think we're limited, and we think that we have a myriad of weaknesses, and we're afraid that if we let people in, then we're actually gonna be weaker, we're gonna lose control, so we never let them into the light of day, Solomon would tell us that surrounding ourselves with yes men will never actually force us to deal with any of our actual stuff, it's like spraying perfume on a cadaver and thinking that we fixed the problem, the solution is terrifying and scary, and we're not ready to expose ourselves to be vulnerable, one of the hardest things you'll ever do is be vulnerable, one of the hardest things you'll ever do is show who you are to someone else and hope that when they've heard it, they still won't throw you away, all of us have that fear, it's deep down in our bones, and it causes us to hide, and it causes us to have people around us who only affirm us, there's an example in scripture of this in 1 Kings 22, a king who surrounded himself with yes men, who came into calamity in a single hour, if you remember the list of Israelite kings, the Northern 10 tribes, there's a long list of people who were evil, there's not a single Israelite king in the Northern 10 tribes who was good, and of that cohort of evil kings, perhaps the most perniciously evil of them all was King Ahab married to Queen Jezebel, and just before 1 Kings 22, he had stolen a vineyard from a man, if you remember the story, it's hilarious, he's on his bed crying because he can't have the vineyard, like you can imagine like a man child having a pity party crying, and Jezebel comes in and is like, what are you doing?

She organizes the murder of a man named Naboth, she kills him, steals his vineyard, gives it to Ahab and Ahab is happy again, the child has been pacified with a vineyard side pacifier. Now to his credit, later, not much later, and in a war where he's gonna try to now steal someone else's kingdom, Ramoth Gilead, this little territory in Syria, to his credit, he does surround himself with counselors, he doesn't isolate himself in this moment, he doesn't go crying on his bed like he did before, he does something on the surface that actually seems wise, he gathers 400 counselors around him to ask him, should I go to war?

And in a voice of beautiful unison, all 400 of them answer with one accord, go up, O king, for God will deliver it into your hand. And in the multitude of counselors, there's wisdom, right? Ahab would have said, there you go.

But I want you to notice the kind of counselors that he actually assembled here, they weren't honest, objective, scrupulous men who were willing to disagree with him and offend him in order for him to be on the side of right, they were men who would only ever agree with him.