I suspect you have at least one master of misdirection in your life.

You just may not know it.

Masters of misdirection are illusionists. They’re similar in some ways to the folks who do magic acts. But they do not announce, “I’m here to try to get away with fooling you.” Instead, they use cunning and skill you may never dream they have, to pursue motives you may find impossible to believe.

Masters of misdirection spend their lives using anyone, everyone, to get whatever they want. They do it so subtly, so skillfully, that the exploited ones may not know they’re being used.

We can learn something about masters of misdirection from an ancient king named Ahab, husband to the ancient queen Jezebel. First, though, we’ll have to step back, clear the fog and give ourselves permission to recognize we’ve been duped. King Ahab was so successful at misdirecting that he’s still doing it today.

I discovered Ahab’s duplicity only a few years ago, as I studied the life of Elijah, the prophet who confronted him. I’ve written about it in depth in The Elijah Blessing: An Undivided Heart. This post tells part of the story. It uncovers what masters of misdirection do not want us to see.

A king we thought we knew

King Ahab is a major player in the Old Testament, yet we tend to minimize him.

Wimpy sidekick – or actively evil?

We tend to see Ahab as Jezebel’s henchman, her patsy, the wimpy sidekick to the really evil one of the pair. In our view, she’s active; he’s passive. She wields the clout while he sits helplessly by.

We can get that impression from a casual reading of the story of Naboth’s vineyard.¹ But it is not the picture the whole of Scripture paints.

Ahab is mentioned by name 83 times in the Bible, nearly four times more often than Jezebel. He ruled Israel during the days when the twelve tribes were divided into the two nations of Judah and Israel. While most of the kings in Israel during this period rated little more than a paragraph, Ahab’s reign fills nine-plus chapters in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles.²

Jezebel did urge him on. Yet the Bible describes Ahab himself as utterly, actively, sold out to evil:

Ahab son of Omri did even more open evil before God than anyone yet – a new champion in evil! (1 Kings 16:30 MSG)

There was no one else who had devoted himself so completely to doing wrong in the Lord’s sight as Ahab. (1 Kings 21:25 GNT)

Mystifying – and masterful

Thing is, when we read the stories of Ahab’s reign, we have trouble seeing the profoundly evil king that these verses describe. What do we see?

• Ahab lets Elijah announce prophecies of doom and then just walk away.
• Ahab lets Elijah order him around.
• Ahab lets Elijah oversee the executions of 850 prophets of Baal and Asherah who ate at Jezebel’s table. Afterward, Ahab runs to tell Jezebel what Elijah has done.
• Ahab lets a lowly vineyard owner refuse him and a Syrian king intimidate him.
• Yet Ahab also goes out to fight valiantly and to win major victories.
• Several times, he obeys God’s prophets.
• At one point, he even repents and stays a changed man for three years.

So was Ahab pitiful – or masterful? If we read the biblical stories apart from the terse descriptions of Ahab as evil, he appears wishy-washy, confusing and at times almost likable.

Yet if we start with those descriptions – if we trust that the words God inspired accurately assess the man’s character, and we see the stories of Ahab’s reign in that light – a different picture begins to emerge.

Murky at first, the picture becomes startlingly clear if we ask two questions as we read each chapter in Ahab’s life:

→ What did Ahab want?
→ How did he seek to get it?

The clues we did not see

Ahab wanted to get what he wanted. He lived to get what he wanted. He saw everyone else as either a means, or an obstacle, to that end.

Ahab gave himself completely to do evil, yet he did not want to be seen as the bad guy.

Counting others only as an obstacle or a means

Remember, Ahab did not rule a pagan kingdom. He ruled a people God called his own.

Ahab knew God’s people had divided hearts. They liked believing they could blend worship of idols and worship of God, without any real repercussions. Ahab himself cared nothing for God. Yet he did not want to be seen doing anything that openly opposed God.

So Ahab became a sorcerer of sorts. He used smoke and mirrors to mesmerize and misdirect. He unleashed venom in a swirl of choking fog. Routinely, he used someone else to get his dirty work done.

• Ahab used Elijah to get rain. (No matter that so many of Jezebel’s sycophants died in the process.)
• Then, Ahab used Jezebel to try to get rid of Elijah. (“He got your prophets killed, dear! I was there. I saw it!”)
• He also used Jezebel to murder a man named Naboth, a God-fearer who owned exactly one plot of land, passed down for generations. (“Poor, poor me! That mean man wouldn’t sell me the one piece of land I just had to have!”)
• Ahab conned the city leaders of Samaria into taking responsibility when he wanted to lead Israel into war with an enemy king named Ben-Hadad.
• Ahab used the defeated Ben-Hadad to get the favorable treaty he wanted.

Caring only for themselves

Masters of misdirection like Ahab have this in common: They’re determined to get what they want – regardless who else gets hurt or destroyed. But they’re sneaky about it. They don’t want to be seen as “the bad guy.” So they set up others to carry out the evil they initiate, and/or to take the heat for it.

Ahab knew how to create a fog that still leads people to believe Jezebel was the only evil one of the pair: The witchcraft and idolatry? The wicked sexual exploits? The destroying of lives? ALL HER DOING!

Ahab mesmerized a nation. The same thing can happen today. It can also happen in the church. Jesus told us it could happen in the church. He warned us to watch out for wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matt. 7:15).

Jude wrote: It is happening already!

Godless people have slipped in among you. They care only for themselves … living according to their own desires. They speak arrogant words and they show partiality to people when they want a favor in return. (Jude 1:4, 12, 16 CEB)

People without scruples, who care only for themselves, know how to blend in with a church culture and (if they desire) to rise in the ranks. They do not love God. Yet to work the system, they need to appear godly. And they desperately want to be admired. Thus, like Ahab, they use smoke and mirrors to mesmerize and misdirect.

Trusting in their own superpowers

An old song says, “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets.” The same could have been said of Ahab – until judgment fell. Then, well, here’s how Ahab’s final ploy played out.

After Jezebel took Ahab’s bait and used the legal system to have an innocent man killed, Ahab hurried down to claim Naboth’s land. God sent Elijah to meet Ahab and tell him:

This is what the Lord says: Have you not murdered a man and seized his property? This is what the Lord says: In the place where dogs licked up Naboth’s blood, dogs will lick up your blood – yes, yours! (1 Ki 21:19)

Hmm. Ahab had not misdirected God. He had not mesmerized Elijah. And he did not want to die violently. So for three years, he stopped using people and going to war.

Ah, but Ahab really wanted a certain city that King Ben-Hadad had promised to return to Israel, but had not. And Ahab really wanted Ben-Hadad to pay for repeatedly embarrassing him.

Arrogant and vindictive, Ahab figured out a plan he was just sure would:

• get him the city he wanted,
• avoid the violent death he did not want,
• and punish Ben-Hadad for messing with him.

Ahab planned a battle to retake the city named Ramoth Gilead. He asked Jehoshaphat (and Judah’s army) to go to war with him (and Israel’s army) against Ben-hadad. Foolishly, Jehoshaphat agreed. When he did, Ahab proposed:

I will enter the battle in disguise, but you wear your royal robes. (1 Kings 22:30)

That’s Ahab in a nutshell! Instigating the attack, mesmerizing the person he wants to use as a pawn – and then hiding himself and misdirecting attention so that the unsuspecting pawn appears to lead the charge. The incredibly telling thing is: Jehoshaphat fell for it!

Deceiving and being deceived

Scripture says that King Jehoshaphat’s “heart was devoted to the ways of the Lord” (2 Chron. 17:6). He had ears to hear God’s voice. Yet step by step, he ignored the warning signs, allowed himself to be hoodwinked and walked into Ahab’s trap.

Meanwhile, as Ben-Hadad prepared to fight, he made this his sole tactic: Kill Ahab. When the battle started, Ben-Hadad’s army watched for the guy in the royal robes and immediately “turned to attack” him. They realized just in time: He was the wrong guy.

Then, a random arrow hit the disguised Ahab “between the breastplate and the scale armor,” his one unprotected spot. And thus Ahab died violently, as God had said he would, in the very act of trying to get someone else killed in his place.³

Ahab had spent his life pulling everyone else’s strings, for the sole purpose of getting his own way. God called that: being completely devoted to evil.

What’s more, the Lord has warned us: As with Ahab, so with all masters of misdirection.

Evil people and impostors [literally, sorcerers] will go from bad to worse,
deceiving others and being deceived themselves. (2 Tim. 3:13 CJB)

It sounds so obvious and so ugly. We might think: If I someone was doing that here, I would know! I would see! I would definitely not take part!

But if godly King Jehoshaphat could be fooled by a sorcerer of sorts so can we.

Such people can hide their true character and motives so well that we can be utterly blindsided when they come after us. Worse yet, their mesmerizing fog can keep us compliant and self-deceived while they use us to control and punish someone else.

The Friend who makes everything plain

How do we overcome such profound deception? We practice walking in the light. How do we do that? By the Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of truth.

If we rely on our own understanding, we can judge by what our eyes see and our ears hear – and reach conclusions that are false. We can trust the wrong people and buy into the illusions they’re spinning. The more they entice us, the murkier things will get – and the more likely that we will succumb to greater and greater lies.

Jesus said:

The Friend, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send at my request, will make everything plain to you. (John 14:26 MSG)

When the Friend comes, the Spirit of the Truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. (John 16:13 MSG)

It’s a process, dear one. And you won’t do it perfectly. But remember: As you set your heart to seek the Lord and to walk in the light he gives you, he takes on himself the responsibility to guide you.

Remember too:

If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin. (1 John 1:7)

Be blessed to walk hand-in-hand with the God whom no one can misdirect or mesmerize. Be blessed to learn from his Spirit to see through the fog that deceivers create. Be blessed to know and love the truth.

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There’s more to this story!

Ebook updated 2025

This post is adapted from The Elijah Blessing: An Undivided Heart.

The original version of this renovated repost was published May 31, 2019, under the title, “Masters of misdirection.”

Image by kai kalhh from Pixabay

See also

• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Spiritual schizophrenia and the two-headed snake
• Witchcraft in the church
• Journey to a divided heart
  
  
• When evil seems invincible: Two surprising sources of hope
• Spirit, power, blessing and an undivided heart
• I will fear no evil: Resting in God’s very present help

Footnotes

1. See 1 Kings 21. ↩︎
2. Ahab is introduced at the end of 1 Kings 16 and is featured in chapters 17-22. He also appears in 2 Chronicles 18, 21 and 22, even though Chronicles recounts the reigns of the kings of Judah, not Israel. ↩︎
3. See 1 Kings 22. ↩︎