“How long will you try to go both ways?” cried the prophet Elijah to God’s people.

King Ahab and Queen Jezebel ruled in Israel. Evil, oppressive, abusive, the two worked in tandem, like a two-headed snake. They did not look as many of us have been taught: Jezebel was never a woman who “usurps authority”; nor Ahab, a wimpy man.

And though the two intensified a bad situation, they did not cause it. Quite the opposite, actually: Ahab and Jezebel came to power when people in covenant with God had been trying to go both ways for a very long time.

On Mount Carmel, the prophet Elijah tried to change that.

Elijah went before the people and said, “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.”

But the people said nothing. (1 Kings 18:21)

Today, divided hearts still produce abusive religious systems. Within these systems, leaders may collectively play the same roles and use the same tactics as Ahab and Jezebel did. Always, abusive systems produce a profoundly confusing fog.

Thus, many Christians still do not see the original Ahab and Jezebel for who they really were. And many do not see what people like me have realized only after the venomous “strike”:

We have followed leaders who abuse in tandem, and who draw their power from a church culture trying to go both ways.

Ahab and Jezebel, the two-headed snake

When you set your heart to follow God fully – to stand before his face, to live in his presence with a heart wholly his – hell sets itself to stop you. That’s not surprising. What can totally surprise you are the tactics hell uses to shut you down.

In places and eras where God’s people insist on trying to go God’s way and our own way, one of hell’s favorite tactics is to unleash the two-headed snake. The same evil that worked through Ahab and Jezebel still has power to deceive and destroy. We tend not to recognize it – and so to be decimated by it – because we believe our own myths:

Myth 1: We think our church culture worships Jesus only, when instead we’ve halted between two opinions for generations.

Myth 2: We think we know how Jezebel and Ahab work, when instead we’ve been misled.

Myth 3: We think that if we follow Christ and keep our heads down, Ahab and Jezebel will leave us alone.

Myth 1

We think our church culture worships Jesus only.

In particular, we in the conservative US church may honestly see ourselves as world leaders in standing up for Jesus and calling the nations to follow him alone.

We may fail to see how we have missed and misrepresented our Lord. We fail to see it because we’ve grown up in it. We do not recognize how deep and pervasive our collective double-mindedness is.

Many of our ancestors’ hearts became divided while the Second Great Awakening faded and died. Since then, our church culture has built a thousand little kingdoms and bowed before a host of golden calves. Though we preach and sing of Jesus and do many good deeds in his name, wholehearted devotion to Christ in our ranks is rare.

I describe this tragedy in detail in We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church. Here’s a glimpse into one aspect of our deep double-mindedness, adapted from chapter 7:

Seeking to serve the Lord, we begin to confuse loyalty to him with loyalty to something we link with him. Over time, we come to view whatever we’ve connected with Christ as inseparable from him. When that happens, we’ll disobey God himself in order to obey the person or structure we’ve confused with him. We will seek above all to protect and defend what has supplanted Christ, and convince ourselves that we’re defending Christ.

And thus double-mindedness, undetected and unconfessed, can grow into full-fledged spiritual schizophrenia.¹ People halting between the true Lord and a beguiling counterfeit begin to show two radically different sides. Ultimately, they swing wildly between the appearance of godliness and blatant God-defiance.

Even when the spiritual schizophrenia has become full-blown, it may be astonishingly hard to spot, especially for those in closest proximity to it. For, typically, such double-mindedness is accompanied by strong deception.

We tend to see what we expect to see. And we in the conservative US church culture tend to see our words, attitudes, and behaviors as pretty close to right. Especially, we may expect the most active church members and the leaders of our organizations, congregations, and ministries to believe, think, say, and do what is godly. After all, the “committed Christians” in our churches have a long history of checking the right boxes. We’ve assumed they/we must be in right standing with God.

Happily, God knows every person identified with Christ who truly seeks to believe, think, say, and do what is godly.

Tragically, in our church culture the appearance of godliness often belies the reality. For the most active church members, as well as the leaders who have moved up the ranks in our structures, are often the most susceptible to confusing loyalty to Christ with loyalty to things connected with Christ. They’re especially susceptible to making a hidden idol of the organizations, ministries, and titles which offer them significance and power.

Lord God, may we see how tenaciously we’ve tried to go your way and our own way. May we see the idols we have made, renounce them, shatter them and follow you with undivided hearts.

Myth 2

We think we know how Jezebel and Ahab work.

Our misconceptions about Jezebel can set us on a witch hunt for women who speak up in church, “usurp” authority and/or use subtle manipulation to control. Thus trying to keep women under the thumb of our toxic systems, we rob an entire gender of our full inheritance in Christ. We deceive ourselves as to who is manipulating whom, and how. And we completely miss Jezebel’s M.O.²

While we hunt Jezebel in the wrong places, we help Ahab stay hidden. To our thinking, a Jezebel is a woman who doesn’t know her place; an Ahab, a man who can’t control his wife. He’s not so much evil, as weak. He just needs to learn to take charge: “Honey, do not kill Naboth to get his vineyard for me. I’ll quit sulking and do it myself.”

Ahab and Jezebel had anything but a godly marriage. Yet reading the Naboth story out of context, we’re even deceived as to what they did wrong and how it applies to us. Seeing only a king sulking on his bed, we dismiss Ahab as inconsequential. We ignore the snake’s other mouth.

That’s the thing with Ahab and Jezebel: They cloak themselves in strong deception – so strong that we can look right at them, and not know it.

Overt, intimidating, openly controlling and attacking, Jezebel does not usurp authority. Rather, she takes full advantage of the power Ahab knowingly grants her. Brazen as Jezebel is, she can coerce all around her to join in blatant evil with her, and frighten them into believing they had no choice.

Covert, wily, able to change personas on a dime, Ahab is a master manipulator. Impotent as he may seem, he can hoodwink just about anybody into getting into bed with him – and use them to bear the evil fruit he wants.

Suppose you’re about to travel through a swamp filled with poisonous snakes. You’ve never seen a snake, and people you trust have described the reptile as a creature with legs and wings. Armed with such false information, you’re in great danger of sustaining a deadly bite.

Now, suppose you know what a snake looks like. You can even identify the poisonous kinds. But you don’t know that a two-headed species exists and that it inhabits that swamp. Seeing a coiled snake, you focus on trying to avoid its venomous fangs – as a second head that you do not see poises to strike.³

Lord God, open our eyes to the two-headed evil that Ahab and Jezebel embodied, and that still works through controlling people acting in tandem, to wreak havoc today.

Myth 3

We think that if we follow Christ and keep our heads down, Ahab and Jezebel will leave us alone.

If you truly want to know Christ, you pursue him. You seek to cultivate an undivided heart, not to make a scene or pick a fight. Since you’re not trying to force your choice on others, or even to announce what you’re about, you may believe the enemy will go after other, more visible people and let you pursue the Lord in peace.

Beloved of the Lord, that belief sets you up to be blindsided, and taken out.

Anyone who seeks the Lord with a whole heart automatically exposes any divided hearts around. People with divided hearts do not like to be exposed – especially people in a church culture that prides itself on its allegiance to Jesus alone.

As you pursue God, he will show you idols hidden in your own heart. As you renounce and forsake those idols, people still worshiping what you’re discarding will see you as a traitor and a threat. They will use every means available to get you to recant. They’ll coax, shame, manipulate, pressure, demand and, ultimately, attack.

It doesn’t matter that you’re not trying to expose anyone. The people who suddenly count you the enemy have put themselves in a terrible place. Choice by choice, they’ve transferred their ultimate love and loyalty from Christ himself to other gods. The more divided their hearts have become, the more self-deceived they’ve become.

Now they follow leaders who deceive in order to control. Anything that threatens to expose the truth triggers a violent reaction within them, a loud and insistent alarm. Not seeing what they are doing, they rush to extinguish the threat.

So there you are, growing more in love with Christ daily, delighted with the ways he’s working in your life. Suddenly, people you thought were on the same path, and especially leaders you trust and believe to be godly, come after you with a vengeance. You’re confused and disoriented, grieved and shocked. As the blows keep coming, the ones bashing you will often look you in the eye and accuse you of being the troublemaker, the one at fault.

Overcoming

In every generation, Ahab and Jezebel exploit the double-minded and incite war against the wholehearted. Under cover of strong deception, they devastate and destroy God’s people.

If you encounter them:

Be strengthened by the Lord and his powerful strength. Put on God’s armor so that you can make a stand against the tricks of the devil. We aren’t fighting against human enemies but against rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens. Therefore, pick up the full armor of God so that you can stand your ground on the evil day and after you have done everything possible to still stand. (Eph. 6:10-13 CEB)

Remember also: Elijah lived where Ahab and Jezebel ruled, yet he lived powerfully and victoriously.

You too be blessed to live fully, and to love fiercely, from an undivided heart.

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The bulk of this post is drawn from The Elijah Blessing: An Undivided Heart, with a quote-within-a-quote from We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church.

The original version of this post was published August 22, 2017, under the title, “We Have Met the Enemy.” The current introduction and conclusion were added Jan. 12, 2020.

See also

• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• When Christian leaders reject God
• Checklists, idols and loving God
• Masters of misdirection
• Journey to a divided heart
• Witchcraft in the church
• I will fear no evil: Resting in God’s very present help

Footnotes

1. “Spiritual schizophrenia,” as described here, is not a parallel to the mental illness. Rather, it reflects the literal meaning of schizophrenia, “split mind.” ↩︎
2. Be wary of labeling any one person a Jezebel or an Ahab. That quickly leads to mislabeling and falsely accusing. Most often, the Ahab-Jezebel dynamic in toxic church systems involves multiple leaders acting collectively. And most often, those who accuse a woman of being a Jezebel are themselves up to their necks in Ahab-Jezebel acts. ↩︎
3. In The Elijah Blessing: An Undivided Heart, I re-examine the Ahab and Jezebel of the Old Testament in more detail. ↩︎