“God came to Bil‘am during the night and said to him, ‘If the men have come to summon you, get up and go with them; but do only what I tell you.'”-Numbers 22:20
After the first negotiation session between Balaam and Balak’s men, we’re told that very night the Lord appeared to Balaam in a dream.
In those days, a dream was thought of as an inferior form of divine inspiration in comparison to the fully conscious direct style of communication the Lord had wth his chosen prophets.
Generally speaking, there are two types of prophets in the Bible.
The first type is the one that usually comes to mind when we think of a Biblical prophet.
I’m talking about a person who is chosen to be God’s mouthpiece and through whom God delivers a specific message to the people.
Prophets such as Elijah, Jeremiah and Isaiah are of this ilk.
The second type of prophet is more like a teacher as defined in the New Testament than one who proclaims future events and judgement
This type of person is called on to expound on and teach what has already been written or established.
Getting back to Balaam, we’re told in verse 20 that the Lord appeared to him in a dream and gave him the okay to go with Balak’s men back to Moab.
However, soon after we find out that the Lord was NOT pleased with Balaam going with them.
What in the heck is going on here?
Why is the Lord giving permission to Balaam to go, yet angry at him for going?
Well, what we have here is a perfect example of God working within the free will he has given to all men.
Let’s get something straight.
Even though Balaam told Balak’s men that he could not act against the command the of the Lord, Balaam had already purposed in his heart to go and curse Israel for all the buckets of cash he could get.
He was a sorcerer and it was a sorcerer’s job to persistently bargain and negotiate with whatever god he was dealing with at the time until he got what he wanted.
Think about it for a second.
Do you really think Balaam was going to travel all the way to Moab riding on his donkey for a good couple of hundred miles just to tell Balak he wouldn’t be allowed to curse Israel after all and then go home completely empty-handed?
Hellllllllllll no!
In Balaam’s mind, he was just taking things step by step.
First, he would get this God of Israel’s permission to go (which he just did) and then in some way he was going to negotiate with YHVH to give him some rope so that he could curse Israel.
I’m sensing an interesting takeaway here.
Isn’t the way Balaam is testing the Lord kinda like how we slowly but surely descend into sin in our lives?
We think, screw it, I’ll just have a quick peek at this nude photo of a girl on the internet, and then two hours later we find ourselves in the midst of a full-blown porn binge.
Or the habitual heavy drinker says, I’ll just have one beer and ends up drinking all night and missing work the next day.
Or at work, we tell ourselves we’re only gonna have a quick peek at our Facebook feed and it ends up turning into a one hour internet surfing session.
There are too many times in our lives when we go ahead and do something we know full well is against the Lord’s will.
We think we’re in control and will have enough strength to pull out of the journey we started towards sin midway unscathed.
Well, in my experience, that’s just naive thinking.
More often than not, we find that once we’ve taken those first couple of steps towards sin, it is VERY DIFFICULT TO TURN BACK.
It would have been much better had we not begun the journey in the first place.
In Balaam’s case, the Lord was going to have to send a talking donkey in order to stop him in his tracks.
To be continued…
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