05/12/2021
And Balaam rose up in the morning, and said unto the princes of Balak, Get you into your land: for the Lord refuseth to give me leave to go with you.… And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went with the princes of Moab.’
Num 22:13-21
Balaam is one of the most interesting characters in the Bible; and it is a special feature of the Bible that it exhibits real living human characters. If ever you come to read the sacred books of other religions—for example, the Koran, which is the Bible, as you know, of the great Mohammedan faith—you will find plenty of moral and ceremonial rules, nay, a good many precepts which you will do well to incorporate in your own Christianity; but you will not be passing, as it were, though a portrait gallery of living men and women, whom you know well. Yet there is certainly no means so efficacious of teaching spiritual or moral truth as by example.
It is the divine mode to teach by example; and, bearing this in mind, as the result of many instances, let me ask, What is the lesson of Balaam’s life?
I. Now, when the messengers of Balak came to Balaam and asked him to do something which he knew to be wrong, he said, ‘No, I cannot go with you.’—That seems at first a very noble answer. But you know there is a way of saying No which means Yes, and I am much afraid that that was Balaam’s way. If you look a man in the face and say I won’t, that is one thing: but it is another thing (is it not?) if you halt and hesitate, and let your ‘No’ come stammering out as if you were ashamed of it. Balaam began by wanting to please God. He said, and probably he was at least half honest in saying, ‘If Balak would give me his house full of gold and silver, I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord, my God, to do less or more.’ Yet he wanted to please himself at the same time. He asked God again if he might not go. He kept trying to curse the people, although he could not; and when he could not curse them, he tempted them to sin.
