GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
NUMBERS 23:13-20
Balaam’s Second Message
13 Balak said to Balaam, “Please come with me to another place where you can see them. You will see only their outskirts. You will not see all of them. From there curse them for me.” 14 Balak took Balaam into the field of Zophim, to the top of Pisgah. Balak built seven altars and offered up a bull and a ram on each altar. 15 Balaam said to Balak, “Stand here by your burnt offering, while I meet the LORD over there.”
Zophim means “the watches” or “lookout field” (Jeremiah 6:7; Nahum 2:2). It was a clearing on the slopes of Mount Pisgah, looking west or northwest. Moses foreshadowed this moment when he described the well that the leaders of Israel dug in the valley below (Numbers 21:17-18). They had camped in “the valley of Moab beneath “the top of Pisgah that overlooks the wasteland” (21:20). By means of that earlier description from Moses, the Holy Spirit said: “I knew you were coming, Balak, with your magician, your clown with his rattles and beads, so I camped my people down here in the valley where you could get a good look. I am watching over my people, hovering over the surface of the land the Father made, to care for them. You cannot curse them” (Genesis 1:2).
Balak’s first attempt at buying a curse had failed. He couldn’t do anything about that now, but he thought that maybe he could try again. He climbed this second peak, another place to see a smaller part of Israel, and he built seven more altars there. As before, fourteen animals perished at the hands of these heathen men, a bull and a ram at each of the seven altars, burned up in a futile attempt to be pleasing to a God they did not trust or really want to listen to.
16 The LORD met with Balaam and put a message in his mouth. The LORD said, “Return to Balak, and you are to deliver this message.” 17 Balaam came back to Balak and found him standing by his burnt offering, and the officials of Moab were with him.
No conversation between the Lord and Balaam is described here. The Lord simply “put a message in his mouth.” This is another way the Bible describes the way God gives a message to be delivered (Jeremiah 1:9; Ezekiel 33:21; Daniel 10:16). Why would Moses say, “The Lord put a message in his mouth” here? Based on the context of the other examples, it seems to me that such a message was to be delivered verbatim rather than according to the spirit of the message and the messenger’s own manner of speaking.
A new element we learn about here is that Balak was not alone. Since he was king this should not surprise us at all. Surely he had more than just a handful of the officials of Moab but a retinue of soldiers even here on the peak of Pisgah, with pickets (lines of soldiers guarding paths) at all of the approaches. What Balak really needed was a guard of patience.
Balak said to him, “What did the LORD say?” 18 Balaam took up his oracle and said:
Get up, Balak, and listen!
Give ear to me, son of Zippor.
19 God is not a man, that he should lie,
nor a son of man, that he changes his mind.
Does he say something, and then not carry it out?
Does he speak, and then not bring it about?
20 Look, I have received a command to bless.
He has blessed, and I cannot change that.
In a question unique to the whole series of seven oracles, Balak urgently asks, “What did the LORD say?” Balak unwittingly accuses himself with these words, since his goal was to curse Israel but he acknowledges that he was listening to the word of Israel’s God. Perhaps he would have said that he misspoke, but Moses records his words faithfully. What he said is what he said.
We will take up the second half of this oracle next week, but in these opening verses, notice that there are two main themes: (1) The LORD is Israel’s God, and (2) It is impossible to curse God’s people. The blessings of the first portion (verse 19) proclaim the doctrinally vital words, “God is not a man, that he should lie.” This is the seat of the doctrine that God is incapable of lying, not because he is unable to do a thing or weakened in some way, but because lying is a sin and God does not sin, nor is he the author of any sin whatsoever.
In verse 20, Balaam addresses the blessing of God (the content of that blessing will follow). This is the word of God, and the word of God is never spoken without results. Just as the rain does not fall without watering something, the Lord says, “so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11). That does not mean that the gospel message will always win souls for Christ. In the Parable of the Sower (Mark 4:3-8), the word of God does not win over everyone who hears it, because their hearts (soils) are not right. We will not always win over our hearers with the message. In Luke 10:10, Jesus warns the disciples that they will enter some towns without being welcomed. In those cases, the word of God has been preached with a different effect, frightening or hardening, rather than softening and saving. In those cases, the gospel is preached as a witness against them, as it was here to Balak and even to Balaam from his own mouth. God told Isaiah: “Go and tell this people, ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding…’ make their ears dull and close their eyes” (Isaiah 6:9,10). And Jesus warned: “Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold” (Matthew 24:12). A man who willfully hardens his heart against the gospel for whatever reason is in danger of having his heart hardened in turn by that same gospel, which will become for him “the smell of death” (2 Corinthians 2:15-16). And Christ will read from the book of that man’s sins on Judgment Day: the gospel was preached to him and he turned away from it; that will count against him as much or more than his other sins. The men of Nineveh who repented at the preaching of Jonah will rise up to condemn him, as will the Queen of the South, “for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, and now one greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:41-42).
So Balak and Balaam did not benefit from this message, but we reap eternal benefits. The words of Balaam’s blessing were recorded by Balak’s scribes and taken throughout his kingdom by his runners and messengers. Of the seven oracles spoken by Balaam, all seven fell into the hands of Moses, either orally when the messages were delivered, or written copies intended for the far ends of the Moabite land. Is it possible that Moses could have been told all this directly by God, in visions or messages from the Angel of the Lord? Yes, it is possible, but if this were the case, why would Moses present the information in such an awkward third person manner rather than just tell us, “The Lord came to Moses and said” as he does at other times? I think that Moses found out about the curses along with the rest of Israel, through the Moabites themselves, perhaps during the vile incident in Numbers 25:1-3.
The specific sin condemned in this passage is accusing God of sin, specifically lying. To state the facts briefly:
1, God’s word is truth (John 17:17; Psalm 119:43).
2, God, in his essence, is immutable. That is to say, God is eternally and constantly one and the same. Any change in God’s being, willing, and thinking is excluded from his essence and therefore from possibility (Psalm 102:27; Hebrews 7:21; Romans 3:3).
3, This is not to say that changes will not occur in God’s actions when, for example, sinful man repents. God’s will in that case remains constant, even though a man, formerly condemned in his sin, is now forgiven and released from his sentence of punishment. Indeed, the entire gospel message centers around this truth, that God’s action of punishment may change to forgiveness, for his will is always to save the lost (Acts 15:16-18; Amos 9:11-12).
Therefore, to try to manipulate God “who does not lie” (Titus 1:2) or to trap him into saying something untrue is a horrendous sin, one that we see in the scribes and Pharisees who were constantly trying to set traps for Jesus, and in the devil who tried the same thing.
The gospel that covers this sin is in the very same truth: God wills to save fallen, sinful mankind (1 Timothy 2:4). For the devil, there is no hope of rescue from his prison. But for mankind, while we live we remain in our time of grace. The gospel still has the ability to affect a change in man’s heart like the jailer at Philippi who “had come to believe in God– he and his whole family (Acts 16:34).
Today, this sin hisses in those groups that want to reject certain doctrines of God’s word, as if they can vote on Bible teachings the way that they vote for Senators and Presidents and school referendums. Trying to twist the teachings and doctrines of the Bible only “exchanges the truth of God for a lie” (Romans 1:25) and sets up a modern idolatry of the self, the mirror, the personal opinion, as supreme.
God keep us from such folly! Lord, keep us steadfast in your word! To reject you is to reject your salvation, and we need you and we need the salvation you hold out to us in Jesus. Let us rest in the loving arms of Jesus, where you have granted to us, undeserving as we are, peace and everlasting life.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Numbers 23:13-20 The second oracle begins