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Numbers 23-24

“The Oracle of Balaam the son of Beor,
the oracle of the man whose eyes is opened,
the oracle of him who hears the words of God,
and knows the knowledge of the Most High,
who sees the vision of the Almighty,
falling down with eyes uncovered” (Num. 24:15-16).

A full three chapters of Numbers are devoted to the Balaam story, making it by far the longest narrative in the book.  The question is why.  Why would this much space be devoted to the exploits and oracles of a pagan prophet? One answer lies in its position in the book.  The story occurs after a series of Israel’s rebellions and failures to keep the covenant.  In the midst of their rebellion and wandering, the Balaam story illustrates to Israel that even in the midst of their wilderness they are still the covenant people of God. No pagan king or pagan prophet, no matter the amount of gold, no matter the amount of sacrifice, no matter the amount of perceived spiritual influence, can undo what God has done in binding himself to a people.  It is the Lord who has declared Israel to be his treasured possession among the nations (Ex. 19:5).

But there is more to Balaam’s prominence.  Israel had forgotten not only their privileged place, but also the power of the God who promised his allegiance and because of this they fundamentally doubted the goodness of God.  The wilderness had become their only reality because they did not rehearse the covenant, and they had forgotten their mighty deliverance from Egypt, the words of blessing and covenant at Sinai, and the provision of God in the desert.  So through the mouth of a pagan prophet, God choose to remind his people of all he had done.

Balaam, the internationally renowned prophet, is helpless before the power of the Lord.  Balaam, in the midst of his oracle, asks,  “How can I curse whom God has not cursed?”  In Balaam’s utterance Israel is reminded that the Lord is the one who blesses and curses and the Lord is the one who opens and closes.  God had opened Balaam’s eyes, so that his oracles, was “the oracle of the man whose eye is opened” (Num. 24:3; 25:15).  God has opened Balaam’s mouth because of “the Lord [who] put a word in Balaam’s mouth” (Num.23:5).  And when he opens his mouth to speak, the words of Balaam’s oracles are stunning.  He rehearses the covenant for Israel.  He reminds them of their privelage.  He reminds them of the might in the Lord.   But most stunning of all, Balaam prophesies a coming king, who will crush the enemies of God,  “a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel” (Num. 24:17). This is the Messianic promise, the coming Christ, who is the true seed of Abraham who will be a blessing to all nations.  In the end, the prominence of Balaam, has much to do with God’s plan to use his treasured possession Israel to bless all people’s in all places through the coming of the true and better Israel, Christ himself.  In light of that vision, we all must fall down with eyes uncovered.

Numbers 22:1-21

Over the next few posts, I plan to do a closer reading of the Balaam story and of Balaam’s oracles than I’ve done in previous posts.  Growing up in church, I of course heard the story in Sunday school, and though the felt board made it clear that the donkey was talking, it was never very clear why the donkey was talking.  Nor was I taught that Balaam, the died-in-the-wool pagan, prophesied under the influence of the Holy Spirit on behalf of the people of Israel.

So to start with, who was Balaam?  As an internationally known prophet, Balaam was considered an arbiter of spiritual power.  Balak, the king of Moab, saw the multitude of Israel camping in his land and he feared conquest.  In his fear of them, he summoned Balaam because he believed that nations rose and fell at Balaam’s word.  Indeed, Balak ascribes Balaam god-like powers: “He whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed” (Num 22:6).

It is also clear from the story that Balaam, the pagan prophet, knew of the Lord, and more than that God talks to him.  Make no mistake, it is the Lord, Yahweh, the God of Israel, who Balaam consults and it is He who answers Balaam. And God makes something very clear to Balaam. The rising and falling of nations in general, and the fate of his covenant people in particular did not lay in the words of Balaam but in the word of the Lord.  It is the Lord and the Lord alone who utters the words of blessing and cursing: “You shall not curse the people, for they are blessed” (Num 22:12).

The language of blessing and cursing, so foreign to us, seems like it is straight out of a fairy story.  And maybe that is no accident.  Perhaps the reason the story of Balaam, particularly the part about the donkey, seems so much like a fairy story, is that blessing and cursing runs at the very heart of our understandings of good an evil, and our understanding of magic.  Take Narnia, for example.   Aslan’s self-sacrifice on behalf of Edmund is a deeper magic that the White Witch is powerless before.  Take Harry Potter as well.  Lily Potter’s self-sacrifice marks Harry so deeply that not even the death curse from Voldemort can break it.  In the world of fairy tales, there is no deeper magic than love.  This is the truth of fairy tales.  In this sense, the covenant love of God is the deepest sort of magic there is because  you cannot curse what the Lord has blessed.   No amount of gold, no measure of shed blood, can purchase the cursing of God’s people.  Though Israel had floundered in the wilderness, though they had consumed themselves and each other by their own murmuring, though they had rebelled in utter faithlessness, God remained faithful to them and would not remove his blessing.  This is the security of covenant.  To be God’s covenant people is to be a blessed people.  And as people of the new covenant, how much greater our  blessing,  how much deeper our security, now that we have been purchased by precious blood into a covenant built on better promises.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39

“Because you did not believe in me, to uphold me as holy in the eyes of the people of Israel, therefore you shall not bring the assembly into the land that I have given them.” (Num 20:12).

Moses raged against the rock, and with two swings of his staff, he lost the promised land.  Of all the tragedies the Bible records, this one is among the most heartbreaking.  Instead of possessing all that God had promised, the land, the milk, the honey, the rest, Moses would only view it from afar.  Only his bones would possess the land.

How do we understand Moses’ fall?  How can we understand his sin?  The people of Israel had already come to rely on Moses rather than on God.  By striking the rock, Moses put himself forward as their savior, saying in effect, “I am your provider.  I am your deliverer.”   God calls this particular sin unbelief: “You did not believe in me to uphold me as holy” (Num 20:12).  For a moment, if only for the fraction of a second it took to swing the staff, Moses stopped believing in God and started believing in himself.  He did not believe God.  Here we see the connection between Moses’ sin and his punishment.  To possess the promise of Abraham, one must believe (Gen 15:6).

Perhaps my sense of tragedy in seeing Moses’ fall stems from my own tendency to elevate leaders. I see myself in this story.  It would have been so easy to put my trust in Moses rather than God.  But Moses was just a servant:  “Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son.” (Heb 3:5-6).  We sin in our elevation of leadership when forget that Moses fades and that Christ endures. In the end, Moses, in all his faithfulness was still just a servant.  His sin came when he forgot this and our sin comes when we forget that our leaders, however dynamic, however brilliant, however persuasive, are still just servants too.  Even the promised land Moses was leading them to was not the fullness of their inheritance.  There was a better Moses to come, and there was a better rest to come. “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).    In Christ we possess better promises, we bask in the light of a better covenant, we stand on the boarder of a better rest.  Our sin is to look at whatever Moses stands in front of us instead of to the rock. As Paul makes clear, there is much more at work in this story than thirsty Israelites:  “For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them and the rock was Christ” (1 Cor 10:4).  Might we drink from him and possess his fullness.

“And the Lord said to Aaron, ‘You shall have no inheritance in their land, neither shall you have any portion among them.  I am your portion and your inheritance among the people of Israel.'” (Num 18:20).

The second story window of our apartment stands level with the crook of a magnolia tree, making our apartment something of a tree house.  I love that tree and I love our window.  There is a special comfort in feeling that you live in a forest while in the midst of a city.  As I was looking out the window yesterday, I noticed that the magnolia tree had a single blossom, nothing more than a shock of white amidst the green.  That single flower was a promise, a token of more to come.   The tree, though beautiful in its own right now, was made for more.  I plan to watch the tree continue to bloom, to watch the flowers appear over the days.  I have a great yearning, a holy ache, to see the tree in its fullness.  The single flower in all its beauty is a only promise of the fullness to come.

I’ll put it another way.  There is a certain kind of music that I have come to love.  Some call it post-rock, some call it ambient. It is easier to describe than label.  Imagine making a landscape of sound.  Songs emerge like mirages, shimmering on the horizon.  In the midst of the drone and swell there faintly emerges from the dripping wet reverb a faintly chiming of melody or the moaning ache of cello as the bow strains against the strings.  Layer upon layer the landscape begins to fill up but still it remains as elusive as the mirage. These are songs that build toward something, songs that reach for more than they can express.

The single blossom.  The yearning music.  They express the ache, the longing I have to fully inherit God.  He is my inheritance.  He is my portion. Yet, these are phrases that reach for more than they can express because I don’t yet possess their fullness.  I only see a blossom now.  I only hear the echo of a song.  In the here and now, I groan like a cello for the inheritance to come.  And creation groans along with me (Romans 8).  The melody strains with the melancholy beauty of all that is hoped for in the midst of all that is broken.  It is the Spirit that groans within, rattling our ribcages.  But more than that the Spirit keens our eyes to see single blossoms and ache for home.  As temples of the Holy Spirit, his presence is the guarantee of the inheritance to come.  His fruits and gifts are simply foretastes of fullness unknown.  They are the single blossom whose beauty promises more beauty. They are notes from an echoing guitar that suggest the symphony to come.

“The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the people of Israel, and tell them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a cord of blue on the tassel of each corner.  And it shall be a tassel for you to look at and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after.  So you shall remember and do all my commandments and be holy to your God, who brought you out of the Land of Egypt to be your God:  I am the Lord your God.” (Num 15:37-41)

“We are fundamentally creatures of desire who crave particular visions of the kingdom—the good life—and our desire is shaped and directed by practices that point the heart.” – James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom

I am a creature of desire.  As much as I like to believe that I live from my mind, and that the world can be tamed by the might of reason and brought into submission by the sword of analysis, I know the truth—I cannot conquer anything because what my heart desires will always conquer me.  We balk at this thought, downplaying the centrality of desire.  After all, we can in many ways delineate patterns of thought, but the heart is always and forever inscrutable.  More than inscrutable, the heart is insatiable.  It is ravenous, a slathering, gluttonous beast.  Further still, God calls the heart a whore.

And according to this passage, what the heart devours, the eyes provide.  There is an intimate connection between our eyes and our heart, so much so that what we behold fundamentally shapes what we desire. Where we fix our eyes is where we fix our hearts. Here God says if the eyes wander, the heart will wander too.  Because we are prone to uphold our minds as the center of our beings, we are unaware of how what we do and what we behold shapes us more than what we think. As embodied creatures we enact what we desire by what we do, so habits are not simply a display of our desires, they fundamentally shape our desires and therefore our hearts.  As James K.A. Smith notes, “Our habits thus constitute the fulcrum of our desire.”  In other words, if we would change what we want, we must change what we do.

God, of course, knows this.  The tassel he commands to the people of Israel is something to see, a way to behold the law itself, and in beholding the law he gives them a way to remember the covenant love of a holy God.  The tassel becomes a place for the people of Israel to fix their gaze so that they might remember their way. Indeed, if we understand ourselves as embodied creatures whose habits and actions fundamentally shape our desires, then we can see beyond the seemingly strange commandments to the heart of the law. The commandments of the law, the rituals and procedures, are in fact the habits of the holy, the enacted liturgy of the covenant people, meant to shape the people of God into a holy people.  A holy people for a holy God.

As Christians, we too are God’s covenant people, and we must ask ourselves about the habits of our hearts. As Smith says, we all crave a vision.  The heart is indiscriminate and will feast on whatever we feed it, so we must ask ourselves what we are feeding our hearts.  What are we beholding?  What are we allowing to shape our desire?

What is the measure of worship? If pressed to answer this question, most of us would probably say that worship should be measured in terms of sincerity.  After all, how can worship be worship if you don’t really mean it? This is true, as far as it goes, but it only accounts for the act of worship and not for the end of worship.  It does not ask who or what is being worshipped. Without an appropriate object, worship can be intensely sincere while also being wholly false.  To that end, sincerity can never be the sole measure of our worship because sincerity does not speak to the object of worship.

When the people of Israel brought their offerings for the consecration of the Tabernacle, all the metal objects, the basins, the bowls, the platters, were weighed against the “shekel of the sanctuary” (Num 7:86).  In other words, there was a standard by which their worship was measured.  The metaphor here is that worship our worship weighs something.  If we think of worship in terms of ascribing God glory do his name, this makes sense.  God’s glory literally describes his weightiness.  To say that God is glorious is to say he is weighty; he is worthy.

If this is so, when we place his worth on one side of the scale and our sincerity on the other side of the scale, our worship will always be found wanting. We weigh the shekel of our sincerity in our hands, feel its heft, and demand that God accept it simply because we really mean it.   But we forget that our sincerity is placed on one side of the scale, while the infinite mass, worth, beauty, and holiness of God is placed in the other side.

Perhaps this is why we want to measure our worship in terms of sincerity—we don’t want to be found wanting.  What do you offer an infinitely worthy God?  Nothing less than an infinitely worthy sacrifice. But raised hands, closed eyes, and shed tears are not the shekels we bring to God.  He does not measure the worship of his children by the shekels of the their sincerity, but by the true “shekel of the sanctuary”—Jesus. He is our North Star.  He is the Prime Meridian.  He is the plumb line. More than that he is the priest who is also our offering. If we lift up Christ, our worship is always acceptable.  And if that truth penetrates our hearts, our worship will not only be true, it cannot help but be sincere.

(I am currently reading through Numbers, so my posts for the foreseeable future will be reflections on Numbers.)