Monday, December 16, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
 Balaam
Just to get this story straight. Balaam’s ass is a most famous animal, first of all because this donkey was carrying Balaam to curse the Israelites and saw an angel and refused to budge. Donkeys are like that anyway, but when they stall spiritually too, they are im-mov-able!
Then second of all, at this moment Balaam’s ass received the ability to speak, reproved his rider for whipping him three times, until finally Balaam also saw the angel. The curses the prophet had planned for Israel disappeared into thin air, replaced over the next few days by blessing after blessing on the Hebrews he had hated and feared just a week before.
How goodly are your tents, O Jacob: your encampments, O Israel! They are like gardens beside a stream, like the cedars planted by the Lord.
Balaam’s prophetic blessings could not be stopped.
I see him, though not now I behold him, though not near: a star shall advance from Jacob, and a staff shall arise from Israel.
That would be Jesus.
Of course these words of blessing enraged the prophet’s paymaster, King Balak of Moab, who was already intimidated by the military victories of Joshua’s army gathered on the shores of the Jordan. Now he was frightened and angered all the more. Balaam was a world-famous seer Balak had known from childhood, but the king sent him off without pay. Balaam heard God’s words of destruction and disgrace for the Moabites and spoke them over the king.
Let’s go back a few hundred years.
When Abraham’s nephew Lot fled Sodom and Gomorrah, his family without a mother (who had turned to salt) hid in a cave. His daughters thought there was no one to give them children except their father, so they made Lot drunk and slept with him on two nights in succession. Lot remembered nothing.
His daughters both became pregnant, and the older daughter named her son Moab (which means “from our father”). His younger daughter’s son she named Ben-Ammi, and his people became the Ammonites. Thus the Moabites and Ammonites were closely related in genealogy to the Israelites.
Generations later Moses died in Moab, overlooking the Promised Land. The most famous Moabite, Ruth, pledged allegiance to her Jewish family’s religion and morals. Things seemed to be looking up for these related tribes. On the other hand, the Moabites did not travel to Egypt with the sons of Jacob, and after Balak in his fear bribed Balaam to curse them, the Israelites rejected them as friends and considered them enemies.
So what else is new? Moab’s new name is Lebanon. Tensions between Israel and Lebanon burst forth over and over, chronicled in today’s headlines. “Israeli strike kills five in southern Lebanon amid shaky ceasefire.” And the land of the Ammonites is now Jordan, whose relationship with Israel is tenuous on the best of days.
Balaam’s ass did what he could. Balaam did what he could. Balak threw him out on his ear, and the battles have not since ceased.
Does God love his Lebanese, Moabite, Jordanian, Ammonite people? Of course he does.
Even Balaam’s ass knew that.
Remember your compassion, O Lord, and your kindness from of old. Guide us in your truth and teach us, for you are God our savior.
 (Numbers 24, Psalm 25, Psalm 85, Mark 21)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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