Your Donkey Said What?

(draft: beware its too long)

Francis the Talking Mule made seven pictures for Universal between 1950 and 1956. The premise never changed. A decent, bumbling man gets himself into a mess, and a mule with more sense than anyone in the cast talks him back out of it.

Mister Ed ran a hundred and forty-three episodes across six seasons, first in syndication and then on CBS. A palomino who spoke to exactly one man, the one who owned him, and who was reliably the smarter of the two.

It is the same joke both times, and it has been working for seventy-five years. The animal is wise. The man is a fool. The comedy is in the gap.

Doctor Dolittle is a different wish. Rex Harrison, 1967, singing a song that won an Academy Award, about a man who wants nothing in the world so much as to talk with the animals. That is the whole dream: to hear what they would say if they could say it.

There is a talking animal in Scripture, and nobody wrote it for a laugh.

A man named Balaam was riding a donkey down a road when God opened her mouth and she spoke to him in his own language. She said something worth hearing. He got Dolittle’s wish handed to him free of charge, unasked and unearned, and he had no interest in it whatsoever. He argued with her. Then he told her he wanted her dead.

Your donkey said what?

He Did Not Even Flinch

Israel is camped in the plains of Moab, across the Jordan from Jericho, at the end of forty years of wandering. Balak son of Zippor is king of Moab and he is terrified. He has watched what happened to the Amorites, and he does the arithmetic. So he sends messengers hundreds of miles northeast, to a man at Pethor near the Euphrates, with a straightforward business proposition: come curse these people for me.

The man’s name is Balaam. He takes the job. And on the road, this happens.

God stations an angel in the road with a drawn sword. The donkey sees it and swerves into a field, and Balaam beats her back onto the path. The angel moves ahead to a narrow place between two vineyard walls. The donkey sees it again and presses against the wall, crushing Balaam’s foot, and he beats her again. The angel moves once more, to a place too narrow to turn at all. The donkey lies down underneath him. He beats her a third time, with his staff.

Then the LORD opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” And Balaam said to the donkey, “Because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand, for then I would kill you.” And the donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your donkey, on which you have ridden all your life long to this day? Is it my habit to treat you this way?” And he said, “No.”

Numbers 22:28-30 (ESV)

Read that again and watch what he does not do.

He does not startle. He does not step back or fall off. He does not ask how a donkey is forming words, or who is doing this, or what it means. A pack animal he has ridden his entire adult life opens her mouth and speaks, and Balaam’s response is to argue with her about whether the beating was deserved.

He loses the argument. She asks whether this is her habit, whether she has ever once behaved this way before, and he has to answer honestly. No. It is not.

A man whose donkey starts talking, and whose only reaction is to argue and then concede the point, has a much larger problem than a talking donkey.

Here is the problem.

Then the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, with his drawn sword in his hand. And he bowed down and fell on his face.

Numbers 22:31 (ESV)

There had been an armed angel standing in the road the entire time.¹ The donkey had seen it three times. The man on her back, riding to a job he had been hired for because of his reputation for seeing what other people could not, had not seen it once.

But God Said Go

That is strange. What comes next is worse, and it is the reason this account is hard rather than merely odd.

When Balak’s messengers first arrive with the offer, Balaam takes the question to God overnight. The answer comes back without ambiguity.

God said to Balaam, “You shall not go with them. You shall not curse the people, for they are blessed.”

Numbers 22:12 (ESV)

Balak sends a second delegation, more distinguished than the first, with a better offer. Balaam takes the question to God again. And this time:

And God came to Balaam at night and said to him, “If the men have come to call you, rise, go with them; but only do what I tell you.”

Numbers 22:20 (ESV)

So he goes. He saddles his own donkey in the morning and rides out with the princes of Moab. And then:

But God’s anger was kindled because he went, and the angel of the LORD took his stand in the way as his adversary.

Numbers 22:22 (ESV)

God said do not go. Then God said go. Then God was angry that he went, and put an armed angel in the road to stop him.

A talking animal is peculiar. This is something else. This looks like a God who contradicts Himself and then punishes a man for obeying the second instruction, and no amount of goodwill toward Scripture makes that sit easily. Anyone who shuts the Bible at that point has a reason.

Do not close it. There is a detail sitting between the two answers, and Balaam supplies it himself. When the second delegation arrives, he tells them to stay the night, and he explains why.

So you, too, please stay here tonight, that I may know what more the LORD will say to me.

Numbers 22:19 (ESV)

What more.

He is not confused. He is not asking for clarification of an answer he failed to understand. He had a clear, complete, unambiguous no, and he went back to see whether there was something else available. That is not inquiry. That is shopping.

And this is where the account stops being about a talking animal and starts being about something that will follow you home. Balaam knew what God had said. Every disaster on that road happens to a man who knew. Knowing God’s word is not the same thing as submitting to it, and the distance between those two things is wide enough to hide a career in.

The rest of the answer is coming. But it will not make sense until you know who was in that saddle.

God Can Use Anyone

Most people who have heard this account before have heard one lesson drawn from it: God can use anyone to accomplish His purposes. Even a donkey.

That is true. It is more true than most people who say it realize, and Scripture will not let you soften it. Consider the high priest who arranged the execution of Jesus, standing in council and arguing for judicial murder as a matter of political convenience.

He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.

John 11:51-52 (ESV)

Caiaphas delivered accurate prophecy about the atonement while plotting the crucifixion. God spoke through him. God did not thereby approve of him.

Which is exactly the trouble with the comfortable version of the lesson. It stops before the end of Balaam’s life.

He does not repent and retire. He is killed with the sword in Israel’s campaign against Midian, and the notice of his death gives him no special mention. He is listed “among the rest of their slain” (Joshua 13:22), one name in a casualty count. Three separate New Testament writers reach for him by name centuries later, and not one of them holds him up as an example of how God can work with anybody. Peter says he “loved gain from wrongdoing” (2 Peter 2:15). Jude says men “abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam’s error” (Jude 11). John, writing down what the risen Christ says to a church at Pergamum, warns them about people who “hold the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel” (Revelation 2:14).

Being used by God did not save him.

There is a scene where Jesus says this outright, and it is the most frightening thing in the Sermon on the Mount.

On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?” And then will I declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.”

Matthew 7:22-23 (ESV)

Notice what those people offer as their defense. Not that they were sincere. Not that they loved Him. They produce a résumé. Prophecy, deliverance, mighty works, all of it genuine, none of it disputed. They are claiming effectiveness, and effectiveness is precisely what “God can use anyone” offers as comfort.

The verdict is four words long and it has nothing to do with what they accomplished. I never knew you.

There is a second problem with the lesson, and it is sharper. “God can use anyone, even a donkey” lines the characters up on a scale, with the prophet at the respectable end and the animal at the bottom as the punchline. That is not how the account arranges them. Listen to what the angel says when Balaam finally sees him.

The donkey saw me and turned aside before me these three times. If she had not turned aside from me, surely just now I would have killed you and let her live.

Numbers 22:32-33 (ESV)

The angel vindicates the animal and condemns the prophet. She saw, she stopped, she was right, and her three acts of stubborn disobedience to the man beating her are the only reason he is alive to be rebuked. God would have killed the seer and spared the beast.

She is not the low end of what God will stoop to work with. She is the one character on that road who behaves properly toward God, and she is a donkey.

The Man Whose Eye Is Opened

So who was he, this man who could not see what his own livestock could see?

By reputation, someone considerable. Balak does not send hundreds of miles for a local fortune teller. The delegation that arrives at Pethor carries “the fees for divination in their hand” (Numbers 22:7), and when the first offer is refused Balak escalates rather than gives up, sending princes more numerous and more honorable than the first, with a promise of great honor attached. This is a man with an international reputation and a rate card.

He also talks like an insider. When he turns down the second offer, he does it in language no skeptic would use.

Though Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not go beyond the command of the LORD my God to do less or more.

Numbers 22:18 (ESV)

Not a god. Not the God of these Hebrews. My God. He claims the relationship out loud, in front of foreign officials, and it is the last impressive thing he says before he goes back that same night to see whether the terms have changed.

Two chapters later, after God has physically forced his eyes open on the road, Balaam introduces one of his oracles this way.

The oracle of Balaam the son of Beor, the oracle of the man whose eye is opened, the oracle of him who hears the words of God, who sees the vision of the Almighty, falling down with his eyes uncovered.

Numbers 24:3-4 (ESV)

The man whose eye is opened.

He is not lying. His eye had been opened. He simply leaves out that it was pried open by God after he failed to notice an armed angel at conversational distance, that a pack animal outperformed him three times running, and that he was face down in the dirt when it finally happened. Set that self-portrait beside the sentence in chapter twenty-two and the man deflates without anyone having to say a word against him.

The oracles themselves are the strangest part, because they are real. Balak paid for a curse and got blessings, four times, each one worse for him than the last. In the fourth, out of the mouth of the man on his own payroll, Balak hears this:

I see him, but not now; I behold him, but not near: a star shall come out of Jacob, and a scepter shall rise out of Israel; it shall crush the forehead of Moab and break down all the sons of Sheth.

Numbers 24:17 (ESV)

He hired a man to destroy Israel and purchased, at full price, a prophecy of a coming King who would crush Moab.

Which points at the thing Balak never understood about what he was buying. His whole premise was that Balaam’s word did the work, that blessing and cursing flowed out of this man and landed where he aimed them. The text says otherwise, plainly, twice.

And the LORD put a word in Balaam’s mouth and said, “Return to Balak, and thus you shall speak.”

Numbers 23:5 (ESV)

It was never his word. He was a pipe, and Balak was paying him for the water.

Now hold two things together, because getting this wrong makes the whole account collapse into something easier and less useful than it is. Balaam is not a fraud. The oracles are genuine, the blessings land, the prophecy about the star is true, and God really does speak through him. And Joshua, recording his death generations later, does not call him a prophet. He calls him “the one who practiced divination” (Joshua 13:22).

Real access. No allegiance. The gift is authentic and the man is for sale.

That is worse than a charlatan, and it is worse in a way that matters, because a charlatan is always somebody else.

No Divination Against Israel

That word Joshua uses is not a neutral job title, and the account itself keeps circling it.

Balaam’s method is stated in passing, without accusation, as ordinary background. Before the fourth oracle the narrator mentions that Balaam “did not go, as at other times, to look for omens” (Numbers 24:1). As at other times. Reading omens was simply what he did, the way another man farms.

Scripture is not neutral about that trade. In Moses’s instructions to Israel it appears on a list, and the company it keeps is not flattering.

There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD.

Deuteronomy 18:10-12 (ESV)

Someone will object that Balaam was not an Israelite and never agreed to Israel’s law. The same passage answers it in the next breath. The reason those nations are losing their land, Moses says, is “because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you” (Deuteronomy 18:12), and two verses later he names the practice as the exact thing that marks them off: “these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do this” (Deuteronomy 18:14).

Which makes the second oracle almost comic. Standing on a hilltop, in the middle of a job he was hired and paid to perform, Balaam says this:

For there is no enchantment against Jacob, no divination against Israel; now it shall be said of Jacob and Israel, “What has God wrought!”

Numbers 23:23 (ESV)

The diviner announces, mid-contract, that divination does not work on these people. He is standing there with Balak’s money.

And then, centuries later, a prophet says something about a different man that lands on Balaam with more force than anything in Numbers. Samuel has come to tell Saul that the kingdom is being taken from him, and he explains why in a single sentence.

For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has also rejected you from being king.

1 Samuel 15:23 (ESV)

Rebellion is the sin of divination. Not similar to it. Samuel puts them in the same category and gives the reason in the same breath: because you have rejected the word of the LORD.

Balaam’s profession and Balaam’s rebellion were never two separate failures. They were one thing wearing two names. He read omens for a living because he wanted an answer he could steer, and he went back to God a second night for exactly the same reason.

He Gave Them What They Asked

Now the road makes sense.

God said no. Balaam went looking for something better. God said go, and was angry that he went. That reads as contradiction only if you assume the second answer was God changing His mind. It was not. It was God handing a man over to what he had made clear he intended to have.

Scripture names this. It is not a one-time oddity in an obscure chapter of Numbers; it is a pattern with its own vocabulary, and once you have the vocabulary you find it everywhere.

But my people did not listen to my voice; Israel would not submit to me. So I gave them over to their stubborn hearts, to follow their own counsels.

Psalm 81:11-12 (ESV)

he gave them what they asked, but sent a wasting disease among them.

Psalm 106:15 (ESV)

Paul turns it into a refrain in the first chapter of Romans, saying it three separate times in five verses. God gave them up to impurity, God gave them up to dishonorable passions, God gave them up to a debased mind (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). Each time, the giving up follows a refusal that came first.

The clearest parallel is a nation asking for a king. Israel demands one, Samuel is grieved, and God tells him to go ahead and grant it while naming exactly what is happening.

Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them.

1 Samuel 8:7 (ESV)

He is not persuaded. He is not worn down. He grants the request, states aloud that the request is a rejection of Him, attaches a warning to it, and lets the consequences run. That is the same shape as the road to Moab: go with them, but only do what I tell you, and an armed angel waiting where the walls narrow.

The yes was not a concession. The yes was the judgment. The most dangerous answer God gives is the one you asked for.

And notice the word the psalm chooses. Not that Israel failed to hear Him. Israel would not submit to Him. They heard perfectly well. Every man caught in this pattern knew what God had said, and the knowing is what makes the handing over just rather than cruel. Knowing God’s word has never been the same thing as submitting to it.

That raises a fair objection, and it is the strongest one available, so it deserves to be stated at full strength rather than managed.

Jesus taught persistence in prayer. He told a parable about a widow who kept coming to a judge who had no interest in her case, badgering him until he ruled in her favor, and Luke says plainly why the parable was told: “they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). If pestering God until the answer moves is Balaam’s sin, what is the widow doing?

Three things separate them.

The first is that she has no answer and he had one. She is waiting on a verdict that has never come, and the parable ends on whether faith can survive a delay: “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). Her subject is endurance in silence. “You shall not go with them” is not silence. Persisting when God has not answered is faith. Persisting after He has is a different act with a different name. And look at what she asks for. Justice, which the same passage says God fully intends to give His elect (Luke 18:7). She is asking God to do the thing He has already said He does. Balaam asked God to undo the thing He had already said.

The second is that the parable makes God the contrast, not the model. The judge “neither feared God nor respected man,” and his reason for finally ruling is his own comfort: “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming” (Luke 18:5). Jesus is arguing from opposites. If even a corrupt man yields to persistence, how much more will a Father who is not corrupt. Anyone who reads that parable as a technique for wearing God down has cast God as the villain of His own story. Balaam’s second delegation was wearing down. It was the widow’s method aimed at the wrong bench.

The third settles it. In a garden, on the last night of His life, Jesus asked His Father to take a cup away from Him.

My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.

Matthew 26:39 (ESV)

He asked again. And then, Matthew says, “he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words again” (Matthew 26:44).

Three times. Balaam asked twice. If repetition were the sin, Jesus sinned worse.

The difference was never how many times. It was what each man carried into the asking. Every one of those prayers in the garden had the submission already inside it, before the answer came back, in the same breath as the request. Balaam’s had a hope that the verdict would move.

I Wish I Had a Sword

There was one more thing he asked for on that road, and he got that too. He said it to his donkey, in a temper, before he knew anyone else was listening.

Because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand, for then I would kill you.

Numbers 22:29 (ESV)

He said that standing directly in front of a being holding a drawn sword who had come out to kill him. He wanted, in that moment, the exact instrument that was aimed at his own chest, and he had no idea it was there.

Years later Israel goes to war against Midian, and the casualty list includes a name that does not belong to Midian.

And they also killed Balaam the son of Beor with the sword.

Numbers 31:8 (ESV)

He asked for a sword. It came from the other end.

Too Small to Bother Him With

Here is what makes Balaam dangerous rather than merely disappointing. His theology was correct.

Read his refusal again, the one he gave with a straight face before going back to the negotiating table: though Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not go beyond the command of the LORD my God (Numbers 22:18). That is a sentence you could say out loud in a small group and watch people nod. It is right. It is well phrased. And the man saying it went back that same night to see what more the LORD would say.

James puts a name on the gap.

So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

James 4:17 (ESV)

That is the same charge laid against Uzzah, who grew up in the house where the ark of the covenant sat and reached out to steady it anyway. It is not a different failure. It is the identical one, and it is available only to people who already know the answer.

Watch, too, what Balak does when the first no comes back. He does not change the request. He changes the messengers. More princes, more honorable, better terms. If the answer will not move, find someone who will hand you a different one.

I would like to tell you I read this account as a stranger. I do not.

Jesus tells us not to worry, and I worry about everything. Not the kind of worry that stops a man from functioning. Just enough to notice a problem, size it up, and start putting a plan together to keep it from becoming a bigger problem. What I do not do is ask God what He wants done about it. The thing is too small. There is no reason to bother Him with something I can handle myself, and most days I can handle it myself, and that is exactly the trouble. We have a living, personal God who wants into every room of a life, and we keep Him standing in the entryway, calling for Him only when something falls that is heavy enough to require Him.

That looks like the opposite of Balaam’s sin, and I want to name the mismatch before you find it yourself. He asked too much. I do not ask at all. He would not take the first answer; I never bring up the question.

They are the same posture facing two directions, and the name of the posture is self-reliance. Both of us already had the answer. He negotiated past his. I skip mine on the grounds that it is not worth His attention. Neither man is submitting to anything. Both are running their own road.

Scripture closes the loophole I have been using, and it closes it with a single pair of words.

do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

Philippians 4:6 (ESV)

Anything. Everything. There is no size threshold. And when Jesus went after the same excuse, He reached for the cheapest item in the market and then went smaller.

Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Luke 12:6-7 (ESV)

Two pennies bought five sparrows. God is keeping track of them. He is keeping a number no one else would ever have occasion to count.

There is a second way self-reliance shows itself, and it is the one that looks most like a virtue.

You are riding down the trail of life and you get stuck. Something is in the road. Everything you have ever been taught says to persevere, dig in, push through the obstacle, and men will admire you for it. Grit is the last virtue nearly everyone still agrees on.

Balaam persevered. He pushed through three times, and it very nearly killed him.

The same behavior is grit or rebellion depending entirely on who put the obstacle in the road, and you cannot tell which from up in the saddle. That is the whole difficulty. From where Balaam sat, an animal was being stubborn and a schedule was slipping. From six feet in front of him, an angel was standing with a drawn sword, and every one of those refusals was the only thing keeping him alive.

His donkey was better at this than he was. Something stood in the road and she stopped. She turned aside, she pressed into the wall, and finally she simply lay down and would not go, and took a beating each time rather than walk her master into a blade he could not see. She had no word from God at all. She had only what was in front of her, and she responded to it correctly, three times running, at cost.

He had the word and would not have it. She had nothing and obeyed.

When the road closes in front of you, which of the two are you?

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.

Proverbs 3:5-6 (ESV)

Leaning on your own understanding is precisely what pushing through an obstacle is. And there it is again, that phrase: in all your ways. Not the big ones.

There is a familiar comfort kept on hand for exactly this situation. When God closes a door, He opens a window.

That sentence is not in the Bible. Those words come from a musical. Rodgers and Hammerstein put them in the mouth of a nun in The Sound of Music, and the sentiment drifted from there into a thousand sermons and greeting cards until it acquired the tone of Scripture without ever having been in it.

Numbers 22 contradicts it flatly. God did not close a door and open a window for Balaam. He closed the road, three times, and then He opened it. The opening was not a kindness waiting on the other side of a disappointment. The opening was the judgment, and the closing was the mercy. Every wall that donkey pressed him into was God being good to him. The open road nearly got him killed.

None of which means the answer is to keep asking until you feel better about it. That is Balaam at the second delegation, and it is worth being precise here, because the two things look alike and are opposites. Do not relitigate what God has already said. Do bring Him the things you have been handling alone because they seemed beneath His notice. The first is a man shopping. The second is a man finally showing up.

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him.

James 1:5 (ESV)

Lacks. The promise is for the man who does not have the answer, not the man who has one and wants another.

Paul knew this gap from the inside, and he wrote about it with no protection at all.

For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Romans 7:15 (ESV)

For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.

Romans 7:18 (ESV)

That is not Balaam. Be careful here, because this is an easy place to slip out a side door. Paul wants to obey and finds he cannot. Balaam did not want to obey; he wanted the fee, and the wanting never changed from the first delegation to the last. If those two get blurred together, Romans 7 turns into a permission slip, and the honest anguish of a man straining toward God gets used to excuse a man who was not straining at all.

Put their confessions side by side and you will not blur them again. This is Balaam’s, the only one he ever offers, spoken with an angel’s sword six inches from his face.

I have sinned, for I did not know that you stood in the road against me. Now therefore, if it is evil in your sight, I will turn back.

Numbers 22:34 (ESV)

Three things in one sentence. He blames not knowing, when the whole trouble is that he knew and went anyway. He says if it is evil in your sight, which is a condition, which means he is still not conceding the point. And none of it arrives until there is a blade in front of him.

Now Paul, with no sword anywhere in the room.

Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Romans 7:24 (ESV)

No conditions. Nothing blamed. Nobody made him say it.

So the test is not whether you fail. You will fail; Paul did, and said so in writing, and the man who wrote half the New Testament called himself wretched over it. The test is what your failure does to you. Paul is undone by the gap between what he knows and what he does. Balaam only says the words when there is steel in front of him, and even then he hedges.

My wife and I used to work with a young woman who always seemed to find a parking space near the door. Every time. My wife finally asked her how she managed to be so lucky, and she said it was not luck. She prayed for a good parking spot.

I have thought about that answer for years, and what stays with me is not whether the spaces were coming from God. It is that she assumed He would be interested. A Tuesday afternoon, a full lot, a small thing that would inconvenience her slightly and no one else at all, and it never occurred to her that this was beneath Him.

Do you pray for a good parking spot?

Listen to Him

Go back to the chapter that put Balaam’s trade on a list with child sacrifice, because Moses does not stop there. Having told Israel what they may not do when they want to know something, he tells them what God will provide instead, and it is the next thing out of his mouth.

The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers, it is to him you shall listen.

Deuteronomy 18:15 (ESV)

The alternative to the diviner is a Prophet. Not a better technique, not a cleaner method of extracting information from heaven. A person, who speaks, and who is to be listened to.

Peter names Him, standing in the temple courts and quoting that verse to a crowd, and the sentence he chooses to repeat is the instruction attached to it: “You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you” (Acts 3:22).

Balaam saw Him. That is the thing that will not leave me alone about this account. Out on that hilltop with Balak’s money in his tent, God put a word in his mouth and he heard himself describe a star coming out of Jacob and a scepter rising out of Israel. He prophesied the King, correctly, and then went down the mountain and taught Moab how to trip the King’s people into ruin. A man can be given sight that far and still not follow what he has been shown.

Balaam said that a house full of silver and gold could not move him past the command of the LORD his God. Well spoken, and untrue, and disproved within hours by his own feet.

Then a second man, on a mountain, is offered rather more than Balak could raise.

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” Then Jesus said to him, “Be gone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.’”

Matthew 4:8-10 (ESV)

Every kingdom on earth, against one man’s house full of silver.

One of them said the right words and kept bargaining. The other said them once, and the conversation was over.

That is the difference between a prophet for hire and the Prophet Moses promised. And the instruction that comes attached to Him is the one thing Balaam never did.

Listen to him.

Not hear Him. Balaam heard Him twice, in plain words, in his own language, and then again through the mouth of a donkey who had better sense than her owner. Hearing was never his problem, and it may not be yours. Knowing God’s word is not the same thing as submitting to it.

A mule who talked his owner out of trouble. A horse with more sense than the man who fed him. A doctor who wanted nothing so much as to learn the language and hear what the animals would say.

Balaam heard. He heard God twice, and an angel on the road, and a donkey in his own language. Every wish in every one of those pictures, granted to a man who would not do the one thing he was asked to do with it.

He had been told. So have you.

Balaam’s confession came with a sword at his throat and a condition attached. Paul’s came with neither, and it did not stop at the wretchedness. He asked who would deliver him, and then answered himself in the next breath.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!

Romans 7:25 (ESV)

Not a better method for getting answers out of heaven. A Person, who has already done the delivering.

There is a wedding at Cana where the wine runs out, and His mother, who cannot fix it and knows she cannot, turns to the staff with the only instruction that matters.

His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

John 2:5 (ESV)

Whatever he tells you. It is the phrase Moses used and Peter repeated in the temple courts.

What He told them made no sense. The wine was gone and He said fill the jars with water, and they filled them to the brim. When the master of the feast tasted it he had no idea where it had come from, “though the servants who had drawn the water knew” (John 2:9).

The servants knew. The man running the feast did not. They knew because they had done it, and not one moment before.

Balaam knew, and would not do it. They did it, and then they knew.

Listen to him.

The invitation was written down for a church that had everything and knew it. I am rich, they said, I have prospered, and I need nothing (Revelation 3:17). That is the sentence I catch myself living most days, over all the things too small to bother Him with.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

Revelation 3:20 (ESV)

Hears my voice, and opens the door. Two things: hear and submit.

Balaam only ever did the first.

References

• The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV). Crossway, 2001.
• Kino Lorber, “Francis the Talking Mule: 7 Film Collection,” https://kinolorber.com/product/francis-the-talking-mule-7-film-collection-blu-ray
• Encyclopedia.com, “Mister Ed,” https://www.encyclopedia.com/media/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mister-ed
• Television Academy Interviews, “Mister Ed,” https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/shows/mister-ed
• AllMusic, “Doctor Dolittle [1967 Original Soundtrack],” https://www.allmusic.com/album/doctor-dolittle-1967-original-soundtrack--mw0000094588
• The Gospel Coalition, “When God Closes a Door, Does He Open a Window?” https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/closes-door-open-window/

Footnotes