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The prophet Bilam (Balaam), described in the Torah reading בָּלָק Balak (Numbers 22:2–25:9), was a gentile prophet from the ancient country of Aram. We see that even though Bilam was a Gentile, he was a prophet of God.
God did not only send prophets to Israel. God, in His mercy, sent prophets to all the nations of the world.
Unfortunately, we meet with Bilam, not in his early years when God first called him to prophetic office, when his heart was open to God. Instead, we are meeting Bilam at the point when his evil inclination has overtaken the good in him. We follow along with him as his greed, corruption and vanity lead him to his downfall, which was so complete, that his story is given to us a template of how the Antichrist will one day function in the world, deceiving, if possible, the elect.
God sends prophets to the Gentiles too
Bilam was a real prophet and gave real prophesies from God to his people, although he was a prophet for hire. People came to him from all over asking him for advice.
When the princes of Moab came to Bilam to ask him to curse Israel, his reputation proceeded him. When Bilam asked God for permission to go with the men on this job, God emphatically told him no and at first, Bilam seems to have no problem with God’s answer. He rejected the princes of Moab and sent them back home after extending hospitality to them.
Do you want your answer or God’s answer?
But when Bilam asked God a second time, God tells Bilam that it’s ok if he goes with them so now he has to decide which answer he should follow. God is testing Bilam with these conflicting answers.
What should Bilam have done? I submit to you that Bilam should have asked God to clarify His conflicting answers and come to the correct conclusion.
But what we read here is that Bilam came to God the second time only because he didn’t like God’s first answer and wanted to see if God would change His mind. God’s first answer was God’s command and God’s second answer affirmed Bilam’s heart desire, which was for money and honor.
Bilam simply chose the answer from God that He liked the most. He didn’t truly care to follow God. He didn’t want God to clarify Himself any further. He simply wanted God’s rubber stamp his greed.
God did not need Bilam’s help to bless Israel. This entire story is an odd detour from Israel’s journey to the Promised Land, but it is a variation of the story of the choice between the Tree of Life vs. the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad.
When errant children are persistent in asking for permission to do their will, even though the parent knows their desire is not best for them, the parent may gave them permission, but the child has to be ready to face the consequences of not accepting their parent’s original guidance.
I don’t think this was the first time Bilam was asked by someone to bless or curse another person so the initial conversation with Moab’s representatives was not unusual. What was unusual was that when Bilam asked God for permission to go along with the princes of Moab and curse Israel, God said no. I suspect that this was the first time God had told Bilam no.
How to corrupt a blessing and turn it into a curse
This is also the first time that Bilam is in a situation where he is lying to and trying to manipulate both the King of Moab and God so he can get the money and honor he wants so bad. I also believe that Bilam already had the plan formulated to give Moab what they wanted, which was a weakened Israel, despite the blessings he knew he would be compelled to speak out loud upon them.
Bilam outmaneuvered the blessings that God forced him to bring on Israel by teaching the Moabites and their Midianite allies how to seduce the Israelites into idolatry and to get them in trouble with God.
Messiah riding on a donkey?
Of all the people on earth, all the people in Torah who spoke prophetic words were Messianic figures, from Abraham, to Moses, to Sampson, to Messiah Himself, all had this rare authority from God. Even those Messianic figures who had significant moral weaknesses, they were still more upright than Bilam.
The strangest thing is that Bilam had this authority too. He understood God’s thoughts and presented God’s blessings to Israel. However, Bilam was also conniving enough to maneuver around them so the people of Israel got into trouble and Moab was willing to pay Bilam generously, even though he didn’t curse Israel himself. His plan was to make the children of Israel curse themselves in a way that he could no do himself.
Love of money is the root of all evil
Bilam’s deadly weakness is his desire for money and his willingness to act subversively against God’s will. He manipulated the scenario between Moab and Israel to get what he wanted.
The closer you are to God, the closer God examines you, so many would wonder why God even continued to engage Bilaam as a prophet as Bilaam’s life slanted further towards evil.
In Bilam’s early years, it seems that Bilam was righteous enough that God was willing to engage with him and use Bilam as a vessel of prophesy to the people of Aram and the surrounding nation, but as Bilam gain fame and renown, it seems like the power that God had given him corrupted him.
We are all a mix of righteous and unrighteous thoughts and action. How do we strengthen our righteous side and set aside our unrighteous sides? How do we overpower the evil in us so that we will grow in righteousness?
The fruit of anti-christ
Bilam is a counterfeit messiah, an anti-messiah. On the surface, he was in tune with God, but on the inside, he was at odds with God. Bilam’s life is a stern warning to us. On the surface, he was righteous but inside, he was evil and wicked. Bilam’s life was a hypocritical facade.
In the aftermath of Bilam’s blessings on Israel, we see that he went taught people of Moab and Midian how to seduce Israel to curse themselves since he was not permitted by God to curse them himself.
As we will see in the next Torah portion, the curse that God placed on the children of Israel in the aftermath of the idolatry of Be’or, appears to have killed off the last of the older generation that God had denied the right to ever live in the Promised Land.
The anti-christ, Bilam, came along to “seduce to elect.” This is one of the primary themes of the entire book of Revelation.
Just before the end of days, God will allow an anti-christ, who has evil intentions, to deceive those who are masquerading as righteous, while he is actually conspiring to destroy those who he seduces. He will know the right things to say and will put on a good show, but his heart will be as wicked as Bilaam’s.
There are many whitewashed tombs in our world that are just like Bilam, because they’re anti-Messiah, not necessarily the Antichrist per se, but their nature is against Christ.
Bilam is a messianic figure on in many ways but he is an anti-messiah figure.
The angel who confront’s Balaam calls him out saying,
Numbers 22:32–33 KJV
“And the angel of the LORD said unto him, Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times? behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me: And the ass saw me, and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive.”
Bilam is acting presumptuously and accelerating swiftly to his destruction and both the donkey and the Angel are trying to snap him out of his delusion.
The donkey saved Bilam’s life three times, which is a very important point to tuck away for later because on the surface, this story of a willfully disobedient prophet and a talking donkey doesn’t seem very important. There’s no Torah judgement it’s presenting, so why is it here? What’s the point of this story.
The easiest person to fool is oneself
The best lies are encased and enrobed in truth, that what makes them believable and effective. These kind of lies appear legitimate and righteous and by the time we realize our error, we have succumbed to it to some extent.
The core of each of us is what is on the inside of us, not what is on the outside. We can wear different facades for different situations. Bilaam put a facade on, a facade of what his people expected of a prophet.
Bilam was a whitewashed tomb, he looked beautiful on the inside but he was prideful and greedy on the inside. The facade is beautiful but the core is complete destruction.
Bilam allowed his evil inclination to turn him away from God’s righteous path and molded him into a person who no longer served God or had any value to Him.
In our day, HaSatan uses our whitewashed facades to destroy, ruin and shakedown our society. We see this in how HaSatan manipulates technology so that we put on a facade of tolerance with fake love and rainbows, but underneath all of it is intolerance and hatred.
We have the same evil corruptions inside us that Bilaam and those around him had. We know what is good and bad, what is right and wrong, but too often it’s easier to choose to do what is bad.
How do we keep evil from subverting the good?
Moses told the children of Israel multiple times to choose life. There are always two choices: life or death. Doesn’t matter what the scenario is on the surface, the inner struggles are always about choosing life or choosing death.
Unfortunately Bilam did not choose life, despite the speed bumps placed in his path that gave him multiple opportunities to reconsider what he was plotting.
But his heart was so full of evil intent that he was plotting to spew out his whitewashed blessings as he was also plotting how to convince the children of Israel to corrupt themselves so they would not live up to the blessings God was bestowing on them.
Bilam’s refusal to heed the warnings from the Angel and the donkey later cost him his life.
The apostle Peter describes Bilam in the Balak haftarah (parallel) reading (Micah 5:6–6:8) this way:
… forsaking the right way, they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; but he received a rebuke for his own transgression, for a mute donkey, speaking with a voice of a man, restrained the madness of the prophet.
2Peter 2:15–16 NASB
What does this mean? If we are all a mix of evil and good, what are the wages of that evil in us? What was the spirit behind Bilam’s choices? Rebellion? Pleasure? Some sort of personal satisfaction? How does evil overpower our inclination to do good?
God gave Bilam opportunities to show restraint, to turn away from his madness, yet he did not take advantage of them.
Notice how Bilam was beating his donkey because it was not acting the way he wanted it to act. He was even considering killing his donkey because it wasn’t doing exactly what he wanted it to do.
Bilam’s greed blinded him from his own hypocrisy. He was blind in his purpose to destroy Israel. He was so blinded by his desire to destroy that he could not see the angel in front of him. This is a prophet who was spiritually aware for many years, yet his evil inclination had so blinded him that the eyes of a dumb donkey were more enlightened than the prophet.
That anger, the intense emotion of Bilam’s own desires welled up so much that he beat an animal, almost to death. Yet the donkey was saving his life. Bilam’s obsession blinded him to how far he had deviated far away from the path of righteousness.
How to avoid evil and nurture righteousness
Evil, just like weeds, doesn’t take much water to grow, and can do their own thing, but righteousness, like food crops, needs a lot of water, pruning, etc., to grow. In Bilam’s case, as it is for the rest of us, we have to make conscious choices to nurture what is good. How do we feed what is good?
The choices we make in the long-term matter. The choices we made in the past brought us to where we are now. We can either repent from the evil that was in our past, or we can repent and turn away from good things we did in our past. Every day, we make that choice and become evil if we nurture evil, or become good if we nurture the good in us.
If we actively nurture the good part of ourselves, we will not be whitewashed tombs. If we are honest in our efforts and not just pretending, and feed what is good in us, we will be better for it.
The Torah tells us how to feed what is good. Micah tells us how we nurture righteousness.
He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6:8 NASB
Yeshua quoted directly from the Torah when he rebuked HaSatan.
And the tempter came and said to Him, “If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.” But He answered and said, “It is written, ‘MAN SHALL NOT LIVE ON BREAD ALONE, BUT ON EVERY WORD THAT PROCEEDS OUT OF THE MOUTH OF GOD’ [Deut. 8:6].”
Matthew 4:3–4 NASB
We know that God desires to bless us, not curse us. We know that God prefers to bestow blessings, and Bilaam, as a prophet of God, should have known that God’s default choice is to bless people, not curse them. Bilaam also should have relayed that truth to the representative of Moab firmly and consistently but because Bilaam’s heart was enticed by greed, rather than by his relationship with God. Bilaam fed his evil inclination, and it overpowered the good that was in him when he was first called by God as a prophet to the gentiles of Aram.
We all have this problem that we desire to set aside what is good and let our flesh do what it wants instead.
Bilaam walked the path of evil and destroyed himself in the process. God had to punish Israel for their sin, as we will read about in the next Torah reading, but Bilam didn’t live to see it or to enjoy the bounty that the King of Moab gave him.
Summary: Tammy