If Satan Can't Shut Us Down...

Lessons from Balaam

One of the truths of Scripture, from all the way back to Israel’s Exodus through the New Testament, is that God’s people—when faithful—cannot fail. When they were right with God through their wanderings and the conquest of Canaan, they won every battle.

This has remained true in the era of the church. Even through great persecution and martyrdom, Christ’s kingdom has never been stopped.

And yet, stagnation does happen. Backsliding happens. The entire Western world has seen a decline in Christian adherents over the last 100-150 years, and our cultural influence has nearly flatlined.

If God’s kingdom is so unstoppable, how can this happen?

As always, the Old Testament has great wisdom for us on the matter. I particularly want to focus on Numbers 22-25. 99% of the attention given to this section focuses on Balaam’s talking donkey (22:21-35), but there’s far more beneath the surface.

In the broader context, Balaam was a prophet upon whom Balak, the king of Moab, had called to curse Israel so the Moabites could defeat them. A prophet or diviner of some kind, Balaam’s word clearly carried some power. However, he was subject to the word the Lord gave him, which meant He could only bless Israel instead of cursing them. This, of course, infuriated Balak.

There you have it—even with a prophet on their payroll, Moab was powerless to fight against Israel and their God. And yet, after Balaam was done prophesying in Israel’s favor, we see them diving headfirst into sin and losing 24,000 people by God’s hand via a plague (25:1-9).

Though the immediate context of Numbers 25 doesn’t connect Balaam to this sin, the rest of the Bible does. Numbers 31:16 said it was Balaam’s counsel that led to Israel’s sin. Jude 11 called the event “the error of Balaam.” And, Revelation 2:14 gives the most detailed reference, saying Balaam “kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols and to commit acts of sexual immorality.”

So, filling in the gaps, it seems that when Balaam could not take down Israel via curse, he taught Moab to take down Israel via subversion.

In other words, God would not let anyone stop Israel. If they were going to fail, it was only going to be from within.

The same thing happened before with the 10 faithless spies, and the same thing would happen again with Achan’s sin at Ai. Only their own unfaithfulness could bring them down.

Though it was wicked of him to take advantage of it, it was also quite clever for Balaam to see this flaw: “I can’t turn God against them, but I can turn them against God.”

You can be certain that Satan has not forgotten this tactic, and he’s using it against us today.

The reason we are losing over half of our children, seeing congregations shut their doors, lacking qualified elderships, and watching a decline in ministers is not because God has been caught off guard by a particularly strong punch from the world.

Rather, all of this is happening because we’ve participated in the sin of Peor. We’ve allowed ourselves to be drawn after the gods of the peoples around us and have compromised our families by “inter-marrying” with the world, both literally and figuratively.

Like fish who don’t know they’re wet, it is hard for us to grasp how many abnormal things our culture has conditioned us to view as normal. If you dropped a Christian from 1900 years ago into our houses today, they would likely be shocked at the ways we dress and speak, the entertainment we consume, the values we hold and externalize, the way we view husbands, wives, and children, and more.

Thankfully, Israel gave us a blueprint for solving the problem

Spiritual adultery must be killed. As Phinehas drove a spear through the Israelite man and the Midianite woman, so we must drive a spear through any compromise that Christians embrace.

Obviously I don’t mean we kill anyone. But the same fervor for keeping the camp pure must flow in our churches, regardless of who takes issue with it. Not only are our own souls at stake, but our effectiveness depends entirely on this one issue.

We can talk all day long about reaching the lost and changing the world, but until we’re rooting out the worldliness within, we can’t expect to win those battles. Israel lost every battle they tried to fight when they were not right with God. Why should we think it would be any different for us?

How?

The first, most obvious practical application is that we need prophetic, counter-culture preaching. I’ve said plenty about that here though, so I’ll spare you another paragraph on it for now.

Second, rather than giving you a few one-size-fits-all high points to check on in your own life (many of which I’ve written about here or spoken about on Think Deeper Podcast), I think the best way for each of us to root out worldliness in our own lives is to ask God to show us how. He rewards those who diligently seek Him (Hebrews 11:6), and He promises we’ll find Him if we search for Him with all of our hearts (Jeremiah 29:13).

Telling you to root out deep-seated, hard-to-detect worldliness might give you anxiety that there is some way you’re falling short. I can’t tell every one of you whether you have some worldliness to root out and, if so, what it is.

But if you know God will answer you if you ask, seek, and knock and show Him a heart that wants to be right with Him, then you can’t lose. Pray, study the Word, pay attention in class and worship, and avail yourself of other opportunities to learn. The Spirit will work to convict you through those means. Praying these things as a church would be beneficial, too.

This is how we drive a spear through the spirit of compromise and get our churches back on track. The backslide we’re seeing is fully of our own doing, but God is always near the minute His people return to Him, ready to fight for us and give us the victory.

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