Today's Reading is Numbers 22-25...
My thoughts on today's reading...
Today brings another story from the book of Numbers you may be familiar with... Balaam and his donkey make for an interesting tale, and one that children find to be funny. One year in summer Sunday School I had the kids act out the story while we video taped it. It was pretty comical, watching Balaam beating the donkey... even though of course in our play, no real violence took place. It appears that Balaam was a prophet of the Lord, who would not go against what the Lord said, except for the one time that he decides to go with Balak's men and the whole donkey episode takes place. While the Lord had told Balaam to go with the men of Balak, evidently he must have decided in his heart to not speak God's word. That's why the Lord says to him, "Behold I have come out to oppose you because your way is perverse before me." (Numbers 22:32b)
Having learned his lesson, Balaam tells Balak, I'm only going to say what the Lord tells me to say, and after three attempts at swayng Balaam, Balak gives up in frustration, because instead of cursing Israel, he blesses them. Then Balaam offers a fourth and final oracle, which peaks not only against Balak and the Midianites but also others from the area.
Unfortunately, in Chapter 25, we see that the leadership of Israel gets caught up in worship of Baal which would have included sexual fertility cults which were apart of Baal worship, which is the descriptive language that we usually don't see very often in verse 1. Because of this great sin, the Lord punishes the leaders who were setting a bad example for the people, by having the leaders hung. And to further show the evil, one of the Israelites brought a Gentile woman into the tent of meeting. Phineas, grandson of Aaron is furious and punishes this great defilement, and the plague that was impacting God's people stopped. Phineas is described as being jealous for God, which God uses to describe how He feels about His people and he is commended for acting on behalf of the Lord.
BTW, this isn't the first time we've heard about the Midianites... remember they were the traders who bought Joseph from his brothers and sold him to the Egyptians. They are descendants of Abraham also through his marriage to Keturah after Sarah had died, and as I mentioned back when we were in Genesis, they pop up in the Biblical accounts from time to time as a temptation to God's people of Israel to sin and worship false gods.