Balaam’s convictions and wishes disagreed sometimes. Therein he was most human. He knew he ought not to go to Balak, and yet he wished to go. He would ask the second time; he would doubt his own convictions, or he would adjust them according to the shape and temper of circumstances. Wherever he came from, he claims herein to be quite a near neighbor of ours. Doubt may exist as to the exact relation of Pethor to the river upon which it was built, but there can be no doubt whatever of the blood relationship between Balaam and our own age. Speaking impulsively from the center of his convictions, he said: “No. Nothing shall tempt me to go. You speak of gold and silver. Were Balak to give me his house full of gold and silver, I would not go. I am the Lord’s servant, and the Lord’s work alone will I do.”
Then the thought occurred to him—a second message coming, borne by more honorable princes: “Perhaps I might go and obtain this wealth and honor, and still do my duty.”
He is on the downward road now. A man who thinks to do forbidden things and spend the bounty for the advantage of the Church is lost; there is no power in him that can overcome the gravitation that sucks him downward. He says: “I will bring back all Balak’s gold and silver, and add a transept to the church or another course of marble to the altar.”
He will never return. God will not have His house so patched and bungled; nor does He want Balak’s gold for the finishing of His sanctuary. A nobler spirit was Abram, who said no to the king of Sodom, “lest thou shouldest say: ‘I have made Abram rich.’”
The whole story of Balaam is intensely Oriental and primeval. The first deputation is dismissed in obedience to a divine warning; but, so far as we know, “the wages of unrighteousness,” which Balaam loved, are carefully retained. A second embassy of nobler messengers, carrying richer gifts, succeeds. He does not at once dismiss them, as God had required, but presses for permission to go with them, which at last is granted.
Balaam would earn the fame and honor apparently within his grasp, yet he knows that when the prophetic afflatus comes on him he can only utter what it prompts. With a feigned religiousness, he protests that if Balak were to give him his house full of silver and gold he could not go beyond the word of Jehovah, his God, to do less or more; but he also bids them wait overnight to see if he may not, after all, be allowed to go with them. If his ignoble wish to be allowed to curse an unoffending nation be gratified, he has the wealth he craves; if it be refused, he can appeal to his words as proof of his being only the mouth-piece of God.
That Balaam should have been allowed to go with Balak’s messengers was only the permission given every man to act as a free agent, and in no way altered the divine command, that he should bless, and not curse. Yet he goes as if at liberty to do either, and lets Balak deceive himself by false hopes, when the will of God has been already decisively made known.
Balaam’s was a maneuvering life—very truthful, and yet very false; very godly, and yet very worldly—a most composite and self-contradictory life, and still a most human life. Balaam never breaks away from the brotherhood of the race in any of his inconsistencies. When he is very good, there are men living today who are just as good as Balaam was; when he is very bad, it would not be difficult to confront him with men who are quite his equals in wrong doing. When he is both good and bad almost at the same moment, he does not separate himself from the common experience of the race. He was always arranging, adjusting, endeavoring to meet one thing by another, and to set off one thing over against another. It was a kind of gamester life—full of subtle calculation, touched with a sort of wonder which becomes almost religious, and steeped in a superstition which reduces many of the actions of life to a state of moral mystery wholly beyond ordinary comprehension.