We’ve seen that even though Balaam had wicked motives, the Lord used him to utter blessings on behalf of His people. Although it’s a strange story, it demonstrates, on several levels, how God’s will is accomplished and proclaimed often through very unlikely candidates.
Just as Job’s friends, misguided at times as they were, spoke truth, so also did Balaam. His three prophecies reinforced God’s faithfulness to His people, even when they were being unfaithful to Him. Still, we must ask, “Who are God’s people?”
First, we know that the answer is not merely, “Israel,” as in all of the Jews and their friends who escaped from Egypt. It is as God says to Samuel after the people had asked for a king to reign over them “like all of the other nations” (1 Samuel 7:7, 8):
“And the Lord said to Samuel, ‘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. According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you.’”
It is this persistent rebellion which prompted God to insist, through the prophet Hosea, “These are not my people” (Hosea 1:9), the very idea picked up by the Apostle Paul as he explains that “all Israel is not Israel” (Romans 9:6-8). Earlier in the book, Paul had pointed out that “no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical” (Romans 2:28, 29), but rather inward and spiritual. In other words, the people of God are His by faith, and not blood or DNA, as Jesus Himself declares to Nicodemus in John 3.
This is precisely what Balaam himself is proclaiming, though he probably did not understand it, in his last prophecy, “God brings him (Israel’s king) out of Egypt. . . He shall eat up the nations, his adversaries, and shall break their bones in pieces and pierce them through with his arrows. . . Blessed are those who bless you, and cursed are those who curse you” (Numbers 24:8, 9).
The blessing AND the kingdom come only through the King, which we know now, is Jesus, the Christ. It is He, God with us, called out of Egypt (Matthew 1:21-23: 2:14, 15), who will die for sinners and triumph over evil. He makes a path of blessing for His people, not those related to Him by blood, but by faith (Romans 11:28-32), which, in the end, will include countless Jews.
Are you one of God’s people by faith in His Son?
“That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’”
John 3:6, 7