Spring Break Edition | Episode 11

We are coming to you this week with a special, shorter Spring Break episode. We look at the strange figure of Balaam, the pagan seer and sorcerer who appears in the last section of Numbers. Did you know Balaam is mentioned outside of the Bible? Also, our question of the week is about the poor naked young man who shows up in the background when Jesus is arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane. What?!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Well, everybody, welcome to a special, special, special spring break edition of the year through the Bible podcast, where you have only me, your humble host, Andrew Forrest, senior pastor at Asbury Church, my colleague Rodney Adams is often not with us today, so you're stuck with me. And I have some thoughts I want to share about the book of Numbers, which is a really weird book. Now, I got to tell you, one of the things that I struggle with a little bit with this year through the Bible format is how quickly we move through everything. So if you're just joining us, we're reading through the Bible in the year using the one-year Bible. Every day there's an Old Testament, a New Testament, a Psalm, and a Proverb reading. And you do that through 365 days, you finish the Bible. So we move pretty quick. And so Numbers is just quick. There is a lot in here that we haven't been able to talk about in other settings. So I want to talk today about Balaam, that really, really, really strange episode at the end of Numbers. So here's some thoughts real quick. First of all, remember the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy 5, and they all go together. Every book apart from Genesis begins with the word and, and, and, and, and. They're all telling a unified story. And there's this chiastic structure, fancy Bible word, where basically things like mirror each other. So Genesis and Deuteronomy are mirrored. Exodus and Numbers and Leviticus is at the center, and the high point of Leviticus is the day of atonement. Okay, why does this matter? Exodus begins with a foreign king who is afraid of the numerical might of the people. It says in Exodus chapter 1, verse 9. And Numbers ends with the king of Moab being afraid of the numerical might of the people we read in Numbers. And so he tries to hire this man named Balaam, son of Baor. Now, here is what is so awesome, everybody. Balaam is actually mentioned outside of the Bible. Do you know how rare this is? I mean, people are always like, what, you know, what evidence do we have for things in the Bible outside the Bible? But the part of the problem is this is really old stuff. We have basically nothing from the ancient world. We have the Bible and a few other things here and there. So to like want all this like evidence outside the Bible is an unrealistic desire. It doesn't exist, which is why when something does exist, it's amazing. So a number of decades ago now, there was it was sort of fashionable to say, you know, King David didn't really exist. And then in Jerusalem, you know, they have the this rule in Israel that you can't like build and dig without like hiring the antiquities people to go through the dirt and make sure there's no artifacts there. Well, they were doing that in the old city of Jerusalem, and they found a shard of pottery that had an inscription about King David, and it comes from about 1,000 BC. Proof, of course, that King David actually lived, which those of us in the faith already believed. Okay, why am I telling you this? Because there is a little inscription that they found online, and it's called, let me get the word right here, the Dair Allah inscription. And it comes from a place in Jordan from about 825 BC, something like that. And it references Balaam, son of Boar. So this man was like this ancient sorcerer, well known in the ancient world, so that he's even mentioned outside of the Bible. Boom! Isn't that awesome? That makes me so excited. I just love stuff like that. It's just so cool. Okay, so here we are. This is the closing part of Numbers, and there's a little bit of a mystery here which I want to explain to you. Like Miss Marple. That's an Agatha Christi reference that will bring all the young people in hearing Agatha Christi references. Okay. So we have uh we have here in Numbers 22 where the king wants to get at them. This is 22.3. And Moab was in great dread of the people, Exodus 9 wrote language, because they were many. Moab was overcome with fear. And so Moab said to the elders of Midian, let's go ahead and try to fight them. Let's hire uh, let's the king's name is Balach, let's hire Balaam. So they try to hire Balaam, and this weird thing happens where God thwarts Balaam from cursing Israel. And in fact, Balaam ends up having to bless them. So what you have in Numbers chapters 23 and 24, 25, 26, uh is all these beautiful poems from Balaam. Balaam's been hired to curse Israel. He ends up actually talking about how there's going to be a Messiah to come from Israel one day. That's what those uh oracles are about. So it's like it's like Genesis 50, 20. Remember, Joseph says, Well, you intended for evil, God is used for good. So they want to use Balaam to curse Israel, and he ends up blessing Israel and giving these amazing messianic oracles. Okay. Well, then it kind of looks like Balaam gets in a little bit of trouble. Why is that? What happens? Well, there's this little verse in Numbers 31. So in the intervening chapters, the Israelite men start lusting after the Midianite women, and then they start worshiping the Midianite gods, and it causes this real problem in Israel, this problem of idolatry. And then the story moves on. And then Moses wants them to fight the people of Midian. This is Numbers 31. The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Avenge the people of Israel on the Midianites, and then you're going to die. So Moses spoke to the people. He said, Arm them, let's go to Midian, and we'll fight against them. So they go to war, they fight against the Midianite Midian. Verse 8, Numbers 31, verse 8. They killed the kings of Midian with the rest of their slain. Evi, Rechim, Zor, Hur, and Rebba, the five kings of Midian. And they also killed Balaam, the son of Boor, with the sword. And you're thinking, why Balaam? What did he do? The last we had seen of Balaam, he had been hired to curse. He doesn't take the money, he doesn't do it. Now, did you see this? This is later on in the passage. This is Numbers uh six numbers thirty-one fifteen. Moses is mad after the battle. He says, And you let all the women live? Behold, these, on Balaam's advice, caused the people of Israel to act treacherously against the Lord. And so the plague came upon them. And you go, Whoa, that wasn't in there. It wasn't. This is how the Bible likes to work, right? You learn a thing later that makes sense of a thing you read earlier. It's why you got to read the Bible over and over and over. Okay, so now we learn that Balaam was behind the idea that sent all these women into the Israelite camp to kind of uh ensnare the men. So the king of Moab, he's trying to hire Balaam to curse. Balaam can't curse. His donkey gets in the way. It's not possible. End of the story. But then it looks like that later on Balaam went back to that king and said, actually, I wouldn't mind having some of that money. Why don't you pay me? Here's the idea. Send the women in. The women will get the men to go after the foreign gods, and then we're going to attack them. And ultimately that's what gets Balaam in trouble. Okay, okay, here's what's cool. This is the Old Testament. Well, there's a Jewish writer from the time of Jesus, a little bit after Jesus, the generation after Jesus named Josephus, and he writes for the Romans this long history of the Jewish people, and he comments on this passage. And so what Josephus, who's writing at the time of Jesus, does is that he shows us how the Jews interpreted this passage. And Josephus puts a speech into Balaam's mouth where he goes to the king and he says, Well, I haven't been able to curse, God has stopped me, but here's another idea. Give me money and I'll do it. And that's how we get this scenario that we have here in Numbers 31. So what I'm what I'm telling you is that this is a great example of how over time the Jews were thinking about this. What could have happened? Why did Balaam get involved? And that's what they came up with. And then finally, if you turn to the little tiny New Testament letter of Jude, it's like one little page, one little short thing. Jude references Balaam in one verse. He says, uh, verse 11 of Jude. Woe to them, for they walked in Balaam's, they walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's era and perished in Korah's rebellion. He's drawing on these Old Testament stories. He's talking about some false teachers in the New Testament dimes, and he says, Balaam was interested in financial gain. So that explains what happened to Balaam. He's doing great. He seems to be doing a pretty good thing. He's not working against God's people. In fact, he pronounced his blessing upon them. But later on, the love of money ensnared him, and he circles back and he has to get him caught up in his own sin. And he's killed in Numbers 31. I thought that was interesting. There's a lot more numbers we don't have time to look into, including the strange passage of the bronze serpents on the poles. The very thing that was meant to bring death is a way of bringing life. Mysterious passage. We may look at that in a future week. What I thought we'd do now as we wrap up is just look at a question that came up a couple of times this last week from the Gospel of Mark. Okay, so here's here's our question of the week. A couple of different people asked it. It's about Mark 1451. Mark 1451. This is in the Passion account when Jesus is taken in the garden of Gethsemane. Gethsem How do you say that? Gethsemane. Gethsemane. Okay, here we go. Mark 1451. And a young man followed him with nothing but a linen cloth about his body, and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked. What? Why is that even in there? Whoa, this is very interesting. Now, in the oldest manuscripts we have, in fact, we have no manuscripts without what I'm about to say. In all of the manuscripts of the gospels we have, they all include the titles. The gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark, according to Luke, according to John. So from the earliest days, they were circulated with the name of this person on it. Now, by tradition, the Gospel of Mark is Peter's preaching, Peter's testimony in Rome. It was the content of Peter's evangelization in Rome among the believers there. And Mark is the man called John Mark, a young man in the book of Acts. In fact, the Apostle Paul and the Apostle Barnabas have a falling out over this little young guy. Paul is tired of him. He won't deal with him anymore, but Barnabas wants to keep him. So that's what Barnabas and Paul split over. So he would have been a young man at the time of the crucifixion. And the best guess is that Mark, who's like Peter's secretary, he's falling around Peter, he's writing down Peter's preaching. Mark has there in Jerusalem. He's a Jerusalem person, and he was there. He's a little guy, young guy. Maybe he stayed up late. He wraps himself with this linen cloth real quick. He's falling behind the disciples and Jesus. He's scared when the soldiers come. They try to grab him. He lets him take his cloak and he just runs away naked. And Mark wrote himself into the story there. So that's a good way to think about Mark 1451. Okay, everybody, party people. That's all I got for you today in this special spring break edition of the Year Through the Bible podcast. Remember, you just got to read. If you are behind, catch up. And don't you dare do that thing where you go, Oh, I'm gonna catch up. I have to read four weeks tomorrow, and I'll catch up. Shut up. Just read that day's reading. Catch up if you want. Cut your losses if you want. The main thing is read that day's session and catch up after that. Well, I'm Andrew Forrest. It's the year through the Bible. Let's keep going, baby, and I'll see you soon.