“AND THE children of Israel set forward, and pitched in the plains of Moab on this side Jordan by Jericho. And Balak the son of Zippor saw all that Israel had done to the Amorites. And Moab was sore afraid...”
What an awesome yet glorious sight it must have been to Balak, king of Moab, as he gazed down from the high places of Baal upon the vast multitudes of Israel spread out in ordered array on the plains below.
Israel were fresh from their victories over the two kings of the Amorites, the powerful Sihon and Og, the giant king of Bashan whose bedstead of iron measured 9 cubits by 4 cubits, or 131/4 feet long by 6 feet wide). The sight of them terrified Balak and his people. Long before they had heard the report of the mighty power of Him who had led Israel out of Egypt, through the Red Sea and across the wilderness, and now here they were encamped within his very land. Well might Moab quail at the sight.
“And Moab said unto the elders of Midian, Now shall this company lick up all that are round about us, as the ox licketh up the grass of the field.”
Balak both feared and hated Israel, but he had the sense that the power of Moab was no match for them. He rightly judged that the power that led them was beyond all human might and that if he ever hoped to overcome them he must invoke a force beyond the power of man.
Here in those early times we have another demonstration of that precious word in Romans 8:3131What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31): “If God be for us, who can be against us?” And how wondrous this is when we think of what a people Israel had proved themselves to be all along the wilderness way — unthankful, disobedient, rebellious, ever turning away from the God of all grace and in their hearts going back to Egypt. But God sees His people in Christ who covers all their failures, who bore the judgment of their sins on the cross. It is not that there was not iniquity in Israel, but God does not look at it; He looks at Christ and sees His people in all the value of His perfect work of redemption.
Balak felt that the only way he could defeat Israel was to call in the powers of the unseen world. He did not know God; he was just a poor heathen, and the presence of the altars of Baal only showed how completely under the power of Satan he and his people were. The idolatry of Moab was only a covering of Satan’s power, for demons are behind every heathen idol.
In Balak’s sending for Balaam to come and curse Israel we have man uniting with Satan against the people of God. But this immediately brings God Himself into the conflict. He enters the arena and the efforts of the world and Satan to destroy His people if it were possible are not only defeated and brought to naught but become the occasion for the richest display of His care for His own and of His purposes of love toward them. O what a God we have! Surely our hearts ought to be more filled with His praise and our lives spent in happy willing service for Him.
ML-03/31/1974