Thoughts on Numbers 23 & James 5

Today’s reading: Numbers 23; James 5

Thoughts on Numbers 23

I don’t have much to say about Numbers 23 this morning other than to point out that it is a great example of why understanding ancient religious and world views is so important to understanding the Bible well.

The story of Balaam and Balak is pretty weird to our modern understanding of God. God knows and perceives all things, and is not bound by geography or line of sight, so Balak taking Balaam around to all these different locations to try to get God to curse Israel is just silly. If God has decided to bless this people, do you really think an extra offering, or asking him from a different location, is going to change His mind such that He will curse them? Of course not! But this is not the God they were dealing with (or at least not what they would have known or thought about the god they were dealing with).

To the ancient mind, all the gods of the nations were real. Some gods were more powerful than others, and that was generally evidenced by how much land that god’s worshippers controlled. Different gods also had different domains. We see this in the conquest narratives where nations gathering against Israel assume things like that they lost because Yahweh is a god of the hills, so they should fight the next battle in the valleys where he will be weaker! So getting what you wanted out of a god was as much about geography as it was payment and ritual.

So Balak and Balaam start up high, overlooking Israel, and Balaam fails to curse Israel, so next they try going down to the plains, to the field of Zophim, to try there. Then when that fails Balak takes Balaam up to the top of Peor. This one is interesting because they worshiped Baal of Peor. Gods were often said to make their homes at the top of mountains, and this is Mount Peor, so they are going to Baal’s home to ask Yahweh to curse Israel on their behalf. Strategically, they are going to the place where their god, Baal, should be the most powerful, and should therefore be able to exercise the most sway over Balaam’s god as they try to get him to curse Israel.

Honestly, I think this is really interesting, but it’s the kind of thing we read past and miss thinking, “That’s dumb, do they really think God is going to be fooled into cursing Israel if He can only see the tail end of the people?” But when we understand ancient thinking about the gods, what they are doing actually makes a whole lot of sense, and this actually sends a powerful message. Yahweh is not a god of the hills, plains, or mountains, and He is not subject to or swayed against His will by men or by other gods. Yahweh is unique and greater than all the other gods of the nations, and His will stands firm and can therefore be counted on by Israel. This is a powerful theological lesson, but if we don’t understand how Israel and the nations thought about their gods, we are liable to miss these points. 

Thoughts on James 5

I don’t think we give enough credit to the power of prayer. 

I remember a number of years ago meeting a man who grew up as a missionary in the Congo until he was in middle school and his family moved back to the US. I asked him what the hardest things were in making that adjustment and he told me one of the hardest things for his family was not having to pray for anything anymore. He told me that where they were living, there were no ambulances to pick you up if you got injured, and the nearest hospital was a few hours away, and there were police, but it may be an hour or more before they showed up if you called them, etc. Basically, a lot of the “safety-nets” that we take for granted simply didn’t exist there, and so everything was done by prayer. For example, he said that every time he and his brother went outside to play, his mother would pray first that God would protect them from severe injury. 

The other day my kids were playing and two of them knocked heads and hit just right that one of them needed stitches. It was a mild inconvenience, but three hours after it happened we were back home putting her to bed all patched up. That’s honestly not something I ever think to pray about because we do have all the safety-nets, protections, and insurances in place.

Instead of coming to God with all the little things needed for life, modern society has provided all that, so instead I tend to just come with the “bigger stuff” like healing someone of a terminal illness, restoring a failing marriage, completely changing someone’s heart, etc. I’m obviously not saying anything is wrong with praying for these big things, but when these our the focus and we don’t have a regular, daily backlog of smaller answered prayers to look back on, one or two “unanswered” big prayers starts to be all we focus on and it makes us wonder if prayer actually does anything…

I’m not going to pretend to understand why some prayers get answered and others don’t, but what I do know is that James reminds us that, “Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that is might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again, and heaven gave rain, and the earth bore its fruit.” James’ point is that Elijah was not some other-worldly demigod with great power at his disposal, he was just a human being like the rest of us, yet his prayers accomplished great and powerful things.

We need to not lose track of just how powerful prayer is. We have the ear of the creator of the Universe, for whom nothing is too big or two small. He is the God who made the sun stand still in the sky for Joshua and was able to keep things from going bonkers physically as a result of evidently pausing the earth’s rotation, and He is the God who restored sight to a man born blind, evidently also adjusting his brain so he could handle interpreting all the visuals of the world around him for the first time without it being overwhelming or disorienting. He is a God of unfathomable power and unfathomable attention to detail, and, in Christ, we have unfettered access to Him.

I bet if we really believed in our hearts that prayer was as powerful as we know it theoretically is, prayer would be much more of a major priority in all of our lives.

James does give us a caveat though that I would be remiss to not point out, and that is that it is not prayer in general that has great power, but the prayer of a righteous person that has great power as it is working. Some people have wrongly taken this to mean that if a prayer goes unanswered it is because you aren’t righteous enough, but I don’t think that is what James is saying here. This ties back into the rest of what we have seen James say, and can go right back to our discussion on faith and works. Just like faith is not “fire insurance,” prayer is not a vending machine. True faith is active in pursuing a life aligned with the priorities and activities of God, and effective prayer springs forth from such a life. So we are not talking about some threshold of holiness in your life that you have to reach before your prayers are as powerful as Elijah’s, but James is telling us that, if we are living for ourselves rather than for the Lord, we shouldn’t have much in the way of expectations about our prayers. On the positive side though, if we are pursuing the life the Lord is calling us to, we should have expectations of God’s ability and willingness to move in response to our prayers.