“How shall I curse, whom God hath not cursed?

or how shall I defy, whom the Lord hath not defied?”

(Numbers 23:8)

In Morris L. West’s novel The Shoes of the Fisherman, Kiril, the pope, makes this entry in his diary: “Men who serve God professionally are apt to regard Him as a private preserve.”

Now I would not disagree with this judgment on the clergy by West’s imaginary pope, but rather I would apply more sweepingly his observation. For my experience with all people who profess religion, the professionals and the laity alike, is this: The gravest danger we all encounter in our religious life is our natural tendency to treat the God we worship as our own private preserve. Furthermore, the lesson history teaches us is that it is the tendency of every nation to think that it is the favorite nation of the Almighty.

This is what the ancient Bible story of Balaam and Balak is all about. How appropriate a Scripture it is for our meditation today as we begin a new administration in our national life, surrounded as we are by so much that threatens our future.

The children of Israel were marching out of Egypt — rather, God was bringing his people out of captivity and obscurity into freedom and serious world responsibility. They had passed through their wilderness wanderings. Now they were encamped just across Jordan and about to enter into their Promised Land. Their tents covered the hills and valleys for miles around. Balak, the king of Moab, saw these ominous, nomad people suddenly appear on the border of his kingdom. They were moving in his direction. Fear gripped his heart. What couldn’t those beggars of the desert do to his peaceful and happy kingdom?

So King Balak appealed to a man of God in those parts by the name of Balaam to curse the Hebrew people that they might be destroyed and his kingdom remain unmolested.

But Balaam replied that he must first consult God and discover what God’s will was for this strange, threatening horde. And the revelation Balaam received from God was that God had blessed this unlikely and threatening band of vagabonds. So Balaam reported to Balak, “How shall I curse, whom God hath not cursed? or how shall I defy, whom God has not defied?”

But Balak, king of Moab, was a persistent man. He offered Balaam rich gifts if only the man of God would curse whom he wanted cursed. And for three whole chapters in the Book of Numbers we read of the shenanigans of Balaam and Balak as the king leads the prophet from one high mountain peak to another, offering sacrifices and seeking new revelations. But always there is the same result, the divine revelation that these are a people whom God wills, not to curse, but to bless. Finally, Balaam said, “If Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go beyond the word of the Lord my God, to do less or more” (Num. 22:18).

Then testily Balak turned from the prophet, saying, “I called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast altogether blessed them these three times. Therefore now flee thou to thy place: I thought to [reward thee richly and to] promote thee unto great honour; but, lo, the Lord hath kept thee back” (Num. 24:10-11).

And Balak returned to his people so soon to be swept under the swirling tides of conquest as Israel moved into her Promised Land.

Balak, king of Moab, represents man, humanity, religious men and women in every threatening experience turning to the source of their faith for deliverance. The king of Moab saw the host of Israel numerous and ominous. He concluded that in mere physical contest Moab must surely be destroyed. Therefore, he bestirred himself to bring into play forces from beyond the natural and the physical.

Here is a man of basic religious and spiritual motivation. Balak is no rank materialist. He is not an atheist. He believes that if only he can get at the ruling spirit of the universe and enlist that spirit on any given side of a controversy, that will be the winning side. He believes this so strongly that he is willing to put a whole lot of money into the project. We cannot find fault with Balak’s basic religious faith and action.

Where we must find fault with Balak is that he brazenly attempts to manipulate God to suit his convenience. He would hire the lackeys of religion to perform the rites of religion to further his cause. Balak’s faith has the weakness of a religion that is primarily intuitive, where the worship that takes place is reverence only for the god that is within.

The writer G.K. Chesterton warns of how dangerous this can be: “That Jones shall worship the God within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.”

Paul Tillich, the theologian, had a well-known sermon on the text from the 139th Psalm: “Wither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Tillich points out that the “man who has never tried to flee God has never experienced the God Who is really God…. For there is no reason to flee a god who is the perfect picture of everything that is good in man,… a benevolent father, a father who guarantees our immortality and final happiness. Why try to escape from someone who serves us so well? No, these are not pictures of God, but rather of man, trying to make God in his own image and for his own comfort.”

For God, as Rudolf Otto magnificently expresses it in his book The Idea of the Holy, is “the Wholly Other” — that one who is completely unlike man, but nevertheless is at work in human history performing his mighty acts, accomplishing his inscrutable purposes entirely apart from man’s chicanery.

It is this objectivity of religion that biblical faith is all about. The Bible is the account of the mighty acts of God, performed on God’s own initiative, wondrous and never to be dreamed of beforehand by man, but which once experienced as God’s gracious mercy to unworthy men may be received, observed, and learned by men as the clear tracings of the Eternal’s resplen­dent character.

Where Balak, a man of great faith in the supernatural, failed was in worshiping only the God within. He came to Balaam announcing: “This is the world that is precious to me. This is how I like things. Keep them the way they are. These are my people, and I want them saved. I’ll pay handsomely to have this threatening horde of strangers cursed and destroyed.”

Had Balak understood the theology of the biblical revelation, the objective side as well as the subjective side of man’s religious faith, he would have come to Balaam and said something like this: “Balaam, I’m concerned. Here are these troublesome people of whom I am very much afraid. They are moving on Moab. Please tell me what you know about God’s plans and purposes for them and for me and my people.”

Then Balak would have been ready to receive the prophetic word: “God is blessing these people. They are a covenant nation. They are marked by the loneliness of election. Through them will all the peoples of the earth be blessed. The way of blessing for you and for your nation is not in cursing them and being belligerent, but through reconciliation and cooperation that you through them may receive God’s blessing.”

Biblical faith can never afford us the kind of religion that the Balaks of the world want and demand: a curse on the Tartars or the Huns when they threaten, or the Nazis or the Communists or the Libyans when each group in the exigencies of history overshadows our destiny ominously, or the un­wanted young man who is about to marry our daughter, or the troublesome competitor who is about to take over our customers with his improved and superior product, or the new social arrangement that threatens our safe and comfortable way of life.

There is always something or someone threatening on the human horizon. Thus it has always been. Thus it will always be while the world stands. Ever our choice remains the same: either to use the offices of religion to curse whatever we see as threatening us, or to make use of the resources of religion to discover as best we can the way God is going in our time and offer ourselves as the servants of his purpose.

And it may just be that what threatens our nation — our American way of life with its horrendous federal budget deficit, our failing savings and loan system, our unsolved problem of atomic waste pollution, and all the rest — it may well be that what threatens us most right now is our freedom, our prized, unbridled American freedom.

In A Touch of Wonder, Arthur Gordon tells about listening to a Fourth of July speech:

The speaker talked about the meaning of Independence Day. He spoke of the men who signed the Declaration, their courage, their dedication. He reminded us of our heritage of freedom, how precious it is, and how jealously we should guard it.

We applauded when he was through. But suddenly, as the applause died away, a voice spoke from the crowd: “Why don’t you tell them the whole truth?”

Startled, we all looked around. The words had come from a young man in a tweed jacket with untidy hair and intense, angry eyes…. “Why don’t you tell them that freedom is the most dangerous gift anyone can receive?” he said. “Why don’t you tell them that it’s a two-edged sword that will destroy us unless we learn how to use it, and soon? Why don’t you make them see that we face a greater challenge than our ancestors ever did? They only had to fight for freedom. We have to live with it.” He stared for a moment at our blank, uncomprehending faces. Then he shrugged his way through the crowd and was gone….

He was right: Freedom is dangerous; it can be a two-edged blade. Look at this country today. All around us there seems to be a drastic decline in morals: cheating where once there was honesty, promiscuity where once there was decency, crime where once there was respect for law. Everywhere there seems to be a growing laxness, an indifference, a softness that terrifies people who think about it.

And what lies behind all this? … Perhaps we do have a blind and misguided concept of liberty. Perhaps we are using the freedom of choice gained for us by our forefathers to choose the wrong things….

… The freedom we now claim has come to mean freedom from all unpleasantness: from hardship, from discipline, from the stern voice of duty, from the pain of self-sacrifice….

As a nation, in short, we have clamored for total freedom. Now we have just about got it, and we are facing a bleak and chilling truth: We have flung off one external restraint after another, but in the process we have not learned how to restrain ourselves.

Before the awesome threats to our national and personal well-being in this crucial hour, our biblical, Christian faith proposes some safeguards on our human vagaries. First, we must make a sincere and systematic study of the mighty acts of God, the biblical record of what God has done in history, revealing his purposes and character. Then, we must look at our contem­porary scene in the light of this revelation and judge for ourselves what schemes and actions of men God will bless and what he will curse. Then again, Christianity proposes this second check on the vagaries of too subjec­tive a faith: the insistence that our prayer and participation in worship be not simply our directions to God on what to do for us in blessing whom we want blessed and cursing whom we want cursed, but rather that they be an unveiling of our spirits to God, unburdening our souls to him, and humbly seeking his directions and his corrections for us and our world.

Primitive, superstitious minds believe that worship is the business of bending the will of deity to perform the intents and desires of human hearts.

But in biblical theology worship has a higher purpose: that of gradually conforming the worshiper to the character of the one Eternal God.

Are we people of genuine biblical faith? When threatened by the troubles of the world, do we turn to God? Well, what is our stance before him in those crucial times? Do we move in to use the resources of religion to curse what we think is threatening us, or do we offer ourselves as his servants for blessing and redeeming his whole creation?