SERMON XIV. BALAAM
NUMBERS xxiii. 19. God is not a man, that he should lie; neither
the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he
not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?
If I was asked for any proof that the story of Balaam, as I find it
in the Bible, is a true story, I should lay my hand on this one
only--and that is, the deep knowledge of human nature which is shown
in it.
The character of Balaam is so perfectly natural, and yet of a kind
so very difficult to unravel and explain, that if the story was
invented by man, as poems or novels are, it must have been invented
very late indeed in the history of the Jews; at a time when they had
grown to be a far more civilised people, far more experienced in the
cunning tricks of the human heart than they were, as far as we can
see from the Bible, before the Babylonish captivity. But it was NOT
invented late; for no Jew in these later times would have thought of
making Balaam a heathen, to be a prophet of God, or a believer in
the true God at all. The later Jews took up the notion that God
spoke to and cared for the Jews only, and that all other nations
were accursed.
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