This is the Bible Book Club.

And we're in the book of numbers.

Welcome to the club.

In chapters 22 and 23, the Moabite king, King Balik, was a little panicked over the Israelites

as they were camped.

They were kind of a menacing.

Yeah, there's a lot of them.

A lot of people down there. He summoned supernatural help hiring the best seer money could buy,

and that was Balaam. Balam resists. He goes, he beats his donkey. It was like an episode of Shrek

in the process. He proves that while he may be a seer, when it comes to seeing the Lord,

he certainly is blind. But God uses him anyway to prophesy about Israel. And Balaam delivers

seven messages, two of which we covered in the last episode and the rest. We will cover in this

episode. Yep. In this one, we're going to cover five more messages, since a couple of them

are really short. But the whole purpose of these was that God intended for people, such as

Balam and the Moabites, people outside of Israel, to hear of his blessing on Abraham and his descendants,

the people of Israel. Remember, Israel is to stand out among the nations. And even

though the Israelites' relationship with God was less than perfect, that was between them and God,

and not out for common knowledge among the Canaanites. So all they knew is what they heard,

in this case from Beelik and Meelam. To the rest of the world, God showed only fierce

support and protection of his treasured possession. Now, King Balak, like Pharaoh, was attempting

to counteract the blessing of Abraham by reducing Israel's descendants. The attempt of Balak to curse the Israelites was an assault

against God. By attempting to curse Israel, Balak and Balam were on their way to bringing a curse

...