190: The Doctrine of Balaam: Satan's Strategy

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 190, The Letter to Pergamum, part three. Well, hello, everybody, and welcome back to the podcast.

My name is Kendall, and I'm so glad that you are here because today we're going to jump into part three of our Pergamum mini-series, and today we're going to embark upon our pen ultimate leg of that journey.

I said I was going to do a three-part series, but I'm actually going to do a four-part series because there's so much information and it's so good. So before we go to our next city in the postal carrier's route in Asia Minor, which is Thyatira, we're going to be diving into Pergamum for two more episodes, and we're going to go into this dense little letter that the risen Christ dictated to that beaten up little church that was suffering on the jagged clips of the most pro-Roman city in all of the ancient world.

But before we do that, I need to first say a huge thanks to you. The way that this little show has grown over the last year and over the last couple of years, frankly, is hard for me to believe, and I don't take any of it for granted because every single one of you who has subscribed and who has left a comment or who has shared an episode with a friend or who has sent a note to me sharing how this show has been a blessing to you and to everyone who has simply watched and been encouraged by it, you are the reason why this show has been such a tremendous success.

We're in a moment in history where Christians have to throw away their eschatological defeatism and stop allowing the culture to continue to decay while we look for a rapture that isn't coming. It's time that we become men with chest, women with conviction, children of discipline who are going to advance the name of Christ and who are going to reclaim what our ancestors lost where that used to be Christian lands.

It's time for the left-behind baby gloomers and the late great planet disbeedowners to move aside as the church militant moves forward and watches the gates of hell fall soundly at her feet. We serve a Lord who's going to put all of his enemies under his feet.

We serve a Lord who said, advance because the gates of hell can't prevail against us, and we've been given one life to use it for the service of Christ, and I, for one, do not want to be found twiddling my thumb, staring into the clouds when I meet him face-to-face.

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So go check it out. It really is astounding. And now with that, with the housekeeping stuff in order, here is where we've been for the last two weeks. Two episodes ago, we didn't even crack open the letter to Pergamum, which is in Revelation 2, 12 through 18.

Instead, we spent the whole hour climbing up that ancient city, looking at it. We saw a thousand-foot wall that literally is rising up in the middle of the landscape where Pergamum is surrounding, and it looked like a wall of rock that was shaped like a crown that was filled with idols.

You'll remember that the throne-shaped altar of Zeus, the very synodal of the mountain with its sculpture of the god stomping the snake-legged giants into the dirt, was foreboding over the landscape.

It would have been like Zeus is king here. You'll also remember the temple of Athena, who was called the victory bringer. You might also remember the steep theater of Dionysus, the god of wine and debauchery and licentious partying that was also in the city.

You might even remember the Asclepion, where live snakes would be dragged across the floor, where desperate pilgrims would come in search of healing. They would pine away in the dark hours of the night, hoping for miraculous demonic healing through a snake bite, all in the service to their serpent god, who promised life and vitality for everyone who would bow.

And finally, you probably recall the temple of Augustus Caesar, which was the very first temple of its kind in the entire empire. It was the first temple that was built to offer worship to a living emperor, enshrining emperor worship into the very DNA of the city, and also it became an influence all throughout Asia Minor and throughout the Roman world as well.

So if you wanted to thrive in the city of Pergamum, if you wanted to get and keep good jobs, if you wanted to feed your family and live a moderately successful and quiet life with the white picket fence, well then you needed to have a relationship with these temples and these gods.

You needed to add them into your own personal pantheon. And as a Christian, Pergamum would never actually require you to give up Jesus. The only thing you needed to do, however, is to add all of the other gods as equal and alongside of him, and lest you become an enemy of the polis.

That's what we learned two weeks ago. Pergamum was a place where severe persecution was happening because they were asking Christians who believe in an exclusive Christ to give in and to compromise and to adopt the other gods.

You could have Jesus, you just had to have everything else too. That was what we learned two weeks ago. Then last week, we opened up the letter and we read from the very first two verses where Christ challenges the city who thought that they held the crown rights to the sword, who thought that they could cut off Christians' heads because they didn't bow and worship the Caesar, who thought that they had the right over life.

And Jesus comes at that city saying that he is the one who actually holds the sharpened two-edged sword in his mouth. And he was saying to them, you think that you can behead my holy ones with your sword?

No, I'm coming against you and I'm going to be coming at you with my sword. That's what Jesus was saying. We also saw how he told the church there, I know where you dwell. He told the people who are going through the persecution, I see you, which is a really humanizing, very gracious way to comfort those people who were maybe feeling unseen and abandoned while they were living in this place that Jesus calls the throne of Satan.

So imagine if you're going on a vacation and you're trying to stay in a hotel, some people are going to stay at the Hilton, some people are going to stay at the Armada. Imagine you get the unfortunate luck of staying at the throne of Satan.

Well, that's kind of where they were, and this is where Jesus is saying to them, I see you, I see where you're at, I see your struggle, don't worry, I've got you, which if you remember is what we looked at next, because lining up all of the suspects in this letter, Jesus lines them up.

And what I argued last week is that he actually pins the blame for this throne of Satan moniker on the Roman imperial cult as the primary and chief perpetrator and institution that is the throne of Satan.

Now, there's a good argument for the throne being the altar of Zeus or the healing temple of Asclepius. There's arguments for other things being the throne of Satan. But what I came to, and if you want that argument, you haven't seen it, go back and watch it last week.

I argued that offering worship to Augustus Caesar in the book of Revelation is the chief culprit for what this throne of Satan is. Again, if you want to know my argument, you can go back and look at that last week.

And finally, last week in closing, we stood at the grave of the faithful witness, the faithful Pergamum, Pergamum Christian named Antipas is a man who paid the ultimate sacrifice for loving Jesus. And he became the one that Jesus and history would never forget.

He's the one who Jesus said, I know your name, Antipas, because you're my faithful witness. That was what we were blessed to learn and to behold last week. And those two weeks have actually prepared us for this week, where we jump back into the city and we identify some of the final features of this letter, such as Balaam and the Nicolaitans.

And next week, we're going to talk about the white stone that Jesus speaks about. And we're going to understand how that applied to the city and the church of Pergamum as well, and how all of this is going to be shown to us out of just a couple verses today.

So with that, let us jump back into the letter, which begins in Revelation 2, 12. And this is what Jesus says to the church at Pergamum. Jesus says this, and to the angel of the church in Pergamum, right?

The one who has the sharp two edged sword says this. I know where you dwell, where Satan's throne is, and you hold fast my name and did not deny my faith, even in the days of Antipas, my witness, my faithful one who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.

But I have a few things against you because you have there some who hold to the teachings of Balaam, who kept teaching Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, to eat things sacrificed to idols, and to commit acts of immorality.

So you also have some who in the same way hold to the teachings of the Nicolaitans. Therefore repent, or else I am coming to you quickly, and I will make war against them with the sword of my mouth. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.

To him who overcomes, to him I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone and a new name written on the stone, which no one knows but he who receives it.". Revelation 2, 12 -17.

Balaam, the Curse, and the Strategy of Compromise

And that brings us to part one, Balaam and the curse. Now up to this point, the letter has been all good news. Christ has threatened the city that is threatening them. He has seen where they are, and his promising reinforcements are coming.

He has named the throne of Satan, and he's called it out for what it actually was. He's praised the church for holding fast his name and for refusing to deny his faith, even though that led to the death of one of their own Antipas, whose blood was still probably staining the streets of the city.

And if the letter had just stopped there at verse 13, maybe you would have thought that the Pergamum church was a five-star congregation. Maybe they weren't suffering or struggling with anything, but the letter doesn't stop there.

It actually continues on into verse 14 and beyond, and the Lord, the one who carries the two-edged sword, not only is going to commission that sword against their enemies, in verse 14 the blade is also going to turn inward into the church who are denying Christ by their allegiances, or some of them doing that by the lack thereof.

This is how Jesus begins in verse 14, after the comfort and the commendations that he gives to the church in verses 12 through 13. This is what he says in verse 14, but I have a few things against you.

And this is kind of where the letter turns. This is the hinge of the letter. This is what separates the commendation from coming condemnation. A single word, but, and that word causes this entire letter to swing on its hinge.

A second ago, literally, Christ was honoring them and their recent martyr for hanging and clinging on to the faith. Now he's opening up the court files to detail some of their latent compromise that makes them not an unscathed church or a perfectly pure and holy church.

The same mouth that said, you did not deny my faith, speaking to the faithful ones in the church, is also now addressing the unfaithful ones in the church saying, hey, I have a few things against you.

He's not saying this to all of the church. He's saying this certainly to the ones who are being unfaithful, and before we even get into that, I want you to just look and see how restraining Jesus's words actually are.

He doesn't say that I have everything against you. He doesn't say that I'm done with you. He says, I have a few things against you, and the reason for this is because there were many faithful Christians in that church who Jesus was gladly commending for their faith and for their loyalty.

This is a mostly faithful congregation in one of the most impossible circumstances and cities with a seriously bad faction of people who were gaining steam on the inside, seeking to derail the entire church.

Jesus is addressing this church like a person who is healthy in every conceivable metric except for a malignant tumor that is threatening to take their life. In the same way, Jesus is looking at a mostly healthy body and he's commending it, but he's also loving them well enough by spotting and naming the cancer, and he's going to be loving them very well as he cuts it out with the sword of his mouth because, as we all know, a handful of bad, polluted, cancerous cells left alone, left untouched, left unmedicated, will soon put the entire body six feet in the ground.

Therefore, Christ is loving the church and he's applying strong medicine to the church so that that noxious faction doesn't spread into terminal cancer. So what exactly is the tumor that's existing inside the church of Pergamum?

What is the unfaithful faction who is seeking to gain ascendancy in this little local church? Well, Jesus identifies it plainly. He says, you have there some who hold the teachings of Balaam. Now, I want you to stop on that word, hold, because it's actually really important.

In the Greek, that word is krateo, which means to grip something with a kind of white-knuckled intensity. It means to clamp down upon something, to hold something with everything that you've got, and it's the exact same verb that Jesus used one verse earlier when he praised the faithful Christians in that church for holding fast to his name.

He uses the exact same word because Christ is praising the ones who are clinging to him, but he's excoriating the ones who are clinging to the doctrines of Balaam, which tells us that the entire letter has turned into a kind of arm-wrestling match between two kinds of holdings, two kinds of grippings.

Most of the church is gripping the name of Jesus with ferocious intensity, but some of them in the same room are gripping the doctrines of Balaam just as furiously. There's two fists in this scenario.

Both of them are clenched on something. Both of them are straining like 600-pound sumo wrestlers trying to yank the other into a pool of muck. The only question that Jesus cares about is which end of the rope are you holding onto?

Are you holding onto him? Or are you holding onto compromise? And to understand why this idea of clinging to doctrines of Balaam was such a grievous offense, why Jesus considered it such pernicious compromise, well, in order to do that, we actually need to go back into the Old Testament world of the Jews, and we have to go back into the wilderness wanderings of the book of Numbers because that's where Balaam shows up.

And if we want to understand Balaam, then we need to go back there and we need to understand what he was attempting to accomplish and why this attitude would be so pernicious to Christians and so dangerous to Christians, but also so noxious to the resurrected Christ.

Now I want you to notice how Jesus is stacking wilderness imagery in this passage. We're not going to talk about all of it today, but I want you to notice Balaam is a wilderness guy. Manna is something that falls in the wilderness where Israel is tested.

There's a priestly white stone in this passage, which is like the stone that had the names written on them on the filigrees upon the shoulder pads of Aaron. Every single one of these images in this passage come out of the wilderness.

Every single one of them have the same geographic and canonical location, often in the book of Numbers. These three images all come out of that 40 years of wandering between Egypt and the promised land when Israel, a redeemed and rescued people, were dragged out of their bondage and slavery and hunted down on every side by every demon-worshiping nation, fed with bread that fell out of the skies of heaven, marching towards a country that they had not yet entered.

This is a picture of the church. Jesus is painting the picture of a church who's literally just been rescued out of their sin and depravity, like the Egyptian taskmasters, and they are being assaulted by people from the nations who worship demons.

Jesus is taking the church of Pergamum back to its Jewish Old Testament roots, and he's showing them how they have also been redeemed from their chains, and they're still surrounded by nations worshiping demons, but they're being fed by Jesus, a better living bread, as they march towards heaven, a better and more intimate or better and more perfect land, as they have their names written on the stone carried by the true and better high priest.

See, this is exactly why Jesus chose the wilderness imagery for the church in Pergamum, because the same old play that Balaam, the enemy of the people of God, ran on Israel back in those days, well, that same play was happening in the church of Pergamum, and Jesus wanted them to be wise and to be faithful, where Israel of old absolutely and totally failed.

So for a moment, I want you to let me recap what happened in the wilderness, especially highlighting Balaam's role in that downfall and how Jesus is picking up that image in Pergamum and how he's applying it to the church even at all times.

And to do that, I'm not only going to be talking about the familiar bits of the story, like Balaam unable to curse the people of Israel from the mountaintop and talking donkeys and all of that. Yeah, I'm going to cover those things, but there's actually parts of this story that maybe you've never heard before that have been quietly hiding in the Bible that you did not even know was there.

You see, in Numbers chapter 22, Israel has just come up out of Egypt. They've crossed the Red Sea. They've crossed the Sinaitic deserts. They've received the Ten Commandments. They've failed in entering into the promised land, and now they're in this state of wandering in the wilderness.

And this enormous redeemed nation with more than a million men as they're wandering have camped themselves on the plains of Moab right at the doorstep of the promised land. And as I'm sure you can imagine, the king of Moab, who's a man named Balak, did not really enjoy looking out and seeing a sea of tents, millions of people littering his borders, threatening the end of his little pathetic demonic empire.

He had already heard rumors of what the people of God, what the people of Israel had done to the Amorites. He knew that if the Amorites were no match for this people, then his puny little army was certainly no better.

He doesn't tell a single soldier to muster their weapons. He knows they don't even have a chance. So instead of blood-soaked sands of war where his people are utterly obliterated because he knows God is on their side, he reached into the world of a different kind of warfare.

Again, instead of telling his people to arm their chariots and put on their bows and all of that, he reaches into a different kind of warfare, which is spiritual warfare. And he uses that dark spiritual warfare to kill them with an entirely different weapon.

He reaches down into the deeply dark and dank, disturbing world of magic and demonic powers and he hires a local wizard shaman named Balaam, a man with a reputation for leaving unbreakable hexes upon his foes, terrifying curses that cannot be undone, awful incantations that will bring a people to ruin.

And Balaam's message to Balaam was pretty simple. He said to the unholy shaman, to the eccentric prophet, name your price and I'll pay it. Come and curse this people so that I can drive them out of the land.

My military can't do it, but you can do it if you bring a curse upon this people that God has called blessed. What follows is one of the strangest and blackest little comedies in the whole of the Bible because Balak wants a victory at all costs and Balaam wants all that money.

But God tells Balaam flat out, you have no power here. God even tells him, don't go. Don't curse them because this people is a blessed people and your hexes cannot touch them. And yet Balaam, like a petulant child wanting the candy in the supermarket checkout line, Balaam continues and continues asking God for permission until finally God lets him go.

But on a rather significant leash that would lead to one of the wildest moments in the entire Bible. Now on the way to enact his curse, or at least in order to attempt to, Balaam's own donkey sees the angel of the Lord with clear eyes standing there on the path with a drawn sword in his hand and the donkey panics.

And this causes the cantankerous eccentric Balaam to jump off of his foal and to start beating her with the rod. And then completely out of left field, God opens up the mind of the donkey and it begins speaking in the native tongue of Balaam so that he would actually understand real words that were coming out of the donkey's mouth.

Now if you remember the story, I want you to notice Balaam doesn't even act all that bothered by the fact that his donkey is talking. Like if you and I were riding a donkey, we got mad at the donkey, and then we did something mean and we started hitting the donkey, which would be cruel and awful, you know, maybe the donkey would hit you back, I don't know.

But imagine that donkey starts talking, saying, what are you doing? All these years I've served you, why are you hitting me? You and I would jump out of our skin, but Balaam's not even bothered by it.

He starts talking back to the donkey, which is weird, almost like he's seen this kind of strange thing before. He jumps right into having a conversation with this newly verbalized beast, showing that the kind of weird and peculiar things that this evil man had been used to seeing was pretty out there.

So a talking donkey to him didn't really move the needle. It didn't really make his pulse flicker an iota. He had been in the dark arts and the magic realm for so long that even a talking donkey didn't arise any sort of fear or trembling, which is an astounding thing, actually.

Now another point to note on this hilarious scene is that the mule had sharper spiritual eyes than the most famous seer who was riding on her back. The animal saw the drawn sword, the expert didn't, which tells us something about God's opinion of Balaam.

In that moment, God is knighting the donkey as the prophet and the prophet as the donkey, which Balaam failed to notice, like an animal. And after that incredible moment, Balaam finally arrives and Balak hauls him up to the mountain to curse the people of Israel and Balaam opens his mouth to curse them, even after God's angel literally almost killed him.

But the only thing that could come out of his mouth was spoken blessings. You see, the God who made the jackass speak was now making the jackass bless. And understandably, Balak is livid because he hired this fixer to fix it.

He hired this man who never failed before to curse this people, but this time things didn't go as planned. This time the prophet didn't deliver. So Balak does what anyone would have done in that moment.

He doesn't ask for a refund. He asks for another way around it. So he drags this honorary prophet up to the next summit, bidding him to try again since, you know, perhaps, possibly, maybe the last mountaintop Vista was not the right angle.

So he brings him up to this new mountain summit and Balaam opens up his mouth a second time, still hell-bent on bringing cursing, and then out comes another blessing, and then a third mountain peak and out comes a third blessing, richer than the one before it.

Three times Balaam builds his altar and attempts to purchase the curses, and three times the only thing that poured out of Balaam's mouth was blessings. And then Balak, shaking with rage, says, these three times you bless this people.

And then, without any provocation whatsoever, Balaam opens up his mouth a fourth time and he prophesies a blessing that no one but God Almighty could have authored on his lips saying, How shall I curse the one whom God has not cursed?

This final blessing was demonstrating to Balak and to everyone who was standing there that there is no spiritual power above the Lord such that evil cannot even speak unless God would allow it. And right there, if you shut your Bible and you don't continue along in the story and you end with the Sunday School flannel graph version, then you're going to walk away with the idea that Balaam was never successful in his task, that God protected his people, which he did, that no weapon formed against them should prosper, and it didn't.

But you'll think that's the end of the story. It's not the end of the story. That's not the end of the drama because the rest of the scene, which is easily missed, happens in different chapters. So as we're reading in our Bible reading plan, we read this, close it out, oh, it's done, and then later a brief little mention in two other chapters in the book of Numbers happens and we miss it, we whiff it, we swing and we miss at the slider because we were expecting a fastball.

For instance, let me give you an example. Right after Balaam is unsuccessful in cursing Israel, right after he comes down from the mountain, right after Balak gives him a good chewing out saying, I can't believe you've done this to me.

I gave you this amount of money and you didn't curse the people, what are you thinking? Right after that, again, in a different chapter of the book of Numbers, Numbers 25, one through five, Moses tells us how Balaam was successful in cursing Israel, not with verbal words spoken over them, but by getting them to turn on themselves.

Moses tells us in chapter 25, verses one through five, while Israel remained in Shittim, the people began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab, for they invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods and the people ate and bowed down to their gods.

So Israel joined themselves to Baal of Peor and the Lord was angry against Israel. The Lord said to Moses, take all the leaders of the people and execute them in broad daylight before the Lord so that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel.

And then in verse five, so Moses said to the judges of Israel, each of you slay his men who have joined themselves to Baal of Peor. Now, there are two things to take note of here in Numbers 25, one through five, while God was protecting them from the evil magician from above, they were down below conspiring and desiring and preparing themselves to whore themselves with Moab to worship their gods and have ritualistic sex with the cult prostitutes of their demonic religion, all while God was protecting them.

They were looking to play the whore. That's the first thing you need to see in this narrative. And the reason why a people that God kept Balaam from cursing did actually fall under a tremendous self-inflicted curse.

The second thing that you need to see is even more striking than that. Notice who God says incited this debauchery. Yes, God commands that 24 ,000 Israelites would be killed for their crimes. They're culpable.

But notice who God blames for the entire thing. Look at Numbers 31 .8. This is six chapters removed from the account. This is later. Years had gone by in the life of Moses before he wrote this down. Numbers 31 .8 says this.

They killed the kings of Midian along with the rest of their slain, Evi and Rechim and Zor and Hur and Reba, the five kings of Midian. And they also killed Balaam, the son of Beor, with the sword. Now why did Moses tell us that?

Why did Moses point out that Balaam, the son of Beor, was killed with the sword? Because in verse 16 of that same chapter, God says, Behold, these women are the ones who caused the sons of Israel through the council of Balaam to trespass against the Lord in the matter of the Baal of Peor, so that the plague was among the congregation of the Lord.

Did you notice what Moses says in verse 16? He says right after Balaam was unsuccessful on the mountain heights, he goes down into the population centers of Moab, and he incites the cult prostitutes and the pagan women to leave their cities, to enter into the camps of Israel, luring them into demonic worship with their genitals and with their hearts, causing God to punish them with a fiery plague.

Balaam does not just slink off home empty-handed. He failed to curse Israel on the mountaintops, so before he leaves, he leans over to Balaam and he hands him a winning strategy, and he whispers a plan, and he says, You cannot beat these people with traditional curses that are uttered over top of them because their God will not allow it, but what you can do is you can make them an immoral people who will be cursed by their God for betraying their covenant with him.

So send in your women. Have them throw a festival and an orgy. Open up your tables and your temples and your beds and get them to eat the food that are sacrificed to idols and get them to lie down with your daughters and worship their daughters' gods.

Get them to break their covenant that they made with Yahweh, and God will curse them by their own foolishness. God will bring the sword against them, and God will do the killing for you. That is what Balaam offered Balak, that if you want these people to go away, if you want to not fight them in a war, you're not going to be able to kill them.

I certainly cannot curse them, but get your women in the camp and get the idolatry in the camp, and God will do the killing for you. That's what Balaam said, and sadly, it worked. The sin occurred, and it was so abominable to God.

24 ,000 Israelites after that day lay dead in the dirt. Not one of them was killed by a Moabite arrow or a Moabite sword. Every last one of them were killed by his own depraved appetite. That, my friends, is what Jesus is referring to when he talks about the doctrine of Balaam.

See, the doctrine of Balaam is not so much a codified theological position. It's not a book that Balaam wrote down his own systematic theology. The doctrine of Balaam is the strategy that Balaam used against the people of Israel to bring curses on God's people.

It's the doctrine by which, the method by which Balaam circumvented the protection that God had over them by corrupting them from within. It's the way that the enemy rots God's people, not from the outside, but from the inside, without the first stone flung, the first arrow shot, or the first weapon pulled.

This is Balaam's strategy. If you cannot curse the people of God, then compromise them. If you cannot beat them, well, then find a way to make them ruin themselves. You get them to do to themselves what no army on earth could do to them, and that will lead to their downfall.

And that is what was happening to the Israelites at Peor, and that is what was happening to the church in Pergamon. Look at what Jesus says about the church. He says, there are some holding on to the name of Christ, which is glorious.

Amen. But there were some holding on to the sins and the doctrines of Balaam, the strategies of Balaam, the plans of Balaam, which means that there were some within the church who, like Balaam, were bringing the pagan culture inside the church and bidding faithful men and women to partake in pagan culture and defile themselves, just like Balaam did long ago.

These were the kind of accommodationist, liberal Christians in the church who always say that friendship with the world is not enmity with God. They were telling mothers with sick infants, go to the healing pools of Asclepion and pay homage to the serpent.