Jude #6 - Cain, Balaam and Korah — Chuck Missler

Jude 11: Cain, Balaam, and Korah

You recall the last time we were together, we talked about Michael contending with the devil and all of that. That brought us down through verses 9 and 10. All of this, again, continuing Jude's apparently forced or compelling mission to speak on apostasy.

And he, of course, has been drawing repeatedly from Old Testament allusions, so part of our interest in the book of Jude isn't just his message, but also to get a little perspective on some of these things that he presumes we know so well.

But verse 11, he continues, Woe unto them, for they have gone the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Korah. Now, that's obvious to all of you what that means.

No? Good. Okay. In fact, he picks these three men from the past, and it's only if you outline the whole book that you recognize this all pivots around verse 11 that happens. Verse 11 is midway between illustrations he has previously chosen from the supernatural realm, that was back in verse 9, for example, and from those that he's going to choose from the natural realm, verses 12 and 13.

And we'll talk about that a little later tonight. Another way of looking at this is that this verse is preceded by apostasy in history, that's what we've been talking up till now, and it's going to be followed by apostasy in prophecy.

In fact, we're going to explore one of the earliest prophecies in the scripture next time. So this verse is placed very specifically. Now, what he's doing here, he has been talking up till now about corporate examples.

Israel that had its problems, the angels that sinned, etc. You and I may have a little trouble personally identifying with Michael's predicament in verse 9. But now we're getting right to examples that Jude has selected that are personal and individual examples.

The three men in this verse are examples that Jude selects to make a point that is intended to apply to you and I. That's difficult to do if you don't really know what the gainsaying of Korah is all about.

And most of us may have been, what little we may know about Balaam is fascinating but mysterious, but what's all that about? And we'll get into that a little bit because it's, if nothing else, a key piece to our background in the book of Revelation.

Then there's also this character Korah. These are not in chronological order. You figure Cain, we know who Cain was, we think, sort of. And we may know about Balaam late in numbers and Korah is earlier in numbers.

So they're not in order. When the Holy Spirit puts something in order, he has a reason to do so. The seven letters, the seven churches of the book of Revelation, if they were in any other order, it destroys most of their message in a sense.

I should say most of them, there's moral points there, but the prophetic outline of all church history is there because of the order they're in. The Gospel of John deals with seven miracles of the Lord Jesus Christ, seven discourses as a result of those miracles, and seven I Am statements.

They're not in chronological order. Those episodes in the Gospel of John happened to mystically chronicle the history of Israel in a very peculiar way. John was a mystic. Whenever the Holy Spirit puts something in order that's unusual, it should alert us that there's something else.

We're going to discover that these three errors are not only three errors that we are admonished to avoid, they also portray a process that he wants to call to our attention. And so I'll alert you to that in advance.

Apostasy as a Three-Step Process

First observation is that apostasy, bear in mind that's Jude's main message, is not confined to any one class of person. Let's take a look at these three people. We've got a tiller of the soil, a prophet, and a prince in Israel.

Cain, we all know, is a tiller of the soil, a farmer. Nothing wrong with farming, but he gets in big trouble. We'll find out why in a minute. Balaam was a prophet. He had the office of a prophet. He made his living as a prophet.

I wouldn't take that as a vindication of his office, but I thought I'd throw that in. And Korah was one of the princes of Israel. He made a gigantic blunder. All three of them made serious errors in judgment, for which they perished.

Each of these guys, these three gentlemen, that we're going to explore, portrays a particular aspect of what it means to fall away from the truth. We talk a lot about finding the truth. We hear a lot about evangelism.

What Jude is talking about is falling away, the opposite of that process. Getting ahead of the story a little bit, so you know where I'm headed, they basically form a process that involves three steps.

They enter on the wrong path. They run riotously down that path. And they perish at the end. Not very complicated. Very profound. Very real. Very actual. And it didn't just happen in numbers. It happens right here in River City, tragically enough.

Now, there's another part of the message that it's hard to package pleasantly. You know me. I love to find little tidbits and merchandise them in some way that makes it all fun, because my primary motive is to get you to fall in love with the Scripture and dig for yourself.

So I love those little tidbits. Here in Jude, and there are some of those that makes it fun, and there's also just some plain, blunt, tough stuff that I don't know how to articulate cleverly, pleasantly, but just to lay it out on the table.

There's no hope for apostates anywhere in the book of Jude. Their doom is sure. To them is reserved the blackness of darkness forever. Hebrews chapter 6, verses 4 through 6. We'll find that the words here are in the past tense about apostates.

Apostates have already perished. They have all the amendability of history. You want to change the history of this country back in 1700? I'm not going to do it. The past tense is intended to connote its certainty.

It's yet future. The apostates we're going to be concerned about prophetically are yet to happen. But their doom is sure. So that's the heavy aspect of what Jude is dealing with, and I don't know any way to make that anything but straightforward.

There's a lot of parallelisms between 2 Peter. You notice we've gone into that a lot, because Peter has a very, very similar thrust in his message. In 2 Peter chapter 2, he talks about them. We'll pick it up, oh, verse 20.

Peter says, For if after they have escaped from the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in it and overcome, and the latter end is worse with them than the beginning.

For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than after they have known it to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. But it has happened unto them, according to the true proverb, a dog is returned to his own vomit again, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.

The example is such a vivid one. I don't know if you as kids, the first time you've ever seen a dog do that, when a dog gets upset and throws up, that's disgusting enough. But then to watch him turn around and lap it up is disturbing.

Even as a child, that just, I remember being, whoa, you know. And it's not unique to some dog. It's characteristic of them, why? I think because of the scripture. Why is that shocking to you? Because God wants it to be.

That's what he says here. It's a point. If you think you're upset when you see a dog do that, how do you think God feels when we, knowing better, fall into error after knowing the way? It's scary. Tough stuff.

The real question that's in your mind is, okay, the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire, was that sow ever a sheep of the good shepherd? Scripture implies, no, it wasn't. Just the word knowledge here is head trip, not an experiential trip.

Remember the swine of Mark 5 that ran down into the deep place, right? What we're going to see Jude suggest from these three, and we're going to go, obviously, this is all preamble, we'll go into each one of these, Cain, Balaam, and Korah shortly.

But the overview may be useful. These three guys are guilty of three separate individual things, but Jude is rolling them together to describe a process because they collectively characterize the process that all apostates go through.

They knowingly choose the way of Cain rather than the way of Christ. They choose the error of Balaam rather than the truth of Christ, and the perishing of Korah for the life of Christ. Three contrasts.

By the way, this verse, to give you just a slightly more literal rendering of the verse, verse 11,. In the way of Cain they went away, and in the wandering of Balaam for reward they rushed headlong, and in the rebellion of Korah they perished.

Same thought, and yet maybe structured just a little differently in the literal translation. That's the first one, the way of Cain. Strange story. Twice in the book of Proverbs, in chapter 16 .25 and 14 .12, it says, There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

The Way of Cain: Natural Judgment Versus Revealed Faith

Our natural judgment is not a reliable guide in spiritual things. It's interesting to me that the creation showeth the creator his handiwork. The heavens declare the glory of God, right? From the creation we know that there's a designer, an architect, a personality behind all that we see.

To deny that is to just flaunt our observation and our reason. Do you realize that the creation cannot communicate his redemptive plan? God's redemption is his greater work. How big, how important is God's work?

Well, how much space is in the Bible on the subject? The creation has a chapter or two in Genesis, a few chapters in Isaiah, some allusions in Job, and you can round up maybe, you know, a handful of chapters on the creation.

Either directly in Genesis 1 or subsequent comments on it. But it's surprisingly limited. A few Psalms. What about his redemption? Most of Genesis, but certainly the book of Exodus, is the book of redemption.

And you go all the way through. Book of Ruth, book of redemption. Other dimensions to it. The Gospels. Whole New Testament. Certainly the book of Revelation. If you wanted to define those things whose unique message is redemption, you got most of it.

Which is his greater work? The creation of the universe or our redemption? Space gives you one answer. Let me give you another. What did it cost him? I suspect that God can breathe into existence universes larger than the one we're experiencing.

He just does it. Probably with less concern than a carpenter goes into a shop and builds a small piece of furniture. What did his redemption of us cost him? His son. Furthermore, the creation that we see is under the curse.

So we can't perceive in the creation the redemption plan. We get that revealed to us supernaturally by his word. Now that leads you to think, where are you going, Chuck? What's that got to do with Cain?

Well, let's read the story of Cain with all this preamble. Let's go to that story that's so familiar to us and yet perhaps has so much yet to reveal itself. We all know the story. We've just been through Genesis 1 and 2.

The universe has been created. Adam and Eve are there. We have Genesis 3, the famous story of the... I hate to promote the myth of the serpent, the shining one, mistranslated serpent. That's a whole other issue.

If you ever want an interesting specialized study, I commend to you to explore what that word really means. But we've been through that. Genesis 3 and the casting out of the garden. Adam and Eve caught in their sin are cast out, right?

And they left the garden. In fact, chapter 3 ends saying that the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from whence he was taken. And he drove out the man. That's Mr. and Mrs. Man.

And he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword. The sword, by the way, is not in the hands of the cherubim. We always assume that. The Hebrew implies it's not. It's there.

But anyway, and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way of the tree of life. Now, you and I usually presume that that's just to keep Adam from going back and getting the tree of life. It's a little more complicated than that.

Because the whole goal of the scripture from Genesis chapter, say, 3 through Revelation 22 is to guard, that is to preserve the way to the tree of life. And the exciting climax in Revelation is that the tree of life is available to man.

Who is trying to deny it from man? Not God. Satan. So what that really implies is a whole other set of issues. But we're in chapter 4, verse 1. Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived and bore Cain and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord.

Excited about that. Women have a right to be. This one has a very special right to be because a few verses earlier in verse 15 of chapter 3, the path of redemption was to come from the seed of the woman.

And we generally presume that Eve presumed that Cain was that answer. Turns out, obviously, he's not. There's a long road ahead, but she may or may not have been aware of that. Anyway, she's gotten a man from the Lord.

She again bore his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. Step one. Don't presume that one calling is above another. I've actually seen documents that tried to, out of this, say that shepherding was a higher calling than nonsense.

Nonsense. I'll come back to this. But anyway, verse 3. In the process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. That seems natural enough. He's a farmer.

He's tilling the soil, so he grows crops and he takes some of those crops and brings us an offering. Is there anything wrong with that? Not on the face of it. Let's read on. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of the flock and of the fat thereof.

And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering. But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. Oh, really? I wonder why. It would be useful for you and I to get some insight into this. You know, there's a concept in business that you ought to know your market.

If you're selling a product, you'd like to know what your buyer prefers. It's awfully useful to you and I, before we start wandering up to the altar, to get some insight into the preferences of the one that we would please.

One of the things you need to ask. If you had a little 15-minute quiz right now, you'd take out a piece of paper and say, Great, what was Cain's mistake? Here's what he did not do. He didn't deny the existence of God.

Was he a believer? You bet. Incidentally, there are scholastic traditions, reasons to believe, that in this time the way the offering was accepted by God was literally, not to the pastor or to the church or to the priesthood, that fire came down from heaven and consumed it.

There are ancient traditions that point to that. They're not authoritative, but provocative. There wasn't apparently any doubt. This wasn't a theological debate. Somehow God was pleased with Abel's. Something happened to manifest that enough to get Cain upset.

It wasn't a question of opinion here. And whatever Cain did, it didn't work. If fire was supposed to come down and consume it, it apparently didn't. It was enough so it got Cain envious, upset, and leads, of course, to the second murder.

I always like to put it that way because the first murder, in effect, was Satan murdering Adam by getting him to sin. But at least in one tradition this is often called the first murder. It's not really the first one.

Another thing Cain did, he did not refuse to worship God. He wasn't some kind of agnostic. He knew God was there. He was a believer. He also wasn't in rebellion. He was not trying not to worship God, right?

So what was his mistake? If you can put on his report card those two positive things, that he recognized God's existence and he moved so as to worship Him with an offering of the fruit of his labor, and he's still in deep trouble, you and I need to get a little uncomfortable.

Because so far we fit the report card, right? We don't deny the existence of God and we don't refuse to worship Him. And we go through our little rituals, whatever they are, of all shapes and sizes. How do we know that God's attitude towards our meager moves is no different than God's reaction to Cain's?

We need to find an answer to that tonight. It would be kind of neat, wouldn't it? Right? Let's get a hint of what it's all about by turning to the book of Hebrews. The book of Hebrews was an epistle written to Hebrew believers.

So they're probably a little better informed on the Old Testament than most many of the other epistle readers. So it's not surprising to find little clues in the book of Hebrews that may illuminate some of this for us.

And one of the great chapters, we all know 1 Corinthians 13 is the famous love chapter, and the great faith chapter is Hebrews 11, sometimes called the hall of faith, because it almost becomes a tour of heroes of faith.

Of course, it opens up with the famous definition, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it, elders, that is our forefathers, our predecessors, received a good report or received witness.

Verse 3, through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. And if any of you in the room are competent in quantum mechanics, then you're excited about that because Paul seemed to, or whoever wrote Hebrews, apparently was very perceptive about subatomic physics and all of that, but I won't get into that here.

Verse 4, by faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts, and by it he being yet dead speaketh. Okay, great.

I wonder what that means. Well, it sounds pretty good. What does it mean? By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice. What was there about Cain's offering? Well, it said faith, right? How does faith come?

Romans 10 .13, by hearing. You can't have faith without hearing. You can have superstitions, beliefs, conceptions, presuppositions, all kinds of things. You can't have faith scripturally. Faith cometh by hearing.

Abel had heard something that was not recorded, I mean, that hasn't been detailed in this summary narrative that we're reading in Genesis. Abel's offering was in response to a commandment. He was giving an offering by faith.

Now, this causes us to lean very heavily on some insights that are not obvious to the casual reader of the book of Genesis. Once you go back, we're back in Genesis, back in chapter 3, and there's a simple little sentence that by itself is easily missed, but it has a profound implication on your insight as to what God is all about.

In Genesis chapter 3, they obviously have sinned. In verse 7, the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. Now, that's funny. Were their eyes closed up until the sin? It doesn't mean literally, does it?

Adam walked with God. Adam was perfect. From the Psalms and some other places in the scripture, we can draw the biblical inference that they were clothed with light. When the sin came, and they were no longer righteous, there was something that happened to them, dimensionally, whatever, that caused them to realize that they had lost that covering.

It isn't clothes, but being conscious of that, they did a natural thing. They attempted to clothe themselves. They knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.

This isn't a sex thing. It's far deeper than that, a much bigger issue. But they attempted to clothe them. Very natural. Okay, they got a problem. That's their dealing with it. Later in chapter 3, God, of course, pronounces war on Satan.

I'll put enmity between thee and the woman and so forth. And we go on here, and he talks to the woman and so forth. We get down to verse 20. Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living.

For Adam also and for his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothe them. Now that's a little strange. Adam and Eve had garments that were apparently inadequate. I'm not one to promote the values of fig leaves as a garment.

But isn't it a little bizarre that God didn't let them find that out for themselves? That he apparently personally, he didn't instruct them to do it. Go do that, it's better. God made coats of skins and clothed them.

The fact that God personally did it should get our attention. Even Jesus, in most of the gospels, ministered through the disciples. The wedding at Cana, the disciples passed out the water. Feeding of the 5 ,000, 4 ,000, the disciples.

He deals through his ministers. Every once in a while he does something personally. That should get our attention. The more I read the scripture, that should, hey, wait, what's going on here? Something very special.

If we had just this verse, I'd be really crawling out of limb. But if we take the rest of the Torah, the book of Exodus, and the Passover lamb. If we take the book of Leviticus, and we wrap that all together, we discover that from Genesis, chapter 3, through Revelation 19, God consistently presents the principle that without the shedding of blood, there's no remission of sins.

As we really understand the whole scripture, the whole counsel of God, we recognize what we might even call, maybe a little facetiously, a preoccupation with shed blood. We go through the offerings. You and I are denied the vivid object lessons of Judaism.

I mean the old Judaism, not current Judaism. I've often threatened to do this. I have never had quite the guts to do this, is to bring in to the Bible study a little duck or a chicken or something. Let you all get acquainted with it, a little pet.

And then here up in front, chop off its head. You'd be shocked and upset, and that would be the point. Poor analogy, obviously, unless I handle it very carefully. But the point is, what I'm saying is God, before Israel, throughout their whole history, again and again and again, ordained rituals, slaughtering animals, shedding blood.

The tabernacle's nickname is the house of blood. The temple, by the thousands, special aqueducts and things to haul off from all the ritual. What's all that going on? You and I read about it, but it's not the same thing.

It's standing and saying, what is all this barbaric ritual all about? God's way of letting us realize that sin is serious. That sin has to be paid for, not by the blood of sheep and goats. That's a model.

That's just an object lesson. That's a tutorial. It's all pointing to the cross. Now, where am I headed? I'm suggesting to you that the cross was preached in Genesis 3. You notice why Adam called Eve the mother of all living?

Because of these coats of skins. Look at this carefully. For Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. For Adam also, and for his wife, did the Lord God make coats of skins and clothe them.

Strange enough, this passage is presuming that we understand the rest. There are some scholars that believe that the altar wasn't some local thing in those days. The altar was at the gate. They were outside the garden, but they were instructed to bring offerings.

God was instituting what I like to call the Levitical system this early. What's my evidence of that? I guess I've got lots, but the most dramatic one is Genesis chapter 22. Long before Moses and Aaron and the Levites and all of that, God told Abraham to offer his son Isaac on a hill.

A very specific hill. You all know the story. Abraham takes Isaac up the hill, ready to be obedient and offer his son. Of course, God at the last minute intervenes, substitutes a ram. But Abraham knew he was acting out prophecy.

The 2 ,000 years later on that same hill, another father would be offering his son as an offering for sin. Abraham knew that. The belief that saved him was the belief in the resurrection of Isaac. He knew Isaac would have to be resurrected from that experience.

That's in Hebrews 3 and Romans 4. If I'm on strange ground, get the tapes on Genesis 22 to get the most fascinating prophecy study in the Bible. Genesis 22. But again, it's presuming and amplifying a sacrifice long before Moses and all of that.

God instituted the concept of the faith offering, the blood sacrifice, in prophetically pointing to Jesus Christ as early as Adam and Eve. When you understand that, now we can look at Cain with much more insight.

Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins. That's Hebrews 9 .22. For those of you that want to dig into that more thoroughly. Now I'm going to back up a little bit and let's take another look at Cain and Abel.

Cain was a tiller of the soil, no problem there. They needed food, right? Abel was a tender of sheep. We've got a problem there. They didn't eat meat. They don't eat meat till later. At this stage, meat is forbidden.

God will later ordain meat to be eaten. Why are they doing raising sheep? Well, maybe wool. That's fair. Maybe offerings. Abel's offering was by faith, Hebrews 11 .4. Now what's Cain doing then? Cain failed to satisfy God by failing to approach Him on the revealed basis of vicarious atonement.

God has ordained then and still does that the only basis by which we can approach Him is on the basis of the shed blood of Jesus Christ. Either prophetically in the Old Testament sense or memorially as we do.

Cain didn't do that. Cain brought what? The works of his own hands. So what is the way of Cain? He's presuming his readers understand all this. What's the way of Cain? To blaspheme God by declaring his salvation incomplete by our attempting to add to it.

There's two ways, faith or works. You've all heard that, right? There's two ways to get to heaven. I love the way Walter Martin presents this. He does a great job. Plan A and Plan B. Plan A, by works.

What you do is be perfect. As you grow up, you never make a mistake. From the age of accountability on, no matter how irritable, tired, overworked, pressured, you never sin. Never make a mistake. No matter what people do to you, you never sin.

You do that all, not most of the time, all through your life. And then when you die, you go to heaven and say, move over. Now there's two of us. Now that's perhaps a little irreverent humor, but it gets the point across.

Plan B is that, hey, we can't do it. I've not only read the Ten Commandments, and I recognize those are not suggestions. They're called commandments, right? And if I fail to get the message in Exodus 20, when I get to Matthew 5, 6, and 7, I know I'm in trouble because the Lord reinterprets this as not only the deeds, but the thoughts of your heart.

Let me tell you, if you really knew the thoughts of my heart on some occasions, you wouldn't come to my Bible studies. You'd throw stones. No, the real message of the Scripture from Genesis on is that we can't make it by our own efforts.

There is a way which seems right to a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. What is the basis? His completed work on our behalf. Now the amazing insight is our attempts to add to that is blasphemy.

Does that mean we shouldn't do works? No. Obviously you should do good works, but not in an attempt to earn anything. Because your attempt to earn position with the Lord by anything you might do is to declare that the position you have by faith in Christ is inadequate.

That's blasphemy. That sounds glib, academic stuff, but it's apparently pretty serious because it got Cain not only perished, but made an example for you and I that we should not perish that way. How?

By bringing the works of our hands to the altar of God? Something wrong with that? Yes. Not by our judgment, but by God's preferences. He wants offerings by faith, not works. That's what the way of Cain is all about.

The blasphemy of God by declaring his salvation incomplete through our attempting to add something to it. You can't add anything to the completed work of Jesus Christ on the cross. Nothing. No matter what you do.

What's the ultimate you give your life? That's not yours anyway. You didn't do that, he did. Sorry to get into this whole business about life after death. It's life after birth that's the problem. But that's another issue.

Anyway, that's Cain. Faith versus works. That theme goes throughout the whole scripture, but it starts right here, Cain and Abel. Amply dealt with in Paul's epistles in many ways. But somehow the graphic finality of Cain's situation is perhaps to me the thing that brings that home.

Cain was not saved. Abel was. They both brought offerings. Both were believers. One saved, one not. One followed God's instructions. One chose his own way. Although it sounds good, it didn't work. Okay, the next thing is the error of Balaam.

The Error of Balaam: Spiritual Gifts and Worldly Reward

And of course the Greek there says they ran riotously or had been poured forth. Rampage. Lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. But who is this character called Balaam? Strange, strange character.

We find his tale essentially in Numbers 22 on. Numbers 22. We don't know a lot about this guy. He sort of shows up and he's a character. Now the basic thrust of the story of Balaam is that he was a prophet.

He wasn't a false prophet in the sense of posing as a prophet. He was a prophet. Had a gift. Had a communication channel. And I don't think we'll take the time to try to study Balaam in total. He's an interesting character.

He has some interesting prophecies. Just to skip ahead, which has got nothing to do with the story but to give you a flavor of Balaam because you're going to talk a lot about the bad stuff. Let me tell you some of the more interesting things.

Chapter 24, verse 15. And he took up this parable and said, Balaam the son of Beor hath said, The man whose eyes are open hath said, he hath said, who heard the words of God and knew the knowledge of the Most High, who saw the vision of the Almighty falling into a trance but having his eyes open, I shall see him, but not now.

I shall behold him, but not near. There shall come, get this phrase, a star out of Jacob. This is Balaam's star. Some scholars believe this is some link to what we call the Christmas star. And a scepter shall rise out of Israel and shall smite the corners of Moab and destroy all the children of Sheth.

And I don't want to go into this because this is peripheral, but the point is Balaam had some prophecies. Some of them are important. He's an interesting character. But Balaam is best known for his major screw-ups.

He was greedy for gold. And he ends up getting hired by the enemies of God to curse them. Okay. Now he is warned not to do this. In verse 22 we have verse 1. The children of Israel are set forth and are encamped in the plains of Moab on this side of the Jordan by Jericho.

And Balak, the son of Zipporah, saw that all that Israel had done to the Amorites. And Moab was very much afraid of the people because there were many. And Moab was distressed because of the children of Israel and so on.

So verse 5, he sends messengers to Balaam. And he says, Behold, the people come out of Egypt. Behold, they cover the face of the earth and they abide. He's heard all the stories. He's nervous. Verse 6.

Come now, therefore, I pray thee, curse for me this people. For they are too mighty for me. Perhaps I shall prevail and we may smite them that I may drive them out of the land. For I know that he whom thou blessed is blessed and whom thou cursed is cursed.