Blessing and Prophecy of Balaam

Israels military success scares the Moabites so King Balak hires a man named Balaam to curse the Israelites. Now I think Balaam is suppose to have some sort of supernatural powers or something. Well, anyway, Balaam is told by God not to go to the King and he obeys that until greed gets in the way and the Kings offers lots of money. So what does Balaam do? He asks again in hopes that God will change His mind. Does this sound familiar in your own life? Yea? Balaam knew Gods will. He knew what God wanted. He simply did not want to obey. We find ourselves in this situation so many times in life. We know what God wants for us to do, but we keep going back asking and asking for God to change His mind. Later on after things go a bit array then what do we do? We say "Oh, I did not realize!" Yea right! This is a lie. I think probably one of the worst lies we can tell ourselves. Oh we knew. We can fool others, but deep down inside we can not fool ourselves and most certainly can not fool God. We can not let our prayers deteriorate into asking God for permission to do something we already know that He does not want us to do.

I find it kinda ironic that God uses Balaam to do His work. I mean here you have a man that clearly is not a man of God, otherwise he would not be involved in sorcery. He obviously is interested in wealth from the King. Yet God decides to use this man to bless Israel. He states that "A Star will come out of Jacob". Now I am taking a wild jump at this. I have the daily reader and a small concordance that I use and that is it. But it seems to me that this has to be the speaking of Jesus Christ. My concordance has a reference to Revelation 22:16. I think it is very funny that God uses this kind of a person to talk about the coming Messiah. God is fully capable of using whom ever He wants to do His work. He is fully capable of protecting His children no matter what harm is in the way. We just have to trust Him.