Years ago I watched an action-comedy movie : The Mummy 3: the Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. I loved the special effects and the scale of the adventure, but at the time, I thought all of it was simply embellishment.

Now as I work with my son through ancient history, we’ve been investigating the life of China’s first emperor, and I’m amazed to discover that the movie did not do the scale of the emperor’s creation justice!

He built a tomb complex larger and more intricate than the pyramids, surrounded it with miles of pits filled with 8,000 life-size Terracotta soldiers, commissioned the great wall to be built for hundreds of miles–all after he had build superior weapons for his army and waged war to conquer and unify the different regions of China.

In my read through the Bible this year, I am struck by the story of Balaam in a challenging way (Numbers 22-24). Here is a random stranger to the story and the people of faith in all of the story of the Bible so far, yet he is able to speak for God, but he allows greed and pressure from a local king to cause him to act only in his own self-interest.

I used to think that only those who are super-spiritual and faithful to God carried His power, but I’ve learned in my life through experience and encounters, that God often gives great gifts to others, like He did with Sampson, to show his power, even in broken vessels. He also often leaves His power with those who have fallen from their willingness to obey Him, the way He allowed Saul and Solomon to continue in their roles as king long after their faithfulness to God failed.

In our own modern world, I’ve seen this take place too. I’ve encounters a few individuals who use their God-given gifts of prayer or preaching primarily for their own personal gain. But I won’t name any names, I don’t invite you to judge or bash God’s servants publically, unless you’ve tried to confront them privately and need to help keep others from being led astray.

Here are some key takeaways that come to mind as I process Balaam’s story:

We should seek to be faithful, not gifted – just because someone is blessed with a great gift from God doesn’t mean that they are someone to be emulated or that they should be envied. Often times those gifted individuals are God’s example of a fool or a tragic story, both of which were true of Balaam.

He was a lot more like us than we might want to believe. Balaam wasn’t evil, so far as the Scripture indicates. He was foolish. He was disobedient. And He didn’t give God or God’s gift to him it’s proper respect. He was more one to try and bend God’s rules than to break them…and that reminds me, of me.

After Balaam asked God a second time about whether he should go with the messengers that were sent to him–disobeying God’s initial order which he should not have questioned–he ended up on a donkey that wouldn’t walk the path and ended up having a conversation with that animal in front of the officials from Midian. God made him foolish in the eyes of the officials.

Then he embarrassed the king three separate times–again failing to obey God’s clear and unchanging commands–and making the king foolish to his officials as well.

They wanted God to meet their terms. Both the king and Balaam hoped that they could game the system, and persuade God to get on their side through money and trickery. But God is not persuaded or manipulated. He showed that He will do exactly as He plans, and that His power will be used to accomplish His goals.

Ultimately, both the king and Balaam lost their lives to the Israelites later in the story. They made the mistake we often do all the time: they wanted God to meet them on their terms, rather than meeting God on His. Had the king relented in his plan to curse Israel and repented to the God who was clearly superior and powerful, perhaps his people would have been forgiven and given a life in their land.

So many people I meet want to be forgiven, to be blessed by God, and to do great things…but they want them on their own terms. They will not come to Jesus to be saved. They will not give up sin in their lives. They make foolish choices and expect God to bless their unwillingness to listen to wisdom, or at least rescue them. As a pastor, one of the most heartbreaking trends I see is people who come to the church needing food or shelter–but instead of letting us help through people and partners who are experts at getting people back on their feet long term, they demand that we do thing their way.

God’s power is always present–always guaranteed to those who meet God on His terms. God is never slow or unwilling to save someone who cries out to Jesus. He saves EVERY person who meets Him at the cross. His power is felt in every person who cries out for it and meets God where He is at. And there’s not a person I’ve met who seeks God with a humble spirit in His ways; in the Bible, prayer, and a community of people, that I don’t feel the Spirit of God powerfully when I’m around them.

We should seek to be faithful, not gifted.

We should never try to trick or manipulate God into doing what we want.

We need to obey what He commands, and not question a command or hope He changes His mind. To honor Him is to hold to the guidance we get from God, the first time He says it.

We need to meet God on His terms, not expect Him to meet our demands.

And if we truly desire for His power to be at work in and through us, we should see God humbly, daily.

Mark Miller once made a statement that has forever stuck with me: “The Bible is all true…but it does not contain all truth.” I believe you would agree with me that God gave us the ability to learn and pass on our knowledge of the world, so that we can build up wisdom through discovery. You would certainly want your brain surgeon to have gotten his education from just the Bible, and your ship captain to have some knowledge of a map, a compass, and how the ship’s engines work! God’s gift to us is a book of spiritual guidance and history, a community of people, and our ability to learn. Science is not in opposition to God, it discovers and glorifies Him when done with Him in mind!

I begin with this train of though because people often criticize the Bible for not giving more clear medical guidelines, or for often suggesting practices that cause people to lean more on faith for their healing than science. I believe that the Bible balances this approach well. As I read through the most specific laws regarding cleansing, disease, and even epidemic sickness in Leviticus and Numbers, I am reminded of a few key ideas that I wish to pass along:

The Bible’s medical guidance is often pretty advanced:

The Bible defines an authority figure, a process, and isolation for both people and buildings showing signs of dangerous contamination. Many of the animals it defines as unclean are, generally, not as good for you as the one’s it approves for the Jews to consume. Although I’m no expert on the ancient world’s medical practices, I find that these restrictions and processes are pretty advanced. Today we understand microorganisms, disease transmission, and hygiene in a way they could not. It was gracious for God to provide a law that required them to follow practices that helped them avoid the outbreak of disease. Just imagine how much more devastating a serious disease would have been in ancient times, when there were no hospitals, medications, and sanitizing agents to help control disease!

The Bible’s medical guidance is also often spiritual:

Although a disease or circumstance often had very rational origins, it is also often the timing of God that causes hardship to come upon a group of people, which is why a medical process was also almost always coupled with a spiritual act of repentance and cleansing. There are even a lot of circumstances where God did not follow conventional medical cures to solve a medical problem, showing His people that He can and will often heal them if they will heal their own hearts first, the most noteworthy example of this in is Numbers, when God chooses to have the people look upon the figure of a snake to counteract the venom of serpents who had invaded their camp and were killing people.

Balance, again, is the key. Not every sickness or circumstance should be interpreted to have spiritual origins. And every cure should couple the wisdom we have in medicine with a plea to God for healing. To isolate one from the other can often mean asking God to heal something supernaturally that He has given us knowledge to heal naturally–robbing people of their purpose and taking the significance of our accumulated wisdom He has allowed us to collect away. On the other hand, trusting doctors to cure us without asking God to intervene, and seeking anything sinful in our own lives we should take the opportunity to ask forgiveness for, robs God of the respect and opportunity to intervene personally and powerfully in our lives.

We need always keep in mind that from the first pages of Scripture, the world is broken because of humanity’s unwillingness to obey God. Plants do not grow as well as they should, all of nature is out of sync and in conflict with us, and sickness reigns where everlasting life would have existed in it’s place, because we disobeyed God and sought the knowledge of good AND evil. Sickness, disease, pain, and death are ultimately our fault, not His, but He graciously intervenes in the midst of it all to provide for us.

For those who seek God’s forgiveness, a new paradise and everlasting life is again our promise: our healing will ultimately be a reality! And, for those who walk in faith, God extends to us protection, empowerment, and resources in this life in much the same way as He sent food for Israel for 40 years in the wilderness, and kept their sandals from wearing out.

God’s Word often outpaces human knowledge.

God’s Law can be trusted and followed, even when we don’t fully understand why.

And the answer to our crisis is always faith: faith in God and faith in the ways God has allowed us to advance our knowledge for health.

Let’s lift up our hearts and minds today in prayers of faith: repenting for our sins and those of our world, asking for God’s healing, thanking Him for how much He’s allowed us to learn about treating sickness, and asking for strength and wisdom for each person who is in the medical field, working hard to help others in this specific time.

Up until the age of 11, my exposure to church was very mixed. My mom was from a catholic background, my Dad grew up as the son of a bi-vocational Wesleyan preacher who worked on repairing vehicles more than he repaired the heart. Our family went to church on Easter, Christmas, and the odd Sunday or camp meeting visit to support my grandfather. Church for me during that time didn’t make a strong impression. I just remember a long time spent in a hard wooden pew, trying to sit still enough to avoid prompting my Mom or Dad to tell me to calm down.

During that time, we built a home in a new neighborhood, and the builder–was a bivocational pastor who helped my Mom to get serious about her faith, leading to her baptism and nightly devotions at bedtime for us for a season. I remember the short season of engagement in her life, and my older brother’s subsequent baptism. The devotional books: Daily Bread and Keys to Life were very good stories to me, and I kept them and read them on my own after our nightly tradition stopped.

It was at the age of 11 that these spiritual seeds finally sprouted for the first time. Leading up to Easter Sunday, I had gotten into more trouble than usual and I vividly remember tossing a shoe at the wall of my room after I was sent there to await my father’s return from work. Then on Easter, hearing about Jesus on the cross, the preacher explained our need to ask Jesus to save us. I left the service convicted, certain of what I must do. Our church didn’t do alter calls or walk people through a sinner’s prayer, so I simply found a private spot in the garage after we arrived home to “ask Jesus into my heart” as I often heard it called then.

What I know for certain is that God really intervened in my life that day. I felt a newfound passion for God, for the Bible, and for church. I would even ask every week if we were going to church, sometimes waking my parents to do so, in order to stay more connected. Armed with my comic book Children’s Bible, the devotional books, and a spiral notepad, I would have a nightly conversation with God at bedtime on paper, reading and writing my thoughts down.

I didn’t really have anyone to share my new connection with Christ with, aside from Him, but it spurred a desire for holiness in my life and created in me a strong private desire to honor Him in everything.

It also fueled my involvement in Bible quizzing for a few years, where I did build some Christian relationships with peers and memorize a lot of Bible verses and facts. However, none of the facts or verses really got connected to practical living and all the community I built at church was unconnected to my school and sports involvement, so I ended up with two entirely different worlds of friends to live in.

The older I get, the more life trains me to live for the long term. When Isaiah predicts that Assyria will leave Israel alone, he gives them a game plan for the next three years: live off what grows for two years, then plant and harvest in the third year. Three years to recovery–that used to sound so shocking! Now it sounds typical.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a patient person. I don’t want anything to take three years. I hate working on projects that I can’t get complete quickly. I need the sense of completion or I lose hope putting together a project.

However, I have learned the danger in a short-term perspective as Isaiah also illustrates it, and I am challenged to take on a perspective that far exceeds even the most conservative ideas of long term perspective today.

In Isaiah’s story, Hezekiah’s only concern is for his lifetime. His whole world stops when he gets sick, and he pleads with God not to end his life. Then, when given an extra fifteen years, Hezekiah doesn’t seem to do anything remarkable with it, doesn’t appear to pour any spiritual guidance into his successor, and isn’t upset by the news that the kingdom will be conquered by Babylon–because it won’t happen in his lifetime.

How much time to I spend working toward things that will outlast me? How far past my lifetime do I envision the world? Am I doing things like raising my kids to make an impact on the world after I am gone, or do I just want them to be responsible adults so that I don’t deal with embarrassment later on…and so I can depend on them in my old age?

This passage isn’t intended to teach that long term perspective matters, but it seemed to jump off the pages to me as I read it this week as something I need to think more about. What do you think?