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What Do You Do When You Face an Existential Threat?

At a pastoral retreat a number of years ago a group of pastors discussed what it would take to spark a broad revival of Christian faith. One pastor answered “an enduring catastrophe”. We all agreed.

As pastors we note that people come into a church looking for God when they have decided they have insufficient resources to face an existential threat. It may be illness, the loss of a loved one, a financial collapse, the loss of a relationship. This is the logic behind the old aphorism “no atheists in foxholes”.

The reason is clear to most of us. If life is rumbling along pretty well, and things are shaping up more or less as we wish or expect we feel ourselves sufficient to meet daily challenges. When something arises that we attempt to address but cannot, we start looking for help. Even in our skeptical age where we may have doubts that God could “come through” for us, a prayer, a chat with a pastor or a visit to a church seems like a small price to pay for a potential way out of our distress.

Most church folks don’t think highly of this dynamic. They know that sustained strength usually requires a sustained commitment and a network of relationships that are built over years. Even in the lives of the every week Christians, however, we too know that our prayers get more fervent and our discipleship more intense when we enter into a time of testing.

This is an enduring aspect of the human condition. In today’s text in Numbers 22 through 24 we see it in the story of the pagan king of Moab and the non-Israelite prophet Balaam.

On the Verge of the Promised Land

When the LORD first lead Israel out of Egypt he decided to not take them to the land of rest where he promised to resettle them by way of the sea. He knew that that path was populated by significant civilizations that were more developed and more powerful than Israel so he took them into the wilderness.

Even without the testing of the coastal peoples in the wilderness the people would rebel and respond to God’s rescue with doubt and rebellion. For that reason in the book of Numbers God would have the children of Israel linger in the desert for forty years until the old generation would die off and a new generation would emerge. They would enter the promised land.

The path into the promised land would be from the south and to the east. Their path would go through the lands of their “cousins”. It is hard for modern Americans to quite “get” how the first 5 books of the Bible work, but a big part of the old stories of Genesis, of Jacob and Esau, and the sons/grandsons of Lot, Moab and Ben-Ammi (Ammonites) were designed to set the nations around Israel within a familial context.

The children of Israel were “late born” in the extended family. They were the cousins who had gotten off to a bad start.

In the aftermath of so much racial violence the Washington Post’s Wonkblog did a study on race and wealth in American. While people wonder why it takes so long for the children of American slavery to “climb out” of poverty they fail to recognize that this population doesn’t as a group the kind of accumulated wealth with which to leverage for their children/grandchildren.

In the same way we look at Edom and Moab and Ammon, the “cousins” of Israel and find them already established in their own lands. Israel now wishes to enter into their own inheritance but these cousins aren’t so sure they really want this new kid around.

Israel first asks Edom for passage through their land. Edom won’t have it so Israel has to take the long way around. More wilderness time.

Israel then asks Ammon for passage through their land but the Ammonite kings muster their armies to attack Israel. God then acts as Israel’s defended, as he did before and as he promised and the Ammonites are defeated. Per the tradition of the land Israel then took many of Ammon’s cities and settled in them herself.

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