You’ve got to admire a farm animal that stands up for itself. After all the years of being told to do this and do that, and being expected to follow obediently, it is something of a welcome relief to say “No More. This really is one step too far and I am not going to do this.”
It would need something pretty drastic to make a farm animal take this step. It’s not going to be just any old act of rebellion. “Let’s go to the shops today to get the milk” is not a suitable cause of rebellion. The consequences will be drastic, so it had better be worth it.
We need to specific now. I am talking about a donkey, not just any old farm animal. Not a cow (and I like cows) and certainly not a chicken. I am not sure about a pig. Pigs get a bad press, which is unfair, because they are kind of cuddly, really, in a piggy sort of way. But let’s stick to the donkey.
I was trying to think about whether an act of rebellion would be pre-meditated. “Today, I am going to rebel” or whether it would be just be the spontaneous accumulation of the petty and daily accumulation of injustice and nonsense, which, given the right occasion, flares up into the unexpected and unpredictable.
At this point, you need to get out your bible, and look up Numbers 22. (For those of you unfamiliar with the geography of the Bible, it is the fourth book in the Old Testament i.e. pretty early on. To make it easy for you, I have supplied you with an internet link. You need to read verses 21 to 35, although you can read the whole chapter if you want to.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers%2022&version=NIV
The donkey is on her way with the master, going to a meeting. The master’s name is Balaam. All is fine, until the donkey lies down in the road and refuses to move. Balaam is naturally furious at this. The meeting is important, and there is no reason for the delay.
He beats the donkey, as that’s what we do to donkeys when they don’t move and we are having a bit of a temper. (It’s what I do to IKEA furniture when it won’t assemble properly.) There is not much thinking going on here in Balaam’s mind, such as, “I wonder what the problem is. Perhaps she is not well. What can she see what I can’t?” (which would have been an intelligent question in the circumstances). No – he just carries on beating her.
The whole story, of which verses 21 – 35 is just one part, spans three Chapters in total, and has a number of points, which I do not intend to go into. In this part, the familiar servant, the donkey, fails to perform as normal.
A simple reading of this section shows that God was bringing Balaam to a stop, in order to speak to him. Balaam was not paying attention, but his donkey was. He had decided that he would go to this meeting, come what may; that was where he was going and nothing was going to stop him. A great deal depended on that meeting. Do you know the feeling?
But God had other intentions.
A reading between the lines of the previous section shows that Balaam knew that he should not be on that road. If he did not know, then he should have known. His donkey lying down annoyed him even more, but he knew in his heart that he was going in the wrong direction, and it took the donkey to lie down and speak for the message to get through.
The common place world, in which we live, provides God with plenty of opportunities to speak to us, of things that we know and of things that we should think about. God made the world like that. Mostly we like to think that God gives us positive experiences, of things that go well. But if we are not listening, then, as with Balaam and his donkey, many times these are negative, of things that go badly. These are not punishment from an angry and revengeful God, but as reminders and instructions / guidance from a loving, if uncompromising, Father.
Keep listening.
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