Sometimes, there is real money involved. Hard cash. Gold and silver.
That was the case with Balaam, a prophet who heard from God and was called by Balak, the king of Moab, to come and curse the Israelites who had been wandering in the wilderness and had now come into the Moabite territory. Balak was afraid for his people, and probably most of all for his rule as king over the Moabites, so he called for Balaam to come and curse the Israelites.
Yet when Balaam came in response to Balak’s invitation, instead of cursing the Israelites, he blessed them three times. He even gave a prophecy that the Messiah would come to crush the Moabites through these Israelite people.
God told Balaam that the Israelite people were blessed and that he could not curse them. They were blessed because they were God’s people. The very God that Balaam was calling upon to curse the Israelites was the God of the Israelites. God would not curse them.
Yet Balak was still holding out a great reward and Balaam wanted the money. If God wouldn’t curse these people, was there another way? Yes, of course there was and Balaam told the Moabites what to do:
They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the LORD in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people.
Numbers 31:16
Balaam, instead, advised Balak and the Moabites to use the women of the Moabites to entice the Israelite men to come and sleep with them.
And so that that is what they did. The Israelite men went with the Moabite women who had prostituted themselves to the Israelite men and lured them away from the blessing of God. The Israelites ignored the commandments of God and instead went with the Moabite women, not only sleeping with the prostitutes but also offering sacrifices to Baal Peor, the god of the Moabites. They no longer worshiped Yahweh, their God who had blessed them, but they also began to worship this Baal, this lord and master of the Moabites.
With all of this as background, we can now see why Peter, later, warned the believers that there would be false teachers and false prophets that would come in amongst the people and lure them away. Just as Balaam had given good advice on how the enemies of the Israelite people could lure the Israelites away from God, there are also people, even today, that love money and prefer to lure the people away from Biblical teachings so that they can receive a monetary reward.
They have left the straight way and wandered off to follow the way of Balaam son of Bezer, who loved the wages of wickedness.
2 Peter 2:15
These “wages of wickedness” that Peter refers to are the monies that Balaam would have ultimately received for advising the Moabites in regard to how they could destroy the Israelites. Their destruction would come when they were separated from their God, from whom they would walk away to not only fall into sexual sin, but begin to worship Baal Peor instead of the one true God, Yahweh.
As Peter has warned the people in his time, we must watch for these people in our day as well. There is an evil, fueled by the desire for the things of this world, the riches and pleasures of our world today, that lurks around the church even today. There are teachers who wish to neuter the power of the Gospel, suggesting that we can “sprinkle in some Jesus” to our doctrines while continuing to strive for our own salvation, ultimately making ourselves our own gods. There are false prophets who tell us that, if we believe, we can become rich, enjoying even ourselves the wages of the evil of our world. We too can prosper if we follow them.
So we must continue to follow the path of Christ. We must maintain our faith in the grace and mercy offered to us by God through the sacrifice of his Son on the cross. The one sacrifice that has purchased us, that ransomed us, out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God. This is the way, and it is the only way. May we not look to the wages of wickedness of our world so that we would be lured away, but instead would be found to be faithful in Christ.