There’s an old joke when it comes to the story of Balaam and the talking donkey. The most amazing part of the story is not that a donkey talked to Balaam—as crazy as that might sound. The really crazy part is that Balaam talked back.
Imagine you’re a passerby on the road from Pethor to Moab and you see this exchange take place. A grown man, otherwise respectable by everyday standards, is pinned against a wall by a mule, only to have the man reach back for his staff, beat the donkey, who then argues with him! The two go back and forth, all the time you’re wondering if you took your medication that morning.
The donkey sees what Balaam does not, which is an angel, sent directly from God, standing in the middle of the road. If that doesn’t signal divine disapproval, then I don’t know what does.
There’s a bit of poetic irony in this entire story, though. Here is Balaam, on his way to curse an entire nation in hopes of letting a different nation take them over, and he can’t even direct his donkey down the road correctly. Man’s futility to orchestrate world-shifting events is on full display.
Meanwhile, Balaam is still hitting his donkey.
I love how the donkey takes offense to the beatings. Like a loyal servant, the donkey mentions how loyal he’s been to Balaam through the years. If he isn’t moving now, the donkey reasons, shouldn’t Balaam assume there’s a good reason?
That’s when Balaam sees the angel standing in the road. And that angel has the same message that God had when Balaam was still sitting in Pethor: He shouldn’t have left. More specifically, Balaam’s way was “contrary” to God (Numbers 22:32).
To his credit, Balaam offers to turn back, but God decides to use Balaam’s greed as an opportunity for good. Instead of cursing the nation of Israel, God will use Balaam’s voice to bless them—right in front of Balak, his new employer (ref. Nehemiah 13:2).
But that’s a story for another time. The story of the talking donkey deserves a little more time than that, precisely because the point is to show the vast difference in intelligence between the two beings.
In this situation, the donkey is the one that reveals a better grasp of the situation. He’s the one that sees the angel and obeys the warning from God, even to the point of sitting down in the middle of the road to prevent him and his rider from going any further.
Balaam furiously tries to drive the donkey further into danger, with a total disregard for God or His word. To quote 2 Peter 2:16, it took “a mute donkey, speaking with the voice of a man, to restrain the madness of the prophet.”
Why do intelligent people act so dumb sometimes? Balaam was the one with the critical thinking skills. Shouldn’t he have known better?
Unfortunately, intelligence doesn’t always translate to wisdom. As Festus accused Paul of in Acts 26:24, “Great learning is driving you mad!”
Think back to the Jewish leaders that Jesus sparred with on an almost-daily basis. These were the most highly educated religious thinkers in Judea at the time, and yet their arrogance kept them from understanding simple truths about God.
The story in John 9 is perhaps the most brilliant. A blind man, who has spent most of his life begging for alms, is able to “see” what the elites could not—that a Man opened his eyes (John 9:30). He didn’t need anything more than that to build his faith.
Obedience is underrated. Most of us prefer to logic our way through situations and convince ourselves that what God asks us to do isn’t really what He wants. Instead, like Balaam, we pray that God will change His mind. Or assume He already has.
If only there were talking donkeys to stop us in our tracks, too.