Self inflicted curses ?

Yesterday, in my daily Bible reading, I came to that strange story in Numbers 23 - 24 about Balaam's donkey. You probably remember it. The Moabite king, a man called Balak, gets in touch with Balaam, an infamous mercenary prophet of the day, and asks him to curse the people of Israel. Although Balaam quickly discovers that it's God's will to bless the Israelites and not to curse them, he tries to find ways of getting around God's instructions - because Balak has promised to pay him well if he pronounces curses on the tribes of Israel. So he sets out to give it a try, anyway, and runs into difficulties when his donkey sees an angel in the road and refuses to carry Balaam any further. The end of the story - or at least it seems like the end - is that Balaam blesses the Israelites three times, instead of calling down curses upon them. As Balaam explains to Balak: How can I curse those whom God has not cursed? God has blessed them and I cannot reverse it.

Sadly, that wasn't the end of the story. Unable to curse the Israelites verbally, Balaam resorted to more subtle means. (See chapter 31 verse 16)  He seems to have been the person who orchestrated the trap of temptation that we read about in Numbers 25: Moabite women invite Israelite men to sleep with them and to attend sacrifices to their foreign gods. Thus, although unable to be cursed by an enemy, the men of Israel brought disaster on themselves with their own sin and disobedience.

Reading that chapter this morning, it struck me that something very similar could easily happen today: the enemy may have no authority to curse us with sickness, but we can bring it on ourselves with workaholism and neglecting the sabbath. The enemy may have no right to curse us with financial ruin, but we can cause problems for ourselves by poor stewardship, getting into debt, or failing to tithe.

There's such security in knowing that an enemy cannot curse us when God has chosen to bless us. Let's not mess it up by steps of disobedience that bring self-inflicted "curses" upon ourselves.