Believing Balaam: Advent Hope on the Way Home for the Holidays

Brian Mahon - 11/8/2020

About

Call to worship: Revelation 5

Text: Numbers 24:15-25

Sermon Outline:

  1. Passage Context: Finding Hope in Christ on the Cusp of Home
  2. Passage Content: Seeing Christ
    • A counterintuitive revelation: a blind seer seeing
    • A Christic revleation: a Star and Scepter coming
    • A concluding revelation: Christ judging
  3. God's Christ: Who is He?
  4. Kingdom counsel
    • A word to unbelieving friends
    • A word to Kingdom citizens as we travel Home

Prepare

Questions to Consider:

  1. Most of all, what I'd like for you to do is read the sermon text together as a family prior to corporate worship. Do that, pray it, soak in it, discuss it as friends, as spouses, as parents. Some questions to help:
  2. Read Numbers 22:6, then Gen 12:3. What's at stake in the Balaam oracles?
  3. What do we know of Balaam? Good, bad, true, false, friend, foe? If the latter, why would God use him to get His truth across?
  4. In our passage, what does Balaam see in v. 17? Or rather, Who? And what is the work that God mainly reveals through this false prophet? Merry Christmas, right? For help on identifying this Person as Christ and His place in the biblical story, read Gen 3:15, Gen 49:9, 2 Pet 1:19, Rev 2:28, Rev 22:16.
  5. Where does Balaam go after seeing Christ? What of Balak? What of us? Do we go Christ's way? Israel immediately did not either! On our way to the Promised Land, are we keeping our eyes on Jesus? Finding our hope in Him? Living as those would whose hearts are captive to our all-glorious King?
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