God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?
Numbers 23:19 (NIV)
The Answer That Stays
“Are you still coming Friday?” A four-year-old will keep asking that all week, and she heard the answer the first time, and the second. She is checking whether it stays the same.
Balak stands beside his own offering with the Moabite officials around him and asks what God said. He is told to stand up and listen, and then comes what God is like. “God is not human, that he should lie.” Then two questions handed back to the man who asked. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?
Balaam has a command to bless and says he cannot change it. Whatever Balak had in mind while he was setting out that offering, he is being told, standing there, that the word already spoken is the word that stands, and that no arrangement made this morning will move it by evening.
A woman whose marriage ended last spring hears a line like that differently than a room full of people who have never had a promise taken back. She has heard someone say I mean it. She has watched the meaning move, slowly enough that she could not point to the day. After that, a person stops listening to words and starts watching for the pattern underneath them, and it is an expensive education that does not wash off.
She can hear what Balaam actually said. The two things named together, lying and changing his mind, are sometimes the same move in a person, a way of getting through a conversation he wants to end. I have made that move and called it something else afterward. The one speaking here is not managing anybody, and he was not managing Balak either, who wanted a different answer and got the true one instead.
A woman who has watched a promise move on her once already needs exactly that news. It tells her nothing at all about Friday.
Ask him again tomorrow. He will not have thought better of it.
A Prayer to Remember
Thank you that what you have said about yourself is still the same this morning, in the same words, with nothing taken back. Teach me to ask you again without apologizing for asking, the way a child does, as many times as I need to hear it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
