Balaam, the son of Beor, was a heathen living in the mountains beyond the Euphrates; and yet the form as well as the substance of his prophecy was cast into the same mould as that of the Hebrew prophets.  He is called in the Book of Numbers “the man whose eyes are open;” and God used this power as His organ of intercourse with and influence upon the world.  The grand record of his vision is the first example of prophetic utterance respecting the destinies of the world at large; and we see how the base and grovelling nature of the man was overpowered by the irresistible force of the prophetic impulse within him, so that he was constrained to bless the enemies he was hired to curse.  And in this respect he represents the purest of the ancient heathen oracles; and his answer to Balak breathes the very essence of prophetic inspiration, and is far in advance of the spirit and thought of the time, reminding us of the noble rebuke of the Cumaean Sibyl to Aristodicus, and of the oracle of Delphi to Glaucus.

God did not leave the Gentile nations without some glimpses of the truth which He had revealed so fully and brightly to His own chosen people.  While He was the glory of His people Israel, we must not forget that He was a light to lighten the Gentiles.  He gave to them oracles and sibyls, who had the “open eye,” and saw the vision of the years, and witnessed to a light shining in the darkness, and brought God nearer to a faithless world.  Beneath the gross external polytheism of the multitude there were deep, primitive springs of godliness, pure and undefiled, working out their manifestation in noble lives; and those who have ears to hear can listen to the sound of these ancient streams as they flow into the river of life that makes glad the city of our God.  We gain immensely by considering the prophetical spirit of Israel as a typical endowment, and the training of the Jews in the household of God, and under His own immediate eye, as the key to the right apprehension of the training of Greece and Rome.  The unconscious prophecies of heathendom pointed in their own way, as well as the articulate divine prophecies of Israel, to the coming of Him who is the Desire of all nations, and the true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.  The wise men of Greece saw the sign of the Son of Man in some such way as the Magi saw the star in the East.  They were, according to Hegel’s beautiful comparison, “Memnons waiting for the day.”  And not without deep significance did the female soothsayer from the oracle of Dionysius, the prophet-god of the Macedonians, whom Paul and Silas met when they first landed on European soil, greet them with the words, “These men are the servants of the most high God, which show unto us the way of salvation.”  In that wonderful confession we recognise the last utterance of the oracle of Delphi and the Sibyl of Cumae, as they were cast out by a higher and truer faith.  Their mission was accomplished and their shrine deserted when God’s way was known upon the earth, and His saving health among all nations.