Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadJohn Trapp Complete Commentary - Numbers 23:10 - 23:10
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Num_23:10 Who can count the dust of Jacob, and the number of the fourth [part] of Israel? Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!
Ver. 10. Let me die the death.] But he was so far from living the life of the righteous, that he gave pestilent counsel against the lives of God’s Israel: and though here, in a fit of compunction, he seem a friend, yet he was afterward slain by the sword of Israel, whose happiness he admireth, and desires to share in. {Num_31:8} Carnales non curant quaerere, quem tamen desiderant invenire; cupientes consequi, sed non et sequi, {a} Carnal men care not to seek that which they would gladly find, &c. Some faint desires, and short-winded wishes, may be sometimes found in them, but the mischief is, they would break God’s chain, sunder happiness from holiness, salvation from sanctification, the end from the means; they would dance with the devil all day, and then sup with Christ at night; live all their lives long in Delilah’s lap, and then go to Abraham’s bosom when they die. The Papists have a saying that a man would desire to live in Italy, a place of great pleasure, but to die in Spain, because there the Catholic religion, as they call it, is so sincerely professed. And a heathen being asked, whether he would rather be Socrates, a painful philosopher, or Croesus, a wealthy king; answered, that for this life he would be Croesus, but for the life to come Socrates. Thus all men wish well to heaven’s happiness; but bad men find no more comfort of it, than a man doth of the sun when it shines not in his own horizon. Balaam might here be compared to a stranger, that travelling a far country, seeth the state and magnificence of the court, and is admitted into the presence chamber, which greatly doth affect him, though himself have no part or interest in the king. {See Trapp on "Num_24:5"}
{a} Bern.