Background: Babel and Balaam: Two Ancient Warnings
A question worth asking openly
This session isn’t in the standard 52-part outline of Revelation sermons — it’s added specifically for this pack, because two very old stories from the Old Testament speak with unusual precision into a live question many of us carry: how do we honor family, ancestors, and cultural heritage, while still giving Jesus the exclusive worship he asks for? That is the question this session opens — as a question, asked with respect, not as an accusation against anyone’s family, culture, or ancestors.
Babel: building a name apart from God
After the flood, humanity settles in Shinar and decides to build a great tower reaching to the sky, for two stated reasons: to make a name for themselves, and to have a central gathering point so they won’t be scattered (Genesis 11:1-9). It’s an enormous undertaking — and then God comes down to look at it, in a move that gently mocks both their effort and the threat behind it. What troubles God is that they’ve convinced themselves nothing is now impossible for them, apart from him.
Neither goal is achieved. They wanted to make a name for themselves — that never happens for them, but God goes on to make a name out of Abraham instead. They wanted to avoid being scattered — scattering is exactly what happens, as God confuses their language, an outcome only reversed centuries later at Pentecost.
When Israel later goes into exile, the text notes that Babylon stood in the very same territory as the original tower — Shinar (Genesis 10:10; Daniel 1:2). The connection is deliberate: pride is the common thread, and both empires are cut brutally short — Daniel’s Babylon lasted less than a century before Cyrus, whom God himself raised up, brought it down. Revelation’s Babylon carries the same features forward: pride, a sudden fall, and God’s people living as exiles in the middle of it.
Balaam: attacked through seduction, not opposition
The story of Balaam is one of the most instructive in the Old Testament, and Revelation itself quotes it directly: Jesus rebukes the church in Pergamum because “there are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality” (Revelation 2:14).
The history: after Israel’s victories over the Amorites and Canaanites (Numbers 21), Moab and Midian grow afraid, even though neither had real reason to fear invasion — Moab had a promise of safety (Deuteronomy 2:8-9), and Midian had close family ties to Moses himself. Fear overrides all of that. Balak, king of Moab, hires the prophet Balaam to curse Israel. God forbids it, twice — yet Balaam keeps asking, as though he might talk God into changing his answer. Eventually God permits him to go, with real consequences along the way (the famous story of the donkey, Numbers 22:22-35). In the end, Balaam cannot curse Israel — he can only bless them, to Balak’s fury.
But the story doesn’t end there. Immediately afterward, Moabite and Midianite women invite Israel to a feast, and it leads straight into sexual immorality and idol worship (Numbers 25:1-2). A plague kills thousands of Israelites before it’s stopped. Only much later do we learn what had actually happened: Balaam, unable to curse Israel directly, had advised Balak on exactly this strategy instead (Numbers 31:16) — and Balaam is eventually found among the very people he’d been advising, killed there himself (Numbers 31:8).
The lesson is sobering: the most dangerous attack on God’s people doesn’t always come as open opposition. It comes as invitation — a feast, a relationship, a blending in — that quietly draws people toward compromise with what God has forbidden, without ever announcing itself as an attack at all.
Why these two stories belong together here
Babel is about self-sufficiency — building something to secure our own name, our own future, without reference to God. Balaam is about seduction into compromise — being drawn, gently and without any dramatic confrontation, toward practices that quietly divide our loyalty. Revelation weaves both threads throughout the whole book: Babylon the great as the ultimate Babel, and the church at Pergamum and Thyatira warned specifically against “the teaching of Balaam” and “the teaching of Jezebel” — both of which describe exactly the same danger, compromise disguised as belonging.
The question this raises for us, honestly
Here is where this touches something real and unresolved for many believers across our continent. Honoring ancestors, maintaining connection with family who have died, observing traditional practices tied to lineage, land, and heritage — these are not fringe concerns. They sit at the center of what it means to belong to a family and a people. And Scripture itself takes family, lineage, and honoring one’s forebears seriously — the fifth commandment calls us to honor father and mother, and Israel’s own faith was passed down and celebrated generation to generation as a treasured inheritance, not something to be discarded.
The honest, open question Balaam’s story raises is this: at what point does honoring family and heritage shade into a kind of allegiance that competes with the exclusive worship Jesus asks for? The Baal-Peor feast wasn’t a hostile invasion — it was a shared meal with people Israel had every natural, even understandable, reason to feel warmly toward. That’s exactly what made it dangerous: not force, but familiarity.
This isn’t a question with one tidy answer that applies identically in every home, every village, every family situation. It is a question worth asking honestly, together, without shame and without a blanket verdict handed down from outside your own context: does this practice draw me toward treating something or someone other than the Lamb as ultimately worthy of my allegiance, my fear, or my hope — even if it comes wrapped in love for family and respect for those who came before us? Or is it simply an expression of remembrance and honor that doesn’t compete with worship at all?
Different believers, different pastors, and different traditions within the wider African church have answered this in different ways, in good conscience, and this session doesn’t pretend to settle that debate for you. What it does insist on, from both Babel and Balaam, is this: the danger is rarely a dramatic, obvious attack. It’s usually an invitation from people we love, into something that feels completely natural — and Scripture’s counsel is to bring that question honestly before God and trusted spiritual leaders, rather than either dismissing it entirely or resolving it defensively without real reflection.
Closing
Babel warns us against building our security apart from God. Balaam warns us that compromise usually arrives disguised as belonging, not as attack. Together, they leave us with an open, pastoral question worth carrying honestly into our own families and communities: how do we hold together real love and honor for our families, our ancestors, and our heritage, with the whole-hearted, undivided worship the Lamb alone deserves?
Where in your own life or family has this question come up honestly? Who could you talk with — a pastor, an elder, a trusted friend — to think it through with wisdom rather than either fear or defensiveness?