The subject of prophecy is one which certainly ought not to be altogether neglected. If it were only for the sake of the many appeals made to it by our Lord and His Apostles, it would have a just claim on our attention.
I. It is a very misleading notion of prophecy if we regard it as an anticipation of history. History, in our common sense of the term, is busy with particular nations, times, places, actions, and even persons. If, in this sense, prophecy were a history written beforehand, it would alter the very condition of humanity, by removing from us our uncertainty as to the future; it would make us acquainted with those times and seasons which the Father hath put in His own power.
II. What history does not and cannot do, that prophecy does, and for that very reason it is very different from history. Prophecy fixes our attention on principles, on good and evil, on truth and falsehood, on God and on His enemy. Prophecy is God's voice, speaking to us respecting the issue in all time of that great struggle which is the real interest of human life, the struggle between good and evil. Beset as we are by evil within us and without, it is the natural and earnest question of the human mind, What shall be the end at last? And the answer is given by prophecy that it shall be well at last, that there shall be a time when good shall perfectly triumph.
III. Thus, as in the text, Balak, king of the Moabites, calls upon Balaam the prophet to curse Israel. This is the history: on the one hand there was one people; on the other there was another. Mere history can find no difficulty in determining that the highest good to unborn generations of the human race was involved in the preservation of Israel. It is the comparative good and evil which history can discern in the two nations which determines their respective characters as the representatives at that time and place of that real good and evil whose contest is the enduring subject of prophecy.
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. vi., p. 333.
Reference: Numbers 23:9. J. Hamilton, Works,vol. v., pp. 281, 292; Preacher's Monthly,vol. v., p. 232.