Integrity: Beyond Compliance

The most dangerous person in your organization may never have broken a rule.

I don't say that to make you suspicious of the people you work with. I say it because our work environment approaches personal integrity by targeting one kind of person: the one who breaks the rules. Compliance training shows us where the lines are. Conflict-of-interest policies make us disclose what might tempt us. Auditors test the controls. Leaders talk about setting the right tone at the top. All of it is good, and all of it assumes that when trust gets violated, a rule gets broken somewhere along the way.

If you've spent any time around accounting or fraud prevention, you may have heard the idea behind much of that thinking. It's called the fraud triangle. A criminologist named Donald Cressey studied embezzlers, people who had been trusted with someone else's money and betrayed that trust. He called them "trust violators." Cressey concluded that when three things come together, even a trusted person is likely to cross the line.

The first is pressure. Something must be pushing them: a debt, a sales target, a bonus, even a reputation to protect.

The second is opportunity. They have access, and they believe no one is watching that particular door. They think they'll get away with it.

The third is rationalization. They have a story that makes it feel acceptable in their own mind. They'll say things like, "I'm only borrowing it." "They owe me." And the self-justifying catch-all, "Everybody does it."

Companies fight fraud mostly by closing the second side of that triangle. They separate duties, require second signatures, and audit the books. The thinking is that since they can't see your pressures and they can't read your rationalizations, guarding opportunity is the most effective prevention.

I mention the fraud triangle because it exposes a blind spot in how we think about integrity. The rationalization side is the story a person tells himself so he can break a rule. So what happens when the story lets him keep every rule and sell out anyway?

One Layer Further

In my previous article about integrity, I wrote about Jeroboam, a king who made one of the worst decisions in Israel's history, and made it with complete deliberateness. His outward actions matched his inward motives perfectly. The problem was that the heart he was being true to had never been surrendered to God. Integrity is more than mere authenticity. I closed that article by saying that true integrity begins with a surrendered heart.

I stand by that conclusion. In business terms, Jeroboam was an authentic leader, true to himself and his own values, and that's exactly what failed him. But I'd like to develop the subject one layer further.

I can imagine a thoughtful reader might push back by saying: "Fine. I don't trust my own heart. I've given it to God. I've determined to only do exactly what I'm told." That certainly sounds like the right answer.

However, the person with true integrity must guard themselves against self-deception. The next Biblical character in this series could have said, almost word for word, "I did exactly as I was told by the Lord." He lost integrity while doing just that. His story shows us just how deceiving our own heart can be. His downfall was not on the second side of the fraud triangle, but on the third. Let me explain.

His name was Balaam, and he was a professional prophet. (Yes, that was a legitimate role during Old Testament times.) While Israel was camped on the plains of Moab, preparing to enter the land God had promised them, Balak, the king of Moab, looked at them and panicked. He saw a large crowd preparing to enter his territory and took it as a threat. So he did what powerful people do when they need a result. He hired an expert. Balaam had a reputation as a man whose curses worked. Balak hired him to place a curse on the people of Israel. He told the prophet: "for I know that he whom you bless is blessed, and he whom you curse is cursed" (Numbers 22:6, ESV). And Balak's messengers didn't come empty-handed. They arrived "with the fees for divination in their hand" (22:7).

Here's what makes Balaam worth your attention. Over the next three chapters, the pressure side of the triangle was in full swing. And yet he never once said a word God didn't give him. He would have passed every test a compliance officer could design.

But he still failed the integrity bar exam.

Honor as a Currency

To understand the pressure Balaam was under, you have to step into a world that kept score differently than we do.

We tend to keep money and status in separate columns. Your salary is one thing, and your reputation is another. In Balaam's world, a man of honor was a man of substance, and the substance was often literal. Honor was paid in goods, and goods put honor on display.

That was the currency exchange Balak used.

The first time his messengers came, God's answer to Balaam was clear: "You shall not go with them. You shall not curse the people, for they are blessed" (Numbers 22:12). Notice that phrase "for they are blessed." God gave Balaam a command and a reason not to go. He could not do what Balak wanted him to do. He could not curse what God had blessed.

The next morning, here's what Balaam told the messengers: "Go to your own land, for the LORD has refused to let me go with you" (22:13). I almost missed the observation the first time. The reason was gone. God had settled it with a reason, but Balaam reported it as a mere permission problem. The wording kept the door open. And by the time the message reached King Balak, it had watered down even further: "Balaam refuses to come with us" (22:14).

Balak heard exactly what any negotiator would hear: the price hadn't been met yet. So he sent "princes, more in number and more honorable than these," with a new offer: "I will surely do you great honor, and whatever you say to me I will do" (22:15, 17).

Notice that Balak never mentioned silver or gold. He offered honor, and a blank check. Balaam understood the currency of his day and translated the offer into money: "Though Balak were to give me his house full of silver and gold, I could not go beyond the command of the LORD my God" (22:18).

Balaam's mouth was saying no. But the rest of the story shows where his heart was.

The Heart That Wanted the Curse

Balaam's signature line throughout the story sounds like the words of a deeply devoted man: "The word that God puts in my mouth, that must I speak" (22:38). He says some version of it again and again. We cannot accuse him of breaking a prophet's rule. But a closer look suggests he kept a technical rule far more than he ruled the desire of his heart.

Start with what he did right after his impressive speech about silver and gold. In the very next breath he said, "So you, too, please stay here tonight, that I may know what more the LORD will say to me" (22:19). What more? God had already answered, and He had given His reason for saying no quite clearly. Balaam should have sent the messengers home, case closed. Instead, he asked them to stay the night, in case God had changed His mind.

It seems clear that Balaam's heart wanted to fill Balak's purchase order. But God's answer wasn't open for revision. In fact, He later put the correction in Balaam's own mouth: "God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind" (23:19).

Balak tried a different approach. His pagan mindset believed that moving the prophet to a new location might produce a different result: "Perhaps it will please God that you may curse them for me from there" (23:27). And Balaam kept going along. Only when it came to the third round does the text tell us, "When Balaam saw that it pleased the LORD to bless Israel, he did not go, as at other times, to look for omens" (24:1). As at other times. In the earlier rounds, he had been looking for a different answer while saying all the right words.

The clearest evidence of his heart comes from later in Scripture. Moses reminded Israel that "the LORD your God would not listen to Balaam; instead the LORD your God turned the curse into a blessing for you" (Deuteronomy 23:5). Joshua reminded them of God's own words: "I would not listen to Balaam. Indeed, he blessed you" (Joshua 24:10).

I thought Balaam was listening to God? But apparently, he was privately seeking to curse the people. Think about it. You don't refuse to listen to someone who isn't asking for something. The blessings came out of Balaam's mouth, but what he kept pressing God for was permission to utter the curse, and then take the honor that was dangling in front of him.

So here is a man under pressure. His heart wanted to do exactly what Balak was paying for, but God bound his mouth. The pressure side of the triangle was fully in place. He never technically broke the rule, but he found what every rule-keeper looks for.

The Loophole

A loophole.

The rule of a prophet was specific. God governed his mouth: "only do what I tell you" (22:20). And Balaam kept it to the letter. Every oracle he delivered came out a blessing.

But watch how Balaam defines obedience. If the rule was about what came out of his mouth as a prophet, then as long as he never pronounced a curse, he was clean. That's the rationalization side of the triangle at work, though not in the form Cressey described. Balaam wasn't telling himself a story so he could break the rule. He was telling himself a story about where the rule stopped.

And if the rule stopped at his mouth, the side door swung wide open.

After Balak dismissed him in anger, Balaam's parting words were, "Come, I will let you know what this people will do to your people in the latter days" (24:14). English translations smooth it over, but the Hebrew verb there means to counsel or advise. Balaam offered the king his advice.

Advice about what?

The next chapter tells us what happened: "While Israel lived in Shittim, the people began to whore with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down to their gods" (25:1-2). God's judgment fell on His own people for the sin of idolatry.

Numbers doesn't connect the dots right away. But in chapter 31, Moses points to the women of Midian and says, "these, on Balaam's advice, caused the people of Israel to act treacherously against the LORD in the incident of Peor" (31:16).

On Balaam's advice. The text does not record the conversation between Balaam and Balak. But the New Testament spells out exactly what that advice was. The risen Jesus speaks of "the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to put a stumbling block before the sons of Israel, so that they might eat food sacrificed to idols and practice sexual immorality" (Revelation 2:14).

Balaam never spoke a curse. Instead, he taught Balak how to get Israel to bring one on themselves.

Anyone who has worked around compliance has heard this kind of reasoning: 'Technically, the policy doesn't say I can't.' That was Balaam's rationalization. He had convinced himself that as long as the curse never came out of his own mouth, he was free to help it land some other way.

And here the story turns Balaam's own words against him. His whole defense had been "The word that God puts in my mouth, that must I speak" (22:38). The Hebrew for "word" there is davar. When Moses names the cause of Israel's disaster, the phrase translated "on Balaam's advice" literally reads "by the word of Balaam." The one word Balaam never claimed as his own was the one that did the damage.

Where the Rules Can't Reach

God's words in his mouth, Balak's goals in his heart.

That is what a divided will looks like. And it's why the fraud triangle, for all its usefulness, would not have caught a man like Balaam. The triangle treats rationalization as the thing to watch for. Balaam shows us that rationalization is only a symptom. Underneath it is a will that rules don't reach.

Go back to the very beginning of the story. When God first spoke to Balaam, He gave him two things: a command, "You shall not curse the people," and a reason, "for they are blessed" (22:12). Balaam kept the command for three chapters. He dropped the reason the very next morning. He never embraced what God wanted for Israel, and in the end, his advice brought a curse upon the very people God had blessed.

In my last article, we saw that being true to yourself isn't enough; you have to surrender your heart to God. Balaam shows us what a counterfeit surrender looks like. A person can obey God's words and still work against His purpose. Real integrity embraces what God wants as well as what He says, and it shows up most clearly in the places no rule can reach. 

We may not trade in honor the way the ancient world did, but the currency hasn't changed much. It's the title on the door, the standing you have with a client, being the expert everyone calls first. And the loopholes look much the same. So before you think passing an audit is enough, ask yourself a few harder questions.

• Where am I keeping the letter of what I'm allowed to say or do, while my heart is working toward something else?
• When I refuse something, do I mean it, or am I saying no while hoping someone will raise the offer?
• Am I obeying God's words while working against His purpose?

Integrity is not a matter of keeping the rules, but of who rules your heart.