Numbers 24:20-25: in context

This is Balaam's final set of oracles, and after blessing Israel he turns and surveys the surrounding nations one by one, pronouncing their futures. What is striking is how uniform the futures are. He looks at Amalek and says, Amalek was the first among the nations, but its end shall be destruction. First, greatest, oldest, and yet its end is ruin. He looks at the Kenites, whose stronghold is impressive, and says, your dwelling place is secure, your nest is set in the rock, and then, in the same breath, nevertheless you will be wasted and carried away captive. Even the ones nested safely in the rock get carried off.

Then his gaze widens to the great powers themselves. Assyria, the empire that would swallow nations, will itself be afflicted, he says, by ships coming from the far western coasts, and even that conqueror comes to destruction. And in the middle of it, Balaam cries out a line that catches the weight of the whole survey: alas, who shall live when God does this? He is looking down the long corridor of history and seeing empire after empire, the first nation and the securely nested one and the dominant one alike, all arriving at the same end. None of them is permanent. Each one that climbs to the top is eventually toppled by the next, and the securely nested are carried away like everyone else. Then Balaam simply gets up and goes home, and the great powers he named went on rising and falling exactly as he said.

The sober point is the sameness of the endings. Every earthly power, however first, however securely lodged in the rock, comes to the same destruction under the sweep of God's history. What earthly power or security am I quietly treating as permanent, a nation, an institution, a position, a nest set safely in the rock, when Balaam's survey says every one of them ends the same way?