This explicit question comes to mind every time I hear someone trying to fan up a revival or some kind of emotional experience using the 2 Chronicles 7:14 offer. Neither Canada nor the US is eligible to call itself God’s people and we do not see a snowball’s chance in hell of either nation doing anything close to humbly praying, seeking God’s face, and turning from malevolence. Since we have no “people” to answer this offer the question stands: what does a healed land look like?

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

2 Chronicles 7:14

The path to health – IF MY PEOPLE

We do not have to imagine what Solomon’s kingdom went through after hearing this invitation to healing. It was steadily downhill from there on. Steeped in Baalism and dependence on the friendship of superpower entities, Judah had the promise of restoration after exile and humiliation. The dozens (hundreds?) of times we have heard 2 Chronicles 7:14 put forward have had an impression but IF MY PEOPLE is a poor model Church health.

What is in the offer?

The humility, praying, the face, the turning, the wicked ways, the voice from heaven, the forgiveness for sins and a healthy land are all familiar. What does ring a discordant bell are the following lines to interpretation. Some things turn out to be oil on the water of gospel truth, and the rivers of repentance in particular.

• How more humble can one get than to be dependent for everything on Christ, the king of humility and justice?
• There are no wicked ways or corruption from which the disciple of Christ has not escaped. Are we going to invent new sins from whose power the great salvation does not free us? Neither Christ nor the Holy Spirit is in the sin ministry. The latter steers us away from sin.
• One individual (Moses) has had a face-to-face with Yahweh and that practically rules out any face gazing by any other ancient Israelite. We are permanently face-to-face with Christ. How else could we claim to see and be in fellowship with the Father?
• The implications of attaching the pollutions of ancient Hebrew life (Canaanite practices) to the Church’s lifestyle is enormously unseemly (the church is not a wandering assembly. She does have a journey but it is in intimate company with God, not accompanied by angels. Were we not begotten in this very world?

SInce the audience to the IF MY PEOPLE offer did not know what God’s face looked like (we know they did not know because light for the world is only in Yeshua’s face) then we are on our way to understanding why the healing of Israel has not materialized.

It is certain that face was not literal for the ancient Hebrew people. The term refers to the type of the interactions and the relationship that God wanted. The face pinpoints the distinction of God’s identity and his word. God did not call Israel to gaze on his face but to pay attention to his words. He did not call the ancients to receive his Spirit as a seal or downpayment.

If Israel knew God’s face history would have been very different: no exile, no defeat by foreign powers, no seduction into Canaanite abominations. They did not know God’s face. An extreme example of this unfamiliarity is Jonah, a prophet sent on a foreign mission, showed that God’s signature – mercy and pardon – was a foreign concept to him. God’s revelation of himself is in Yeshua’s face. Seeing God’s face means the opposite of returning to Sinai, the Exodus, and the possession of Canaan. It ought to mean a person-to-person reality: God and human.

Pardon and Productivity

Forgiving sins was God’s commitment from the Exodus to the destruction of the temple. All along the pilgrim journey God forgave sins. If he did not it meant that people were not asking for it.

“Lord, if you are pleased with me, please go with us. I know that these are stubborn people, but forgive us for the bad things we did. Accept us as your people.”

Exodus 34:9

And He did! There are 9 scenarios in Leviticus 4, 5 and 6 where Yahweh instructed Moses to assure the people that missing the mark will be forgiven.

I think it is wonderful for IF MY PEOPLE to contain a path to mercy (hileos, ιλεως) and health. However the healing of the land, if it is to be faithful to the law, has to be the same old “purge out the heathen” and “rid the camp of leaven”. Even the land of milk and honey has famines, leprosy, widows and pestilence, so its health has to be a factor of something other than fertility. That would mean that the church is tasked with rooting up weeds and, in ignorance, assaulting the grain.

The healed land in prophecy

The healing of the land or people has not happened. The first two of the three pillars of this prescription are familiar to every Christian- quite literally. Hearing from heaven and having sins forgiven are in our heritage. True, we block out the voice with our busyness from time to time and it is silly to propose that anyone can ignore the voice of the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit has the commission and all the means of heaven to help us. He is not failing to keep us for the day of resurrection. We do grieve him, but we are sealed.

The healed land revealed

It is far more likely that the picture of a healed land is something out of prophecy, which is a good thing, but land is locked in on earth or dust: what we are made of the lands where we live. There is no era in the history of Israel where this healing has covered the land and Ezekiel alone among the prophets gets down to the nitty gritty of a healed land and he does so without Gentiles! Was he kidding or just being orthodox?

Magnificence without magnifying the Lord

In the visions of God He brought me into the land of Israel and set me on a very high mountain, and on it to the south there was a structure like a city.

Ezekiel 40:2

What Ezekiel reports regarding the land, the people and the services of the priests runs counter to the other prophets and is mind-bogglingly oppositional to the Messianic mission and vision. There are more than a few empty cups on the table. If we can see no trouble in Peter telling the Holy Spirit “No” then we should find no reason to support unclean people and a Mosaic temple. Anything that revives a symbol is likely to be polluted.

Empty cups on the menu

• The temple itself. Who needs another symbol?
• The offering of animals for sins cannot be a serious treatment of human need for effective atonement
• Circumcision separates the worshippers
• Regulations about who the priests may marry cannot be anything but partiality

The healed land is definitely one of those things that the wise men and kings of old longed to see and never did, which puts it in the “we have it now” or “we have seen it now” category, or it it one of those things that has not entered into human thought.

Exodus 23:6-7

6) “In court, don’t let anyone take advantage of a person simply because that person is poor. 7) “Be very careful if you say that someone is guilty of something. Don’t make false charges against a person. Never allow innocent people to be killed as punishment for something they did not do. Whoever kills an innocent person is evil, and I will not treat a guilty person as innocent.

Those who think that justice can be met by taking into account (1) what family the accused or victim comes from (2) the good deeds of either or (3) the likelihood of personal benefit have missed the boat.

Some people never seem to wake up from their colonial imperial nightmare. They think that by calling their reptilian standards “nationalism”. The last time people ignored a nationalist with a well-armed military six million Jews died.

This is America’s hour to repent of her deeply entrenched homicidal governance and her suicidal constitution. Guns and free speech are a festering wound which make justice a rare beast, made all the more difficult to find when people who claim to have experienced divine justice and a heartless political party lined up behind the manifesto of alternative truth. Every butcher has his version of the facts. Miscarriages of justice are still familiar and despicable.

They will kill you for not supporting their bigoted religion and politics

They did it to the teacher from Galilee. He taught us that since they did it to him, they will do it to those who follow him in a hypocrisy’free way of life. We have lost count of the number of people of every ethnic group that have been put to death in a kangaroo court or extrajudicially in the United States of America. Some of the proponents of this kind of justice stand behind pulpits and call themselves pastors. Others take an oath to do public service and devote their lives to justice and consent to “fine racists” and make financial gain the reason to deny people health care. Potus45 will kill!

By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who among them considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living? for the transgression of my people was he stricken.

Isaiah 53:8

It is far more likely that people are being killed to make way for the creation of the facade of greatness than the greatness of the American dream filling America.  The technological future is not going to be a caring place.   If  we thought that the colonial race and the capitalist economy were dog-eat-dog fasten your seatbelts.

There was an establishment in New Testament times that saw the man from Nazareth make the temple and its magnificent services appear in the cold light of facts as a shameful operation.

We see shades of that low profile in the political establishments of our times. Responding with malice and out of envy is the fingerprint. The interest in saving lives seem to have never been an priority. Saving their positions for their familiy is something modern politicians have in common with biblical kings and priests. We do not have to guess who gets taxed and sent to war and prison. Homicide is in the DNA of modern nations without exception. They will do it and pretend that there is an alternate cause for the high number of people dying and in prison.

ALL KINDS OF HOMICIDE!

22. And the voice of harpers and minstrels and flute-players and trumpeters shall be heard no more at all in thee; and no craftsman, of whatsoever craft, shall be found any more at all in thee; and the voice of a millstone shall be heard no more at all in thee; 23. and the light of a lamp shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the princes of the earth; for with thy sorcery were all the nations deceived. 24. And in her was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all that have been slain upon the earth.

Revelation of John 18:22-24

1 Samuel 22:2

And every one that was in distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented, gathered themselves unto him; and he became captain over them: and there were with him about four hundred men.

If you had been anointed king while there was an anointed king, who would you choose for companions? Would you choose people who had so little backbone they do not so much as bark at the thief and robber? Who would you accept as comrades? Let me suggest an A-list.

• A priest
• A scribe
• A wise and wonderful woman
• An experienced warrior
• A creative cook
• A butcher
• A farmer
• A wealthy and prosperous landowner
• A healer
• A prophet
• The young and fit
• The successful blacksmith and tradesmen

Missing the great and famous

How did I do with the list?

God chose the unwise, the foolish things of the world, the weak things of the world, the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, not the mighty, and not the noble.

Might we be missing our calling with our choices of associations? I’ll bet! We live in a generation that thinks it must have chosen God’s way and deserves to be recognized for doing so. It really does. Where do we get our heroes? They are not from Galilee, the jungles of South America, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the refugee camps, or the reservations of First Nations. Many of us are saying what Peter said when offered food the majority of humans love and thrive on. Many of us would go hungry instead of accepting food from an unclean bird. Most of us have trouble accepting the Christ himself because of his earthly lifestyle which is still a stiff rebuke to our 21st century priorities and ideals. Christ and his disciples do not play “dance to my music and I will dance to yours “.

The assemblies of the Christian church have been deteriorating into star events where the arrangement is no longer private – churches are not publicly traded corporations, nor participatory. Someone, usually of questionable competence in the Biblical message gets up and talks at us for up to an hour and we are expected to only say amen, even when it is obvious that the speaker is regurgitating poorly processed foods and is not equipped to handle either milk or nuts. I stopped being a yes yesman when I was a teenager. The chances of me getting bogged down in digitally-enabled Christian fellowship are not good. I can assure you that hordes of yesmen are in the making and the makers will wax worse and worse. There is nothing to stop the use of the mute and disconnect button when a legit point is raised in these sessions or a question that exposes the vanity of sloganism.

Gospel Integrity is Interpretation not Repetition

I reserve the right to say “Not so” and “Where did you get that thought?” because the gospel message deserves to have men and women who know how to say both yes and no with confidence, and the cause of Christ can only be exposed to ridicule if people keep cherishing the role assigned them by the new and shameful yesmen.

A recipe for a miracle of untold misery came out of the singularity on 1600 Pennsylvania, touting the next to nil effect of coronavirus on some states. Let’s open for business.  There’s a trend there.

• What Russian threat?
• In love with the brutal Dear Leader?
• An ineffective missile strike from Iran?

Close to three hundred Americans died on April 16, 2020, and the person pledged to keep people safe evaluates the situation as “next to nothing “. He and his heir apparent are probably the only two people on the planet who literally stand next to nothing because of the vacuous nonsense that comes from inside them.

Whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth, or gives to the rich, will only come to poverty.

Prov. 22:16

The governments that oppress the people with fewer or liitle means are going to find out. If Solomon has a thing to say about rich and influential people you would think the victory and prosperity crew would find it and trot it out. Not this one. People can make up all kinds of limits, barriers, and criteria for governing how they interact with the poor, but God is not deceived by anyone’s greatness. Neither was Solomon. But we can take our evaluation of the treatment of the poor to another level. Yeshua said that the poor will always be among us. So, kiss the prosperity of all believers GOODBYE.

The other “poor” are the people in prison whom the heartless in governemnt are willing to see perish. When, not if, this happens, righteous indignation, greater than the threatened fire and fury on the PRK, will paint that nation out of its mind and out of mercy and grace.

While the bigot in the White House distracts the people with a Quixotic fight against Black and Brown people, a radical hatred of immigrants and the fundung of the World Health Organization, he continues to press more and more of the American people’s money into the pockets of the corporate giants , scores of fly-by-night corporations and shadow chuches, all of whom who have been denying people the one decent job they need. A sadder brutality is hard to conceive happening in the 21st century. Let his 1/3 base and the greedy manipulators of the common pot cling to the delusion that the crumbs in tax relief is a sign of real prosperity for the majority. They will be clinging until the political skies part and give the United States a truly democratic government. It will be the GOP that incites riots and the upheavals that will signal the end of the human era. They do not want to see either justice or prosperity.

If happy means “in a good place” what is Yeshua saying about the mourner and the persecuted? I did not see a happy word about the successful businessman, the prophet or the politician. I get that. More danger than blessing?

Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.

Matthew 5:12