Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 107 · April 17
If My People
“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.”
"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."
Read the verse just before it, and the promise gets its setting back: "If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people." God is speaking to Solomon by night, after the temple has been finished, and He is talking about particular disasters. So the land being healed means the rain coming back and the locusts leaving. "My people, which are called by my name," means Israel, bound to God by His covenant. The verse after it adds "this place," the temple Solomon had just built.
Behind this promise stands an older one. Generations earlier, Leviticus 26 laid out the same pattern: "If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers," God says, then "will I remember my covenant with Jacob, and also my covenant with Isaac, and also my covenant with Abraham will I remember; and I will remember the land."
Now watch a man who actually did it. Daniel is in Babylon, and the seventy years Jeremiah spoke of are nearly over. He sets his face "to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes." This is what comes out of him: "We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled." And again: "O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers." Confusion of face means shame. Daniel is one of the most upright men in the Bible, yet he confesses as "we," for sins that were mostly other people's, and he tells nobody else to repent.
That shows what this promise has always been. God spoke it to His own people about their own sin, and the people who prayed it prayed it from the inside. Today it is often used the other way round, when someone quotes it at a nation while standing outside the "my people" of the sentence.
The four things the verse asks are still yours, and each one is something you do yourself: humble yourself, pray, seek God's face, and turn from your own wicked ways. None of them has to wait for anyone else to move first, and no country can do them for you. And the promise on the other side still stands for those who belong to Him: "then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 107 is Delivered from All (Psalm 34:17).