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 above it and the promise gets its terms 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, about specific covenant disasters, and the land being healed is rain returning and locusts leaving. My people, which are called by my name, is Israel under covenant, and the verse after adds this place, meaning the temple whose smoke had not yet cleared.
Behind it stands the covenant text it is built on. Leviticus 26 laid the pattern out generations earlier: If they shall confess their iniquity, and the iniquity of their fathers, with their trespass which they trespassed against me. 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.
Then look at a man who actually did it. Daniel, in Babylon, with the seventy years nearly up, sets his face to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth, and ashes. What comes out of him is this: We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled. O Lord, to us belongeth confusion of face, to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers. One of the most upright men in the book, confessing in the plural, for sins that were mostly other people's, and instructing nobody else to repent.
Which shows what the promise has always been: spoken to a people about their own sin, and prayed from the inside. The commonest modern use runs the other direction, quoted at a nation by somebody standing outside the my people of the sentence.
The four verbs are still yours, and every one is something you do to yourself. Humble, pray, seek, turn. None requires anybody else to move first, and none can be performed on your behalf by a country.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 107 is Delivered from All (Psalm 34:17).