The Old Testament book of Second Chronicles contains a well-known verse:

[If] My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

2 Chronicles 7:14

The verse is usually quoted exactly as above. But that is not completely accurate: It is the back half of a sentence that really starts in verse 13. Here’s the full sentence, with verse 13 emphasized:

If I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or if I command the locust to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among My people, and My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

2 Chronicles 7:13-14

I have to wonder why God would do that. Why would He shut off the rain, or send locusts or pestilence? That doesn’t seem like a very nice thing to do!

The Conditions

These verses are at the end of several chapters that describe King Solomon building the magnificent Temple in Jerusalem in about 960 B.C. The immediate context is Solomon’s prayer dedicating this new Temple to God and asking that He take up permanent residence there. What is striking to me is the repeated request: “If Your people sin, and you punish them for it, please hear when they pray toward this place, and forgive them.”

• If a man sins, and comes to the Temple to swear to make it right…
• If Israel is defeated by an enemy because of their sin…
• If the heavens are shut up and there is no rain because of sin…
• If there is famine, pestilence, blight, mildew, locusts, grasshoppers, plague, sickness…
• If the foreigner who travelled to worship has a request…
• When Israel goes into battle…
• When (not “if”) the people sin and are taken captive far away…

Each time, the section ends with the thought, “When they confess that they have sinned, and repent and turn back to You, and pray toward this Your dwelling place…hear their prayer, forgive their sin, and restore them to their right relationship with You.”

Afterward, God spoke to Solomon. His prayer had been heard, and his request would be granted. If the people sinned, and God punished them, He would not write them off completely. If they turned back to Him, then He would forgive them. If they followed Him faithfully, He would always be with them.

However, the answer also came with a warning: If the people rejected God to the point of worshipping other gods, “then I will uproot you from My land which I have given you, and this house which I have consecrated for My name I will cast out of My sight and I will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples.” People would be astonished at the desolation. They would ask “What on earth happened here, to cause this?!” The answer would be “They forsook their God, the One who had rescued them from Egypt.”

What I notice throughout this passage are the conditional statements:

• If the people sin, God will punish.
• If they repent and return, God will forgive and restore.
• If they reject God for other gods, the Temple — the place where God dwells among them — will be destroyed.

The History

The rest of the Old Testament shows the history of this being played out. Of the kings after Solomon, almost all were evil. They led the people away from God, and so the nation was punished. Occasionally a righteous king would arise, leading a revival and return to God with accompanying blessings. But the repentance never lasted. The people kept turning away into idolatry, and eventually Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by Babylon in 586 B.C.

Even from Babylon, though, a remnant of the people repented, and God brought them back home to build a second, smaller, Temple in 516 B.C. That second Temple was the one of Jesus’ day. It was destroyed — as He predicted — in 70 A.D. by Rome in retaliation for a Jewish revolt. That was barely 40 years after the Jewish leadership rejected the Messiah, the One whose coming was the reason their nation existed! The end result was that the nation did NOT exist again for 19 centuries, until modern Israel in 1948.

The Current Situation

What can we learn from this? Does our focal verse still apply…to anyone? Who are now “My people who are called by My name“? Does it apply to us, and to our own country? How?

God doesn’t change. His promises, and His warnings, are still in force. Any individual or nation that turns away from Him — which would include everyone — forfeits their claim on His blessings. But any individual or nation that acknowledges their sin, and turns away from it and back toward God, will be forgiven. But also, for any individual or nation that persists in rejecting God, there will come a time when He says “That’s enough!”

Even after all the centuries, the Jews are still called by His name ¹. They have now been joined by the Christians: also called, also named, also promised…and also warned ². The Church, the worldwide body of believers who claim Christ, now shares the responsibility for demonstrating Him to the world.

Looking around me, reading the news, watching in horror at some of the flagrant sin in our society, makes me think that well-deserved punishment must be coming soon. We are seeing it already in the form of disintegrating families, rampant fraud, and increased acceptance of violence. The locusts are on the way!

It’s tempting to despair of our society ever being redeemed. Collapse can seem inevitable. Our land desperately needs healing.

The Choice

We haven’t yet reached God’s “enough” point, though. We still have time. As individuals, and as a nation, led by “those who are called by [His] name“, we can “humble [our]selves and pray and seek [His] face and turn from [our] wicked ways“.

If we do so, He will “hear from heaven, will forgive [our] sin and will heal [our] land“.

The question is “WILL we do so?” Church, it’s time to get on our knees!

Here is a video of a virtual choir from the Philippines singing the anthem based on this verse written in 1973 by composer Jimmy Owens.

1. Paul goes into this in detail in Romans chapter 11.
2. For more on that joining, see article “Christianity’s Jewish Heritage“.