If My People

“For the days are coming upon you when your enemies will raise a palisade against you; they will encircle you and hem you in on all sides. They will smash you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another within you because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.” Luke 19:43-44

This is the desolate fate for the city prophesied by Jesus as he approached Jerusalem. Was punishment coming because the Jews did not recognize Him? True enough, in 70 AD., the Romans leveled the magnificent city of Jerusalem until all the buildings and the Temple were like a desert country. No more were the famed towers and colonnades and pleasant gardens. More than one million people were killed in the first Jewish-Roman war, including foreigners who visited for Passover and were trapped in the city by the revolt. According to the historian Josephus: “Round the altar the heaps of corpses grew higher and higher, while down the Sanctuary steps poured a river of blood and the bodies of those killed at the top slithered to the bottom.”

I don’t know about you but what is happening to our country seems to me to be very like a judgment. It started in January with the rumblings of Taal Volcano. We all prayed hard that it would not erupt and God mercifully gave us a miracle. Then this pandemic that has already claimed 1.3 million lives worldwide,  with 7,957 deaths in the Philippines. And then came the back to back super typhoons Rolly and Ulysses which made rivers of raging waters of our low lying cities. 

If this isn’t punishment, then it is a warning of worse things to come if we do not change our ways. We may say what can I do about what our leaders are doing? What can I do about corruption, about the denuding of our mountains, about the spread of fake news and all the selfishness. We can take to heart what God says in 2 Chronicles 7:14: “If MY PEOPLE, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” 

Are we part of a people peculiarly His own like the Jews were? Then we have it within us to change the course of a nation. God said it and I believe it.