The Land Is in That Verse and Almost Nobody Prays for It

I want to name a wound first, because we are going to be talking about a verse that has been used as a weapon and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

There is a promise in Chronicles that people have shouted from platforms my whole life, usually with a flag somewhere in the frame, and usually to say something about a country that the verse is not saying. I have watched people hear it and go quiet in a way that had nothing to do with reverence.

So here is what I want to do with it. I want to take the word almost everybody skips, which is the last word, and ask what would happen if a person actually prayed it.

The word is land.

Not a nation. Not a headline. The ground. The dirt and the water and the road and the eleven houses you can see from where you are standing, and the people in them, most of whom you have never spoken to.

I have never once heard anybody pray that.

Where the promise was actually given

The setting matters more than anything else in this passage, and it is almost never mentioned.

Solomon has finished the temple. There has been a dedication, and fire, and a long prayer, and afterward God appears to him at night with an answer that includes the words everybody quotes.

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, King James Version)

Read what comes immediately before it, which nobody ever quotes, because it tells you what kind of trouble is in view.

Verse thirteen names drought, locusts and disease. Actual ground problems. Crops, water, sickness in a real place with real animals in it. The promise is not addressed to an election. It is addressed to people standing on soil that is not doing well.

You have a God who is interested in dirt, and He said so at the dedication of the most sacred building His people ever built, and 2 Chronicles 7 puts the healing on the land in the same sentence as the hearing from heaven, and the Spirit is the one who keeps a promise about ground from being flattened into a slogan.

He put a person in a garden before He put them anywhere else

This is not a peculiarity of Chronicles. It runs from the second chapter of the Bible.

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. (Genesis 2:15)

To dress it and to keep it. Before there was a nation, before there was a temple, before there was a single religious institution, there was a man and a piece of ground and a job.

And David says the ownership out loud in one line.

The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein. (Psalm 24:1)

And they that dwell therein. The ground and the people on it, in the same breath, in the same possession. Scripture almost never separates them, and we almost always do.

You were placed somewhere on purpose, and the place is not scenery, it is part of the assignment (Genesis 2:15). The Spirit is the one who gives a person an actual affection for a street rather than a general goodwill toward everywhere.

The mile you actually live in

Here is where I want to get very concrete, because a prayer for the world is often a way of praying for nowhere.

There is a mile around where you sleep. In it there are houses, and in those houses there are people who are having a much harder week than you know about, and there is ground that grows things or has stopped growing things, and there is water going somewhere.

Almost nobody prays for that mile. We pray for our own household, which is right, and sometimes for the far side of the world, which is also right, and the mile in between gets nothing at all.

You have neighbors nobody has ever prayed for by name, and their being unprayed for is not a judgment on them, it is just a gap, and Psalm 24 puts the world and them that dwell therein in one possession, and the Spirit is the one who closes a gap like that through somebody ordinary.

Jeremiah wrote a letter to people who had every reason to refuse this. They were captives in a city they had not chosen, in a place they had every right to resent, and he told them to pray for it.

And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace. (Jeremiah 29:7)

Pray unto the LORD for it. For the place. Not only for the believers in the place.

You have been given a mile as your own, and it was given rather than chosen, which is exactly the situation Jeremiah is writing into, and Jeremiah 29 tells captives to pray for a city they did not pick, and the Spirit is the one who turns an address into a place a person actually loves.