| “…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.” |
| —2 Chronicles 7:14 |
As most anyone knows who has come to an English-speaking country from another land and tried to learn how to speak coherently in the English language, the language that we Americans take for granted is very difficult. You can see post after post on Facebook and in blogs pointing to some of the follies of our language.
Just last evening, I saw a post on Facebook that contrasted certain English words, emphasizing how seriously wrong many Americans use them:
- not “supposably,” but “supposedly”
- not “for all intensive purposes,” but “for all intents and purposes”
- not “irregardless,” but “regardless”
- not “I could care less,” but “I couldn’t care less”
- not “expresso,” but “espresso”
- not “I seen it,” but “I saw it”
… and on and on and on it goes.
In learning English, we must understand different kinds of statements. One that has great importance is the “conditional statement.” This kind of statement is propositional—yes, “propositional,” not “prepositional,” which is something entirely different. It states a proposition, beginning with the word “if.” A conditional statement takes the form: “If you do this, I will do that.”
One of the great conditional statements in the Bible is found 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.
Spoken first to King Solomon on the occasion of the dedication of the Temple that Solomon built for God, this conditional statement is preceded by actions God might take to bring His people into line, or that God might take to call them to repentance. In other words, when God does something to get His people’s attention, the proper response for them to make is to humble themselves and pray.
I have long observed, over the course of my nearly 77 years of life, that our nation is in an ever-accelerating downward spiral. Sin is pulling us deeper into an abyss from which I sometimes wonder if we can recover. I also wonder if some of the truly horrific things that have happened to our morals and our common way of life have been allowed by God in order to call the people of our great nation to repentance.
If that is so—if God is allowing this downward spiral to get our attention—then the obvious thing for us to do is to heed God’s conditional statement above: humble ourselves, pray, seek God’s face, and turn from our wicked ways.
Perhaps, even this very day, we should begin by performing our part of these noble conditions and by asking God to heal our land. I don’t know about you, but that is exactly what I intend to do.
Based on a blog originally posted on Monday, July 30, 2018
