Praying the Peace of Jerusalem - Part 1 — Art Katz

Most Bibles there will be a little italicized statement before the text where there's a summary of the meaning of the text. In my New King James it says the joy of going to the house of the Lord. Anybody else have another inscription over there?

The Pilgrim's Ascent to the House of the Lord

A song of degrees. A song of ascents. There are a number of songs of ascent. That means the actual going up. I guess everybody knows a pilgrimage. There were three times in the year when Hebrew men were required to go up to Jerusalem to keep free of the solemn feast days.

And Jerusalem is a going up. If you've never been there, even by bus, the spiraling thing that brings you up. So I was glad when they said to me, let us go into the house of the Lord. Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is built as a city that is compact together where the tribes go up. The tribes of the Lord to the testimony of Israel to give thanks the name of the Lord. For thrones are set there for judgment.

The thrones of the house of David. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. May they prosper who love you. Peace be within your walls. Prosperity within your palaces. For the sake of my brethren and companions, I will now say, peace be within you.

Because of the house of the Lord our God, I will seek your good. This is a psalm of pilgrimage, literally of pilgrim saints going up. But I think that it wouldn't hurt us to consider that that's a description of our life and called also.

Are you aware of that? Hebrew speaks about being strangers pilgrims and there's another phrase in the earth, sojourners in the earth. I think there are very few saints who look upon themselves as pilgrims.

It's a word that is almost archaic, antiquated. We have so settled down and into our respective cultures that we don't see ourselves as a people in movement toward something. There's a goal. A pilgrim has a goal and he will not rest until he has attained it.

Whatever the hardship of going up, and up is always contrary to gravity. There's a tug always that seeks to hold down or to repress or to keep from going up. So may the Lord restore and give us the mindset of a pilgrim that is appropriate to the faith.

Lest we stay down or stay settled in our leaves and not realize that we're in a movement toward something. What that something is, maybe the psalm itself will help to clarify. But just get the word pilgrim in your spirit.

We're pilgrims, strangers, and sojourners in the earth. We're not fixed. We're moving toward something spiritually and actually and it would not hurt to say that it could be summed up in one word, Jerusalem.

The People of God Going Up Together

Both as an actual, physical, literal city and center, but also as a symbol and a statement of what is in God's ultimate intention. So no wonder that the psalmist says, I was glad when they said to me, let's go up.

Notice they said to me, so it's more than one who's making the suggestion and in fact going up probably and any pilgrimage, though there's great emphasis upon us individually, has to be seen also as something that's corporate.

They said to me, it's the people of God that go up. We're making it with the company of God's people, the saints of God, the Saddukim, the righteous ones. Not that they are perfect, they are imperfect, but God intends that we should be become blameless and he sees us as the righteous of the world because there's only one other alternative to that and that's the wicked.

The righteous and the wicked are the two polarities that are continually referred to in the Psalms and they are in contention. The wicked have as their object the persecution and the oppression of the righteous.

The righteous are crying out to God continually in the Psalms for the persecution and the opposition that comes to them from the wicked. I don't know that I have yet found an adequate definition for wicked, but I think we'll see as we go on in the Psalms.

It's a suggestion of those who ought to know better, who maybe even purport to be among the people of God, but have turned from the faith, betray it, and there are special hostility is to those who seek to be faithful and want to go up to Jerusalem.

So, let us go into the house of the Lord. I put the word, I don't know if you have the word into in your text. It's more than let us go to, let us go into. What about the house of the Lord? Are we talking about a building, a structure?

What is the house of the Lord that you can go into and not just come to? There's an entry into something. I'm asking, feel free to to conjecture and think the house of the Lord is what you call a pregnant phrase.

First of all, because he inhabits it, and the house of the Lord can be the sanctuary, the dwelling, the temple, or and as well the whole corporate thing that is made up by the body of Christ. It's something to come into, not just merely to approach.

It's one thing to be respectful and to stand outside and admire a building. It's another thing to enter. It's another.

Thing to be made part of. Is not the house of the Lord also heaven? I'm sorry? Is not the house of the Lord also heaven? Is that not the ultimate house for one?

Wherever the Lord is, heaven is. Okay. So, heaven is not a geographical location. It's where God is, and his sanctuary and dwelling place is heavenly. The house of the Lord is a heavenly place, and out of it radiates the light of God and the law of the Lord and the word of the Lord to the nations.

This is the locus. This is the epicenter, and we need to have a sense of this. The world is not just a bunch of this coordinate things thrown out there. There's a God who has structured it, and he has a center.

We've got to find the epicenter, the quintessence, the heart of the heart of the matter, is the house of the Lord, his designated dwelling place and presence, and in the place where he himself has designated and chosen, namely, the city of Jerusalem in the land of Israel, and within the city of Jerusalem, the holy hill of Zion.

Zion, God's Chosen Center

So, if you've not read Psalm 2, that is one of the great celebrations where he says, he holds the nations in derision, he holds them to scorn, he laughs, because they seek to break the fetters of God and loose themselves from the Lord and from his anointed one, but he holds them in derision, for I have set my king on the holy hill of Zion.

If ever you've been to Jerusalem and see the city of David, which is Zion, it's not all that much to look at, not physically, and it's only a hill. I call it a pimple. When you think of the great mountains that you would think appropriate for the locus of God's dwelling, Mount Olympus, the Greeks loved the large and the impressive and the outwardly external thing.

God chooses the foolish, the weak, the vain, the cave where David had his inception, the stable where Jesus had his inception, and the hill, the holy hill of Zion, God's choice. But the nations rage against it.

They don't like specificity. This is the scandal of specificity, is the God who chooses something explicit, Jerusalem, Zion, Israel. No, not the least of the offense of the Jew is that it shows God's chosenness, that a lot of what constitutes the animosity against Jews or anti-Semitism is the fact that it has to do with a people whom God has chosen.

And in the democratic temper that characterizes our age, we don't like God to be that specific, particularly when in being specific it omits us. Got the idea? We like equality, we like all things the same, male and female, men and women, equal rights, equal this, equal, equal, equal, but God is hierarchical.

God has a divine order, God has a crowning glory, God has a pinnacle, God has a centerpiece, and it behooves us, the church, to be in agreement with what he has chosen, Jerusalem, and not merely to admire it from afar, but to come up and into the house of the Lord.

Jerusalem's Future Restoration

Ironic to say that in one breath and to acknowledge in the other, that if there's one place I dread going in the earth, it's Israel and Jerusalem. I need almost to be dragged by a team of horses. I cannot stand to be in the city of Jerusalem.

Well, how do you explain that, Katz, having said what you've said? Well, because it is not yet a dawn for the bridegroom. It's a city with grass growing up in the cracks of the street and the jerry-built houses and hotels and motels and flashing lights and neons and places of entertainment are totally incongruous and unbecoming and unfitting the house of the Lord.

But the day will come when that city will be rebuilt upon its ruins, and one of the offenses that we bear now in the body of Christ, especially in Israel, is to say that this present city of Jerusalem will be reduced to rubble, and must be, in order to be raised up appropriately as the dwelling and the sanctuary of the Most High God, that all nations shall come to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles.

Jerusalem will be the crowning city of God in the earth. So this psalm gives us a sense of anticipation, and it can almost be read eschatologically as if it has already taken place, and that the pilgrims are going up to the city that has been rebuilt and restored, and in which now the sanctuary is actually occupied by the presence of the Living God, and that his word can go forth out of Jerusalem and the law of the Lord out of Zion.

So our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem. In a little commentary I looked at this morning, the writers give the Hebrew another statement. You know, the Hebrew lends itself to varied expressions.

It's remarkable. I don't know if that's true for other languages, but there's something about the nature of the Hebrew language. You could read it this way, but you could also read it that way, and both are true.

So this translation says, our feet have been standing within your gates, but the translation of Kyle and Dalich, one of whom was German, the other a Hebrew Christian German, who have written a definitive commentary on the Old Testament in the late 19th century, their translation reads, our feet stood still within your gates, seeming to suggest that when the pilgrims, after their long and arduous ascent up, finally come into the gates of Jerusalem, they have to stop.

There's not another step to be taken. They are so awestruck by the beauty and the magnificence, the celestial glory that is to be found in that holy place, that they don't take another step. You don't just come in and spit out your chewing gum and go like a tourist to look and gawk at this thing and that thing.

You stand transfixed at the visible beauty of the great city of God. Now if that's an allegory of the church as the house of God, may the day come when our feet stand still and look upon and contemplate the beauty of that house that is now in a pretty crummy condition, but it will be a majestic habitation for the spirit of the living God.

The Church and Israel's Redemptive Destiny

So what did we say about these days? We're seeking the definitive faith of Israel in this house, and we're going to see a mindset, a perception, an attitude of heart, the disposition of spirit that so eclipses anything that we presently know as New Testament saints.

It's a remarkable paradox that we have to reach back into the biblical past to find a statement of faith that it would be appropriate for us as the church that concludes the age, that our feet would stand still when we come within the gates.

You see how out of keeping that is with our modern mindsets? Our feet would trample. We would come rushing in. We would look for the souvenir kiosk. We would go to put our initials, carve it into some building.

When you come into the city of God, your feet stand still when you come in within the gates. You're awestruck at the remarkable beauty of the city of God. Art, I don't know the grammatical justification for the decision of the translators, but some translations put this on a future chance.

It says, our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem, having an eschatological tinge about it, so that this is something that they wouldn't just go and come from, go to and retire again, but it would be something permanent and lasting, enduring, that at length and at last their feet would stand in Jerusalem.

A hope of a transfigured that would have the full character of the promise fulfilled, praise the Lord. All the more, if the pilgrimage to that Jerusalem was sacrificial along the way. It had to do with struggle, with sacrifice, with opposition, with fighting the good fight of faith, with being bloody but unbowed, and all the kinds of humiliations and whatever it is that constitutes pilgrimage, that when you get there, you're standing not only in respect for what you see, but the price that has been extracted from the saints of God through time immemorial to finally come to that place, that the city of God is the awesome phenomenon that it is.

So what should we say? This ought to kindle our spirits and to encourage us in the pilgrimage, because we have a goal. A pilgrimage is not an aimless wandering. A pilgrimage is something set in a motion and a direction with a culmination and the goal, and that goal is the city of God, the tabernacle of God, the dwelling place of God, and the locus of God's theocratic rule over the nations.

This is not just pretty poetry, this is nuts and bolts government, the government of God over creation, because when this city is the glorious thing that will bring awe to the pilgrims who stand there, it will also at the same time be the locus of God's rule over creation, his theocratic crown, the law of the Lord shall go forth out of that Zion, but not before, not before it becomes a splendor and the glory.

So there's an incentive for our pilgrimage. We're moving towards something. It's not just a physical entity, however beautiful that might be in itself, it's the conclusion, the consummation of God's whole redemptive drama.

Paul spoke of that in these days, that Genesis 1 from 11 is creation, sin, the fall of man, the rise of the nations, the building of the Tower of Babel, the first statement of nations and defiance of God who want to get, elevate themselves even into the heavens, and then chapter 12, God's answer is with one man out of all of the Colbys, Abram, and that begins God's whole redemptive program of bringing forth out of him a nation, and through that nation the redemption of all mankind in the capital city of that nation, the holy city of Jerusalem, the city of peace.

So this is the end of the journey. Genesis 12 is beginning, and we're caught up as pilgrims in the process. So how much of the church has gone up? You hear part of the question? How much of the church has gone up to Jerusalem?

How much of the church sees itself in pilgrimage? How much of the church understands that there's a redemptive drama, a great saga that is taking place of which the church is God's principal agency for its fulfillment in the last days.

As we will see on other occasions, Israel itself will be down and out. Israel will be as dry bones. Israel will be incapable of the fulfilling of its own destiny and goal. It's the church in the nations that is God's agency for Israel's own redemption and the restoration of its principal city and the holy Jerusalem.

But how many in the church see that? How many realize that they're embarked on something and in something together? That we're in a pilgrimage and a journey toward an end. If you don't see it, really see it, it condemns your Christianity, as I've said on many occasions, to a mere succession of Sunday services.

Probably one of the greatest anomalies of the world is a church that is bored. Christians that are bored and yawn and come sluggishly to the house of God without any anticipation for one Sunday has become like the next.

Because there's no direction, there's no movement, there's no pilgrimage, there's no conservation. This is remarkably important, that we are called to go up. So I'm raising the question, how many in the church have heard that call?

And maybe we who have heard it and are in motion need to say to others, come up with us to the house of the Lord. Is it because the church is offended by Israel? The church doesn't want to accept the fact that there is a responsibility, as Paul demonstrates, that they have to be a witness to the Jews.

That there's no demonstration of jealousy. There's more a demonstration of separation rather than unity. Good, yeah. They've not chosen what God has chosen and they don't like God's choice. They would much rather had been Berlin or Geneva or New York City or some other nation, some other people.

But the Jew, the outcast, the blasphemer, the apostate, and we're to go to that nation, to that people, to that city, really searches us out and finds the deepest reservoirs of resistance to God as is expressed in our resistance to what he has chosen.

So to say to someone, come up to a Gentile, come on up to Jerusalem, is to put before them a very large thing. And their unwillingness and the dragging of their feet is a remarkable statement, not so much against the Jew as it is against God, as the God who chooses Jerusalem.

And we need to recognize that. This is the principal struggle, I would say, in the church today. The unwillingness of the church to understand and to give itself to the centrality of Israel and the chosenness of God for Jerusalem and for Zion.

Seeing itself in opposition, wanting itself to be elevated, and yet God says to that church, pray for the peace of Jerusalem, that you might prosper. Get over your hang-up and whatever it is that is deep in your Gentile gut that prevents you from honoring whom God has chosen and for being conditional and critical and saying they don't deserve it, as if we ever deserve it.

You see what that reveals? Maybe not least of God's objective in declaring his purpose, that his purpose would be according to election, is because it does peak something in man, it stirs. In fact, if you look at the whole history of redemption, from Abel to Esau and Jacob, look at Joseph and his brethren, always when there was a choice it would stir the envy and contempt.

And so God is doing something in that choice to prove the hearts of men. And when they defy and protest his choice, his freedom of that choice, they exclude themselves. It's not that his choice has excluded anyone, it's that the failure to bow before God's broadness of choice is a self-exclusion.

That's what it turns out to be. Remember the phrase, the scandal of specificity, and note the temper of modern times toward ambiguity, toward generalization. God made the male and female, but we make them unisex.

The men's hair now is longer than the woman's, and the woman is shorter and is becoming masculine. There's a blurring of the distinctiveness of what God has chosen, and a kind of a bland universality that doesn't like that which is specific.

So there's much here at the heart of the rebellion of man against God and against his design that is nowhere revealed more acutely than in the resistance to the Jerusalem that God has chosen, and to the people, Israel.

That underlies the whole conflict and struggle. We need to search our own hearts to see what residue of resistance there might be with us, and be a people who chooses what God has chosen, and not the least of which is your own chosenness.

Someone raised the question last night, many called but few are chosen. I almost felt like saying, many who refuse to be chosen, and you know that that's the condition of Israel today? They don't want to be chosen.

It has not brought them nachos and satisfaction, it's brought them tsuras, trouble and affliction. They would rather be like every other nation. They want to become the Hong Kong of the Middle East, and a great commercial center where you can get your Gucci handbags and and other stuff like that.

They don't want to be distinctive and chosen, because there's trouble there. Even the chosen refuse to be chosen, and maybe there's something like that in the church. We'd rather be a bland, I don't know what, formless Christian.

We shrink from the distinctiveness of our call, and the responsibility that goes with that acceptance, and the glory that will follow. What is specific is offensive, particularly if it's God who has specifically chosen.

Sentimentality and the Misuse of Christian Zionism

I was also going to mention too, that the romanticizing of Israel by the church, too, those of the Christians that then have some kind of romantic love for Israel, because I've been there many times, and seen the hordes of Christians that come through that worship the Jewish people, and aren't they wonderful, and haven't they done such wonderful things.

Then you've got the Christian Zionists that, being a Jewish believer, it's embarrassing, because they want to elevate you to a position which rightfully is not to be elevated into, and there's this whole kind of theology that Israel is not going to be devastated.

The church refuses to see what God is going to do. There's this other side to it. You can oppose God in your sentimentality of endorsing the right people for the wrong reasons, some humanistic celebration of their hit-squad ability, rather than their theocratic calling.

So, we'll talk about that.

Some of your church is also hypocrite, because my go-throughs, when they're in awe, but when they see a Jew on the street, man, they're not going to talk to them. I mean, they're, I mean, you know what I'm trying to say?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that not, in that, kind of being a hypocrite?

Yeah. I'm always suspicious of this love for Israel, and for the Jew there, and the complete neglect of the Jews that are in their own hometown. Why aren't they as excited for them as those that are walking?

God is saying something much more and other than that. Right. In fact, what I'm saying is, the kind of peace that God is wanting shall not be accomplished without the first being tremendous devastation, violence, sacrifice, and judgment for Jerusalem.

Jerusalem standing as the symbol of all Israel. The real peace will not come until that violence first falls. So, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem in truth is to invite and to welcome God's last day's dealings with Israel.

It's to welcome the apocalyptic violence of God's judgment upon the people and upon the land, so that the true peace can really come. Can you follow that? Yes. And us as well, right? I'm sorry? And us as well, right?

Okay, that was my next thought. If you have a heart for that, when you recognize that there's an unavoidable violence, a conflict, a devastation, an uprooting, a plucking up, and a tearing down that precedes the building and the planting for Israel, to what degree do we welcome that for ourselves?

Can we really pray for Jerusalem for that reality if we shun that reality for ourselves in our own life and ourselves as believers in the church? How much of our present devastation in our marriages and our families is the shaking up of God who is not letting us get by with a cheap peace, because we happen to be compatible, or we're doing well financially, or we have, what shall I say, established a kind of relationship that's more like a truce than it is a peace, where you can get by, where you can function, where there's no squabbling and you can go on, is not the kind of peace that glorifies God.

It will not suffice for Israel, and it will not suffice for us and for the church. So to be a pilgrim and to pray for the peace of Jerusalem means not only to welcome God's devastation, where devastation is required for them, but also for ourselves.

Can you follow that? Yeah. Or our prayers will fall to the ground. Talk about hypocrisy. They will be hollow unless we welcome for ourselves as the Israel of God, the believing community, the same thing that we're asking God for, for the Israel of God that is national.

You see the tandem thing? When you understand that, you can understand why Christians shrink from the idea that Israel shall have to face and the apocalyptic fury of God, that there will be a judgment and a destruction and a dispersal and an exile before there will be a return and a glory.

They would rather see President Israel succeed progressively than be brought down into ruin and have to be raised up as resurrection. And we have the same set of desires for ourselves. We would rather see ourselves progressively improved than to welcome the devastations that cannot be avoided, that God would raise us up, not just as an improved people, but as the people of the resurrection.

Because it's only as that kind of church that our prayers could be effectual on Israel's behalf. To pray for the peace of Jerusalem in a way that will bring the peace of Jerusalem has got to be itself resurrection prayer.

Not just wishful thinking. The wishful thinking is still at the level of humanism. And I don't think such prayers even get beyond the ceiling. But the kind of prayer that will actually affect the peace of Jerusalem will be God's own prayers prayed in God's own power by a people who have welcomed his own devastations for themselves, that they might be a people of the resurrection praying resurrection prayers and obtaining the answers that only that kind of prayer can bring.

Resurrection, Judgment, and the Valley of Dry Bones

If this is not making sense, think on Ezekiel 37 and the Valley of Dry Bones, where Israel is reduced to such a condition that they themselves say, we are cut off, we are without hope, we are as dry bones.

That is imperative for a people who are historically so self-sufficient, so enabled in themselves, and cannot fulfill their destiny on that basis. Remember the word that was in last night's speaking from Paul, predestined, a destiny that was established by God before.

Israel has a destiny, but it cannot accomplish it on the basis of its own Jewish ability. To think so as Christians is to be romantic and to be deluded. They can only fulfill it as a nation that has been raised from the dead.

To pray for the peace of Jerusalem is to pray for the death of present Israel. But how is Israel raised from the dead? Not by the Lord himself directly, but by the son of man who is commanded to speak to those bones that they might live.

And that speaking itself has got to be resurrection speaking, words charged with resurrection power, as if God himself had spoken it, that it is creative in its speaking. It actually raises the dead. So to pray for Israel's resurrection from the dead is to pray for our own.

We're so connected, our faith, our destiny, with this people. And that's why we prefer to keep it at the level of sentimentality, of romanticism, of shallow humanism, of wanting the best, of saying, let's pray for the peace of Jerusalem.

Let's take a moment of prayer. Yes, Lord, bring peace and resolve their conflicts, remove Arafat, the PLO, harmonize this established executive order. Okay, now let's turn to something else. That is not only unbecoming, it actually is a setback for the church.

To pray prayers of that kind is not only to pray prayers that are invalid, but it is to actually weaken the composition of the church itself. It is to bring delusion into the church and to make us non-church by participating in a non-prayer.

Because in our deepest heart, we're unwilling for the true peace and the thing that must proceed. When God says, pray for the peace of Jerusalem, it's not only Jerusalem that he's thinking about, it's you who he's calling to prayer.

By that invitation to pray, he's calling you to an awareness and an acknowledgement and a call of a kind that you would not otherwise have seen and from which you would have shrunk. God always has the two things in mind, Israel and the church.

It's not Israel that's being addressed here and pray for the peace of Jerusalem. They are incapable of it. They have no effectual relationship with God. Their prayers at best are mechanical, liturgical, humanistic.

He's addressing a believing people, the pilgrim people of God, namely the church. You pray for peace of Jerusalem because you're the key to their peace. Your failure to pray or your failure to pray truly leaves Israel in its destitute condition.

Your prayer is the key to its peace and its peace is the key to the peace of all nations. For when the law goes forth out of Zion, nations will study war no more and turn their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.

We're not talking about kid stuff. This is not poetry. This is a little compressed statement, but when you unpack it and come into this house, it contains the genius of the whole redemptive drama of God of which the church is the principal agent.

But a church of what kind? Not a bunch of flim-flam saints who just want to discharge a little responsibility and yes, I prayed for the peace of Jerusalem, but a church that prays with cognizance, with understanding, prays together recognizing that there'll be no peace before the necessary judgment, that to pray for the peace is to pray for the judgment.

Got the picture? And to pray for their judgment is to pray for our judgment or it's not a prayer at all. So does the church have a corporate death ahead of it? Yes, and I have never before said this at any time but now.

I'm hearing myself. I'm being instructed out of my own mouth. I'm seeing something with greater clarity than I have ever before seen it. The remarkable and inextricable union of the church with Israel, which in fact we share that destiny, we are the Israel of God, so that our prayer is the key.

But if prayer becomes a trite exercise, if it's a mere batting at the air, if it's only a cathartic experience, excuse my fancy language, you know what that means? When cathartic is when you engage in something for your own relief, a kind of spiritual masturbation where your prayer is only to relieve you of a sense of duty or obligation and you can get rid of it, I have prayed for the peace of the Christian.

When our prayer becomes that, and it is that largely now, not only is it ineffectual but it defaces the church itself. Can you understand that now? If we hear a word that is a non-word, we're sitting in a church, we're hearing a man preach and it's eloquent or impressive or sounds nice, it's biblical, but it's not a true word.

It's not that we have just been robbed of something, but we have been denuded. We have suffered loss and if we continue in that, we're going to become insensitive, all the more if we say amen to it and are inducted into a religious format by which we nod in agreement and say amen to words that are non-words and prayers that are non-prayers.

We become religious, dull, dense, and inert. We become non-church and totally incapable of being through Israel what we must. Prayer is the measure of the truth of what we are in God. You want to take your index?

You want to know where you are in God, how spiritual you are? You want to know what the truth of your life is? Measure it by your prayer and most especially your public prayer of what are you capable of then.

I'm very interested in our morning prayer times. This is more than just getting our feet wet and setting the atmosphere for the day. This is significant transaction with God and I don't know if you'll notice, there are whole pockets of silence that are never broken and may not be for the entire school.

How is that? There are certain things that are incapacitated. We're incapable of praying aloud and publicly. It's a statement of where we are in God and the reality and the truth of God in our lives, measured nowhere more accurately than in the issue of prayer.

Prayer as the Measure of Spiritual Reality

Prayer is the name of the game and I suppose you can say with that worship. Prayer, praise, worship are all statements of truth and measure of the reality of the relationship which we have or do not have with God.

If prayer can become mechanical, if prayer can become religious or we just remain silent, what do you think we will be capable of in praise and in worship? Equally, something is amiss and we're talking about not just an aspect of the Christian life but a critical center for if our prayers have become non-prayers, if feet, ineffectual.

A brother quoted the scripture today, it's the fervent prayer of righteous men and women that avails much. I'm alive today and serving you because 35 years ago some roly-poly gentile woman in Oakland, California together with her teenage daughter were praying for a Jewish atheist and radical who was on his way to death but their prayer was effectual and fervent not because they were of an Italian descent or Latin but because they were righteous.

That is to say they would not tolerate a compromised religiosity, they would not be content with feigned prayer, they would not get through the moment of prayer as an exercise or the relief of conscience that I prayed for the peace of Jerusalem, now let's go on.

They were taking the faith seriously, they were fervent, they were welcoming for themselves what they were praying for others. Something like Isaiah 35 when Israel is in the wilderness and they're downcast, they're nigh unto death, not so much for physical exhaustion though that will certainly be true but for the lack of hope.

To be in a wilderness is desolation, it's the loss of hope, it's the lack of anything familiar, where am I, how did I get here, where am I going, I'm starving, I'm thirsty, the heat is burning me up, we're extending our lives, we're at the verge of death and where is God who has allowed this calamity to fall upon us and to uproot us from Hollywood and Pasadena and Moscow and the places that we have enjoyed and find ourselves in the wilderness.

I'm speaking literally, this is going to take place for a remnant of Israel, God is going to sift them in the wilderness, they'll be nigh unto death, not only from the physical demand of it but the absence of hope, the disorientation, the dread and then God says in Isaiah 35, say to them, who's he talking to, not to those who are expiring but to another people who are not identified, who are evidently in the wilderness with them, you say to them your God will come, he will vindicate, he will save you and when they hear that it says the lame leap and the eyes of the blind are open, what a word they have received, it's more than just the pablum of well-meaning nicety, it's a word of life that's tempered and carries the resonance of God because the people who speak it have themselves passed through wilderness experience where God who seemed absent came to their rescue at the last minute, they know their God as a God who saves and they can say to the hopeless and the destitute, your God will come, he will save you, he will deliver you and when they hear that they leap, so too our prayer, no more effectual than the reality from which it springs, the knowledge of God to which it testifies, to pray for the peace of Jerusalem is not a cop-out, it's an ultimate challenge of the most ultimate kind and if it cannot be met by the church, there will be no peace either for Jerusalem or for the nation, the stakes are enormous, they are ultimate and it rests upon the response of the people who are called to pray for the peace of Jerusalem.