Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: October 14, 2026

"For thus says the LORD of hosts: Yet once more, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land. And I will shake all nations, so that the treasures of all nations shall come in, and I will fill this house with glory, says the LORD of hosts." Haggai 2:6-7, ESV

Three weeks since the last issue, so here's the shape of them. Sukkot on the Temple Mount set a record, and the police commander of Jerusalem said out loud that Jews are allowed to pray there now. An Omani first officer took an axe to his captain over Jordan with a hundred and seventy-four people behind him, and the Emirati prosecutors say he meant to fly the plane into the terminal at Ben Gurion. Arabia's airports and Aramco's headquarters were hit from Yemen, the Mecca pact was activated, and Pakistan's forces are in the kingdom. Iran tightened its hand on the strait, Britain named the Revolutionary Guard for a plot at the airfield the American bombers flew from, and the bombers went home. Israel marked three years since the seventh of October with no hostage left in Gaza, and this afternoon its chief of staff said the potential for escalation has grown on every front, thirteen days before an election. And the Noah's Ark drillers, who said on the thirtieth that the wood was a hypothesis they're testing, put out a release the next day saying their radar man finds the ridge isn't geological. The lab results that could say either way are still months off. We'll wait for those.

Headlines:

1. The Mount after the feast: a record, a police commander's rule, and a gate still shut on the Sabbath

Sukkot ended with a record on the Mount. By the count Arutz Sheva published, eight thousand six hundred and ninety Jewish ascents were made across the feast's intermediate days. The Temple Mount Administration put two thousand five hundred and fifty-nine of them on the last Wednesday alone, when the police held the afternoon gate open longer to fit them in. Beyadenu's own tally was higher, nine thousand one hundred and seventy-two against seven thousand four hundred and seventy-four last year. On the first intermediate day the police removed five men for saying the blessing over the four species and reciting Kaddish. On the Tuesday a twenty-three-year-old was taken to the Kishle station for carrying his palm branch and citron through the gate. Ben-Gvir went up on the Monday and said Israel is the master of the Temple Mount. The head of the Temple Mount yeshiva said, we are seeing redemption with our own eyes. The Emirates condemned the minister's walk two days after hosting the prime minister. Down at the Wall the priests blessed the crowd twice on the Monday, and the Jerusalem Post said more than fifty thousand came. We've been watching the plaza's cameras this season, but they ran only at night for the selichot, so we have no picture of that morning. A blessing is said over everyone at once, so this isn't the cumulative count we questioned at Yom Kippur. Fifty thousand is the very top of what the plaza and the streets around it can hold. Plausible, and we can neither confirm it nor knock it down. Before the feast the commander of Jerusalem's police, Avshalom Peled, told Ynet what the rule actually is now. Today we allow Jews to pray there, he said, on the eastern side under escort, with prayer sheets, prostration, and a little singing. A pilot that let fifteen men carry full prayer books in didn't create any noise, so it stayed. Prayer shawls, tefillin, and Torah scrolls are still barred. We are not at that stage, he said. On the Sabbath he was plain. Opening the Mount on Saturdays is beyond my authority, it would be a precedent, and only the political leadership can decide it. Three justices of the High Court heard the petition to open it on Sabbaths at the end of September. We've found no ruling, and the gate stayed shut on the Sabbath of Simchat Torah.

Why it's on the page. On last year's Day of Atonement fifty Jews were detained or barred for carrying prayer sheets. This fall the police commander describes prayer, prostration, and prayer books as the rule, and names the three things still barred as a stage not yet reached. The word stage is his. Daniel's last week turns on a sacrifice being stopped, which needs a sacrifice started, which needs a hill where Jews may pray and a government willing to let them. The hill has the prayer now. What it doesn't have is the Sabbath, and the one man who says he can't give it points at the politicians, and the politicians face an election in thirteen days. Direction, not fulfillment. But direction with a schedule attached.

Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? The psalm asks it of the hill they're ascending by the thousand, and answers with clean hands and a pure heart, not with a permit from the district commander. That isn't a word against them. It's a word for all of us, because none of us has those hands either, and the one who did went up that hill and was carried down it. Pray for the men who went up eight thousand times this feast, that the gate they want opened would be the one he opened. Pray for Commander Peled, who has to keep a peace nobody has written down. And pray for three justices who have a question on their desk that the Sabbath keeps asking.

"Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD? And who shall stand in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false and does not swear deceitfully." Psalm 24:3-4, ESV

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2. The Accords tested from inside, and three nations at Jerusalem's door

On the last day of September an Emirati airliner from Dubai to Tel Aviv, with a hundred and seventy-four people aboard and nearly all of them Israelis, fell fourteen thousand feet over Jordan. The Omani first officer had attacked the captain, an Indian named Smit Machchhar, and by the Emirati prosecutors' account he meant to fly the plane into the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion. The weapon was the cockpit's emergency axe. The wounded captain got the door open, passengers and a crew member pinned the man down, and pilots riding in the back landed the plane at Tabuk in Saudi Arabia. The Emirati attorney general's findings came out on the ninth. He was twenty-nine, had flown to Tel Aviv twice before to learn the route, says he acted alone, and had passed every check, including a certificate of good conduct. Reports from his student years in Melbourne say he visited radical mosques, and the Associated Press reported he'd been barred from flying in Oman over extremist views. None of that is official, and the Saudis, who hold him, have announced no charge. Israel's defense minister called it a jihadist attack. Israel's foreign ministry told its ambassadors it was an attack on Israelis, on the Emirates, and on the Abraham Accords.

Then the quarrel. Flydubai fired a large number of employees, asked to come back, and was told no by Israel's transport minister until Israel sees the whole file. The airline has suspended its Israel flights through October. Israel wants its own scanners and Shin Bet agents at Dubai's airport. By Channel 12's account the Emiratis answered, we won't do what you want, you're hurting our honor, and said they won't hand Israel the full investigation. Israeli airlines got a security arrangement and have been flying people home since the fifth. All this came in the weeks after the prime minister flew secretly to Abu Dhabi to talk about Iran with the Emirati president. A Libyan government plane, a Moroccan Hercules, a Qatari military plane, and an Emirati plane from Riyadh were on the tarmac that day. And it came after the Emirati delegation sat still in New York while most of the Arab delegations walked out on his speech. That was the speech where he told the ones still seated that any other moral cowards should leave now, called the charge of genocide the greatest lie of the century, and said that if Israel hadn't struck Iran's nuclear sites, we'd all be dead. Why it's on the page: the Accords took Abraham's name, and Genesis says the families of the earth are sorted by how they treat his seed. In three weeks one Gulf monarchy hosted Israel's prime minister, condemned his minister over the Mount, had one of its cockpits turned against a plane of Israelis, and then refused to show Israel the file. The Accords are being tested from inside, by honor as much as by hatred. Not broken. Tested. And three other nations moved at Jerusalem's door in the same two weeks. Britain's consulate in east Jerusalem, open for nearly two hundred years, stopped being a consulate on the eighth. Israel pulled its sign down, sent twenty diplomats home, and left seven in the building as a mission with a very limited scope, after Britain sanctioned settlements and trained Palestinian police. London says Israel has no legal right to do it and that east Jerusalem is occupied. On the ninth Washington sanctioned the International Criminal Court itself, not just its judges, hours after the Nobel committee gave the peace prize to a former ICC judge. The court's warrants for Israel's prime minister are part of the reason. And this morning Colombia opened its embassy in Jerusalem, the tenth country to put one there, reversing the break its last president made. By evening Egypt had called it a blatant violation and the Arab League had asked Colombia to reverse it. Three nations, three directions, one city.

I will bless those who bless you. The promise was made to a man who died owning one field, and every nation since has been sorted by it whether it knew or not. Pray for Captain Machchhar, who opened a cockpit door with an axe wound in his head. Pray for the man in a Saudi cell, whatever moved him, and for his family in Oman. Pray for a hundred and seventy-four people who will never buckle a seat belt the same way. And pray for the prince in Abu Dhabi, that the God of Abraham, whose people keep landing on his runways, would make himself known to him, and that honor wouldn't break what hatred couldn't.

"I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." Genesis 12:3, ESV

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3. Arabia under fire: a week of airports, and the Mecca pact answers

The war the Houthis have fought with Saudi Arabia since the truce collapsed in July came north in stages. On the twenty-fourth of September they fired at Riyadh and at the Aramco terminal at Yanbu, and the coalition shot down six ballistic missiles aimed at Taif and Yanbu while civil defense warned Mecca. Pakistan's defense minister said whatever means Pakistan has are available to the Saudis. This month it came to the kingdom's airports. On the sixth and seventh, missiles and drones killed two women at Abha and a man at Riyadh's King Khalid airport. On the eighth two strikes on King Khalid killed three Saudis, one of them a Saudia captain, and damaged a parked Airbus. On the tenth a ballistic missile hit a crowded terminal and killed at least twelve, among them an American, and wounded three hundred. On the eleventh Terminal 4 burned again and a Pakistani resident died, and Dammam's airport was hit. Overnight on the thirteenth missiles and drones went at Aramco's headquarters in Dhahran. The coalition says it shot down three missiles and two drones, falling fragments wounded four people and damaged fifteen homes, and Aramco told its staff to work from home. Riyadh's airport is shut until the seventeenth. The Houthis have told civilians to stay away from every airport and oil site in the kingdom. It was the deadliest week in Saudi Arabia in more than a decade.

The kingdom's answer came through the pact it signed in Mecca in August. On the fifth Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey activated it, and Pakistan's army spokesman told CNN, the forces of Pakistan are already there, and the rest is classified. The New York Times reported Pakistani jets striking the Houthis. Islamabad called the story fabricated and said its troops won't cross into Yemen. France is putting soldiers and radars at Yanbu, and Britain's tanker aircraft has flown fourteen missions for the Saudi jets. The Saudis are hitting Yemen by the dozens of strikes a day. And the President, asked whether America would join, said, we may, we're going to look at it. Then he said the Houthis are misbehaving very badly and had told Washington they'd rather not fight it, and he sent two more Patriot batteries. Why it's on the page: Isaiah has an oracle for Arabia, and it's about caravans fleeing the drawn sword and the press of battle. Ezekiel has Sheba and Dedan standing apart from the northern army, asking what it has come for. This month the peninsula was pressed from Iran's side, and it answered by binding itself to Pakistan and Turkey rather than to Washington, which is still looking at it. That's a realignment of Ishmael's house, and it happened in a week. Direction, not fulfillment.

To the thirsty bring water. Meet the fugitive with bread. That was the Lord's word to the people of Tema when the sword came through Arabia. Pray for the dead of Riyadh, who came from six countries and had tickets home. Pray for a Saudia captain's family. Pray for the Pakistani soldiers sent to stand under the missiles of men who share their faith. Pray for Yemen, where the fighting that produced this has driven hundreds of thousands from their homes and nobody is counting the dead. And pray for the kingdom that holds Mecca, that the God of Abraham would be found by Ishmael's sons too.

"The oracle concerning Arabia. In the thickets in Arabia you will lodge, O caravans of Dedanites. To the thirsty bring water; meet the fugitive with bread, O inhabitants of the land of Tema. For they have fled from the swords, from the drawn sword, from the bent bow, and from the press of battle." Isaiah 21:13-15, ESV

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4. Iran: the strait tightened, the bombers sent home, and a ram that does as it pleases

The seven-day map Iran laid on the table at the end of September was rejected the next day, answered the week after, and has gone nowhere since. When Israeli television reported in between that the President was weighing sanctions relief, he wrote in capital letters that he had offered them nothing. On the fourth the speaker of Iran's parliament said Washington had sent proposals through a mediator, and that the era of dictating unilateral demands is over. The strait won't open until Iran's seven conditions are met, he said, and Iran would both fight and negotiate. Iran now wants the collapsed June memorandum back and American backing for a shipping arrangement it made with Oman. The Vice President said Iran must make a meaningful cut in enrichment, which is softer than zero. On the eighth the President wrote that the discussions are productive and that America will not be attacking Iran at any time before the midterms on the third. Iran's atomic chief answered that Tehran won't give up enrichment or its stockpile. The same day the Treasury blacklisted seventeen more of Iran's shadow tankers and said it's starving the regime of the money it uses for war. Nobody expects a deal before Israel votes on the twenty-seventh or America on the third. Meanwhile the strait got worse. Twelve ships were attacked in the first week of October, the most in any week of the war, and fifteen more since, two of them yesterday. A container ship sank south of the strait today, by a mine says the Guard, by a projectile says Singapore. Iran's navy announced new units east of the strait to watch traffic. An official told Reuters the new tactics are meant to shape the American midterms. The Guard's security chief said, the strait is under Iran's control, and we manage it. Central Command says it has turned around a hundred and thirty-five ships, destroyed ten of Iran's tankers, and escorted nineteen million barrels out in a single day. Oil is a hundred and six dollars. The Saudis, with their Red Sea pipeline knocked out by drones from Iraq, have been loading crude at Ras Tanura and sending it out through the strait Iran says it controls, a few tankers at a time.

On the second the President sent a second carrier group and two thousand Marines, which will put twenty thousand Americans in the region by the end of the month. He has said the strikes could resume after the midterms, that with Iran, I don't think you could ever have peace, that the decision would come the easy way or the hard way, and on Tuesday in Alaska, wait until you see what we do to Iran, they're waiting. This afternoon Israel's prime minister told Army Radio that a strike on Iran in the coming days is not convenient for us, and that Israel's enemies want to attack in these days and there are indications of it. On the last day of September the coalition that has fought in Iraq since 2014 ended its mission and left, Britain's troops with it, so the ground next door to Iran has fewer Western soldiers on it than at any time in twelve years. In Britain five men were arrested with cans of gasoline outside the airfield the B-1s fly to Iran from. The bombers were flown home on the fourth. On the twelfth Britain's prime minister told the Commons the plot was almost certainly directed by the Revolutionary Guard, sanctioned two Iranians, and summoned the ambassador, and thirty-two governments signed a statement backing him. Tehran called it a clumsy false flag. Seven men are on bail and none is charged. At home the regime hanged five men in one week for the January protests. Amnesty counts thirty-four for that uprising alone. Why it's on the page: Daniel saw a ram charging west, north, and south, and no beast could stand before it, and it did as it pleased and became great. This month Iran pushed west at Arabia's airports, north at an English airfield, and south through Yemen, and the strait it holds got tighter while the men who could stop it campaigned. The ram has its day in the vision. It isn't the last animal in the chapter.

Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other, declaring the end from the beginning. The men in Tehran who said the strait is theirs, and the men in Washington who said wait and see, are both speaking lines in a story whose ending was declared before either capital was built. Pray for the crews of the ships, who have no vote in any of this. Pray for the sailors on their way to the Gulf and the airmen flown home from England. Pray for the families of five hanged men and the scores Amnesty says are next. Pray for Lida Alexani, a grandmother of fifty-eight who was summoned on the ninth to begin thirteen years for deviant proselytising, which means a house church, while her husband Joseph serves sixteen in Evin. Pray for Mahboubeh Shahbani in Vakilabad prison, sentenced to death for carrying wounded protesters on her motorcycle, who asked from a prison phone that someone do something. And pray for the church in Iran, which has outlived shahs and will outlive this.

"I saw the ram charging westward and northward and southward. No beast could stand before him, and there was no one who could rescue from his power. He did as he pleased and became great." Daniel 8:4, ESV

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5. Israel's borders in the third year: no hostage left in Gaza, and a warning thirteen days out

Israel marked three years since the seventh of October with no hostage, living or dead, left in Gaza, the first such anniversary. At the Nova site the families stood together at twenty-nine minutes past six. The prime minister said Israel had turned the tables and that four thousand of the six thousand who crossed that morning are dead. None of them have immunity, he said, and Hamas may try something before the election and would get an overwhelming answer. The Gaza ceasefire turned a year old on the tenth. Its second phase, withdrawal for disarmament, hasn't started. Israel holds about sixty percent of the Strip against the plan's fifty, the committee meant to run Gaza sits in Cairo because Israel hasn't let it in, and about two hundred and thirty aid trucks a day go in against the six hundred promised. Israel's strikes go on at two or three a day, and the Gaza count puts the dead since the ceasefire at about fifteen hundred. On the twenty-ninth of September one of them killed Izz al-Din al-Beik, who had commanded Hamas's northern brigade since November 2023, and another killed the man who ran the money exchange that fed the armed wing. On Wednesday one killed a woman in Rimal whose small daughter was pulled from the fire. The same morning Walla reported that American officials and the Board of Peace are preparing to survey Gaza for sites where Hamas men could hand in weapons, while Israeli officers say Hamas is rebuilding and the Strip is closer to escalation than to an arrangement. Three weeks earlier one of the board's own officials told the Times of Israel that Israel's growing support for moving Palestinians out of Gaza makes the board's job harder and is impractical besides, since no country will take people it believes can't go home. In Lebanon the prime minister sat with the Secretary of State in Washington on the twenty-eighth of September, asked for a clear timeline for Israel's withdrawal and a way to verify it, and went home without a date. That morning the army finished its work in Mansouri near the coast and said it had destroyed more than six hundred Hezbollah sites and eight tunnels there. On the twelfth the European Union voted a three-year mission to train the army. The United Nations force leaves on the last day of December, nobody has agreed what replaces it, and the talks with Israel have stalled with no date set. In Syria the shelling of the Quneitra countryside and the house searches in Daraa went on, and at the end of September a valve blew on the gas line feeding Syria's power plants, sabotage by Damascus's account and a theft gone wrong by a local oil man's. At home the polls have the two blocs tied at fifty-two seats each. This afternoon the chief of staff said the potential for escalation has grown. The army has reinforced every front and put a division into the West Bank, he said, and it's ready to go over to the offensive against anyone who tries. Thirteen days to the vote.

Why it's on the page. Moses says the Most High fixed the borders of the peoples when he divided mankind. Three of Israel's borders are held by Israeli troops on the far side of the line, and the fourth is a strip of Gaza with a yellow line drawn through it. The men responsible for all four are asking the voters to keep them there. Whether the lines move after the twenty-seventh or not, the hand that drew them hasn't.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases. His mercies are new every morning. The Nova families said that with their bodies at twenty-nine past six, standing where it happened, because a morning came again. Pray for them. Pray for a little girl in Rimal who will remember a fire. Pray for the Lebanese soldiers about to be handed a border with no peacekeeper on it. Pray for the reservists sent back into the West Bank this week. And pray for a nation choosing a government under a warning, that it would choose with clear eyes and that the warning would come to nothing.

"When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God." Deuteronomy 32:8, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Let us pray for the Mount after the feast: for the thousands who went up, for a young man held for a palm branch, and for the guards of the Waqf. For the police commander who says plainly what he allows and what he can't, and for three justices with a Sabbath on their desk. Ask that the gates would lift up their heads for the King of glory, and that those who ascend would meet him.

"Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of glory? The LORD, strong and mighty, the LORD, mighty in battle!" Psalm 24:7-8, ESV

Let us pray for the Accords in their testing: for Captain Smit Machchhar, for the man who attacked him and for his family in Oman, and for the hundred and seventy-four. For two governments arguing over scanners and honor, and for the Emirati president who gathers Israel's enemies and Israel's prime minister under one roof to talk about Iran. Ask that the families of those nations would remember and turn to him, since kingship is his.

"All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the LORD, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. For kingship belongs to the LORD, and he rules over the nations." Psalm 22:27-28, ESV

Let us pray for Arabia under fire: for the families of the dead at Riyadh's airport, for the wounded, for Aramco's staff sent home, and for the air defense crews on both coasts. For Pakistani and French soldiers in a land not theirs, and for the people of Yemen on both sides of the line. Ask that the flocks of Kedar and the rams of Nebaioth would one day come up with acceptance on his altar.

"A multitude of camels shall cover you, the young camels of Midian and Ephah; all those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall bring good news, the praises of the LORD. All the flocks of Kedar shall be gathered to you; the rams of Nebaioth shall minister to you; they shall come up with acceptance on my altar, and I will beautify my beautiful house." Isaiah 60:6-7, ESV

Let us pray for Iran and the strait: for the seamen struck at night, for the negotiators carrying paper nobody will sign, for twenty thousand Americans in the Gulf by month's end, and for the seven on bail in England and whoever sent them. For the families in Mashhad, Shahr-e Kord, and Esfahan who buried sons this month, for Lida Alexani and Joseph Shahbazian, and for the believers in Iran. Ask the one who declares the end from the beginning to accomplish his purpose there and to spare the people under it.

"remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose," Isaiah 46:9-10, ESV

Let us pray for Israel's borders in the third year: for the Nova families, for the child in Rimal, for the Lebanese army and the peacekeepers packing up, for the villages of Quneitra, for the reservists in the West Bank, and for a country voting under a warning. And for the church this month. For Pastor Wang Yi of Early Rain, whose congregation says his family has seen him fewer than five times in eight years and can't find out whether he's sick. For Preacher An Yankui, taken from his home in Taiyuan. And for Plateau State, where Fulani gunmen killed twelve Christians in Barkin Ladi at the end of September and six more in Riyom and Bokkos on the first weekend of October. Ask for mercies new every morning for all of them.

"The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." Lamentations 3:22-23, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: September 23th, 2026

"But the LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him." Habakkuk 2:20, ESV

On the Day of Atonement more than two hundred Jews prayed for four hours on the Temple Mount from prayer books the police themselves handed out, and this morning the High Court refused to open the hill on the Sabbaths of the feasts, so the first day of Sukkot will find it closed. On Israel's borders the fighting was quieter than the speeches, as the nations went to New York and said what they think of Jerusalem from the podium, the Board of Peace put a price on Gaza, and a father of six was shot dead at a spring. The war with Persia produced a veto at the Security Council, a missile over Riyadh, and three hours of messages between American and Iranian envoys on the day the President spoke of annihilating Iran. And a drill bit broke in eastern Turkey, and the press release says it may have struck Noah's Ark. We'll keep this short. There's teaching to get to.

Headlines:

1. The Day of Atonement on the Mount, and the court says not on the Sabbath

On the eve of the fast the national security minister went up for the afternoon prayer with about five hundred and seventy Jews, by the Palestinian count. On the Day of Atonement the gates opened at half past six. Six hundred and fifty-four Jewish ascents were counted. More than two hundred people prayed together for about four hours, led by the head of the Temple Mount Yeshiva, from full prayer books the police had approved and handed out themselves. A year ago fifty Jews were detained or barred for carrying prayer sheets. Jordan's religious trust called it a flagrant violation. The Palestinian Authority called it religious warfare, and Saudi Arabia and Egypt condemned it. This morning the High Court refused to order the Mount opened on the Sabbath days of the feasts. It stays closed to Jews on the first day of Sukkot this Saturday. A three-justice panel hears the case next Wednesday, and the state must answer by Monday.

The Wall had its largest night. The foundation that runs it put the final selichot crowd on Yom Kippur eve at nearly one hundred and fifty thousand. We've been watching the plaza's cameras this season, so a word on that number. At half past midnight the plaza was full wall to wall, and full is real. But the plaza is about ten thousand square meters, and packed solid it holds roughly forty thousand. The figure is everyone who came and went across the night, plus the alleys and the screens half a mile away. That's what the foundation's own phrase, arrived over the course of the night, has always meant. Why we watch the Mount hasn't changed. Daniel's last week turns on sacrifice being stopped, which assumes it has started. Every step on that hill this fall has been toward starting, and the police handing out prayer books on the Day of Atonement is the largest step yet. It's direction, not fulfillment.

On this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. The men on the Mount on Monday recited the service the high priest performed on that hill, step by step, with no temple, no priest, and no sacrifice. Hebrews says Christ didn't enter a holy place made with hands, and didn't offer himself year after year. He appeared once for all to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. That happened a few hundred yards west of where they stood. It isn't a reason to look down on them. It is the reason to pray for them, for the Muslim guards who watched, for the police, and for three justices who must rule on a closed gate.

"And it shall be a statute to you forever that in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict yourselves and shall do no work, either the native or the stranger who sojourns among you. For on this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. You shall be clean before the LORD from all your sins." Leviticus 16:29-30, ESV

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2. Israel's borders, argued from a podium in New York

The borders were quieter than the podium. In Lebanon there were no new talks with Israel. The president went to Paris instead, where France and Jordan agreed to strengthen the Lebanese army and plan for the end of the United Nations force in December. In Gaza an army engineering vehicle was blown up on the Israeli side of the line on Monday night, and the army struck Hamas sites in reply. A drone strike in Gaza City killed two on Tuesday, and the search of last week's collapsed building ended with twenty-one dead. On Wednesday the Board of Peace priced its plan in New York: sixty-six projects and two and a half billion dollars over six months, with a five-step disarmament and troops from Kosovo, Morocco, Albania, and Kazakhstan. None of it's deployed, and the envoy said again that all of it hinges on Hamas giving up its weapons. In the West Bank on Sunday a father of six was shot dead at a spring where he had gone to immerse before the fast. The gunman was caught in a Ramallah hospital, and Hamas praised him. Syria's president said a year of talks with Israel reached ninety percent of an agreement before Israel pulled back, and that nothing moves until Israel returns to the 1974 line. Fourteen settler activists crossed into Syria to found a settlement and were carried home by the army.

From the podium, Qatar's emir said genocide. France's president called the peace a spectacle that shames us all. Turkey's president spoke of villages destroyed in daylight, and Jordan's king called Israel's presence in Syria a threat to the region. The American president mentioned Israel once in thirty-eight minutes. Why this is on the page: Zechariah says all the nations of the earth will gather against Jerusalem. The General Assembly is the closest thing yet that the world has to that gathering, and this week it met and said what it thinks. That isn't the siege. It's the sentiment a siege will need, on the record from five capitals, with Washington quieter than in memory. Direction, not fulfillment.

Isaiah says there'll one day be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and Israel will be the third with them, a blessing in the midst of the earth. The prophet put that promise in the same book as his judgments on every one of those peoples, and he didn't see a contradiction. Neither should we. So we pray both ways. For a widow and six children near Ramallah who will keep the feast without a father. For the two families in Gaza City who buried their dead on Tuesday. For a Lebanese president asking Paris for a timetable nobody can give him. And for every head of state who spoke this week, that the God who set their borders would make them look up.

"In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and Assyria will come into Egypt, and Egypt into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians. In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the LORD of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance." Isaiah 19:23-25, ESV

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3. Persia: a veto, a missile over Riyadh, and three hours in New York

Three things moved. On Thursday Russia and China vetoed the American resolution to keep alive the panel of experts that monitors the Iran sanctions. The vote was eleven to two, the panel's mandate dies on Saturday, and Iran's mission thanked both capitals. On Saturday at dawn Saudi air defense shot down a ballistic missile over Riyadh, the first fired at the capital in this war, while smoke rose from the fuel tanks at the airport. The king said the attempt on Mecca had provoked Muslims everywhere. The Saudis struck the port of Mokha, Britain agreed to send a refueling aircraft, and the G7 told the Houthis to stop and Iran to stop arming them. Washington, which met the Houthis in Muscat the week before, declined the crown prince's request for strikes. On Tuesday the President told the General Assembly he must decide whether to make a deal or annihilate the Islamic Republic, and predicted a deal after the election. The Iranian delegation walked out. His envoys spent three hours the same day trading messages with Iran's foreign minister through Qatar. Iran's terms came out on state television: lift the blockade, release the frozen assets, end the war on every front. An official told Reuters the strait could reopen within seven days on those terms. One ship passed through it on Saturday, against eighty-five a day before the war. Today Iran's president held up photographs of dead children and said, they hit us, but we did not bend the knee. At home the regime announced on Saturday that it had executed a man for giving Israel the location of missile sites near Isfahan.

Why it's on the page: two roll calls. At the Council, when the question was Persia, Russia and China voted as one for the third time in a month, and the only body that watched Persia's weapons trade died on their hands. Ezekiel's Persia marches with the prince of the north, and that seating is now the ordinary business of the United Nations. In Arabia, Ezekiel has Sheba and Dedan, whom the teachers place in the peninsula, standing apart from the northern army. This week the kings of that peninsula had a missile over their capital and a drone at their holiest city, both from Persia's side, and they asked Washington and Israel for help. They're choosing where to stand in that chapter. Direction, not fulfillment. A deal after the election is a prediction, not a date.

Paul says to pray for kings and all in high places, so that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life. The men in that room on Tuesday, on both sides of the mediators, will decide whether the strait opens and the bombers stay home. Pray for them. Pray for the air defense crews who shot down a missile over a city of eight million, and for the fishermen of Mokha under the Saudi jets. Pray for the sailor still missing off Oman. And pray for the Christians of Iran, who watched their president hold up photographs and know whose children aren't in them.

"Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish and all its leaders will say to you, ‘Have you come to seize spoil? Have you assembled your hosts to carry off plunder, to carry away silver and gold, to take away livestock and goods, to seize great spoil?" Ezekiel 38:13, ESV

Sources:

4. A drill bit broke in Turkey, and the press release says it may be the ark

This morning a group called Noah's Ark Scans announced by press release that it has begun core drilling at the Durupinar formation, a boat-shaped ridge of rock about twenty miles from Mount Ararat, under a permit held with a Turkish university. It says the drill reached about sixty feet, that at about fifteen feet the bit broke on a layer so hard it may be petrified wood, that the cores show organic material and several cavities and no bedrock, and that laboratory results come this winter. The group's fundraising director told a British paper that when they're done, university curricula will need to be rewritten and Darwinism will be dismantled. The site has a history. A shepherd found it in 1948. An army captain photographed it from the air in 1959. An expedition dug for two days in 1960 and found soil and rock. Ron Wyatt promoted it from 1977, and his partner David Fasold scanned and drilled it in the 1980s, then went back with a geologist, changed his mind, and in 1996 co-wrote the peer-reviewed paper that identified the ridge as an eroded fold of sediment. Andrew Snelling, the geologist at Answers in Genesis, which believes in a literal ark and would welcome finding it, examined the site in 1992 and reported that it's a natural formation. His ministry still lists it under arguments Christians should avoid.

What to do with it, since it'll be in your feed soon if it wasn’t already. Find the source line first. The announcement comes from the people drilling and was written by the people raising the money, and every claim in it carries a hedge: possible, may, interpreted as. A drill bit breaking on a hard layer is a drill bit breaking on a hard layer. The samples that could settle it are in a lab until winter. Remember who first sold this site. The men behind it also announced Sodom, the Ark of the Covenant, the real Mount Sinai, and chariot wheels in the Red Sea, and the noise they made has done real damage to serious study of the Bible's places, including the honest case for a Sinai in Arabia. When a young-earth geologist and a secular one look at the same ridge and agree it's a ridge, trust that.

By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark. The verse praises a man who built on a warning nobody could see, not a man who found something. If that ridge turns out to be timber, praise God and expect the world to shrug, as it shrugged at the empty tomb. If it turns out to be rock, nothing in Genesis moved, because nothing in Genesis was standing on it. One thing that interests me: the ark was covered inside and out with pitch, and the Hebrew word for that pitch, kopher, is the same root as the word for atonement. There's a lot of symbolism in that, and I do wonder whether covering the inside as well was meant to preserve it. Perhaps it'll be found someday. Whether it's or not, we don't need it to believe. Jesus said the days before his coming would be like Noah's days, and the likeness he named wasn't a boat. It was people eating and drinking and unaware until the door closed. So don't pass along the drill bit. Pass along the warning.

"By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith." Hebrews 11:7, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Let us pray for Jerusalem going into Sukkot: for the police who will keep a gate closed on Saturday and open on Sunday, for the men who prayed the atonement service with no altar, for the guards who watched them, for the court that must rule, and that people on both sides of the wall would find the priest who went in once and came out alive.

"Then everyone who survives of all the nations that have come against Jerusalem shall go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Booths. And if any of the families of the earth do not go up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the LORD of hosts, there will be no rain on them." Zechariah 14:16-17, ESV

Let us pray for the borders and the podium: for a widow near Ramallah and her six children, for the dead of Gaza City, for a Lebanese army being asked to do what no one in Beirut can order, for the soldiers who fetched fourteen settler boys home from Syria, and for the kings and presidents who spoke about Jerusalem this week. And for a widow in Plateau State, Nigeria, whose husband, a Baptist pastor, was shot dead the same Sunday morning on the road to his church, with their son wounded beside him. Ask that they would all be still and know who's God.

"Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!" Psalm 46:10, ESV

Let us pray for the room in New York and the sky over Riyadh: for the negotiators, for the air defense crews and the airport fuel handlers, for the families of Mokha, for the sailor missing off Oman, and for the church in Iran that lives under the throne its president defended today. Ask for a quiet and peaceable life for people in five countries who didn't vote for any of this.

"First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way." 1 Timothy 2:1-2, ESV

Let us pray for discernment in a week when a headline will ask us to believe before we see: for the geologists in Turkey, that their cores would be read honestly whatever they hold, for believers who will be embarrassed by a claim they repeated, and for our own house, that we would build on the warning and not on the find.

"The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." Deuteronomy 29:29, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: September 16th, 2026

"It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be lifted up above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it, and many peoples shall come, and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem." Isaiah 2:2-3, ESV

Six topics this week, and the first moved the way we said to watch. On the second morning of Rosh Hashanah a few hundred Jews prayed on the Temple Mount for close to four hours, shofars were sounded during the service, and the police removed the men who sounded them. On Israel's borders the army blew up a ridge in Lebanon and killed the commander of Hamas's Rafah brigade, and the talks that were supposed to happen in Rome did not. The war with Persia expanded to the Red Sea, where Iran's proxy now holds both shores of the second strait, and a human rights report counted the regime's executions of its own protesters. Because this letter is named for men who knew what to do, there is a section on what two closed straits, a drought, and a winter mean for a household in the Ozarks, and what to do about it. The nations put two documents on paper, in Cardiff and New Delhi. And in Nigeria a count came in: more than three thousand Christians killed in eight months.

Headlines:

1. The horn sounded on the Mount, and eight men were led off

Last week we said Sunday morning was the morning to watch. Here is what happened. The Mount stayed closed to Jews on the Sabbath, the first day of the feast, as it always is, and the High Court never set a hearing before the holiday. On Sunday morning a few hundred Jewish worshippers went up, between two and six hundred depending on who counted, and prayed for close to four hours, the Musaf service included. Shofars and small silver trumpets were carried in against the rules and sounded together during that prayer, with a second shofar answering from outside the eastern wall. The police removed eight men for the sounding and two more for prostrating, opened administrative proceedings against them, and said afterward that they facilitate freedom of worship for all faiths at holy sites while maintaining the rules. Jordan's foreign ministry condemned it the same day; Egypt, Qatar, and the Palestinian Authority followed. The court finally heard the Sabbath petition this morning, and the state asked for more time. Yom Kippur begins Sunday at sundown, and as of this writing nobody has announced what the gates will do on it, or on the Sabbath that opens Sukkot.

Put this beside the last two months and the direction is clear: a prayer book in August, a hymn sung two weeks ago, a horn this week, and each time the police enforce a line one step beyond the last one. A lone activist has sounded a shofar up there before and been arrested for it; what was new on Sunday was a service of hundreds with the horns sounded inside it, as part of the liturgy of the day. The arrangement on the hill is now that Jewish prayer happens and the shofar is punished, which is stranger than either full prohibition or full permission, and it probably will not last. Why we watch it has not changed. Daniel's seventieth week hinges on sacrifice and offering being stopped, Jesus told us to watch for the abomination standing in the holy place, and Paul's man of lawlessness takes his seat in the temple of God, and every one of those assumes Jewish worship on that mountain first. A horn is not a sacrifice, and I am not going to tell you a countdown started on Sunday. But the Feast of Trumpets is the one feast whose commandment is a sound, and the sound was made in the place the commandment was written for. Notice too who spoke afterward: Jordan, which claims custody of the compound, and the Palestinian Authority, and not Washington. Zechariah said Jerusalem would be a cup of staggering to the surrounding peoples first, and it is the surrounding peoples who staggered this week.

In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, a memorial proclaimed with blast of trumpets. That is nearly the whole commandment for the day: rest, a sound, a gathering, an offering. It is a memorial, a sound to remember God by, and the tradition has argued for two thousand years about what exactly is being remembered, while the New Testament tells the church what the trumpet ahead of us means: the Lord himself will descend with the sound of the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise. Eight men were led off that hill on Sunday for making a sound to remember God by, and the officers who led them off were keeping a peace that has thousands of lives behind it. I can pray for both without pretending either one is the last trumpet, though the service that day does end with a final blast that tradition calls the last trumpet. Pray for the men in the proceedings, for the police who have to hold that line on Yom Kippur, for the Waqf guards whose job is to be offended, and for a city that cannot agree who may make a sound to God in it, though the muezzin calls from that same hill five times a day. The psalm calls his holy mountain the joy of all the earth. It is not the joy of anyone in Jerusalem this week, and that gap is the thing to pray about.

"Speak to the people of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe a day of solemn rest, a memorial proclaimed with blast of trumpets, a holy convocation." Leviticus 23:24, ESV

"Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King." Psalm 48:1-2, ESV

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2. Israel's borders: a ridge blown up, the Rafah commander, and talks that did not happen

Israel dug in on two borders this week, and the talking stopped. In Lebanon the army finished the Ali al-Taher story by blowing up the tunnel complex under the ridge, eleven hundred tons of explosives felt across the south; the Rome talks slipped to October, the two ambassadors met in Washington instead and called it positive, Lebanon's president said there will be no new negotiations for now, Hezbollah refuses any at all, and the Prime Minister and defense minister said in writing that the army stays. In Gaza the plan is stalled until Israel's election, by the account of the board that runs it; the army killed the commander of Hamas's Rafah brigade on Tuesday, and before dawn today a building cracked by earlier strikes came down on the families sheltering in it, twenty dead by the morning count. On the Syrian line nothing changed.

What matters here for our purposes is not the tonnage. It is that Israel now says out loud, on two borders, that it is not leaving, and that both northern neighbors have stopped talking. Ezekiel's picture of the last invasion is a people dwelling securely in unwalled villages, without bars or gates, and Paul's picture of the day of the Lord is people saying peace and security when there is neither. Israel this week has walls on every side and no one saying peace, which means the prophetic picture is not this week's picture, and I would rather tell you that than stretch it. The direction is still worth naming: a ridge blown up is a border that is not moving back, a postponed conference is a channel closing, and Hamas mourning a brigade commander inside a ceasefire is a war that has changed its name and not its nature. None of that fulfills anything. All of it is the ground the prophets' picture will one day be painted over, and the ground is what we watch.

Ezekiel's quiet people, dwelling securely, are the ones the enemy plans to fall on, and that is the thing to notice: in that chapter security is the condition for the attack, not the reward after it. So we do not pray for Israel to feel safe. We pray for the thing that produces safety, which the prophets call righteousness and the apostles call peace with God, on both sides of every one of these borders. Pray for the families around Nabatieh, for the families of the children killed in Rafah on Tuesday, for Israeli soldiers spending the feasts on a ridge and a summit, and for a Lebanese president who has nothing to bring to a table and knows it. And pray, as we did last week, that Hezbollah's guns would be laid down without another war to force it. The Arab League said it should happen. Nobody in Beirut has the power to make it happen.

"Thus says the Lord GOD: On that day, thoughts will come into your mind, and you will devise an evil scheme and say, ‘I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will fall upon the quiet people who dwell securely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having no bars or gates,’ to seize spoil and carry off plunder, to turn your hand against the waste places that are now inhabited, and the people who were gathered from the nations, who have acquired livestock and goods, who dwell at the center of the earth." Ezekiel 38:10-12, ESV

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3. Persia: the Red Sea's door, a tanker with an Indian crew, and a regime that hangs its children

The larger change this week was not in the Gulf. On Thursday Iran’s Yemeni proxy, the Houthis we have discussed before, took the Red Sea port of Mokha, and within two days Perim Island in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb and the Zuqar and Hanish islands north of it, as Saudi-backed forces withdrew; the group that already contested one strait now holds both shores of the second. Saudi Arabia's crown prince reportedly called the American president twice that day asking for strikes, and by the weekend Israeli and Saudi officials were talking, with the American command in the middle, about intelligence on Houthi drones and the islands. The war at sea did not pause for the feast: on Sunday a Panama-flagged tanker with fourteen Indian sailors aboard, the El Gaia, burned off Oman, thirteen rescued and one still missing, Iran saying mine and the Americans saying an Iranian drone. The Houthis put missiles into three Saudi cities on Monday and hurt thirteen civilians, and on Tuesday evening Saudi air defense shot down a drone before it entered the closed airspace over Mecca, the first time the holy city has been targeted since a ballistic missile in 2017; the kingdom sounded a security alert in Mecca for the first time in nearly a decade, its coalition spokesman called the two holy mosques a red line, Muslim governments condemned it, and the Houthis called the accusation a worn-out lie while Iran's foreign minister sat in Beijing telling the Chinese that Tehran wants calm with its neighbors. The nuclear file sits at the Security Council, where Russia and China hold vetoes, and nothing has been decided. And on Thursday Human Rights Watch counted the regime's executions on political charges since March: fifty-nine men, twenty-nine of them arrested in the winter protests, several eighteen and nineteen years old, five hanged in public, most convicted of throwing stones or breaking into buildings.

Two things here have prophetic weight, and neither is the tanker. The first is the map. Ezekiel names Persia first among the peoples who march with the prince of the north, and then, standing apart and asking questions, Sheba and Dedan, whom scholars place in Arabia. This week Iran proxy closed the Red Sea's door and, by Riyadh's account, aimed at Mecca itself, while Arabia's rulers turned to Israel through an American general for help against it. A Shia militia flying a drone at the holiest city of Sunni Islam does more to fix that seating than any treaty could; it makes the line between Persia and Arabia a religious one, which is the only kind that lasts in that part of the world. That is the chapter's seating chart taking shape, and it is direction, not fulfillment, and I will keep saying so until it clearly is. The second is the throne. Daniel's ram with two horns is the kings of Media and Persia, and it is easy to read the prophets and see only a nation on a map. But the psalmist asks whether a throne that frames injustice by statute and condemns the innocent to death can be allied with God, and answers that it cannot and will not last. The regime that appears in the prophecies as a threat to Israel is at home a regime that hangs teenagers for stones and buries them where their mothers cannot go, and it is that throne, not the Persian people, that the LORD says he will bring their iniquity back upon. If you want to know what Persia is in the latter days, look at what it does to a nineteen-year-old wrestler, not at what it does to a tanker.

Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? The psalm answers itself: the LORD will bring back on them their iniquity. That is not a prayer we aim. It is a promise we get to trust, and it frees us to pray for Iran the way we prayed last week, against the men and for the people. Picture the fourteen Indian sailors, one of them still in the water, whose government has no side in this war. Picture the families in Abha and Taif under the Houthi missiles, the mother of a nineteen-year-old wrestler hanged five weeks after his arrest, and the believers in Iran who meet in apartments and know exactly what the statute says about them. The LORD is the stronghold of people who have no stronghold. Pray that way.

"Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? They band together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death. But the LORD has become my stronghold, and my God the rock of my refuge. He will bring back on them their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness; the LORD our God will wipe them out." Psalm 94:20-23, ESV

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4. Prepare: two straits, a winter, and what a household can do

Here is the part of the Iran war that reaches a kitchen table in the Ozarks, and it is why this letter carries the name it does: men who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do. Diesel was six dollars and twenty-nine cents a gallon on Monday, up more than eighty percent since January, and diesel is the fuel that moves food, freight, and farms. The August inflation report, collected before the strait closed tight and before the Saudi pipeline was hit, already shows energy up sixteen percent in a year while everything else runs near two and a half; the September report, out in October, is the first that will carry this month. Walmart, the best near real-time gauge of the American household there is, said last month that its shoppers are stretched thin, grew slower than expected, named gasoline and food, and expects two billion dollars of extra fuel cost of its own this year. Three more things you can see this week without a statistics office. Costco is rationing motor oil, two boxes a week at nearly double last year's price, because the Middle East plants that make the base stock are damaged, and the lubricants trade group does not expect the market to be right until the end of next year. Saudi Arabia, whose pipeline to the Red Sea was the world's way around Hormuz for millions of barrels per day until it was hit last Thursday, has suspended loadings at Yanbu and begun cancelling late-September cargoes to European refineries, so Europe now bids for what is left. And in California, where nearly half of the country's vegetables and more than three-quarters of its fruit and nuts are grown, diesel passed eight dollars a gallon this week, a record, and that bill rides on every truck of produce to our stores. And the drought is here. Since the middle of August the rain slowed or stopped in the midwest and the heat did not, and a flash drought has spread out of the Plains across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas; the Springfield weather office has issued drought statements two weeks running, the fire districts have burn bans, and the Drought Monitor had sixteen percent of Missouri in severe or extreme drought as of last week, most of it on our side of the state. Hay came in at about a third of a normal year, bought dearly, cattle went onto stored feed months early, my own included, and some producers are moving stock for water. The national herd on the first of January was already the smallest since 1951 and the date on the size of the beef herd just keep rolling back through the 1980’s monthly.

What is coming, in the order it arrives. In weeks: propane and heating fuel into the October demand season, groceries on the freight lag of a month or two, and the small trucking outfits that run on spot rates with no fuel surcharge, some of which will not make it to Christmas. In months: fertilizer disrupted by two wars priced into spring planting, compounded by dry conditions, food priced at harvest, medicine and parts that come through the same conflicted water and use the same fuel to move, and credit stress that only shows up in reports months after the fact. In years: beef, because a herd takes at least two years to rebuild once anyone decides to, and every bred cow sold this fall for lack of hay is a calf not born in 2027. Be fair in both directions here too. Corn, beans, and wheat are all up on the year, so a row-crop farm faces higher costs against higher checks, and how it comes out depends on how much diesel it required to grow. A cow-calf operation gets no such offset: the ranch selling cows into a drought is selling the animals they meant to keep, hauling water with six-dollar diesel, and paying up for a third of a hay crop, and high cattle prices do not make them whole, because what he is selling is next year’s stock. Now the other direction, because a Sons of Issachar letter has to be as correct as I can make it. The shelves in our stores are probably not going empty, and empty shelves are not what Revelation describes either; the third seal is a day's wage for a quart of wheat, which is expensive and intermittent, not explicitly bare. And this afternoon the Federal Reserve raised its rate a quarter point, to a range of three and three-quarters to four percent, its first increase in three years, on a unanimous vote, and said in the same statement that activity is solid, that uncertainty is elevated because of geopolitical developments, that inflation remains elevated, and that it will deliver price stability. The statement never uses the words oil or fuel. Understand it plainly: the central bank looked at an energy shock and chose to treat it as an inflation problem, which is what a central bank does when it fears the pump will teach people to expect more of the same increases across the rest of the market. The quarter point was expected. What was not is the committee's own forecast, published beside it: one more increase this year and no cuts at all through 2027, where in June it expected to be easing by then. Nothing about it produces fuel or opens a strait. What it does at a home is raise the cost of every mortgage, truck note, and farm operating line that floats, strain further the budget of anyone carrying a balance on a credit card, and it means anyone waiting for rates to come down next year should stop waiting and plan on these or higher. If you carry debt with a floating rate, that is the number to work on first. And notice the distance between the economy in the Fed's statement, solid, productive, robust, and the economy in Walmart's ledger, where store sales less than prices increased, the average basket grew one percent, which against three percent inflation is a smaller basket, less food and product for the more money, and the company said its shoppers are cutting back under fuel and food. Both accounts are true. The first describes companies and the people who own them; the second describes the people who shop on a weeknight. The official line that the consumer is fine rests on bank data that takes months to show households pushed over the precipice into default, cannot see where the stress is; in car loans, pay-later plans, and student debt, which the banks do not hold. When the statement and the register disagree, trust your wallet.

So here is what to do, in order, and none of it is a build a bunker. Get a paper bible, read it daily, Fill the propane and lay in firewood now, before heating season bids against the diesel that moves food. If you feed animals, buy the feed and hay forward, and if you run cows, make the cull decision on paper with the extension office before the sale barn makes it for you. Make sure the your house can make heat and water without the grid or a delivery truck for a couple days. Refill the maintenance medications early and ask the pharmacy for ninety-day fills. Keep ordinary food depth, a few weeks of what you already eat, rotated, and no more we aren’t called to be anxious but prudent. For the church: this winter the need will include heating bills and propane, not just food boxes, and utility shutoffs have hard deadlines that hunger does not. We should look for the need before it is asked for, because our people absorb a great deal privately: a truck that stops appearing in a driveway, a vendor gone from the market, a family gone quiet on Wednesday night. Watch especially the wage households with long commutes and the elderly on fixed incomes. Agabus foretold a famine, and the disciples did not argue about the date. They took up a collection, each according to his ability, and sent it. That is the whole pattern: a word about hard times, received soberly, answered with a plan and a gift.

"Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world (this took place in the days of Claudius). So the disciples determined, every one according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul." Acts 11:27-30, ESV

"When he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” And I looked, and behold, a black horse! And its rider had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine!" Revelation 6:5-6, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Let us pray for Jerusalem between the feasts: for the eight men facing proceedings and the officers who removed them, for the Waqf and for Jordan's king, who fears losing a custody his family has claimed for a century, for the judges who never set a date, and for the gates on Yom Kippur and on the Sabbath that opens Sukkot. Ask that the mountain meant to be the joy of all the earth would not cost a life this month, and that Jew and Arab on it would meet the King it is named for.

"Great is the LORD and greatly to be praised in the city of our God! His holy mountain, beautiful in elevation, is the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King." Psalm 48:1-2, ESV

Let us pray for the people on Israel's borders who will not see peace this month: the families of Nabatieh and Kfar Reman, the children of Rafah, the families under the building in Gaza City this morning and the men digging for them with their hands, the soldiers on Ali al-Taher and Hermon, and the diplomats whose meeting was pushed to October. Ask for the peace that comes from righteousness and not from tonnage, and that the guns in Lebanon would go down without another war.

"He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." Isaiah 2:4, ESV

Let us pray for the sailor still missing off Oman and the thirteen who were pulled out, for the fishermen and towns of a Yemeni coast that changed hands in two days, for the wounded in Abha, Khamis Mushait, and Taif, for the pilgrims in Mecca who heard a siren for the first time in a decade, for the families of fifty-nine men hanged on political charges, and for the church inside Iran that lives under the same statute. Ask the LORD who is the stronghold of the innocent to bring the throne's iniquity back on the throne and not on the people.

"Can wicked rulers be allied with you, those who frame injustice by statute? They band together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death. But the LORD has become my stronghold, and my God the rock of my refuge. He will bring back on them their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness; the LORD our God will wipe them out." Psalm 94:20-23, ESV

Let us pray for the people this winter will find first: the men with one truck and a diesel bill, the cattlemen selling cows they meant to keep, the poultry growers with a barn to heat, the families driving forty miles to work, and the widow on a fixed check with a propane tank to fill. Ask for rain on the Ozarks. Ask for the wisdom of Issachar for our own deacons, to see the need before it is spoken, and for the grace of Antioch, to give before the famine arrives.

"Know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds, for riches do not last forever; and does a crown endure to all generations?" Proverbs 27:23-24, ESV

Let us pray for the nations that put their names on paper this week: for the people of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and the believers among them, for the governments in New Delhi and Tehran and Abu Dhabi who signed on Jerusalem, and for London, which was told its time is ending. Ask that every border God moves would move someone to seek him.

"And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us," Acts 17:26-27, ESV

Let us pray by name: for the thirty-seven of Ariko and the survivors of Awon, five months in the forest; for Silvia Samuel; for the six taken from Angwan Tsapta and the two left for dead; for Scholastica Hills; for Pastor Wang Sanyuan and a family six months without a word; for Pyotr Mitskevich and a Bible that is now contraband in Moscow; for two elders in a Chengdu cell; and for three thousand whose names are in a report and known to God, and nowhere else.

"We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our bodies." 2 Corinthians 4:8-10, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

 

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: September 9th, 2026

"He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings; he gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to those who have understanding; he reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him." Daniel 2:21-22, ESV

Four areas Scripture tells the church to watch moved this week but the movement was small again. Rosh Hashanah begins Friday at sundown, and the argument over who may pray on the Temple Mount that day went to the High Court, while Arab foreign ministers met Monday to say the hill is not Israel's to open. On Israel's three borders the Gaza plan is running in reverse, Israel took a ridge in Lebanon and stood on Hermon to say it is not leaving Syria, and the Arab League told Hezbollah its weapons belong to the state. The war with Iran went back to sea, and on Wednesday the nuclear agency's board reported Iran to the Security Council for the first time in twenty years, with Russia and China voting no. And the church buried more of its own in Nigeria. With no major changes I will keep this short again. There is teaching to get to.

Headlines:

1. Two days to the feast, and the question went to court

Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown Friday, and its first day is the Sabbath, when the police keep the Mount closed to Jews. Nothing changed on the hill this week; what changed is the paper. Two Temple Mount activists asked the High Court for an urgent order opening the Mount on the Sabbath days of the fall feasts after the district police commander refused, the committee chairman's letter we reported last week is still unanswered, and on Monday the Arab ministerial committee on Jerusalem, chaired by Jordan with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar at the table, called Jewish prayer on the Mount an unprecedented escalation and rejected any division of the compound. The same Thursday the petition was filed, Jewish visitors sang Lecha Dodi, the hymn that welcomes the Sabbath, on the Mount, a thing unthinkable a few years ago and now both common and the potential catalyst for war. As of this writing there is no ruling, no shofar permit, and no police announcement. Because the first day is the Sabbath, the shofar sounds on Sunday, which is also the first morning the Mount reopens to Jews. Sunday morning is the morning to watch, and next week we will tell you what happened.

Why the church watches this hill at all: Daniel was told that the last seven years of his prophecy turn on a covenant and on sacrifice and offering being stopped, Jesus told his disciples to watch for the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place, and Paul wrote of a man who takes his seat in the temple of God. There is no temple, and a shofar is not a sacrifice. But every one of those texts assumes Jewish worship on that mountain, and for fifty-nine years the arrangement that kept it off the mountain has been eroding by increments too small to refuse: a visit, a silent prayer, a prayer book, a sung hymn, and now a petition to open the gates on the feast itself. The increments are the thing to watch, not the feast day. Rosh Hashanah is the Feast of Trumpets, and some of you have heard teaching that ties its trumpet to the trumpet Paul says will raise the dead. Paul's trumpet is the trumpet of God, and it will not need a permit from the Jerusalem district police. So we watch the hill for what the prophets said would happen on it, and we refuse to read a court ruling as a countdown. If the court opens the gate on Sunday, that is one more increment. If it does not, the pressure that produced the petition is still there, and it is not going away.

Blow the trumpet at the new moon, on our feast day, for it is a statute for Israel, a rule of the God of Jacob. The trumpet on that hill was never a police commander's to grant. God wrote the statute, and no court in Jerusalem can repeal it or enforce it. But read the next verses of the psalm. The trumpet was a memorial: I relieved your shoulder of the burden, your hands were freed from the basket, in distress you called and I delivered you. It calls Israel to remember a rescue, not to take a summit. And Hebrews tells the church where we have already arrived, not at a mountain that can be touched but at Mount Zion, the heavenly Jerusalem, and innumerable angels in festal gathering. Pray for the officers who will stand between worshippers on Sunday morning, for Jews who love a hill they may not pray on and Muslims afraid of losing one place they have, and that both would find the God who does not live in temples made by hands and needs no permit to be worshipped.

"Blow the trumpet at the new moon, at the full moon, on our feast day. For it is a statute for Israel, a rule of the God of Jacob." Psalm 81:3-4, ESV

"But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel." Hebrews 12:22-24, ESV

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2. Israel's three borders: a plan in reverse, a ridge above Nabatieh, and a promise on Hermon

Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, in one paragraph. The Gaza plan is running in reverse: Israeli security officials say Hamas is back in its weapons depots, the envoy says a two-state outcome becomes practically impossible without the plan, and none of the three things the plan requires, a transitional government, decommissioned weapons, and an Israeli withdrawal, has happened. The hinge of the plan is being opened the wrong way. Two Israeli ministers spent the week talking about moving Gaza's population out by sea and by air, eight Muslim-majority governments condemned them by name, and the foreign minister walked it back. In Lebanon, Israel took the Ali al-Taher ridge above Nabatieh and said it had completed its security zone, its strikes killed at least twenty-seven people in three days including two children in Kfar Reman, and the same Monday the Arab League backed Beirut's decision that weapons belong to the state alone and rejected Iranian interference. In Syria, a United Nations commission called Israel's presence a belligerent occupation that may involve war crimes, and the next day the Prime Minister and the defense minister stood on the Syrian side of Hermon and said, we are not moving from here. And twelve Western governments, Britain, France, and Canada first among them, committed to ban trade in settlement goods.

Here is what is worth discussing in that pile. Ezekiel says the invasion he foresaw comes in the latter years against a people gathered from the nations who dwell securely, all of them, in a land of unwalled villages without bars or gates. Israel this week is the opposite of that picture: a security zone in Lebanon, a security zone in Syria, most of Gaza held by the army, and a government telling all three neighbors it is not leaving. The teaching you hear that Ezekiel 38 is next in line has to account for that, and it is worth saying plainly that the ground does not look like Ezekiel's unwalled villages yet. Two alignments did move, and both are worth watching. The Arab League lining up against Hezbollah and Iran is not Psalm 83, where Israel's neighbors conspire with one accord to wipe her out; it is Arab governments choosing a side against Persia, and Ezekiel has Sheba and Dedan, whom the teachers put in Arabia, standing back and asking questions when the northern army comes rather than marching with it. And Zechariah's picture, Jerusalem a heavy stone and all the nations of the earth gathered against it, moved one increment closer when twelve Western governments put their position on the land in writing. Neither is a fulfillment. Both are direction. And the plan to empty Gaza gets the standard we read last week: the effect of righteousness is peace, and a people moved out for convenience is not a peace plan, whoever proposes it.

They shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken. Look where Micah puts that promise: after the LORD judges between many peoples and decides disputes for strong nations far away. Nobody sat unafraid on any of Israel's three borders this week, not in Kfar Reman, not in the villages of Quneitra, not in the tents at Khan Younis, and not in the northern towns the drones flew over. Micah does not say a security zone gets a nation to the fig tree, or a directorate, or a council resolution. He says the LORD of hosts gets them there, when he judges. So we hold every government in this story to that standard, and that includes the one we love. And a room full of Arab foreign ministers telling a militia to give up its weapons is a smaller thing than swords into plowshares, but it points the same way, and we can pray it happens without another war to force it.

"He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide disputes for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken." Micah 4:3-4, ESV

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3. Persia: ten tankers, a vote in Vienna, and a funeral the regime forbade

The war went back to sea. By Wednesday the American command said it had destroyed ten Iranian tankers in a week after the Revolutionary Guard fired twice at an American warship, with some reports indicating the missiles might have gotten far too close for comfort; the crews were ordered off first, and no Americans were hurt. Iran answered with missiles at an American base in Jordan, nearly all intercepted, with claims of hits on two destroyers that the command called false, and with a captured underwater drone the Pentagon says had already died of its own malfunction; the Houthis hit four Saudi cities; no ceasefire, no talks. In Vienna the nuclear agency's board reported Iran to the Security Council for the first time in twenty years, twenty-three votes to three, with Russia, China, and Niger voting no. Inside Iran the regime executed a twenty-one-year-old rapper named Erfan Mirzaei for protest footage on his phone, told his family afterward, and buried him in a village far from Isfahan so there would be no funeral to gather at. And a correction: last week we said nobody outside Iran had confirmed the strike on a wedding in Kuhestak. Reuters and the New York Times have since verified the footage; four people died, two of them children, and the Vice President, asked about it, said he was skeptical and that sometimes things happen.

The tankers are not the prophetic item. The vote is. Ezekiel names Persia first among the peoples who march with the prince from the uttermost parts of the north, and for a generation the teachers you listen to have watched for Russia and Iran to be found on the same side of a line. On Wednesday they were, in a roll call, with China beside them, against the West, over Iran's bomb. I am not going to tell you a vote in Vienna is Ezekiel 38; the chapter describes an army on the mountains of Israel, not a board of governors. But the alignment the chapter assumes is now the ordinary arrangement of the world, and it took a vote to make it visible. Daniel's messenger was withstood twenty-one days by the prince of the kingdom of Persia; whatever that spiritual reality is, the earthly Persia is a regime that fears a funeral more than a navy, and it has told you what it is by burying a boy in secret. The other text is Jeremiah's oracle to Elam, southwestern Iran: a broken bow, a scattering to the four winds, a throne set against the king and his officials, and then, in the latter days, restored fortunes. Nothing about ten tankers fulfills it, and I will not pretend it does. But the shape of it is the shape of our prayer.

I will set my throne in Elam and destroy their king and officials, declares the LORD. But in the latter days I will restore the fortunes of Elam. The LORD's throne goes to Elam and it lands on the king and the officials. The people are not the target. The people are the ones he promises to restore, in the latter days, which is his phrase and not mine. That is exactly the shape of our prayer for Iran. We are not asking God to destroy a country. We are asking him to deal with the men who bury a boy in secret so his mother cannot grieve in public, and to keep the promise he made to the people of Elam, which the underground church in that country will tell you he has been keeping for a generation. Picture the sailors on the tankers and the mother in Isfahan when you pray, not the men behind the podiums.

"and I will set my throne in Elam and destroy their king and officials, declares the LORD. “But in the latter days I will restore the fortunes of Elam, declares the LORD." Jeremiah 49:38-39, ESV

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4. The church under pressure: three Nigerian states, and a pastor missing in Ji'nan

Nigeria, in three states, and a correction. Pastor Gabriel Dipak, whom we reported held last week, was freed the same night after a ransom his church and family paid, and he says the men killed Pastor Hills in front of him when Hills tried to run. Five more Christians died around Mangu in Plateau, more than thirty in that district in a month by one count; suspected Boko Haram fighters killed twelve at Dzangola in Adamawa on Sunday and burned the church; and in Kaduna a watchdog reported that three of eleven villagers taken from Awon in April have died in the forest camp where they are held with thirty-seven worshippers seized from three churches: a mother named Joy Samuel, who gave birth there and died with her baby, and a father named Yusuf Bawa with his five-year-old son, of sickness and hunger. A three-year-old girl is critically ill, and two fourteen-year-old girls lived for months on river water. In China, Pastor Wang Sanyuan, seventy-three, of a registered church in Ji'nan, has been missing since police took him from his home in March, and his family does not know the charge. On the rest of the list, Krasnogorsk, Myanmar, Maharashtra, Kenscoff, nothing moved, and they stay on it until it does.

A word about why this is here, and why it is not a sign. Christians have been killed for being Christians in every century since Stephen, and the level we see now is roughly the level the church has always lived with. It is not an escalation, and I am not going to read it as one. Jesus did put persecution on the list, they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name's sake, but read it the way he said it: a thing to endure, not decode, and a description of something worse than Plateau, when all nations hate us and not some. Expect that. What we have now is the ordinary cost of the gospel in ordinary places, and the reason it is on this page is not that it proves anything about the hour. It is that these are our people, in one Body by one Spirit, and Scripture tells us to remember them as though we were in the camp with them. They should be in our prayers, not only that they be rescued and comforted, but that their witness would be used powerfully by God. If the situation in this nation changes, I pray they will do the same for us, just as Jesus did for Peter. Revelation tells us what heaven does with the ordinary cost Christians have paid for millennia. Under the altar the souls slain for the word of God ask how long, and they are not given a date. They are given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their brothers who are to be killed as they were is complete. God is watching and counting, and the count is not finished. Pastor Hills is in it, and so is a mother who died in a forest camp with her newborn. That is not a comfort in their physical situation, but it is the one the text gives, and it is enough if you trust God's promises.

It means two things for us. The first is that the church in Plateau is not losing. It is being counted, by a God who knows the number and has already handed out the robes. The second is that we do not get to shrug at a number because it is an old one. Remembering means their names in our prayers on Wednesday night and money where money reaches. We are not going to make the dead of Nigeria into a sermon illustration or a sign of the times. They are our people, and we pray for those who remain.

"Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers." Luke 22:31-32, ESV

"When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne. They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been." Revelation 6:9-11, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Let us pray for Jerusalem in the two days before the feast: for the police who will stand between worshippers on Sunday morning, for the judges holding the petition, for Jewish families who love a hill they may not pray on and Muslim families afraid of losing the one place they have, and that the holiday would pass without a body count. Ask that on both sides of that wall people would find the mountain no one can close.

"But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel." Hebrews 12:22-24, ESV

Let us pray for the people on Israel's three borders who cannot sit unafraid: the families of Kfar Reman burying eleven, the villagers of Quneitra under a promise that nobody is leaving, the children of Khan Younis a second year inside a ceasefire that keeps killing, and Israeli soldiers on a ridge and a summit their government says they will hold. Ask that the plan would run forward again, that no government would move a people for convenience, and that Hezbollah's guns would be laid down without another war to force it.

"He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide disputes for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken." Micah 4:3-4, ESV

Let us pray for the men on the tankers and the warships, who did not vote for any of this; for the mother of Erfan Mirzaei, who was told after and buried him where no one could come; for the inspectors who cannot see what they were sent to see; for the wounded in four Saudi cities; and for the believers in Iran who are the down payment on a promise the LORD made to Elam. Ask for restraint in Washington and Tehran, and for the men who order strikes to remember whose throne it is.

"Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters; they saw the deeds of the LORD, his wondrous works in the deep. For he commanded and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea. They mounted up to heaven; they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their evil plight; they reeled and staggered like drunken men and were at their wits’ end. Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad that the waters were quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven." Psalm 107:23-30, ESV

Let us pray by name: for Scholastica Hills, widowed on the Bokkos road, and for Pastor Dipak, who watched it; for the families of Awon and Ariko, and for Silvia Samuel, three years old and sick in a forest camp; for Dzangola, burying twelve and a church; for Pastor Wang Sanyuan and the family that cannot find him; and for the ones who did not move this week, in Krasnogorsk, Chin State, Maharashtra, and Kenscoff. Ask that the witness of every one of them would be used powerfully by God, and that they would pray the same for us.

"Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints." Psalm 116:15, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: September 2nd, 2026

"If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them." Ecclesiastes 5:8, ESV

Crude fell about three and a half percent this week and the price of a gallon went up four cents, which is worth understanding instead of merely resenting. Washington opened what the Treasury Secretary called an economic D-Day against Iran, and Tehran responded by threatening to seize ships. A tanker was struck and disabled nine miles off Oman on Monday night and nobody claimed the attack. The United States took Syria off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, eight days after Israel bombed a Syrian airbase to limit Turkey and Washington objected in public. Gunmen killed at least forty-seven people above Port-au-Prince, and the United Nations reports that twenty-two of them were executed inside a church compound where they had gone for shelter. The president of the International Criminal Court said her credit cards had been cancelled. A federal judge told the Secretary of State he had exceeded the authority Congress gave him. Rain in Panama ran a third below normal and the canal began rationing the water that lifts ships. On the Temple Mount, nothing further was permitted, and Rosh Hashanah is sixteen days away.

Headlines:

1. Oil fell all week and the price at the pump went the other way

Brent crude closed Wednesday near eighty-eight dollars a barrel, its third straight session down from just over ninety-one dollars when we wrote to you last Wednesday. That is a drop of roughly 3.5%, driven by reports that Iran and Oman were sketching a transit corridor through the Strait of Hormuz. Over the same nine days the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline went up about 1%. Crude fell. The gas price rose.

There is a standard explanation for this and I'll present it, and why it's a fig leaf. The gasoline in the tank under the station was refined weeks ago, trucked, taxed, and bought at an older price, so a three-day slide in a futures contract does not reach into that tank and make the fuel cheaper. That's true. It's also only half the picture, because the same tank of old fuel is sitting there when crude spikes, and the price on the sign goes up that same afternoon.

Economists have measured this asymmetry for thirty-five years and gave it a name. Robert Bacon called it rockets and feathers in 1991. The pattern is consistent across countries and decades: retail prices rise quickly and almost completely up to the crude price increase when costs rise, and fall slowly and not all the way when costs fall. The gap between those two speeds is margin, and the Federal Trade Commission has documented the corresponding swings. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which is our own regional bank, published a plain-English account of it.

The causes are argued over. Some economists blame inventory and menu costs, some suggest the fact that shoppers stop hunting for a better price once prices are falling, and some point to market power. Notice that every one of those is a description of how a firm keeps more of the margin. None of them suggests that anybody is trying to charge less and failing. A publicly traded company is legally obliged to pursue profit for its shareholders, and it would be foolish to expect anything other than squeezing the maximum profit from our wallets, regardless of the morality. The most useful single outcome is this: a study of the Southern California market found that a competing station within immediate sight measurably shrank the gap between crude price changes and gas price changes. Same fuel, same refining lag, same taxes, and the gap narrows when somebody across the road can undercut you. Capitalism does drive more efficient prices when allowed to function. The issue is when the companies collude to maintain higher profits, like the light bulb cartel did. I'm skeptical that we'll actually see charges, even if that is happening in this case. Whatever else is true, this is not simply the physics of old fuel in a tank.

The other half of the week argues against relief. On Monday night an oil tanker about nine nautical miles northeast of Ash Shishah, Oman, was hit, damaging the engine room and disabling the vessel. The crew was reported safe. Nobody claimed responsibility. About five commodity vessels a day are now moving through a strait that once carried a fifth of the world's seaborne oil, and one analysis puts each additional month of closure at seven to eight dollars a barrel increase on Brent pricing. Futures rallied on the idea of a corridor in the same week a ship was left dead in the water inside that corridor.

A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight. Scripture returns to weights and measures more often than you might expect, because a scale is where a man's character meets his neighbor's grocery money. Amos listened in on merchants waiting for the Sabbath to be over so they could get back to making maximum profit regardless of the morality, and what he condemned was not a clever mechanism but an appetite. We should be careful here in two places at once. We do not know the internal decisions of any particular company, and we are not accusing the station on the corner of a crime. We also refuse to pretend that men and institutions do not reliably act in their own interest at the cost of their neighbor, because Scripture never pretends that and we see it all around us. The useful question is not for them. It is for us. Every one of us sets a price on something, our labor, our goods, our time, our forgiveness. Ask honestly which way yours moves quickly, and which direction it moves slowly, and whether the Lord would call that balance just.

"A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight." Proverbs 11:1, ESV

"saying, “When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great and deal deceitfully with false balances, that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and sell the chaff of the wheat?" Amos 8:5-6, ESV

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2. Washington opens an economic war and Tehran answers with ships

On Monday the Treasury Secretary announced what he has been calling an economic D-Day against Iran. The program is named Operation Economic Outcast, and it extends the threat of secondary sanctions into five areas: digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Secondary sanctions punish third parties, which means the target is not only Iran but any company or country still doing business with it. He said the President is calling world leaders to demand support for what he termed the economic asphyxiation of the regime.

Two things about the announcement are worth noticing. He stopped short of the heaviest measure and named no countries, though Iran's largest trading partners are China, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. And he promised a major designation against an unnamed financial institution before the end of the week, which is a way of applying pressure twice with one announcement. Treasury's designations that same day did name Emirati oil networks, which is enforcement against the very channel Abu Dhabi announced it was closing last week when it suspended all trade with Iran.

Tehran responded. Iran's security chief vowed to neutralize the economic war and threatened to stop the flow of oil altogether. The authority Iran has set up over the strait warned that vessels violating its transit rules could face fines, seizure, or confiscation. Against that, and in the same week, the Iranian president said his country cannot continue with war forever. During the MOU negotiations, seeing varied conflicting reports was normal, but this is an actual change from their president and not some low level flunky. I see that as a good sign.

The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will. That is a strange comfort in a week of sanctions lists, and it is not the same as saying every policy is God's will. It says the men who sign these orders are not the final authority over their own intentions, which is exactly what the Psalm means when it tells us not to put our trust in princes, because on the day a man's breath departs his plans perish with him. Economic pressure is a real instrument and it can be a just one, but it hits the people with the least room to absorb it. A currency collapse does not reach a general before it reaches a mother buying bread. And we should be plain about the sequence, because it is our own country's. On February 28 the United States and Israel struck first, roughly nine hundred strikes in twelve hours, while indirect nuclear talks were still running in Geneva. Those strikes killed Iran's head of state. What Iran has done since is its own, the proxies and the ships and the threats, and the regime answers for every bit of it. But it did not begin this, and we are not going to say that it did. That makes the hunger our sanctions are now producing a harder thing to look at rather than an easier one, because the ordinary Iranian who chose none of this is our neighbor, and the pressure that reaches him first was applied by our own government in our own name.

"The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will." Proverbs 21:1, ESV

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish." Psalm 146:3-4, ESV

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3. Syria comes off the terror list, eight days after Israel bombed it

On Monday the State Department removed Syria's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, which took effect after a forty-five day congressional review period expired without objection. The same action revoked the global terrorist designation of the group formerly known as the al-Nusrah Front, now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the Treasury removed that organization from its list of blocked entities. Syria's government had described the designation as the last major obstacle to foreign investment.

The legal mechanics are the story here, because a designation is not a label but a set of restrictions. It had limited American assistance, defense exports, some dual-use goods, and financial activity, and it made every bank and investor treat Syria as a compliance risk. Removing it lowers those barriers. It does not legalize dealings with every sanctioned person, and the Treasury proved the point on the same day by designating two former affiliates of that same organization which it says are tied to al-Qaeda. Relief for the state and sanctions on individuals, signed the same afternoon. The irony runs deeper than the country. The man now governing Syria was himself a Specially Designated Global Terrorist carrying a ten million dollar American bounty, and the Treasury took him off that list in November of last year. The leader was cleared nine months before the nation was.

Compare this to what we reported last week. Eight days before the delisting, Israel flew eight airstrikes against a Syrian airbase specifically to keep Turkish troops from establishing a foothold, and the American envoy for Syria said publicly that Washington was deeply concerned the strikes were an unnecessary escalation. Syrian and Israeli officials have since met. So within nine days the United States rebuked its closest regional ally over Syria, and then handed the Syrian government the thing it wanted most. That is a realignment happening quickly enough that its own participants may not have finished adjusting to it.

No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. That is the standard the Lord gives for judging a change of character, and it has the useful property of requiring time. Fruit is not a promise or a press release. The men now governing Damascus led an organization the United States called terrorist until Monday, and whether that was a genuine change or a successful rebranding is not a question anyone can settle from a policy announcement. The simple believes everything, says Proverbs, but the prudent gives thought to his steps. Notice that the prudent man in that proverb is not a cynic. He is not refusing to move. He is watching where he puts his foot. Christians should want a real change to be real, because that would mean fewer funerals in Syria, and Christians should also decline to celebrate it before the fruit is in.

"For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush." Luke 6:43-44, ESV

"The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps." Proverbs 14:15, ESV

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4. Twenty-two killed in a church compound above Port-au-Prince

Armed men attacked Kenscoff, a hillside town above Port-au-Prince, through the night of Sunday into Monday. The United Nations said on Tuesday that at least forty-seven people had been killed, including at least five children, that more than fifty had been kidnapped, and that twenty-two were injured. The United Nations spokesman said twenty-two of the dead were reported to have been executed inside a church compound where they had gone to shelter.

Counts differ and we will give you both. The mayor of Kenscoff, citing police and judicial records, told an American newspaper that authorities had confirmed twenty-five deaths, twenty-five homes burned, and fifteen people still missing. The United Nations says its own figures may change. The mayor blamed a gang coalition that the United States designated a foreign terrorist organization last year, and a man speaking for that network threatened to kill the hostages if police harmed any of its members. Residents said the attackers reached the center of town near the police station, which had not happened before.

We want to be careful about what this was. Haiti's gangs are fighting for control of the roads into the capital, and Kenscoff sits on one. There is no reporting that these people were killed for being Christians, and we are not going to tell you there is. What the United Nations reported is that a church compound was where people ran, and that being inside it did not save them. That is worth sitting with on its own terms, without being made into something else.

Have regard for the covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence. The Psalmist is not describing a metaphor. He is describing a country where the men with weapons have taken the hills and the ordinary people have nowhere to run to, which is a literal description of Haiti this week. Hebrews tells us to remember those who are mistreated as though we were in the body with them, and the reason given is that we are. Somewhere above Port-au-Prince there is a congregation this Sunday with twenty-two empty places in it, and whatever else separates us from them, we will be doing the same thing at the same hour. Pray for them by that name. Not as a headline from a country most of us will never see, but as a church burying its own.

"Have regard for the covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence." Psalm 74:20, ESV

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

Sources:

5. Two courts in one week, pushed in opposite directions

The president of the International Criminal Court spoke by video from The Hague on Wednesday, her first press conference since the United States sanctioned her and a senior trial lawyer on the eighteenth of August. She said there was no reason for her to be sanctioned, that her credit cards had been suspended, and that the measures had not intimidated her. The court, she said, will never be defeated. She asked Japan, which is the court's largest financial backer and an American ally, to press Washington not to escalate and to keep other member states from withdrawing.

That is the mechanism we described last week, being enacted. Sanctions freeze American property and cut named people out of dollar banking, and because nearly every internationally operating bank touches that system, a cancelled card is simply the first thing you notice. Travel, payroll, and payments to vendors follow. Nine of the court's eighteen judges are now designated. No new designation was announced this week. What was added is a face and a detail. If these controls are imposed on notable world figures, how much more readily might they be employed against regular folks.

In the same week an American court moved the other direction. On Friday, August 21, a federal judge in New York vacated the administration's suspension of immigrant visa processing for nationals of seventy-five countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and Somalia. The State Department had justified the suspension on the ground that people from those countries were more likely to need public assistance. The judge set the policy aside as contrary to law and in excess of statutory authority, ruling that the Secretary of State had mandated the refusal of visas to eligible applicants without any basis in law, because Congress assigned that case-by-case judgment to consular officers rather than to a blanket instruction from Washington.

Read the two together. In one, a government that dislikes a court has made it expensive to sit on. In the other, a court told a government it had exceeded what the legislature actually gave it, and the government has to answer. Both are questions about whether power stops where the law says it stops. We wrote last week that a standard which moves depending on who is in the dock was never a standard. This week supplied the test rather than us having to invent it.

Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. That charge in the eighty-second Psalm is spoken to judges, and the striking thing is that God holds them accountable for it whether or not they acknowledge Him. Paul then tells us the governing authority is God's servant for our good, that it does not bear the sword in vain, and that we are to be subject to it. Christians who take Romans thirteen seriously should notice what it actually establishes. Authority is real, and it is delegated, and a delegated authority has an edge to it. A ruler who reaches past what he was given is not exercising more authority. He is exercising less, because the part beyond the grant was never his. That is why a believer can honor an office and welcome a court that tells its holder no, on the same day, without any contradiction at all.

"Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked." Psalm 82:3-4, ESV

"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer." Romans 13:1-4, ESV

Sources:

6. Panama begins rationing the water that lifts ships

The Panama Canal Authority announced on Thursday, August 20, that it will cut daily vessel transits from thirty-six to thirty-four in early September, and to thirty-two on the fifteenth. Rainfall from May through August has run thirty-four percent below the historical average, and water flowing into the system is reported forty-four percent below normal.

The mechanism is worth knowing because it is not obvious. A canal lock does not pump a ship uphill with seawater. It lifts each vessel using fresh water drained out of Gatun Lake, and that water then runs to the sea and is gone. Every transit spends a lake. Less rain means less water for each lifting and less depth under a loaded hull, so the Authority is rationing slots to protect the lake. That preserves the waterway and reduces its capacity at the same time, which means queues, delivery delays, pressure on freight rates, or longer voyages around. Roughly five percent of world maritime trade goes through it.

We are printing this alongside Hormuz, the Red Sea, and the Black Sea on purpose. Four of the narrow places the world's goods pass through are constricted at once. Hormuz has been shut since February by the war with Iran. At the Bab el Mandeb, a Houthi blockade aimed at Saudi shipping has cut transits by roughly a quarter and tanker traffic by more than forty percent. In the Black Sea, Ukrainian strikes since early July have taken more than ninety percent of Russia's grain export capacity in that basin offline, with all three terminals at Novorossiysk suspended. And Panama is short of rain. That is three separate wars and one drought, and not one of them has anything to do with the others. That is not a sign. It is a reminder of how thin the margins are in the arrangements that put food on a shelf in this county, and how little of it depends on anything we control.

God has shut up the heavens before, and He said so beforehand. He warned Israel that if they turned aside to serve other gods He would shut up the heavens so that there would be no rain. we read a couple weeks ago that Solomon prayed at the dedication of the temple assuming exactly that arrangement, asking God to hear and forgive and send rain when His people repented, and Elijah's three and a half dry years were that clause enforced. So I won't tell you that God does not govern rainfall, or that He has never withheld it as discipline. He has, He announced it in advance, and He named the remedy. Now notice what made that legible. Not the weather. The covenant. Israel could read a drought as a sign because God had told them in advance what one would mean and what to do about it. Panama has no such word, and neither do we. For the nations generally Christ gives us the other principle, that our Father makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust, and He says it while commanding us to love our enemies. The error is not believing that God governs weather. The error is reading a verdict off a rain gauge in a country He has not spoken to. What is left is simpler and harder. The rain is not ours. An engineering marvel that has carried the commerce of the world for a hundred and ten years is at this moment waiting on weather, and no amount of steel or capital changes that. We eat because it rains somewhere we have never been, and the One who sends it has never once been obliged to.

"Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the LORD is giving you." Deuteronomy 11:16-17, ESV

"so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." Matthew 5:45, ESV

Sources:

7. On the Temple Mount, nothing further was permitted

We told you last week that Israeli police had allowed Jewish men to carry full prayer books onto the Temple Mount for the first time, and that officials called it a limited trial. This week the trial did not expand. No further easing was announced and nothing was rolled back. The August fifth declaration from Amman still stands, in which foreign ministers from more than twenty Arab and Islamic governments named the Jordanian waqf the sole authority over who enters the compound.

Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Friday, September 11, which is sixteen days from today. The ministers said plainly that they expected the next challenge to their custodianship to come during the autumn holidays. Nobody has announced an intention to do anything of the kind, and we have looked. This is a week in which a thing we are watching did not move, and we are telling you that it did not move, because a report that only arrives when something happens will eventually teach you that something is always happening.

I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me. Habakkuk had asked God a hard question about violence going unanswered, and the posture he took while waiting was not despair and not frantic activity. He climbed up, and he stayed there, and he expected an answer. That is most of what a watchman's work actually consists of, and it is the part nobody writes about. Wait for the LORD, says the Psalm, be strong, and let your heart take courage. The courage is required precisely because nothing is happening yet. Anyone can pay attention during a crisis. Standing at the post through a quiet week in September is the harder discipline, and it is ours.

"I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint." Habakkuk 2:1, ESV

"Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!" Psalm 27:14, ESV

Sources:

Watch and Pray

Let us pray for households in this county who are watching the number on the pump and doing arithmetic before they drive. For men and women who set prices for a living, that they would be able to sleep. And for our own honesty, that we would not name greed in a distant boardroom while excusing the same appetite in ourselves.

"A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight." Proverbs 11:1, ESV

Let us pray for Iranian families who will meet this decision in the price of food long before any official does. For the sailors and crews moving through a strait where ships are being struck by weapons nobody claims. And for the men in Tehran and in Washington who could still choose to stop, that the Lord who turns a king's heart would turn one of them first.

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish." Psalm 146:3-4, ESV

Let us pray for Syrian Christians, who have survived one government and are now learning the habits of another, and who will find out before anyone in Washington does whether this change is real. For the investors and aid workers who will arrive first. And for our own patience, that we would wait for fruit rather than applaud an announcement.

"For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush." Luke 6:43-44, ESV

Let us pray for the church at Kenscoff, which will meet this Sunday with twenty-two of its people dead inside its own walls. For more than fifty families waiting on a hostage and on a threat. For the police of a country whose government cannot protect its hillsides. Ask the Lord to have regard for the covenant in a dark place.

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

Let us pray for judges on both benches, who decide cases that powerful men would rather they decided differently. For officials who must accept being told no. And for our own church, that we would want the law to hold when it protects us and equally when it restrains someone we voted for.

"Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked." Psalm 82:3-4, ESV

Let us pray for rain over Panama, which is a small thing to ask and would settle a large one. For the crews who will wait at anchor and the households at the far end of those shipments. And for gratitude in us for a harvest we did not water.

"so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." Matthew 5:45, ESV

Let us pray for Jerusalem in the sixteen days before the feasts, for the police who will stand on that compound during them, and for worshippers on both sides who love that hill. And ask the Lord to give our church the patience to keep watching something that has not happened yet.

"Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!" Psalm 27:14, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: August 26th, 2026

"If you see in a province the oppression of the poor and the violation of justice and righteousness, do not be amazed at the matter, for the high official is watched by a higher, and there are yet higher ones over them." Ecclesiastes 5:8, ESV

Crude fell about three and a half percent this week and the price of a gallon went up four cents, which is worth understanding instead of merely resenting. Washington opened what the Treasury Secretary called an economic D-Day against Iran, and Tehran responded by threatening to seize ships. A tanker was struck and disabled nine miles off Oman on Monday night and nobody claimed the attack. The United States took Syria off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, eight days after Israel bombed a Syrian airbase to limit Turkey and Washington objected in public. Gunmen killed at least forty-seven people above Port-au-Prince, and the United Nations reports that twenty-two of them were executed inside a church compound where they had gone for shelter. The president of the International Criminal Court said her credit cards had been cancelled. A federal judge told the Secretary of State he had exceeded the authority Congress gave him. Rain in Panama ran a third below normal and the canal began rationing the water that lifts ships. On the Temple Mount, nothing further was permitted, and Rosh Hashanah is sixteen days away.

Headlines:

1. Oil fell all week and the price at the pump went the other way

Brent crude closed Wednesday near eighty-eight dollars a barrel, its third straight session down from just over ninety-one dollars when we wrote to you last Wednesday. That is a drop of roughly 3.5%, driven by reports that Iran and Oman were sketching a transit corridor through the Strait of Hormuz. Over the same nine days the national average for a gallon of regular gasoline went up about 1%. Crude fell. The gas price rose.

There is a standard explanation for this and I'll present it, and why it's a fig leaf. The gasoline in the tank under the station was refined weeks ago, trucked, taxed, and bought at an older price, so a three-day slide in a futures contract does not reach into that tank and make the fuel cheaper. That's true. It's also only half the picture, because the same tank of old fuel is sitting there when crude spikes, and the price on the sign goes up that same afternoon.

Economists have measured this asymmetry for thirty-five years and gave it a name. Robert Bacon called it rockets and feathers in 1991. The pattern is consistent across countries and decades: retail prices rise quickly and almost completely up to the crude price increase when costs rise, and fall slowly and not all the way when costs fall. The gap between those two speeds is margin, and the Federal Trade Commission has documented the corresponding swings. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which is our own regional bank, published a plain-English account of it.

The causes are argued over. Some economists blame inventory and menu costs, some suggest the fact that shoppers stop hunting for a better price once prices are falling, and some point to market power. Notice that every one of those is a description of how a firm keeps more of the margin. None of them suggests that anybody is trying to charge less and failing. A publicly traded company is legally obliged to pursue profit for its shareholders, and it would be foolish to expect anything other than squeezing the maximum profit from our wallets, regardless of the morality. The most useful single outcome is this: a study of the Southern California market found that a competing station within immediate sight measurably shrank the gap between crude price changes and gas price changes. Same fuel, same refining lag, same taxes, and the gap narrows when somebody across the road can undercut you. Capitalism does drive more efficient prices when allowed to function. The issue is when the companies collude to maintain higher profits, like the light bulb cartel did. I'm skeptical that we'll actually see charges, even if that is happening in this case. Whatever else is true, this is not simply the physics of old fuel in a tank.

The other half of the week argues against relief. On Monday night an oil tanker about nine nautical miles northeast of Ash Shishah, Oman, was hit, damaging the engine room and disabling the vessel. The crew was reported safe. Nobody claimed responsibility. About five commodity vessels a day are now moving through a strait that once carried a fifth of the world's seaborne oil, and one analysis puts each additional month of closure at seven to eight dollars a barrel increase on Brent pricing. Futures rallied on the idea of a corridor in the same week a ship was left dead in the water inside that corridor.

A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight. Scripture returns to weights and measures more often than you might expect, because a scale is where a man's character meets his neighbor's grocery money. Amos listened in on merchants waiting for the Sabbath to be over so they could get back to making maximum profit regardless of the morality, and what he condemned was not a clever mechanism but an appetite. We should be careful here in two places at once. We do not know the internal decisions of any particular company, and we are not accusing the station on the corner of a crime. We also refuse to pretend that men and institutions do not reliably act in their own interest at the cost of their neighbor, because Scripture never pretends that and we see it all around us. The useful question is not for them. It is for us. Every one of us sets a price on something, our labor, our goods, our time, our forgiveness. Ask honestly which way yours moves quickly, and which direction it moves slowly, and whether the Lord would call that balance just.

"A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight." Proverbs 11:1, ESV

"saying, “When will the new moon be over, that we may sell grain? And the Sabbath, that we may offer wheat for sale, that we may make the ephah small and the shekel great and deal deceitfully with false balances, that we may buy the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and sell the chaff of the wheat?" Amos 8:5-6, ESV

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2. Washington opens an economic war and Tehran answers with ships

On Monday the Treasury Secretary announced what he has been calling an economic D-Day against Iran. The program is named Operation Economic Outcast, and it extends the threat of secondary sanctions into five areas: digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping. Secondary sanctions punish third parties, which means the target is not only Iran but any company or country still doing business with it. He said the President is calling world leaders to demand support for what he termed the economic asphyxiation of the regime.

Two things about the announcement are worth noticing. He stopped short of the heaviest measure and named no countries, though Iran's largest trading partners are China, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. And he promised a major designation against an unnamed financial institution before the end of the week, which is a way of applying pressure twice with one announcement. Treasury's designations that same day did name Emirati oil networks, which is enforcement against the very channel Abu Dhabi announced it was closing last week when it suspended all trade with Iran.

Tehran responded. Iran's security chief vowed to neutralize the economic war and threatened to stop the flow of oil altogether. The authority Iran has set up over the strait warned that vessels violating its transit rules could face fines, seizure, or confiscation. Against that, and in the same week, the Iranian president said his country cannot continue with war forever. During the MOU negotiations, seeing varied conflicting reports was normal, but this is an actual change from their president and not some low level flunky. I see that as a good sign.

The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will. That is a strange comfort in a week of sanctions lists, and it is not the same as saying every policy is God's will. It says the men who sign these orders are not the final authority over their own intentions, which is exactly what the Psalm means when it tells us not to put our trust in princes, because on the day a man's breath departs his plans perish with him. Economic pressure is a real instrument and it can be a just one, but it hits the people with the least room to absorb it. A currency collapse does not reach a general before it reaches a mother buying bread. And we should be plain about the sequence, because it is our own country's. On February 28 the United States and Israel struck first, roughly nine hundred strikes in twelve hours, while indirect nuclear talks were still running in Geneva. Those strikes killed Iran's head of state. What Iran has done since is its own, the proxies and the ships and the threats, and the regime answers for every bit of it. But it did not begin this, and we are not going to say that it did. That makes the hunger our sanctions are now producing a harder thing to look at rather than an easier one, because the ordinary Iranian who chose none of this is our neighbor, and the pressure that reaches him first was applied by our own government in our own name.

"The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will." Proverbs 21:1, ESV

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish." Psalm 146:3-4, ESV

Sources:

3. Syria comes off the terror list, eight days after Israel bombed it

On Monday the State Department removed Syria's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism, which took effect after a forty-five day congressional review period expired without objection. The same action revoked the global terrorist designation of the group formerly known as the al-Nusrah Front, now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the Treasury removed that organization from its list of blocked entities. Syria's government had described the designation as the last major obstacle to foreign investment.

The legal mechanics are the story here, because a designation is not a label but a set of restrictions. It had limited American assistance, defense exports, some dual-use goods, and financial activity, and it made every bank and investor treat Syria as a compliance risk. Removing it lowers those barriers. It does not legalize dealings with every sanctioned person, and the Treasury proved the point on the same day by designating two former affiliates of that same organization which it says are tied to al-Qaeda. Relief for the state and sanctions on individuals, signed the same afternoon. The irony runs deeper than the country. The man now governing Syria was himself a Specially Designated Global Terrorist carrying a ten million dollar American bounty, and the Treasury took him off that list in November of last year. The leader was cleared nine months before the nation was.

Compare this to what we reported last week. Eight days before the delisting, Israel flew eight airstrikes against a Syrian airbase specifically to keep Turkish troops from establishing a foothold, and the American envoy for Syria said publicly that Washington was deeply concerned the strikes were an unnecessary escalation. Syrian and Israeli officials have since met. So within nine days the United States rebuked its closest regional ally over Syria, and then handed the Syrian government the thing it wanted most. That is a realignment happening quickly enough that its own participants may not have finished adjusting to it.

No good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. That is the standard the Lord gives for judging a change of character, and it has the useful property of requiring time. Fruit is not a promise or a press release. The men now governing Damascus led an organization the United States called terrorist until Monday, and whether that was a genuine change or a successful rebranding is not a question anyone can settle from a policy announcement. The simple believes everything, says Proverbs, but the prudent gives thought to his steps. Notice that the prudent man in that proverb is not a cynic. He is not refusing to move. He is watching where he puts his foot. Christians should want a real change to be real, because that would mean fewer funerals in Syria, and Christians should also decline to celebrate it before the fruit is in.

"For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush." Luke 6:43-44, ESV

"The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps." Proverbs 14:15, ESV

Sources:

4. Twenty-two killed in a church compound above Port-au-Prince

Armed men attacked Kenscoff, a hillside town above Port-au-Prince, through the night of Sunday into Monday. The United Nations said on Tuesday that at least forty-seven people had been killed, including at least five children, that more than fifty had been kidnapped, and that twenty-two were injured. The United Nations spokesman said twenty-two of the dead were reported to have been executed inside a church compound where they had gone to shelter.

Counts differ and we will give you both. The mayor of Kenscoff, citing police and judicial records, told an American newspaper that authorities had confirmed twenty-five deaths, twenty-five homes burned, and fifteen people still missing. The United Nations says its own figures may change. The mayor blamed a gang coalition that the United States designated a foreign terrorist organization last year, and a man speaking for that network threatened to kill the hostages if police harmed any of its members. Residents said the attackers reached the center of town near the police station, which had not happened before.

We want to be careful about what this was. Haiti's gangs are fighting for control of the roads into the capital, and Kenscoff sits on one. There is no reporting that these people were killed for being Christians, and we are not going to tell you there is. What the United Nations reported is that a church compound was where people ran, and that being inside it did not save them. That is worth sitting with on its own terms, without being made into something else.

Have regard for the covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence. The Psalmist is not describing a metaphor. He is describing a country where the men with weapons have taken the hills and the ordinary people have nowhere to run to, which is a literal description of Haiti this week. Hebrews tells us to remember those who are mistreated as though we were in the body with them, and the reason given is that we are. Somewhere above Port-au-Prince there is a congregation this Sunday with twenty-two empty places in it, and whatever else separates us from them, we will be doing the same thing at the same hour. Pray for them by that name. Not as a headline from a country most of us will never see, but as a church burying its own.

"Have regard for the covenant, for the dark places of the land are full of the habitations of violence." Psalm 74:20, ESV

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

Sources:

5. Two courts in one week, pushed in opposite directions

The president of the International Criminal Court spoke by video from The Hague on Wednesday, her first press conference since the United States sanctioned her and a senior trial lawyer on the eighteenth of August. She said there was no reason for her to be sanctioned, that her credit cards had been suspended, and that the measures had not intimidated her. The court, she said, will never be defeated. She asked Japan, which is the court's largest financial backer and an American ally, to press Washington not to escalate and to keep other member states from withdrawing.

That is the mechanism we described last week, being enacted. Sanctions freeze American property and cut named people out of dollar banking, and because nearly every internationally operating bank touches that system, a cancelled card is simply the first thing you notice. Travel, payroll, and payments to vendors follow. Nine of the court's eighteen judges are now designated. No new designation was announced this week. What was added is a face and a detail. If these controls are imposed on notable world figures, how much more readily might they be employed against regular folks.

In the same week an American court moved the other direction. On Friday, August 21, a federal judge in New York vacated the administration's suspension of immigrant visa processing for nationals of seventy-five countries, including Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and Somalia. The State Department had justified the suspension on the ground that people from those countries were more likely to need public assistance. The judge set the policy aside as contrary to law and in excess of statutory authority, ruling that the Secretary of State had mandated the refusal of visas to eligible applicants without any basis in law, because Congress assigned that case-by-case judgment to consular officers rather than to a blanket instruction from Washington.

Read the two together. In one, a government that dislikes a court has made it expensive to sit on. In the other, a court told a government it had exceeded what the legislature actually gave it, and the government has to answer. Both are questions about whether power stops where the law says it stops. We wrote last week that a standard which moves depending on who is in the dock was never a standard. This week supplied the test rather than us having to invent it.

Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. That charge in the eighty-second Psalm is spoken to judges, and the striking thing is that God holds them accountable for it whether or not they acknowledge Him. Paul then tells us the governing authority is God's servant for our good, that it does not bear the sword in vain, and that we are to be subject to it. Christians who take Romans thirteen seriously should notice what it actually establishes. Authority is real, and it is delegated, and a delegated authority has an edge to it. A ruler who reaches past what he was given is not exercising more authority. He is exercising less, because the part beyond the grant was never his. That is why a believer can honor an office and welcome a court that tells its holder no, on the same day, without any contradiction at all.

"Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked." Psalm 82:3-4, ESV

"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer." Romans 13:1-4, ESV

Sources:

6. Panama begins rationing the water that lifts ships

The Panama Canal Authority announced on Thursday, August 20, that it will cut daily vessel transits from thirty-six to thirty-four in early September, and to thirty-two on the fifteenth. Rainfall from May through August has run thirty-four percent below the historical average, and water flowing into the system is reported forty-four percent below normal.

The mechanism is worth knowing because it is not obvious. A canal lock does not pump a ship uphill with seawater. It lifts each vessel using fresh water drained out of Gatun Lake, and that water then runs to the sea and is gone. Every transit spends a lake. Less rain means less water for each lifting and less depth under a loaded hull, so the Authority is rationing slots to protect the lake. That preserves the waterway and reduces its capacity at the same time, which means queues, delivery delays, pressure on freight rates, or longer voyages around. Roughly five percent of world maritime trade goes through it.

We are printing this alongside Hormuz, the Red Sea, and the Black Sea on purpose. Four of the narrow places the world's goods pass through are constricted at once. Hormuz has been shut since February by the war with Iran. At the Bab el Mandeb, a Houthi blockade aimed at Saudi shipping has cut transits by roughly a quarter and tanker traffic by more than forty percent. In the Black Sea, Ukrainian strikes since early July have taken more than ninety percent of Russia's grain export capacity in that basin offline, with all three terminals at Novorossiysk suspended. And Panama is short of rain. That is three separate wars and one drought, and not one of them has anything to do with the others. That is not a sign. It is a reminder of how thin the margins are in the arrangements that put food on a shelf in this county, and how little of it depends on anything we control.

God has shut up the heavens before, and He said so beforehand. He warned Israel that if they turned aside to serve other gods He would shut up the heavens so that there would be no rain. we read a couple weeks ago that Solomon prayed at the dedication of the temple assuming exactly that arrangement, asking God to hear and forgive and send rain when His people repented, and Elijah's three and a half dry years were that clause enforced. So I won't tell you that God does not govern rainfall, or that He has never withheld it as discipline. He has, He announced it in advance, and He named the remedy. Now notice what made that legible. Not the weather. The covenant. Israel could read a drought as a sign because God had told them in advance what one would mean and what to do about it. Panama has no such word, and neither do we. For the nations generally Christ gives us the other principle, that our Father makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust, and He says it while commanding us to love our enemies. The error is not believing that God governs weather. The error is reading a verdict off a rain gauge in a country He has not spoken to. What is left is simpler and harder. The rain is not ours. An engineering marvel that has carried the commerce of the world for a hundred and ten years is at this moment waiting on weather, and no amount of steel or capital changes that. We eat because it rains somewhere we have never been, and the One who sends it has never once been obliged to.

"Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the LORD is giving you." Deuteronomy 11:16-17, ESV

"so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." Matthew 5:45, ESV

Sources:

7. On the Temple Mount, nothing further was permitted

We told you last week that Israeli police had allowed Jewish men to carry full prayer books onto the Temple Mount for the first time, and that officials called it a limited trial. This week the trial did not expand. No further easing was announced and nothing was rolled back. The August fifth declaration from Amman still stands, in which foreign ministers from more than twenty Arab and Islamic governments named the Jordanian waqf the sole authority over who enters the compound.

Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Friday, September 11, which is sixteen days from today. The ministers said plainly that they expected the next challenge to their custodianship to come during the autumn holidays. Nobody has announced an intention to do anything of the kind, and we have looked. This is a week in which a thing we are watching did not move, and we are telling you that it did not move, because a report that only arrives when something happens will eventually teach you that something is always happening.

I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me. Habakkuk had asked God a hard question about violence going unanswered, and the posture he took while waiting was not despair and not frantic activity. He climbed up, and he stayed there, and he expected an answer. That is most of what a watchman's work actually consists of, and it is the part nobody writes about. Wait for the LORD, says the Psalm, be strong, and let your heart take courage. The courage is required precisely because nothing is happening yet. Anyone can pay attention during a crisis. Standing at the post through a quiet week in September is the harder discipline, and it is ours.

"I will take my stand at my watchpost and station myself on the tower, and look out to see what he will say to me, and what I will answer concerning my complaint." Habakkuk 2:1, ESV

"Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!" Psalm 27:14, ESV

Sources:

Watch and Pray

Let us pray for households in this county who are watching the number on the pump and doing arithmetic before they drive. For men and women who set prices for a living, that they would be able to sleep. And for our own honesty, that we would not name greed in a distant boardroom while excusing the same appetite in ourselves.

"A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight." Proverbs 11:1, ESV

Let us pray for Iranian families who will meet this decision in the price of food long before any official does. For the sailors and crews moving through a strait where ships are being struck by weapons nobody claims. And for the men in Tehran and in Washington who could still choose to stop, that the Lord who turns a king's heart would turn one of them first.

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish." Psalm 146:3-4, ESV

Let us pray for Syrian Christians, who have survived one government and are now learning the habits of another, and who will find out before anyone in Washington does whether this change is real. For the investors and aid workers who will arrive first. And for our own patience, that we would wait for fruit rather than applaud an announcement.

"For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For figs are not gathered from thornbushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush." Luke 6:43-44, ESV

Let us pray for the church at Kenscoff, which will meet this Sunday with twenty-two of its people dead inside its own walls. For more than fifty families waiting on a hostage and on a threat. For the police of a country whose government cannot protect its hillsides. Ask the Lord to have regard for the covenant in a dark place.

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

Let us pray for judges on both benches, who decide cases that powerful men would rather they decided differently. For officials who must accept being told no. And for our own church, that we would want the law to hold when it protects us and equally when it restrains someone we voted for.

"Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked." Psalm 82:3-4, ESV

Let us pray for rain over Panama, which is a small thing to ask and would settle a large one. For the crews who will wait at anchor and the households at the far end of those shipments. And for gratitude in us for a harvest we did not water.

"so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." Matthew 5:45, ESV

Let us pray for Jerusalem in the sixteen days before the feasts, for the police who will stand on that compound during them, and for worshippers on both sides who love that hill. And ask the Lord to give our church the patience to keep watching something that has not happened yet.

"Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!" Psalm 27:14, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: August 19th, 2026

"The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations." Psalm 33:10-11, ESV

Four plans failed this week. On Sunday Israeli police allowed Jewish men to carry full prayer books onto the Temple Mount and pray openly, the first time this has been permitted. The autumn feast that twenty Arab and Islamic foreign ministers warned about is now three weeks away. In Cairo an American envoy met Hamas, a rare event. The next day in Jerusalem he and the Israeli prime minister agreed an American general should oversee the handover of weapons. Israel's position remained unchanged. The sixty day memorandum between Washington and Tehran expired Monday with no deal and no extension sought. In the same seven days the war pushed into Lebanon, the Emirates, and Syria. The United States sanctioned the ICC president and half its judges. The plans of the peoples failed. The counsel of the LORD stands.

Headlines:

Jewish prayer books reportedly allowed onto Temple Mount for first time (The Times of Israel, 2026-08-17) US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding expires: How and why it fell apart (Al Jazeera, 2026-08-17) US hits ICC president and senior prosecutor with sanctions in another move against the court (Associated Press, 2026-08-18)

  1. Prayer books on the Temple Mount, and a date in September

On Sunday, August 16, Israeli police allowed Jewish men to carry full prayer books onto the Temple Mount and pray openly from them. The national security minister confirmed the change as a limited trial. Earlier this year only a single pre-printed prayer page had been permitted. Full books and ritual objects remained barred until Sunday.

Last week we noted that on August 5 more than twenty Arab and Islamic foreign ministers met in Amman, declared the compound an exclusive Muslim place of worship, named the Jordanian waqf the sole authority, and warned of challenges during the autumn Jewish holidays. Those dates are now set. Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown Friday, September 11, Yom Teruah, the day of the blast. Yom Kippur follows on the 20th and 21st; Sukkot runs from the 25th into early October.

Precedent exists. In 2024 a group completed all one hundred required shofar blasts over police objection. Six men were removed, six shofars confiscated, no one charged, and the instruments returned. Jordan and Saudi Arabia have condemned Jewish visits during Rosh Hashanah; the Palestinian Authority calls shofar-blowing one of Israel's most dangerous rituals of control.

The ministers' warning now sits three weeks out. No one has announced plans to blow a shofar this year, and a prayer book is not a trumpet. What we are watching is a status quo shifting toward Jewish practices by increments small enough that absorbing each seems easier than resisting. None of this is particularly sensational to a Christian eye, but it is also not nothing and is provocative to their Muslim neighbors.

Twenty governments convened over thirty-five acres of limestone and issued a communique about who may carry a book across it. That is what a heavy stone for all the peoples looks like in ordinary diplomacy. Leviticus tells us what September is: the first day of the seventh month is a memorial proclaimed with the blast of trumpets. A trumpet on that hill would not be a noise complaint. The day is defined by the sound. We can watch closely without needing to settle it. The mountain was never the thing that saved anyone.

"Behold, I am about to make Jerusalem a cup of staggering to all the surrounding peoples. The siege of Jerusalem will also be against Judah. On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it will surely hurt themselves. And all the nations of the earth will gather against it." Zechariah 12:2-3, ESV

"Speak to the people of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall observe a day of solemn rest, a memorial proclaimed with blast of trumpets, a holy convocation." Leviticus 23:24, ESV

Sources:

Jewish prayer books reportedly allowed onto Temple Mount for first time (The Times of Israel, 2026-08-17) Jewish men permitted to pray on Temple Mount with prayer books for first time (The Jerusalem Post, 2026-08-17) Israel Police Ease Restrictions on Jewish Prayer at Temple Mount (Haaretz, 2026-08-16) Jewish Men Allowed To Carry Full Prayer Books on Temple Mount for First Time (The Media Line, 2026-08-17)

  1. Kushner meets Hamas, and the veto holds

On Sunday the American envoy met Hamas leader Khalil al-Hayya in Cairo. Direct contact is rare enough to be news. Hamas reaffirmed commitment to demilitarizing Gaza; the envoy said disarmament could begin within thirty days, with tunnel-filling taking sixty to ninety. The next day in Jerusalem he met the Israeli prime minister for several hours. A source said they agreed an American general should supervise the weapons handover. That is not actually a good thing in my view, as it will put US forces in harm's way and leave the blame with us if something goes wrong.

The prime minister's position did not move: no withdrawal of any kind before full disarmament of light and heavy weapons. Strikes resumed. On August 18 an Israeli strike killed six at a crowded cafe in the Gaza City port, an area that now serves as a displacement camp. On August 19 a strike on a police station killed nine people. Israeli forces crossed the ceasefire line in the south and detained a Hamas police colonel. Israel said the targets were commanders planning attacks; Palestinian authorities reported police officers and a child among the dead. Both of those can be true simultaneously.

Last week we called this a mutual veto, each side making the other's first step the condition of its own. The veto still stands. What is new is a key sitting beside the deadlock that could unlock it: an American officer positioned so neither side must trust the other. Hamas speaking directly to Washington is new, as is the thirty-day clock. Israel's answer is unchanged. In the days between the meeting and its announcement, men and children continued to die.

Jeremiah warned against healing a wound lightly by saying “Peace, peace” when there is none. That temptation belongs to us as much as to any negotiator. James locates the same engine in our own houses: wanting, not getting, and refusing to ask. Anyone who has let a quarrel run for years over who should speak first knows precisely how this works. Only the scale differs.

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace." Jeremiah 6:14, ESV

"What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask." James 4:1-2, ESV

Sources:

Jared Kushner meets Hamas in Egypt over Gaza disarmament (Axios, 2026-08-16) Kushner and Netanyahu agree U.S. general should oversee Hamas demilitarization, source says (NBC News, 2026-08-18) Meeting with Kushner, PM doubles down on IDF remaining in Gaza until Hamas disarmed (The Times of Israel, 2026-08-17) Israeli strike reported to kill at least six in Gaza City (Al Jazeera, 2026-08-18)

  1. The war widened in every direction at once

The hinge was the sixty-day memorandum of understanding signed in June between the United States and Iran. It expired Monday, August 17, with no deal and was in effect already dead weeks ago. Washington is not seeking an extension, and President Trump has said, how seriously remains to be seen, that he will declare the strait American territory once Iran is defeated. He posted a map on social media circling the waterway and labeling it new United States territory. The president said no direct talks are planned, the naval blockade of Iranian ports stands, and Iran should raise the white flag. He also threatened to attack Oman if it interferes in the Strait of Hormuz.

The strait has been shut since February. Confirmed crossings fell roughly a fifth week over week; three vessels passed on Sunday where more than a hundred a day once did. An unidentified projectile damaged a ship near Oman and injured a crew member. Iran claims an understanding with Oman on a transit route; Washington objects to joint administration and the voluntary fees the arrangement would charge.

Pressure then went sideways. In Lebanon on August 15 Israeli airstrikes killed at least eleven in the south, the deadliest day since the June 20 truce. Seven died near Ansar, three of them children; four more at Deir al-Zahrani. Israel said it struck Hezbollah infrastructure after an explosive drone wounded three of its soldiers and later claimed a senior commander among the dead. Roughly 360,000 remain displaced. Lebanon's prime minister is pressing for a withdrawal timetable; Hezbollah's secretary general rejected the negotiations outright, saying Beirut is signing Israeli-imposed terms with Israeli ink.

On Wednesday the United Arab Emirates suspended all trade, exchange, and financial dealing with Iran. Its defence ministry reported two ballistic missiles fired from Iran toward the country; both fell into the water and caused no injuries. Iran denies firing them. The Emirates had supplied more than thirty percent of Iran's imports. The decision closes Tehran's main import channel into an economy already carrying roughly seventy percent inflation and a 5.4 percent contraction. Ordinary Iranians will feel it first in the price of food.

In Syria on Tuesday Israel flew eight airstrikes against the runway and storage facilities at Abu al-Duhur airbase in the northwest, causing no reported casualties. The stated aim was to prevent Turkish troops from establishing a foothold. Turkey, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia condemned the strikes. The American special envoy for Syria said publicly that Washington was deeply concerned the strikes were an unnecessary escalation. This is exactly the type of scenario we what-if'd two weeks ago around the new Muslim confederation.

Four fronts in seven days, not four separate stories. A negotiating clock ran out and the pressure moved into every adjacent seam. Two weeks ago Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan signed a pact in Mecca treating an attack on any one as an attack on all. Eleven days later Israel bombed a base specifically to keep Turkish troops out, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey's new treaty partner, issued only a condemnation. Nobody invoked the pact. An alliance is dangerous for what it may one day oblige, not for what it has obliged so far.

Solomon's picture is exact: strife is water through a breach. It widens because the breach is open, not because anyone designed a flood. Four seams opened this week and no one intended a general war, which is precisely the danger. Christ said His people would hear of wars and rumors of wars. In the same breath He told them not to be alarmed, and that the end is not yet. Whoever hands us a calendar this week is not repeating Him.

"The beginning of strife is like letting out water, so quit before the quarrel breaks out." Proverbs 17:14, ESV

"And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet." Matthew 24:6, ESV

Sources:

US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding expires: How and why it fell apart (Al Jazeera, 2026-08-17) Trump threatens to bomb Oman over its deal with Iran on Hormuz, as 60-day MOU expires (The Times of Israel, 2026-08-17) Trump threatens to make the Strait of Hormuz a US territory: Can he? (Al Jazeera, 2026-08-16) Trump says he will declare Strait of Hormuz a US territory (The Hill, 2026-08-15) Israeli airstrikes on southern Lebanon kill 11 people (Associated Press, 2026-08-15) Lebanon's PM urges timetable for Israeli withdrawal as Hezbollah slams deal (Al Jazeera, 2026-08-14) UAE says it is suspending trade with Iran after missile attack (The Washington Post, 2026-08-19) Israel strikes an air base in Syria to prevent Turkish troops from deploying (NPR, 2026-08-19) Israel confirms strikes on Syria's Idlib airbase after US envoy condemns attack (The Jerusalem Post, 2026-08-19)

  1. The United States sanctions half the ICC bench

On Tuesday the State Department sanctioned ICC President Tomoko Akane and senior trial lawyer Abdoulaye Seye. The order freezes property under American jurisdiction and blocks transactions in the American financial system. The Secretary of State said the court exceeded its mandate by pursuing personnel from the United States and Israel, neither of which is a party to it. The court replied that the sanctions attack judicial independence and that its work will continue. By Wednesday the administration had sanctioned nine of the court's eighteen judges, both deputy prosecutors, the former chief prosecutor, and one additional staff member.

Nothing about this looks dramatic. No building closes; no case is formally stopped. Dollar clearing, bank compliance, travel restrictions, and private firms avoiding penalty exposure combine until a named individual finds ordinary banking and services unavailable. The court has not been shut. It has been made expensive to work for.

The jurisdictional argument is real. The United States never ratified the Rome Statute, and a court asserting authority over nationals of a non-party state is a genuine dispute. Keep that in half your mind. In the other half: the bench of an international tribunal is now under sanction by a single government. A state that disagrees with a court and responds by making it difficult for judges to keep a bank account has done something worth noticing. The test is simple. Imagine another government doing this to a court whose judgments we liked, and notice how quickly the objection forms. A standard that moves depending on who is in the dock was never a standard.

Moses charged judges not to show partiality and not to let the eyes of the wise be blinded. A court can be bent by a bribe or by making the judges' lives difficult until the easier ruling becomes the obvious one. Scripture does not appear to distinguish the two. Solomon then gives the discipline we need: the first account always sounds complete until the other side is heard.

"You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the LORD your God is giving you." Deuteronomy 16:19-20, ESV

"The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him." Proverbs 18:17, ESV

Sources:

US hits ICC president and senior prosecutor with sanctions in another move against the court (Associated Press, 2026-08-18) ICC slams US decision to sanction the court's president and a senior prosecution lawyer (Associated Press, 2026-08-19) Watch and Pray Let us pray for Jerusalem before the feasts arrive, for Muslim families who fear losing a place of prayer and for Jewish worshippers who love a hill they have not been permitted to pray on, that both would find the God they are reaching toward. For the police who will stand between them in September, and for ministers on every side who gain from provocation. Ask the Lord that this autumn pass without a body count, and that our church would watch that hill closely and calmly without needing to settle it.

"On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it will surely hurt themselves. And all the nations of the earth will gather against it." Zechariah 12:3, ESV

Let us pray for the hostages still held and the families who have waited a long time. For Gazan civilians under strikes that did not pause for any meeting in Cairo or Jerusalem, and for the child whose death was reported this week. For the men in those rooms, that one of them would find the nerve to move first and carry the cost.

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace." Jeremiah 6:14, ESV

Let us pray for the crews still lying at anchor after six months and for the sailor hurt near Oman. For the families in Ansar burying three children, and for Israeli families who count their own dead and wounded. For ordinary Iranians who chose none of this and will meet a trade decision in the price of bread. Ask the Lord to stop the water at the breach while it is still a trickle, and to give restraint to the men deciding what to answer this week.

"The beginning of strife is like letting out water, so quit before the quarrel breaks out." Proverbs 17:14, ESV

Let us pray for judges who must rule against the interest of powerful men, wherever they sit. For our own leaders, that they would be willing to be measured by the standard they apply to others. And for our church, that we would hold one standard of justice whoever stands in the dock, and not discover a new principle whenever the verdict stops suiting us.

"The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him." Proverbs 18:17, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: August 12th, 2026

"So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90:12, ESV

The ground moved under Colombia on Monday morning. More than two hundred fifty people are dead. Most died in cities a hundred miles from where the fault broke. A peace plan collapsed in Jerusalem and Washington over the meaning of one word: disarmament. Israel demands every weapon be surrendered before it withdraws. Hamas refuses to surrender any until it does. Leaders from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed a mutual defense pact in Mecca. The agreement declares that an attack on one is an attack on all. This quietly extends a nuclear umbrella and ties a NATO member to a bloc outside NATO. Foreign ministers met in Amman over Al-Aqsa and issued their declaration. They claim the whole compound as an exclusive Muslim place of worship. They warn that the next test will come during the autumn feasts. The Strait of Hormuz is closed now for over five months. Iran and Oman have nearly agreed how to run the water. Each government demands the other pay reparations first. The strategic reserve that has cushioned the cost of that closure fell below three hundred million barrels for the first time since 1983. The President was smuggled off Air Force One in a catering cart to dodge an Iranian missile threat. He golfed on Sunday beside a Stinger battery. His own guards read that as a real threat, even though the podium calls it spent. An Ebola outbreak in Congo passed two thousand dead. It is now the fastest growing ever recorded. A federal judge blocked the mail-ballot order nationwide. America has just lived through the hottest month it has ever measured. None of this proves a date. All of it teaches us to number our days and make use of the time allotted to us.

Headlines:

1. Colombia: a deep quake, and the dying happened elsewhere

At 7:34 on Monday morning, a magnitude seven point four earthquake struck sixty-eight miles beneath the Colombian department of Chocó. It hit five kilometers south of San José del Palmar. By Tuesday, the death toll had passed two hundred fifty and was still climbing. We saw nearly a hundred aftershocks recorded, a state of national disaster declared, and soldiers deployed into the coffee country. This remains the most powerful earthquake Colombia has suffered in decades.

Let us look at where people died, because it explains something. Cali, a city of two point two million, lost at least eighty-five. Pereira lost sixty-six. Chocó, the rural province sitting directly over the epicenter, lost thirteen. The reason is depth. This quake broke a hundred and ten kilometers down. It sits far below the shallow ruptures that flatten the ground above them. A deep quake spreads its energy over an enormous area instead of concentrating it, that was a mercy. Some thirty-four million people across four countries felt it. We know the shaking arrived nearly everywhere at moderate strength. The dying happened where the buildings were, not where the fault was. That is not fate. It is engineering. It is also why onerous building codes can be a form of loving your neighbor.

For our own records, the world logged ninety-two earthquakes of magnitude four and a half or greater during our coverage window. We measured this total against a recent norm near a hundred and thirty. The earth was quiet this week with one catastrophic exception. This marks the third week running that we can say the same thing. The count is not the story. The one that hit a populated valley at breakfast is.

Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. When they told the Lord about the eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell, He asked if they were worse offenders than everyone else in Jerusalem. He answered His own question. No, I tell you. But unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Christ took a building collapse and rejected two ideas we are tempted to follow. He said the dead did not deserve this, and He said it is not without meaning. Let us pray for Colombia's bereaved. Let us pray for the rescuers still on the piles. Let us pray for the injured and the homeless in the coffee towns. Let a fallen building do to us what the Lord said it should do.

"So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90:12, ESV

"Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish." Luke 13:4-5, ESV

Sources:

2. The peace plan died over the meaning of the one word that really matters

On August 9 Israel rejected the fifteen-point plan the American President had announced ten days earlier, and the fight is about sequence, not substance. The plan envisioned Israeli withdrawal and Hamas disarmament unfolding together in phases. The Prime Minister said no: complete disarmament first, then withdrawal. Asked what complete meant, he was unusually specific, and it is worth quoting because we raised this exact question last week when nobody had answered it. Heavy weapons, lighter weapons, all weapons. Genuine disarmament, he said, not a fictitious one.

Hamas has taken the mirror position. It will only disarm after Israel withdraws completely and stops fighting. Its heavy weapons would come later still, once a Palestinian state is established. The Prime Minister has answered that as long as he is prime minister there will be no Palestinian state. The election that decides that happens in October. Both parties have now made the other's first step a precondition for their own. This is not a negotiation. It is a mutual veto with an ever growing body count. Last week we wrote that the framework was a real thread and not an announcement out of nowhere. It was real. It is also, for now, dead.

The way of peace they do not know, and there is no justice in their paths; they have made their roads crooked; no one who treads on them knows peace. Isaiah was not writing about Gaza. He wrote for every place where men prefer the leverage of the standoff to the risk of the first step. Seek peace and pursue it. We pray for the hostages still held. We pray for Gazan families under strikes that never paused for the announcement. We pray for Israelis who want their people home. We ask that someone with authority would move first and absorb the cost and both sides actually abide by the agreement. In this fallen world full of men who love darkness that truly would be miraculous.

"The way of peace they do not know, and there is no justice in their paths; they have made their roads crooked; no one who treads on them knows peace." Isaiah 59:8, ESV

"Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it." Psalm 34:14, ESV

Sources:

3. Three nations sign a mutual defense pact in Mecca

On August 7, in Islam's holiest city, the president of Turkey, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and the prime minister of Pakistan signed an agreement. They declared that an armed attack on any one of the three shall be regarded as an attack on them all. That is the language of NATO Article Five. It marks the first time we see this rule written across this particular set of countries. The pact extends a bilateral Saudi-Pakistani defense agreement from last September to include Turkey. We note it was signed against the backdrop of the Iran war and renewed fighting with the Houthis in Yemen.

Two details make this larger than a regional handshake. Pakistan is a nuclear power. A mutual defense clause quietly extends a nuclear umbrella over Saudi Arabia without anyone having to say the words. Turkey is a member of NATO. This means a NATO state has now bound itself to collective defense with two countries outside the alliance. The enemies of those nations are not NATO's enemies either. Analysts call this an inflection point in an emerging multipolar order. As a hypothetical, ponder what could happen if Ukraine continued to target Turkish assets like we discussed last week. Turkey could invoke both agreements and I expect NATO would balk at answering that call, either removing Turkey or failing to respond and that likely ending the agreement. Quite the mess. The situation is fairly analogous to the Balkans pre WWI. The choice to sign it in Mecca rather than Riyadh or Ankara was not decorative. This is the kind of story that gets read two wrong ways. One way is to ignore it because no shots were fired. The other is to announce it as a prophesied confederacy, it may be, but we cannot know that yet. We are doing neither. We are writing it down. Alliances turn regional wars into larger ones. This one now spans from the Bosporus to the Arabian Sea.

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together. We see in the psalm that we should not be surprised by treaties. Isaiah gives us our posture. Do not call a conspiracy what others call a conspiracy. Do not fear what they fear. Instead, honor the LORD of hosts as holy. Let him alone command your fear. We pray for wisdom for the men who sign this agreement. We pray for the soldiers whose lives it may one day cost. And we pray for our church to watch an alliance form with steady faith, without boredom or panic.

"Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying," Psalm 2:1-2, ESV

"Do not call conspiracy all that this people calls conspiracy, and do not fear what they fear, nor be in dread. But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread." Isaiah 8:12-13, ESV

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4. What the Jerusalem meeting actually decided

Last week we reported that Jordan had summoned Arab and Islamic foreign ministers to Amman over what it called an imminent Israeli takeover of the Al-Aqsa compound. The meeting has now concluded, and its results deserve just as careful reporting as the warning that started it. Ministers joined with delegations from Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, and Malaysia to issue a joint declaration rejecting Israeli measures to alter the legal and demographic status of Jerusalem. They reaffirmed that the entire hundred-and-forty-four-dunum compound is an exclusive Muslim place of worship. They also stated that the Jerusalem waqf, which answers to Jordan's Ministry of Awqaf, is the sole legal authority over who enters and on what terms. They asked the United Nations Security Council to act. They also called for a joint meeting of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Arab League in New York next month during the General Assembly's high-level week.

Two things in that are worth naming plainly. First, the declaration takes a firm stance. It calls for exclusive Muslim worship over the whole compound (despite Jerusalem never being named in the Quran). This blocks any chance of Jewish prayer there (though it is named hundreds of times in the Bible). That is exactly what Israel's national security minister has been encouraging in practice. Both sides have now stated a claim the other cannot accept, just like the deal with Hamas. This turns a dispute over access into a dispute over sovereignty. Second, we must look at the calendar. Jordanian officials also raised reports about recruiting a police unit dedicated to the compound. They said openly that they expect the next challenge to their custodianship to come during the major Jewish holidays this autumn. That is a stated expectation by a government, not a prediction by us. We should write it in the margin of our calendar and revisit it later instead of speculating now.

These I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. That is God's own description of that hill, and it is not what either communiqué says. When a woman asked the Lord which mountain was the right place to worship, He told her that a time was coming. Neither on that mountain nor in Jerusalem would men worship the Father then, because the Father seeks worshipers in spirit and truth. Christians hold that sentence with care. We do not use it as a taunt against anyone's devotion. Instead, we keep it as the reason we can watch this quarrel without needing to win it. Pray for Muslim families who fear losing a place of prayer to discover the God they should be praying to. Pray for Jewish worshippers who love a mountain they are not permitted to pray on to do the same. Pray for the police who will stand between them in the autumn. Pray for the peace of a city that has never yet known it.

"these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples." Isaiah 56:7, ESV

"Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." John 4:21-24, ESV

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5. A red heifer, a government ear tag, and a standard almost nothing survives

We reported in July that a red calf born in the Golan had been deliberately left untagged. The puncture of an ear tag counts as the blemish that disqualifies an animal from the rite of Numbers 19. There may now be a third, and it is worth being precise about what we know. On August 9 Arnon Segal wrote that a red heifer, apparently unblemished, is the third of its kind born in the land within two months. Segal is not a bystander. He has written a weekly Temple Mount column in a Hebrew newspaper for about a decade. His work is read in synagogues across the country. He is also an open advocate for Jewish sovereignty over the site. He holds both roles openly. He wrote only that the animal is somewhere in Israel. He gave no location. He hedged his own claim by using the word apparently. No institute has announced it, and no news organization has confirmed it. So we will say a knowledgeable man who cares deeply about this says there is a third. We will leave it there until somebody puts a place and a name to it.

The Muslim world has just organized diplomatically around the compound, claiming all of it is exclusively Muslim and warning of religious war. We see Jewish presence on the mount keep widening in practice. Three thousand people gather there on Tisha B'Av for open prayer. A cabinet minister who commands the police has announced for four years that he permits it. We also hear reports of a unit dedicated to the site. The preparation is not theoretical. We note more than seventy vessels built from gold, silver, and copper declared fit for use. A stone altar already stands at Mitzpe Yericho, cut without iron. Priests have trained on full-sized replicas since 2014. We also know that a red heifer was actually slaughtered and burned in Israel in July of last year, with ten gallons of ashes gathered.

We have seen that last point reported incorrectly on both sides, so let us look at what actually happened and what the real objection was. The event was advertised as a practice run. It took place on a hilltop in Samaria. Afterward the Temple Institute said it did not count. They explained that the problem was the location, not the animal. We should check the original sources instead of relying on news reports. Numbers says only that the cow is taken outside the camp and that the priest sprinkles the blood toward the front of the tent of meeting, seven times. The word toward shows a direction, not a straight line of sight. We see this when Daniel prayed toward Jerusalem from Babylon. The Mishnah, in the tractate Parah, describes the practice. They built a ramp from the Temple Mount to the Mount of Olives for the procession. The priest stood in the east, faced west, and sprinkled toward the Holy of Holies. Its actual invalidating rule is also about direction. If the blood was sprinkled but not aimed toward the entrance of the Holy of Holies, Parah says it is invalid. Both the verse and the tradition care about which way the priest faces. The Mount of Olives simply provides the ground from which a man can face that way. A hilltop in Samaria does not. The ashes are real. The direction was not correct, and that is the whole of the objection.

Notice what that means for the two stories we have just told, because they are bound together by this fact. The bodies that will decide whether any future rite counts are the Temple Institute and the Sanhedrin. They hold that it must happen at one prepared spot on the Mount of Olives, facing the Temple Mount. Under their standard, the ceremony everyone is watching for cannot happen without access to that ground and the political conditions to stand on it openly. That exact question is what twenty foreign ministers met in Amman to argue about. It is why nobody should tell you they know the timetable, including the people running the program. The honest reading is not that a clock is running. It is that the distance between impossible and possible has narrowed to one qualifying animal and one political decision about one hill. Neither event has happened yet. We will keep saying the other thing too, which no communiqué on either side will say: all of this is careful preparation to resume a sacrifice whose purpose was finished where they want to restart things almost two thousand years ago, by the high priest who needed no ashes and offered no calf.

The law only shows us a shadow of the good things to come. It does not show the true form of these realities. Because the same sacrifices are offered every year, they can never make those who draw near truly whole. The blood of bulls and goats cannot take away our sins. Look at the ledger above, and Hebrews stops being abstract for us. A ritual so fragile could be undone by a single hair or a misplaced tag. It was never the thing itself. We were not ransomed with perishable things such as silver or gold. We were ransomed by the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. He met the standard no calf has met. Let us pray for the Jewish people in their longing for the house of God. May their longing find the One who cast the shadow.

"For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins? But in these sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." Hebrews 10:1-4, ESV

"knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot." 1 Peter 1:18-19, ESV

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6. At Hormuz, both governments now bill the other first

We note that the strait has been closed since February. Iran and Oman have now spent more than three weeks working out how it would be run if it opened. They are close to an agreement, but it is unclear if the US will agree with whatever they decide. They have settled on inbound and outbound routes, technical arrangements, language protecting each country's sovereignty, and a proposed joint coordination center to manage traffic and collect information from passing vessels. That is a real piece of work. We see it as the machinery of a reopening.

We see that it will not open, because the two governments that matter have each decided the other owes them money first. Iran's conditions are that America withdraw the naval blockade, unfreeze Iranian assets, lift sanctions, permanently end the war against the regime and its allies, and pay compensation for war damages. On Monday the President answered with a demand of his own. He asked Iran to compensate Americans for all the people it has killed and gravely wounded with roadside bombs. He also asked that Iran compensate the families of protesters the Iranian government has killed over the past fifty years. Yet neither will be paid. And so a waterway that carries a fifth of the world's oil stays shut while two capitals argue about a debt that runs back five decades. It is a very old human pattern wearing a very modern hat.

One more number belongs here, because a closed strait gets paid for out of a tank. On August 7 the Strategic Petroleum Reserve stood at two hundred ninety-eight point seven million barrels. That is the first time it has been under three hundred million since 1983. It held about four hundred fifteen million in the middle of March, before the President ordered a hundred and seventy-two million barrel emergency release in response to the war. Roughly a hundred and seventeen million barrels have gone out the door since, which leaves about fifty-five million still owed under an order already signed.

The natural question is how close that is to the bottom of the tank, and the answer is not the one the headline number suggests. The Energy Department puts the minimum needed to operate the reserve safely near seventy million barrels, so the physical floor is still a long way off. The legal floor is much nearer. Federal law bars any drawdown under the limited authority once the reserve holds fewer than two hundred fifty-two point four million barrels, which leaves about forty-six million barrels of room, less than the standing order still calls for. But the limit that actually binds is neither of those. It is rate. The Government Accountability Office reported this summer that as of December the reserve could deliver only sixty-one percent of the rate it was designed for, two point seven million barrels a day against four point four, and that more than a quarter of the oil in it could not be withdrawn at all because of construction and cavern outages. Wells decades past their design life are deforming faster than the department can repair them. A reserve is not what it stores. It is what it can push out on the day you need it, and that is the number that has quietly fallen while the other one got the attention. David Goldwyn, a former State Department energy envoy, says he is not worried about the stability of the reserve or our ability to draw it down again, and he may well be right. The point is only that the cushion under American fuel prices is thinner and slower than three hundred million barrels sounds, and it is being spent on a waterway that has been shut since February.

Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Do not say, I will repay evil. Wait for the LORD, and he will deliver you. Scripture does not pretend the debts are imaginary. It says vengeance belongs to God. Waiting on Him is the only way we get out from under a ledger like this. Let us pray for the crews still waiting at anchor. We lift up the negotiators in Muscat. We also ask for households worldwide that feel the toll of a closed sea on their fuel and food prices.

"Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." Romans 12:17-18, ESV

"Do not say, “I will repay evil”; wait for the LORD, and he will deliver you." Proverbs 20:22, ESV

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7. Watch what the bodyguards do, not what the podium says

Two stories surfaced this week that belong together. After the NATO summit in Turkey on July 8, the President boarded Air Force One. About five minutes later, he was moved off it inside a catering cart. This is the kind of cart used to load meals onto aircraft. The cart drove him to a C-32A, a smaller Air Force jet. The two planes flew in tandem to a base in England, landing minutes apart. The traveling press and some White House staff were aboard the decoy and did not know. Reporters were told to keep their window shades down. The White House said publicly that he was on the other aircraft. We learned from intelligence reporting that the reason was a threat from Iran as he departed a country that borders it. Specifically, there was concern about a shoulder-fired missile aimed at Air Force One.

We see this second point clearly: on Sunday the President played golf at his club in New Jersey while an Avenger air defense vehicle sat near the fairway. That is a Humvee mounting Stinger surface-to-air missiles. It was paired with a Sentinel acquisition radar, with F-16s overhead and restricted airspace above the course. During the visit, NORAD fighters intercepted two civilian aircraft that wandered into the restriction. One photograph shows the President holding a club with the missile vehicle visible behind barbed wire.

Here is why we are printing this rather than treating it as a curiosity. You do not swap a president between aircraft with a catering cart for fun. You also do not put a radar-cued missile battery on a golf course for a lone gunman. Those are countermeasures against an adversary with standoff weapons and the organization to use them, which is to say a nation state. The administration has spent months telling the public that Iran's capability is mostly gone and the war is won. We noted last week that its own intelligence service put the remaining missile stockpile far higher than the President's public number. Now add this. Whatever is said from a podium, the people whose entire profession is assessing the threat to this man are acting as though it is live and capable. When the words and the security posture disagree, believe the posture. That is not a partisan observation. It would be just as true of any administration. It is the soberest single indicator we have of where this war actually stands.

Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain. The psalm does not tell the watchman to go home. It tells him whose city he is guarding. The name of the LORD is a strong tower. The righteous man runs into it and is safe. We must pray for the President's protection and for the agents and airmen who keep those watches. We must pray for the leaders of both parties who live under threat in this season. And we must pray for an end to the war that makes a missile battery beside a fairway seem reasonable.

"Of Solomon. Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain." Psalm 127:1, ESV

"The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe." Proverbs 18:10, ESV

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8. Congo passes two thousand dead in the fastest Ebola outbreak ever recorded

Congolese officials said Tuesday that the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has killed two thousand and eleven people out of four thousand three hundred eighty-one confirmed cases. Half of those deaths came in the last twenty days. The toll went from one thousand to two thousand in under a month.

Put that against the epidemic everyone remembers. The West African outbreak of 2014 to 2016 was the worst in history, and it took nearly five months from its declaration to reach a thousand deaths. This one reached two thousand in under three months, roughly three times faster. It is now the second-largest Ebola epidemic ever recorded and unambiguously the fastest growing. The World Health Organization declared it a public health emergency of international concern on May 17, and it is caused by the Bundibugyo strain, spreading in Congo and Uganda where terrain and conflict make containment brutally hard. We reported this outbreak at seven hundred dead in the middle of July. That was four weeks ago.

Blessed is the one who considers the poor; in the day of trouble the LORD delivers him. The LORD sustains him on his sickbed; in his illness you restore him to full health. I was sick and you visited me. Pray for Congolese and Ugandan families burying their dead faster than any outbreak in history has required, for the health workers going into isolation wards in the hardest country on earth to do it, for the researchers racing a vaccine, and that this would not become the epidemic the world decided not to look at.

"Blessed is the one who considers the poor! In the day of trouble the LORD delivers him; the LORD protects him and keeps him alive; he is called blessed in the land; you do not give him up to the will of his enemies. The LORD sustains him on his sickbed; in his illness you restore him to full health." Psalm 41:1-3, ESV

"I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me." Matthew 25:36, ESV

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9. America: the mail-ballot order blocked nationwide, and the hottest month on record

On Tuesday, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the Postal Service from carrying out the mail-voting section of the President's election order. She also expanded her earlier injunction so it now applies across the whole country instead of just the twenty-three states that sued. That halted order would have set new federal standards for mail ballots. It would have directed Homeland Security to assemble lists of citizens eligible to vote. It would have instructed the Justice Department to prioritize investigations of state and local election officials. We expect the administration to appeal to the First Circuit. This is the same court that upheld an injunction against the citizenship-list piece of this order two weeks ago. We say again what we said then: the mechanism is working. An order was issued. States sued. Judges examined it. It stopped twice, before an election rather than after.

The other American number this week is the temperature. July was the hottest month the contiguous United States has ever recorded, with records going back to 1895. It was not the hottest July. It was the hottest month period. The Lower Forty-Eight averaged seventy-six point nine degrees. If you have been attending the past few weeks with our AC broken you know it is more than that here. That is three point three degrees above the twentieth-century average. It just edged past July of 1936 and July of 2012. Every single one of the Lower Forty-Eight states ran at least a degree above its long-term average. Last week we wrote that the measure that matters for our bodies is not the thermometer but the wet-bulb temperature. We also noted that a muggy day kills where a dry day does not. This is the month that arithmetic was written across an entire country.

By justice a king builds up the land, but he who exacts gifts tears it down. And Moses charged the judges: hear the cases between your brothers, and judge righteously; you shall not be partial in judgment. We give thanks for courts that examined an order twice and stopped it twice. The LORD has been a stronghold to the needy in his distress. He is a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat. We pray for the elderly and the outdoor workers who lived through that month, and we ask that our church be the shade it asks God to be.

"By justice a king builds up the land, but he who exacts gifts tears it down." Proverbs 29:4, ESV

"For you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat; for the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall," Isaiah 25:4, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Let us pray for Colombia. We ask for families in Cali and Pereira who are burying more than two hundred fifty dead. Please pray for rescuers working the rubble in their second and third days. Also pray for the injured and for villages in Chocó that remain hardest to reach. Ask the Lord to teach us to number our days without teaching us to fear.

"So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90:12, ESV

Let us pray for the hostages still held and the families waiting for them, for Gazan civilians under strikes that never pause for an announcement, and for leaders locked in a mutual veto to find the courage of a first step. We ask God to give someone the nerve to move first.

"Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it." Psalm 34:14, ESV

Let us pray for the three governments that signed in Mecca and for the soldiers who may one day serve under that promise. We ask the Lord to keep this pact a deterrent rather than a tripwire, and to give His church the steadiness to watch alliances form without yawning or panicking.

"But the LORD of hosts, him you shall honor as holy. Let him be your fear, and let him be your dread." Isaiah 8:13, ESV

Let us pray for Jerusalem before autumn comes. We ask for Muslim families who fear losing a place of prayer. We pray for Jewish worshippers who love a mountain they may not pray on. We lift up the police who will stand between them during the feasts. And we ask for restraint in the ministers on every side, who gain by provocation.

"these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples." Isaiah 56:7, ESV

We ask you to pray for the Jewish people as they long for the house of God. We hope that longing will lead them to the One without blemish or spot. We also pray that our church will watch this work with genuine interest and no worry, resting in the purification already finished.

"but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot." 1 Peter 1:19, ESV

Let us pray for the tanker crews still at anchor after five months, for the negotiators in Muscat who have done the technical work, and for two governments each waiting to be paid first. We ask the Lord to break a fifty-year ledger that no settlement will ever balance.

"Do not say, “I will repay evil”; wait for the LORD, and he will deliver you." Proverbs 20:22, ESV

Let us pray for the President's safety and for the agents and airmen who keep watch. We also ask for leaders of both parties who live under threat this season. Please ask the Lord who watches the city to end this war that has made a missile battery beside a golf fairway look reasonable.

"Of Solomon. Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the LORD watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain." Psalm 127:1, ESV

Let us pray for Congo and Uganda. We ask for families who are burying their dead faster than any outbreak in recorded history has demanded. We pray for health workers entering isolation wards and for the scientists racing a vaccine. We ask God to keep the world's attention on a place it finds easy to forget.

"I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me." Matthew 25:36, ESV

We give thanks for the judges who examined an election order twice and stopped it twice before a vote rather than after. We pray for our elderly neighbors and outdoor workers who survived the hottest month this country has ever measured. Help us be the shade we ask God to be.

"For you have been a stronghold to the poor, a stronghold to the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat; for the breath of the ruthless is like a storm against a wall," Isaiah 25:4, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: August 5th, 2026

"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring." Proverbs 27:1, ESV

This was a week of deals almost made and systems quietly giving way. The Strait of Hormuz reached its hundred and fifty-seventh day closed, with two ships passing on Tuesday where seventy-three would pass on an ordinary day, while mediators from Qatar, Pakistan, and Oman carried proposals and the President said an agreement might come as early as today. America has now spent roughly eighty percent of its THAAD interceptors and two-thirds of its Patriots defending against Iran, and the bill for that arrived in Kyiv, where Russia fired twenty-four ballistic missiles and Ukraine shot down none of them, killing seventeen. At a border fence in North Africa more than seventy people died as tens of thousands crossed into a Spanish enclave in two days. In Gaza the President announced an agreement to disarm Hamas entirely, and the strikes continued while the parties argued over who moves first. Gunmen went house to house in a Nigerian village and killed thirty-one Christians, eleven of them children. Arizona's supreme court ruled that churches, not judges, decide what a confession is. And across three continents the heat began breaking infrastructure, from Romanian reactors starved of river water to Japanese earthquake shelters where the dying has continued after the shaking stopped. None of this proves a date. All of it answers the proverb: do not boast about tomorrow.

Headlines:

1. Hormuz, day one hundred fifty-seven

The strait has now been closed for more than five months. On Tuesday two commercial ships made the passage, on a waterway that carries about seventy-three on an ordinary day, and those two moved in convoy under naval escort. War-risk insurance runs eight times its prewar cost. There was a real reopening once, under the memorandum signed on June 17, and traffic came through at a fraction of the norm on June 19 before the arrangement collapsed. Tehran calls the strait closed; the American military declines to use the word and points out that ships are still transiting. Both statements are technically defensible, which tells you most of what you need to know about the state of the thing.

American and Qatari officials reported progress toward restoring the ceasefire and reopening the channel, with Qatar, Pakistan, and Oman carrying proposals between Washington and Tehran like teenagers passing notes in class, and the President said a deal could come as early as today. He also approved canceling a planned strike on Iran yet again, citing the chance of an agreement, with American forces still on alert. Oil fell about two percent on the optimism alone. Read the fine print, though: Iran denies negotiating with the United States directly, and what Tehran is actually discussing with Oman is a temporary escorted lane rather than a reopened strait. Meanwhile British maritime authorities reported that an unidentified projectile struck a cargo vessel near Oman. Announcements are not yet arrivals, and a corridor is not a peace.

Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. That is not cynicism about diplomacy, it is the reason to pray for it rather than merely to predict it. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Pray for the negotiators in Doha and Muscat and Islamabad, for the crews sitting at anchor waiting on other men's decisions, and for the households in poor countries who have paid for five months of a closed sea in the price of food.

"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring." Proverbs 27:1, ESV

"You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you." Isaiah 26:3, ESV

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2. The interceptor ledger, and a night over Kyiv

Here is a chain worth following all the way through, because the two ends of it are usually reported as separate stories. Defending against Iran has consumed roughly eighty percent of America's THAAD interceptors, from a prewar stock the Center for Strategic and International Studies put near four hundred fifty, and something close to two-thirds of its Patriot interceptors, leaving fewer than a thousand. Rebuilding those inventories takes years, not months, because the production lines are narrow and the components are specialized. Patriots are also the only weapon Ukraine has that can stop a ballistic missile.

So follow it to the other end. Overnight into Wednesday, Russia fired twenty-four ballistic missiles at Kyiv and the surrounding region, along with four Zircon or Oniks missiles and a hundred and fifteen drones. Ukrainian air defenses shot down ninety-eight of the drones. They shot down none of the ballistic missiles. Seventeen people were killed and forty-four wounded, eight of them near a railway station outside Brovary, and the strikes hit a brewery, a construction warehouse, and a mail sorting office, with an ammonia leak complicating the rescue. Russia said it struck military logistics, which is its own claim about its own targeting and not an established fact. Five days earlier another barrage killed nine. Across one week, President Zelensky counted a hundred and forty-four missiles and nearly two thousand drones against sixteen regions, and said plainly that the shortage of interceptors is what leaves the cities open.

None of this makes the prioritization of the defense of American forces by American systems wrong. It does mean the accounting is not finished when the last Iranian missile is intercepted. Magazines are finite, factories are slow, and a shortage in one theater of war becomes a funeral in another. The offensive side of the ledger is thinner still. Reuters reported this week that five months of war have consumed virtually all of the Army's stock of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles, the surface-to-surface weapons fired from mobile launchers at ranges of a hundred and ninety and three hundred miles, at about a million dollars apiece, along with close to half the Tomahawk inventory. Four hundred Tomahawks went out in seventy-two hours during a single March operation, roughly a tenth of the entire American stock. Replacing one runs about four years from order to delivery, which sounds absurd until you learn why. It is not that the missile is slow to assemble. The supply chain is specialized and the production line has been running cold for years on low-volume orders, so what takes four years is the restart. The practical consequence is plain enough: targets that could have been struck from a safe distance will now need manned bombers over them. The White House disputes the assessment. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is not given to alarm, put it carefully in April, that there is enough left to finish this war with Iran under any plausible scenario and the real risk is the next one, with rebuilding measured at one to four years. Japan has already been told its four hundred Tomahawks may arrive late because of this war.

And Iran is not spending its stock at random. Analysts tracking the campaign describe a deliberate tiering: the older, cheaper missiles go first in large saturating salvos, while the newer Fattah 2, which carries a hypersonic glide vehicle, is held back for higher-value targets. The Kheibar Shekan, inexpensive to build and now among the weapons most often fired at American bases, is flown on varied trajectories at varied speeds with maneuvering warheads and drones alongside it, precisely so that each incoming round forces the defenders to launch more than one interceptor. Notice the arithmetic that creates. A single THAAD interceptor costs more than fifteen million dollars. Iran can lose every missile in a salvo and still come out ahead on the exchange, because the magazine being emptied is ours.

And here the public numbers and the intelligence numbers do not match, which is itself the story. The President has said Iran's missiles are mostly decimated and that Tehran retains perhaps eighteen or nineteen percent of what it had. A Central Intelligence Agency assessment delivered to his own administration in mid May put it at about seventy percent of the pre-war missile stockpile and seventy-five percent of the mobile launchers, and found that Iran had reopened most of its underground storage sites, repaired damaged missiles, and begun assembling new ones. Israel, which is a party to the war and has an interest in the answer, has claimed it destroyed half.

That May assessment is the last authoritative public number, and three months is a long time in a war like this one. Some of what has happened since would push the figure up: Iran kept building, and its rate of fire stayed about ninety percent below where it started, which is what husbanding looks like rather than exhaustion. Some would push it down: the campaign that resumed on July 7 ran eleven consecutive nights and widened from the coast into western and central Iran. We do not know where the number sits today, and on the public record neither does anyone else. What we can say is that the last time American intelligence put a figure on it, that figure was seventy percent remaining, and the President's public number was off from his own agency's by roughly a factor of four. So the picture is not that we are running dry while Iran runs dry with us. It is that we are burning interceptors and cruise missiles that take years to replace, against an adversary his own intelligence service says is still holding most of its arsenal and building more. China can do that arithmetic as easily as we can.

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God. The psalm is not against air defense; it is against the belief that any magazine is deep enough to be our security. O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed. Pray for Kyiv's dead and their families, for crews working an ammonia leak in the dark, and for the nations deciding who gets the next interceptor off the line.

"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God." Psalm 20:7, ESV

"O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more." Psalm 10:17-18, ESV

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3. Seventy-two dead at a border fence in two days

On July 30 and 31 something happened at Ceuta, the Spanish enclave on the North African coast, that has no recent parallel. Somewhere around sixty thousand people crossed from Morocco in roughly forty-eight hours, and Spain later told European ministers the figure may have reached seventy-two thousand. By August 2 at least seventy-two were confirmed dead on the Spanish side and eleven more on the Moroccan side, with later Spanish briefings putting the toll higher still. They drowned swimming around the breakwater, or were crushed against it. Within four days roughly sixty-nine thousand had gone back to Morocco, most of them voluntarily, because Ceuta's status means arrival there is not arrival in Spain or in Europe. Spain has since installed a floating barrier offshore.

How it happened is contested. Spain blames trafficking networks that spread word of a Supreme Court ruling barring the immediate return of migrants who arrive by sea without due process. Morocco says criminal groups drove it and denies that its own government intended any of it. Several European governments point to video of truckloads of young men apparently organized and ferried toward the border, which if true would make this a state using human beings as leverage, and Spain has leveled that exact charge at Morocco before, in 2021. What is documented this time is that Moroccan forces were working both directions: water cannon against crowds still pressing toward the fence, and, according to a Spanish government source, Moroccan authorities blocking their own nationals from moving along the beach. Photographs circulating of Moroccan soldiers stoning citizens trying to go home have not been corroborated by any news organization, and in an age when anyone can generate a photograph, one image from an anonymous account is not a trustworthy fact. What is not in dispute is Europe's response. Twenty-two member states called for coordinated action, Italy suspended passport-free travel with Spain, and Spain's prime minister called Europe's answer selfish.

Two duties sit here and they are not the same duty, so we should not blur them. A government may lawfully control its borders. Paul told the Athenians that God himself determined the times and the boundaries of the nations, so a border is not an offense against heaven, and Spain deciding who enters is not wickedness. The church's assignment is different and more specific: the person in the water is our neighbor whatever his paperwork says, and seventy-two people drowned or crushed against a seawall is not a policy debate to us before it is a tragedy. Both things are true at once, and a Christian who can only hold one of them is holding half.

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. And the King will say, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Pray for the families of the more than eighty dead on both sides of that fence, for the rescuers who pulled bodies off a breakwater, for Ceuta's residents whose small city was overwhelmed, and for governments to make policy that is both lawful and humane, which is harder than either alone.

"When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:33-34, ESV

"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me," Matthew 25:35, ESV

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4. A deal to disarm Hamas, and the strikes that followed

On July 30 the President announced that his Board of Peace had reached an agreement for the complete disarmament of Hamas and every other armed faction in Gaza. What counts as a weapon is not settled, and that gap is not small: nobody has said publicly whether personal rifles stay in the homes that hold them, or whether rocket-propelled grenades and mortars go into the same pile as the rockets. The terms as described are still serious: an eight-month phased handover of weapons to a National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, after which Israel withdraws and an international stabilization force takes over alongside a new Palestinian police force. That is the framework whose first two hundred troops Israel's security cabinet approved last week, so this is a real thread and not an announcement out of nowhere.

Then came the sequencing, where these things usually die. Hamas says Israel must withdraw from parts of Gaza first. An Israeli official answered that there will be no withdrawal from the yellow line until Hamas is disarmed and the strip demilitarized. Reporting suggests the Prime Minister will not publicly oppose the deal, calculating instead that Hamas will break it, and that he will not order a withdrawal before October's elections in any case. Meanwhile the strikes did not pause for the announcement. Palestinian officials reported at least twenty-six killed over one weekend, and Gaza held a mass funeral for a hundred and twelve bodies finally recovered from a 2023 strike site.

The northern front moved the same way. On August 5 Israel ordered residents of Mansouri in southern Lebanon to move a kilometer north and then struck, saying Hezbollah had blatantly violated the ceasefire, which is Israel's characterization and not an independently established finding. Lebanon's health ministry said a strike on Tebnine killed one person and wounded twelve. All of this happened while Lebanese and Israeli negotiators sat in Rome discussing withdrawal and Hezbollah's disarmament. The pattern is consistent enough now to name: the table and the target list are running at the same time, and the people under the flight path are not at either.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. For my brothers and companions' sake I will say, Peace be within you. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Pray for the hostages and their families, for Gazan families burying the recovered dead of a strike three years old, for villagers in Mansouri and Tebnine given an hour to leave, and for negotiators in Rome to close what men in the field keep reopening.

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! “May they be secure who love you! Peace be within your walls and security within your towers!" Psalm 122:6-7, ESV

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV

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5. In Nigeria they went house to house

On Sunday gunmen entered a village in Kaduna State and killed about thirty Christians, and reporting published August 4 put the week's toll across Nigeria's Middle Belt at thirty-one. Twenty-one of the dead belonged to a Catholic parish and nine to the Evangelical Church Winning All. Nine men, ten women, and eleven children. The youngest was three years old. The oldest was eighty-seven. A former local councillor described what happened in one sentence that does not need any help from us: they were going from house to house, shooting. Survivors say the army was asked to come and did not come in time, and that police arrived after it was over.

We reported last week that at least two thousand five hundred and fifty Christians were killed in Nigeria in the first hundred and eighty days of this year, roughly fourteen a day. This is what one of those days looks like from the inside, with the ages written down. We keep printing these because a number that large quickly stops being human and becomes an abstraction, and a three-year-old and an eighty-seven-year-old killed in the same house do not.

They have given the bodies of your servants to the birds of the heavens for food, the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth. Asaph prayed that in the psalms and God did not rebuke him for it. Weep with those who weep. Pray for eleven families in Kaduna burying children this week, for the wounded and the hidden, for pastors who will hold funerals and then hold services, and for a Nigerian government that will do the one thing God assigned it and protect its people.

"They have given the bodies of your servants to the birds of the heavens for food, the flesh of your faithful to the beasts of the earth. They have poured out their blood like water all around Jerusalem, and there was no one to bury them." Psalm 79:2-3, ESV

"Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep." Romans 12:15, ESV

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6. Arizona rules that churches decide what a confession is

This one belongs to us more directly than most things we print, so we are going to state it plainly. On July 30 the Arizona Supreme Court ruled unanimously that clergy may withhold what they learn about child abuse in a confession or confidential communication when they judge nondisclosure reasonable and necessary within their religion, and that the First Amendment generally bars courts and juries from second-guessing that judgment absent fraud or collusion for secular ends. In practice churches, not judges, now define what counts as a confession under Arizona's mandatory reporting law.

The facts underneath the ruling are ugly and should not be skipped. A man named Paul Adams told Mormon bishops that he was sexually abusing his daughter. He told a bishop, and told it again with the bishop's wife present, and told it again before a disciplinary council. Nobody called the authorities. The abuse continued. Three of his children sued in 2020, and this ruling affirms judgment for the church. The court was careful to add that religious institutions have no general immunity from secular law, and survivors' advocates were not comforted by the distinction.

There is a real principle on the other side, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest: the confessional seal is ancient, priests have gone to prison rather than break it, and a state that can compel a pastor to testify about what was told to him in repentance has acquired something dangerous. But a legal right is not a moral permission, and this ruling settles what a church may be sued for, not what a church should do. Our own answer should be settled in advance and out loud: when a child is being harmed, we call the police. Whatever protection the courts extend to us, we do not want it for this.

Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea. That is the Lord's sentence on this subject and He did not soften it. Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Pray for the Adams children and every survivor whose church chose its process over their safety, for elders and pastors who will face this and must not hesitate, and that our churches would be the safest rooms a child can walk into.

"Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea." Matthew 18:5-6, ESV

"Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known." Luke 12:2, ESV

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7. A hundred billion dollars back, and who can actually claim it

In February the Supreme Court ruled six to three that the emergency-powers statute never authorized tariffs, and we covered the sequel in July when the same duties came back through older laws Congress had actually written. This week the money started moving. Customs has now refunded roughly a hundred billion dollars of the about one hundred sixty-six billion collected under the invalidated program, close to sixty percent, processed through a system built in late April that had taken more than two hundred fifty thousand refund declarations by July 31.

The detail worth digging in on is who gets it. Only the importer of record can file a claim, which means the refund flows to the company whose name was on the customs paperwork, generally a large importer. The small business that paid the higher price down the chain has no mechanism to recover anything, and the customer who paid the higher shelf price is further out still. So the tax was collected broadly and is being returned narrowly. That is not a scandal and nobody appears to have schemed it; it is how the plumbing was built. It is still worth noticing, because a refund that reaches only the top of the chain leaves the burden exactly where it fell and calls it made right.

Do not rob the poor, because he is poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate, for the LORD will plead their cause. Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, to turn aside the needy from justice. Neither text is about tariff refund mechanics, and both are about who ends up bearing what. Give thanks for courts that made the government give money back, and pray for lawmakers to notice the small importer at the end of the chain who has no form to file.

"Do not rob the poor, because he is poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate, for the LORD will plead their cause and rob of life those who rob them." Proverbs 22:22-23, ESV

"Woe to those who decree iniquitous decrees, and the writers who keep writing oppression, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be their spoil, and that they may make the fatherless their prey!" Isaiah 10:1-2, ESV

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8. The heat is breaking things

Follow the water and you can watch a heat wave turn into an electricity problem. On August 3 Romanian naval engineers detonated a hundred and eighty kilograms of explosives in the Danube to clear rock from a channel feeding the Cernavoda nuclear plant, so they could build a temporary dam and push cooling water toward the country's last operating reactor. Record-low river levels had already forced another Romanian reactor offline. In Hungary the Paks plant, which normally supplies close to half the country's electricity, ran below half capacity, and officials said voluntary conservation cut demand by seven hundred megawatts in a single day. Reactors need river water to shed heat. When the river drops, the lights get expensive and the air conditioning stops running.

The same pattern showed up as fire and as illness. European fire weather from January through July ran forty-three percent more severe than the twenty-year average, with about one million and seventy-five thousand acres burned across roughly fourteen hundred fires, triple the usual area; France has already set a full-year national record and three firefighters died in Greece. In Spokane, Washington, wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes and displaced close to a quarter of the city. South Korea recorded one hundred eight and a half degrees Fahrenheit at Yangsan on August 2, the highest in a hundred and twenty-two years of observation, with sixteen dead and more than two thousand treated since May, and Seoul issued its first severe heat warning under a new system while crews checked on sixty-three thousand vulnerable residents.

And in Kumamoto the dying continued after the shaking stopped. The July 28 earthquake has now killed thirty-eight with a hundred and fourteen injured, including seven in an explosion at a shopping mall and eight at a paper mill. A woman in her seventies was found dead of apparent heatstroke while sheltering in her car, likely the first death caused by the disaster rather than by the quake itself. Water mains are broken and the power for air conditioning is out, in the hottest part of a Japanese summer, with thousands still in shelters. Officials expect the toll to rise. That is worth saying carefully, and carefully cuts both ways. The creation is groaning, and Paul says so plainly in Romans, but that groaning has been the condition of the whole created order since the fall and it is not a dated signal. Scripture does give us one specific water sign, the drying up of the great river Euphrates to prepare the way for the kings from the east, and a shrinking Danube in a Romanian August is not that. Not yet, and possibly not ever in our lifetimes. What this is, is heat, and old bodies, and broken pipes, and it kills people quietly for weeks after the cameras leave.

Since we have said what this is not, it is worth setting the number beside the text so nobody has to take our word for it. The world now runs about two and a half degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the late eighteen hundreds, while the entire natural swing of the previous two thousand years was closer to one degree. That is genuinely unusual and worth taking seriously. It is also nothing like the fourth bowl of Revelation, where an angel is given power to scorch men with fire and they curse God by name and refuse to repent. Scorching human skin takes radiant heat rather than warm air, and the rise required runs from about ten degrees at the very low end to something nearer ninety, not two and a half. The bowl is also poured out on people rather than on the planet, which is not how a climate behaves at all. A thing can be genuinely abnormal without being promoted to a sign.

One practical note, because this is something a congregation can actually use. The number that kills is not the one on the thermometer. It is the wet-bulb temperature, which combines heat and humidity and tells you whether sweat can still cool a body. Above about eighty on that scale, the elderly and the sick and people working outdoors are in real danger. At about eighty-eight a healthy adult is past the limit. At ninety-five a man sitting in the shade with all the water he wants will die in roughly six hours, because evaporation has stopped working altogether. And here is the part worth carrying: in humid air the wet-bulb number climbs nearly to the air temperature, so a muggy ninety-five degree afternoon is far deadlier than a dry hundred and ten. That is precisely why heat kills quietly in Kumamoto shelters and across the humid South rather than in the desert, and why the forecast that sounds mild is often the one to watch. If your weather station reports a wet-bulb reading and it crosses eighty, that is the afternoon to go knock on doors.

Joseph told Pharaoh to find a discerning man and store the grain in the years of plenty, and that counsel is in Scripture because foresight is a form of love. The LORD is your keeper; the sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. Pray for evacuees in Kumamoto shelters, for outdoor workers and elderly neighbors in Korea and southern Europe, for firefighters in Greece and Spokane, and for engineers keeping reactors cool on a shrinking river. Then go check on somebody old who lives alone, and do it on the muggy days, not only the hot ones.

"Now therefore let Pharaoh select a discerning and wise man, and set him over the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plentiful years. And let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming and store up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to occur in the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine." Genesis 41:33-36, ESV

"The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night." Psalm 121:5-6, ESV

"The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire. They were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues. They did not repent and give him glory." Revelation 16:8-9, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Pray for the mediators in Doha, Muscat, and Islamabad, and for an agreement that actually opens the strait rather than announcing that it will. Pray for crews waiting at anchor on other men's decisions, and for families who have paid for five closed months in the price of bread.

"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring." Proverbs 27:1, ESV

Pray for the seventeen killed over Kyiv and the forty-four wounded, for the rescue crews who worked an ammonia leak in the dark, and for Ukrainian families under a sky their defenses cannot reach. Ask the Lord who hears the desire of the afflicted to end this war before the next shortage becomes another funeral.

"O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear" Psalm 10:17, ESV

Pray for the families of the more than eighty who died at Ceuta, for those who recovered bodies from the breakwater, and for the residents of a small city overwhelmed in two days. Pray for governments to guard their borders lawfully and treat every person at them as an image-bearer, and for a church that refuses to choose only one of those.

"You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:34, ESV

Pray that the disarmament framework survives its own sequencing, for the hostages still held, for Gazan families burying dead recovered after three years, and for villagers in southern Lebanon ordered from their homes at an hour's notice. Ask God to make peacemakers of the men in Rome.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV

Pray for the families in Kaduna burying eleven children this week, for the wounded and those who fled into the bush, and for pastors holding funerals and then services. Ask the Lord to move the Nigerian state to protect its citizens, and keep us from letting a number this large go numb.

"Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep." Romans 12:15, ESV

Pray for the Adams children and for every survivor whose church protected its process instead of them. Pray for pastors and elders who will one day hear such a confession, that they will not hesitate, and that our congregation would be the safest room a child can walk into.

"but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea." Matthew 18:6, ESV

Give thanks for courts that can compel a government to return what it took unlawfully. Pray for small businesses that paid the cost down the chain and have no way to claim it back, and for lawmakers with the patience to fix plumbing that quietly favors the largest party in the room.

"Do not rob the poor, because he is poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate," Proverbs 22:22, ESV

Pray for evacuees still in Kumamoto shelters where the heat is now the danger, for elderly neighbors and outdoor workers in Korea and southern Europe, for firefighters in Greece and Spokane, and for engineers keeping reactors cool on a shrinking river. Then go check on somebody old who lives alone, and do it on the muggy days, not only the hot ones.

"The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade on your right hand." Psalm 121:5, ESV

Maranatha,
Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: July 29th, 2026

"For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” But you were unwilling," Isaiah 30:15, ESV

This was the week the guns went quiet, and then, on Tuesday evening, they did not. Five nights passed without an American strike on Iranian soil, the longest silence since the campaign resumed three weeks ago; Iran held its own fire, Qatar and Pakistan carried messages between the capitals, oil fell nearly nine percent in a day, and negotiators from Oman and Iran worked on reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Then the Revolutionary Guard fired a surprise barrage of ballistic missiles at American forces, every one of them intercepted, and American and Saudi aircraft struck militia sites across eastern Iraq in reply. It happened while Israel's prime minister was inside the White House. Off Saudi Arabia the Houthis declared a blockade and set a tanker on fire, so that both of the world's oil gates are now under attack at once. Iran hanged two young men in a public square in Isfahan while the crowd shouted at the executioners. In Gaza the famine was declared over, a real mercy, even as the yellow line pushed deeper into neighborhoods and Israel approved the first foreign force to enter the strip. Ukrainian drones shut the Black Sea terminal that carries most of Kazakhstan's oil, forcing a country not at war to cut a fifth of its production, so that the world's oil is now squeezed at three gates at once. A red calf was born in the Golan, deliberately left untagged so a piercing would not disqualify it. Fire drove three hundred thousand people from their homes in France and Spain. None of this proves a date. All of it finds the church where the prophet said our strength actually lies, in quietness and in trust.

Headlines:

1. The pause that broke

For five nights the sky over Iran was empty, the longest pause in offensive operations since the campaign resumed on July 7. Iran's military said it would hold its retaliatory attacks as long as the quiet lasted. The President said Tehran had asked to resume ceasefire talks because, in his words, we have been hitting them very hard; Tehran denied negotiating with Washington at all, which can be true at the same time when Qatar and Pakistan are carrying the messages. Markets believed the calm before the diplomats would name it: Brent crude fell eight and a half percent in a day to about eighty-eight dollars, and a war that had driven oil more than fifty percent higher this year gave a little back.

It lasted until Tuesday evening. At a quarter to six eastern time the Revolutionary Guard launched multiple ballistic missiles from Iran at American forces in the region in what Central Command called an attempted surprise attack. Every missile was intercepted. American and Saudi aircraft then struck logistics and weapons sites used by Iran-aligned militias across eastern Iraq, after more than thirty drone attacks on American and Saudi targets in seventy-two hours, and Washington warned that further attacks would bring more. All of this unfolded on the same afternoon Prime Minister Netanyahu sat in the White House and President Zelensky came a few hours later. Five quiet nights, and then the war reached for a new country to be fought in. We should say plainly what that pattern is: not a ceasefire failing, but a war widening while everyone talks about peace.

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace. Jeremiah was not describing men who wanted war; he was describing men who wanted the wound closed faster than it could heal. The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. Give thanks for five nights without bombs, pray for the soldiers under those intercepted missiles and for Iraqi civilians who live where the strikes landed, and ask God for the one thing no summit can manufacture, which is peace that is actually peace.

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace." Jeremiah 6:14, ESV

"The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue." Psalm 33:16-17, ESV

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2. The world's oil under fire at three gates

Start in the Black Sea, because this is the piece most people missed. Ukrainian drones struck oil tankers loading at the Caspian Pipeline Consortium terminal near Novorossiysk, hitting a tanker at the berth on July 20 and coming back two days later, and the consortium suspended operations for safety on Monday and took further strikes on Thursday, including damage to a mooring buoy. That terminal is the sea end of a pipeline running fifteen hundred kilometers from the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan through Russia to the coast, and it carries roughly eighty percent of Kazakhstan's crude exports and something close to two percent of the world's daily oil supply. With no way out, Kazakhstan simply had to stop pumping. Production at Tengiz fell fifty-six percent in a day, from a July average of nine hundred twenty-five thousand barrels to about four hundred six thousand, and the country's total output dropped from two million seventy thousand barrels a day to one million six hundred thirty thousand, a twenty-one percent cut. Russia has now warned tankers that its own Black Sea waters are unsafe. Consider what that means: a landlocked nation that is not at war with anybody had to shut in half of its largest field because somebody else's harbor came under attack.

The same squeeze is being applied at both of the other gates. In the Red Sea the Houthis declared a blockade of Saudi ports on Monday, saying it answered a Saudi strike on the airport at Sanaa, and then made it real: the Saudi-flagged tanker Encelia was hit about seventy nautical miles southwest of Al Shuqaiq and caught fire, no casualties reported, and on Tuesday they claimed to have driven off the tanker NCC Ghazal with ballistic missiles while Saudi forces shot down more drones aimed at oil installations. At Hormuz there was actual progress, with Oman and Iran working on reopening the middle passage, though mines still sit in the water, war-risk insurance runs ten to forty times its prewar cost, and traffic is under ten cargo ships a day where a hundred used to pass. Add Ukraine's strikes on Russian refining, Yaroslavl on Monday and two more refineries on Wednesday within hours of President Zelensky leaving the White House, plus Iran's weeks of hitting desalination and power plants across the Gulf, and the shape of it is clear. Three gates, three sets of attackers, one result.

It is worth putting numbers to the scale, because the scale is genuinely historic and honest figures are more useful than adjectives. When Hormuz effectively closed in March, the world lost ten point one million barrels a day, which the International Energy Agency called the largest oil supply disruption in history, more than twice the peak of the 1973 crisis. Flow through the strait fell from over twenty million barrels a day in February to under four million by April, Brent touched a hundred and eighteen dollars, and Iran's own production has slid from roughly three point two million barrels a day to about two point four. Prices have come down since, but we should be honest about why: much of the relief came from the world buying less rather than from supply coming back, with global crude demand down more than three million barrels a day from a year ago. And the Gulf spare capacity that could cover a shortfall, some five million barrels a day, mostly sits behind the same strait that is blocked.

The war in Ukraine has been squeezing the other end of the pipe for four years, in a different way. Ukrainian drones have now struck every one of Russia's largest refineries, taking roughly a third of Russian refining capacity offline, about two million barrels a day of it, and pushing Russian refinery runs below four million barrels a day in June, the lowest in twenty-one years. Russian crude exports are down more modestly, from about five million barrels a day before the invasion to something over four. That distinction is the whole point and it is worth teaching plainly: Ukraine has damaged Russia's ability to make fuel, not mainly its ability to pump oil, which is why an oil superpower has had a gasoline shortage at home while still shipping crude abroad. The two wars cannot simply be added together, since one takes barrels off the water and the other takes diesel out of refineries. But set them side by side and the week comes into focus. One war is squeezing the barrels, the other is squeezing the refineries, and this week both squeezed at once. That is why a quieter week still ends with families paying more for fuel and food, and it is worth understanding as plumbing and economics rather than as omen.

Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters; they saw the deeds of the LORD, his wondrous works in the deep. The psalm knows what sailors know, that the sea is no respecter of plans, and it ends with men crying out and being brought to their desired haven. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you. Pray for the crew of the Encelia and every mariner threading two threatened straits, for minesweepers who will go first, and for the poor of many nations who pay the toll of a closed sea in the price of bread.

"Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters; they saw the deeds of the LORD, his wondrous works in the deep." Psalm 107:23-24, ESV

"When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you." Isaiah 43:2, ESV

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3. Iran hangs two young men in a public square

While its diplomats talked about peace, the regime carried a gallows into a public square. On Tuesday morning Iran publicly hanged Abolfazl Sepahi Badjani, twenty-four years old, and Amirhossein Safari Hosseinabadi, twenty-seven, at Alikhani Square in Isfahan, the first public executions in Iran this year. The judiciary charged them with enmity against God and corruption on earth, and with a role in the deaths of four security officers during January's uprising, along with possession of weapons, burning a police station, and blocking streets. Twelve men were sentenced to death in what is now called the Alikhani Square case; rights groups say eight of them remain at imminent risk of the rope. At least fifty people have now been executed for political offenses since the end of February.

The detail worth sitting with is what the neighbors did. A crowd gathered to stop it, shouted dishonorable at the men doing the hanging, and refused to disperse until security forces fired tear gas into them. The United Nations had warned publicly against these executions days earlier. Ordinary Iranians standing in a square in the early morning, unarmed, telling their own government that killing these two was a shameful thing: that is not a headline about a distant enemy, that is a picture of conscience surviving under a boot. We can hold two truths together. We cannot adjudicate every charge from here, and a government that hangs young men in public, before witnesses it has to gas, has told us exactly how sure it is of its own justice.

Let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die. Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute; judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy. Pray for the eight men still waiting under sentence, for the families of Abolfazl and Amirhossein, for the Iranians brave enough to stand in that square, and for believers in Evin and every prison where faith is a crime. Ask God to preserve those doomed to die.

"Let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die!" Psalm 79:11, ESV

"Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy." Proverbs 31:8-9, ESV

Sources:

4. Gaza: the famine ends, the line moves, a foreign force is approved

Begin with the mercy, because there was one. The international body that classifies hunger announced on Thursday that the famine in Gaza has ended. All five governorates have come down to crisis conditions from the famine classification confirmed in Gaza City last year, and the monitors credited two things plainly: less fighting, and Israel allowing more aid through. That is a real answer to prayers this newsletter has printed for months, and we should thank God before we say anything else. The gain is also fragile. More than two hundred thousand people remain in emergency conditions one step below famine, most families still do not get enough to eat, and the monitors warned that small disruptions to aid could reverse everything quickly.

The rest of the week complicated it. Israel's security cabinet approved the first entry of an international stabilization force into Gaza, an initial deployment of up to two hundred troops drawn from countries including Kosovo, Albania, and Morocco, to take over a pilot humanitarian zone near Rafah as Israeli forces pull back; the national security minister voted against it and the foreign minister for it. Meanwhile the yellow markers defining the Israeli military zone were moved deeper into neighborhoods from Deir al-Balah to Khan Younis to Shejaia, and families who had already fled more than once loaded mattresses onto trucks again. An airstrike killed two Hamas security officials in a vehicle in Deir al-Balah, and on Tuesday jets destroyed the Al-Muttaqin Mosque in Gaza City, killing one person, wounding more than a dozen, and burning tents where displaced families were sheltering. In southern Lebanon, days after last week's first genuine withdrawal, Israeli forces set off demolition blasts across the border villages. Hunger eased and the map kept moving.

One more piece belongs in the record, because it took a long time to be recognized and it runs counter to what has been shouted in streets worldwide. The United Nations' own humanitarian coordinator for the Palestinian territories has now stated plainly that Hamas endangered humanitarian personnel, intimidated workers delivering lifesaving food, and disrupted humanitarian operations, describing an increasingly dangerous pattern of intimidation, violence, and obstruction that includes smuggling. The occasion was armed men entering a food distribution point in Jabalia and assaulting two drivers at a World Food Programme warehouse, which forced aid work to stop. Hamas denies it and calls the raid a law enforcement operation. What the wider record describes is a system of control rather than a shortage of goods: aid taxed and rationed through channels Hamas runs, an American-backed distribution effort that paused operations after direct threats against its staff, and Hamas pressing in negotiations to have food handling taken away from anyone outside its reach. Israel's own logistics agency reports that nearly one and eight tenths million tons of food entered Gaza between October and June, roughly three times what the World Food Programme called necessary for that period, and argues the obstacle was never the volume but the management, the taxation, and the circulation of it on Hamas-held ground. This matters for how we pray. Hunger in Gaza has had more than one author, and honesty about all of them is a form of love for the hungry.

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house? Give thanks that bread reached Gaza in enough measure to end a famine, and pray it keeps coming. Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Pray for families displaced yet again by a line drawn deeper, for the hostages and their families, for Lebanese villagers whose houses came down this week, and that any foreign force entering Gaza would serve peace rather than become one more armed authority over suffering people.

"Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?" Isaiah 58:7, ESV

"Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked." Psalm 82:3-4, ESV

Sources:

5. A red heifer is born in the Golan, and nobody tagged it

Days before Tisha B'Av a red calf was born in the Golan Heights, in a herd belonging to a rancher working with the National Institute for the Study of the Red Heifer. It is the second candidate in about six weeks, following a calf born on a Galilee farm in June and named Temimah, and the institute says two more cows were inseminated at ancient Shiloh in an attempt to establish a sustainable herd. The detail worth reporting precisely is this: no ear tag was placed on the calf at birth, deliberately, because the puncture itself would count as the kind of blemish that disqualifies a heifer from the rite. These ranchers are handling these animals according to the letter of a commandment, and they are keeping records with that seriousness.

It is a candidate and not a certification. The animal must grow to maturity without blemish and must never have borne a yoke, and its coat has to stay red, which is where earlier candidates have failed. This one carries an additional question: it was born as the female twin of a male calf, and in cattle that often produces what breeders call freemartinism, where shared hormones leave the heifer infertile with an underdeveloped uterus. The institute's rabbinic scholars now have to decide whether an internal defect nobody can see from the outside disqualifies an animal from being unblemished. So let us say clearly what this is and is not. It is not a date, not a countdown, and not a clock. It is evidence that some Jewish groups are making practical preparations for commandments that have been impossible to keep for nineteen centuries, and that is worth knowing and watching soberly.

The law required a red heifer without defect or blemish, on which a yoke has never come. Hebrews takes that exact rite and makes the comparison for us: if the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are defiled sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. We can watch Jerusalem with real interest and without anxiety, because the purification we needed has already been accomplished by a spotless sacrifice, and He was not a calf. Pray for the Jewish people in their longing for the house of God, and that their longing would lead them to the One who called His own body the temple.

"This is the statute of the law that the LORD has commanded: Tell the people of Israel to bring you a red heifer without defect, in which there is no blemish, and on which a yoke has never come." Numbers 19:2, ESV

"For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God." Hebrews 9:13-14, ESV

Sources:

6. Three hundred thousand flee the fires in France and Spain

Southwestern Europe spent the week on fire. More than three hundred thousand people were driven from their homes as wildfires tore through southern France and central Spain, roughly two hundred and fifty thousand evacuated in France around Bordeaux, more than seventy-five thousand in Spain across Madrid, Toledo, and Avila, and thirty thousand more ordered to shelter where they stood. At least one person has died and ninety-three firefighters have been hurt. Spain declared a national wildfire emergency for the first time in its history and put nearly three thousand personnel, four hundred vehicles, and twenty-one aircraft into the fight, joined by crews sent from Greece, Italy, and Portugal.

The forecast offers no relief: another heat wave is arriving in the hardest-hit areas with no rain behind it. There is something worth noticing in the middle of the smoke, which is that Greeks and Italians and Portuguese sent their own firefighters into another country's emergency. That is what neighbors are for, and it is a mercy that people still do it. Pray for exhausted crews going back into the line, and for three hundred thousand people who do not know yet whether they have a house to return to.

The whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. Joel watched fire devour the pastures of the wilderness and the water brooks dry up, and he did not tell his people to explain it. He told them to return to the Lord with all their heart. Pray for the displaced, for the injured firefighters, for the crews arriving from other nations, and for rain.

"To you, O LORD, I call. For fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and flame has burned all the trees of the field. Even the beasts of the field pant for you because the water brooks are dried up, and fire has devoured the pastures of the wilderness." Joel 1:19-20, ESV

"For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now." Romans 8:22, ESV

Sources:

7. America: a voter list blocked, an age gate widening, a power bill negotiated

A federal appeals court this week upheld an injunction blocking the executive order that would have built a national list of eligible voters and restricted mail ballots to the people on it. The order, signed in March, directed immigration services and the Social Security Administration to assemble a state citizenship list; twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued in Boston, arguing that the Constitution gives the states and Congress, not the President, the power to set election rules. A federal judge agreed in June, and on Saturday the First Circuit upheld him, leaving the order blocked in nearly half the country ahead of November's midterms. Whatever one thinks of the policy, notice the mechanism: an order was issued, states went to court, judges examined it, and the order stopped. That is the system doing precisely what it was designed to do, checks and balances at work, and it is worth saying so plainly in a year when many Americans have concluded nothing works. Though it must be said that lately the only parts of our government that seem to work are the part that collects the taxes and the part that keeps anything from happening.

The identity machinery kept advancing elsewhere, quietly and with almost no argument. This month California signed a law lifting the cap on its mobile driver's license program from fifteen percent of licensed drivers to sixty percent, putting a state credential in the phone wallets of as many as twenty-four million people, and authorizing the motor vehicle department to join a national verification service that checks whether an applicant already holds an identification card in another state.

Age verification belongs in this section too, but it needs sorting rather than lumping. About half the American states, more than twenty-five of them, now require an age check before a person can reach pornography, and the Supreme Court has held that constitutional. Let us say plainly what should not need saying: pornography is not an ordinary part of the internet, and keeping children out of it is not surveillance. It is a fence around a pit, and we are glad of every one of those laws. Rules reaching social media itself are fewer and shakier: eight states have passed them and courts have blocked or enjoined several, including Arkansas, Utah, Ohio, Texas, and Louisiana, mostly on First Amendment grounds, while Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, and New York have theirs at least partly in force. Four states now require app stores to check ages, and abroad the European Union has urged its own age-verification system into place by the end of the year, following the French under-fifteen ban we covered last week.

The thing to watch is not the fence around the pit. It is the turnstile going up at the door of everything else: a single general-purpose credential, carried on a phone, checked against national databases, that step by step becomes how a person proves he may speak or read or buy at all. That architecture is being assembled faster than anyone is debating it, and it will be justified by a good cause every single time. The church can bless the fence and still ask hard questions about the turnstile, and it should do both.

One more piece of infrastructure news, and this one is mostly good. The White House expanded what it calls the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, bringing in more than two hundred additional utilities, states, cooperatives, and data-center developers, so that it now covers about eighty percent of the electricity delivered to American homes and businesses. The commitment is straightforward: companies building large artificial-intelligence data centers must fund the generation and the delivery infrastructure their projects require, pay the full cost of the power whether or not they end up using it, and do it through separately negotiated rates so the bill does not land on ordinary households. Whether every signatory honors it is a question for the years ahead, and pledges are not statutes. But the underlying instinct is the right one, and it names something true about this moment: the machines now being built consume so much power that somebody has to be told, in writing, not to charge it to their neighbors.

The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him. That proverb is a commendation of courts, of cross-examination, of slow and adversarial process, and it is why we can give thanks this week even about a ruling some of us dislike. The prudent sees danger and hides himself. Pray for judges who examine, give thanks for every law that puts a fence between a child and pornography, and pray for citizens awake enough to notice the wider architecture being built while everyone argues about something else.

"The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him." Proverbs 18:17, ESV

"The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it." Proverbs 22:3, ESV

Sources:

8. Nigeria at the midpoint: a number we should not look away from

This one is not a single week's headline, it is a ledger, and it came due at midyear. In the first hundred and eighty days of 2026, at least two thousand five hundred and fifty Christians were killed in Nigeria. In the same six months there were roughly two thousand eight hundred abductions, three hundred churches destroyed, and eight hundred people forced to convert. A six-year study by the Observatory for Religious Freedom in Africa identifies militia violence in the Middle Belt as by far the deadliest source, and this year's global persecution index names Nigeria alongside Nicaragua, Syria, and India as places where the pressure on Christians is accelerating.

We put this in the issue because a number that large stops being news precisely when it should stop being tolerable. Two thousand five hundred and fifty people is roughly fourteen believers killed every day for six months, in one country, mostly farmers and villagers whose names never reach us. They are our brothers and sisters, and while we may not know them, God does. The New Testament does not ask us to solve Nigeria or every problem in the world. It asks us to remember them as though we were in prison with them and to help them as we can, which begins with refusing to let the number fade away.

Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Under the altar the martyrs cry, O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long? That cry is in our Bible, and it is not rebuked. Pray for the widows and orphans of the Middle Belt, for pastors who keep preaching where churches burn, for the abducted still held, and for the Nigerian state to do the one thing God assigned it, which is to protect the innocent and punish the guilty.

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

"They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" Revelation 6:10, ESV

Sources:

Watch and Pray

Pray for the American service members under Tuesday's intercepted missiles, for Iraqi civilians living where the strikes fell, and for the mediators in Doha and Islamabad still carrying messages. Ask the Lord who is not impressed by great armies to give us peace that is actually peace, not a wound healed lightly.

"The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD." Proverbs 21:31, ESV

Pray for the tanker crews under drone attack in the Black Sea and under missiles in the Red Sea, for Kazakh and Russian oil workers idled or endangered by a war not of their making, and for households in poor nations who feel every closed gate in the price of bread. Ask the Lord of the great waters to bring them to their desired haven.

"Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters;" Psalm 107:23, ESV

Pray for the eight men still under death sentence in the Alikhani Square case, for the families of the two hanged on Tuesday, and for the Iranians who stood in that square and said it was shameful. Ask the Lord who hears the groans of prisoners to preserve those doomed to die and to give Iran a government that does not fear its own people.

"Let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die!" Psalm 79:11, ESV

Give thanks that the famine in Gaza has ended and pray the aid keeps flowing to the two hundred thousand still one step from it. Pray for families displaced again as the yellow line moved, for the hostages, for Lebanese villagers whose homes were demolished, and that the incoming international force would protect rather than police the suffering, and that every party obstructing food, Hamas included, would be stopped.

"Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?" Isaiah 58:7, ESV

Pray for the Jewish people in their longing for the house of God, that it would lead them to the Messiah who is Himself the temple and the spotless sacrifice. Pray that the church would watch Jerusalem with interest and without date-setting, resting in a purification already finished.

"how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God." Hebrews 9:14, ESV

Pray for the three hundred thousand driven from their homes in France and Spain, for the ninety-three injured firefighters and the crews sent from Greece, Italy, and Portugal, and for the family grieving the one confirmed death. Ask God for rain, and for neighbors who keep showing up for each other.

"For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now." Romans 8:22, ESV

Give thanks for courts that examine before they permit, and pray for judges handling election cases before the midterms. Pray for parents raising children online, and for a church awake to identity systems being built quietly, neither panicked by them nor asleep to them. Pray too that the cost of the new machines falls on those who build them rather than on households already stretched.

"The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him." Proverbs 18:17, ESV

Pray for Nigerian Christians: for families in the Middle Belt burying their dead, for the abducted still held, for pastors rebuilding burned churches, and for a government that will protect its citizens. Ask the Lord to make us the kind of church that remembers prisoners as though we were bound with them.

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: July 22nd, 2026

"But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." Lamentations 3:21-23, ESV

This was the week the war stopped being an abstraction and became a ledger. Eleven consecutive nights of American strikes on Iran; eighteen American service members dead since February and, by the Pentagon's own unsettled ledgers, more than four hundred wounded; two soldiers killed by ballistic missiles at a base in Jordan and one still missing; a thirty-seven billion dollar bill already run up and an eighty-seven billion dollar request laid before a Senate that interrupted the hearing with protests. The President promised to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant for every ship fired on in the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran's allies answered by choking a second strait, the Houthis turning tankers around at the mouth of the Red Sea. Iran, meanwhile, kept hanging its own young people for the crime of protesting. In Gaza a family of six died under a strike while a miles-long earthen wall rose along the ceasefire line; in Lebanon, for the first time, Israeli troops actually withdrew and the Lebanese army marched into a shattered village behind them. The tariffs the Supreme Court struck down in February returned through statutes of 1930 and 1974, fifty percent on Canada and twenty-five on Brazil. France barred children under fifteen from social media. And as this issue goes out, the Jewish world sits down on the floor for Tisha B'Av, the day of mourning for two destroyed temples. None of this proves a date. All of it drives the church to the one mercy that is new every morning.

Headlines:

Trump threatens Iranian infrastructure after Houthis block Red Sea artery (Reuters, 2026-07-22) Israel is building a miles-long earthen barrier inside Gaza, entrenching its division (AP News, 2026-07-21) Lebanon's prime minister visits shattered border village as deal with Israel begins (AP News, 2026-07-22)

  1. Eleven nights: the war bleeds on both sides

The air campaign against Iran ran through its eleventh consecutive night this week, and the blood is no longer abstract. Iranian ballistic missiles struck the Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan on July 17, killing two American soldiers, wounding others, and leaving one service member missing, the first American dead by Iranian fire since March. By the Pentagon's own count, eighteen American service members have now been killed since the war began in February. The wounded are harder to number, even for the Pentagon: its public casualty pages listed anywhere from four hundred thirteen to four hundred forty-seven wounded this week even as the official July tally briefly read zero, and the department separately acknowledged nearly a hundred more hurt, mostly concussions, in the two weeks since the war resumed. When a war outruns its own bookkeeping, believe the higher grief. The United States answered with waves of strikes on Iranian coastal defenses, radar, missile and drone sites, and the strikes have widened from the coast into western and central Iran. Iran has pounded desalination and power plants in Kuwait and targeted American assets in Bahrain and Jordan, and its missiles are finding their marks: satellite imagery shows radar sites guarding American missile-defense batteries struck in Jordan and the Emirates, among them the radar of a THAAD battery, apparently destroyed, a sensor with almost no spare production to replace it. CBS reports what the casualty lists imply, that Iranian missiles are now evading American defenses, and not merely one leaking through.

The threats climbed with the casualties. The President vowed to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant for every ship fired on in the Strait of Hormuz, and repeated that the buried nuclear site at Pickaxe Mountain would be hit soon and very heavily; an Iranian military source promised to answer against the region's infrastructure. Secretary Rubio said Washington is still willing to negotiate and accused Tehran of unseriousness; Tehran says the same of Washington. Eleven nights of bombing, and each side insists the other does not want to talk. And behind its own battlefield the regime kept hanging its young: at least four protesters executed this week, one of them eighteen years old, with rights groups counting twenty-three hanged from January's protests so far and more than seventy under death sentence in Isfahan alone. A government that hangs teenagers after one-hour trials while asking the world to trust its nuclear promises has told the world what its promises weigh.

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? The prophet's complaint is the believer's honest prayer in a week like this, when destruction and violence are before us and the wicked surround the righteous. What causes wars and what causes fightings among you, James asks, and answers: your passions, you covet and cannot obtain, so you fight. Pray for the families of the eighteen, for the wounded and the one still missing, for Iranian conscripts and civilians under the bombs, and for God to grant somebody at some table the courage to stop.

"O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save? Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise." Habakkuk 1:2-3, ESV

"What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask." James 4:1-2, ESV

Sources:

18 U.S. service members have been killed during the Iran war. Here's where. (The Washington Post, 2026-07-20) US military says two service members killed in Iranian strike in Jordan (Al Jazeera, 2026-07-18) U.S. fires on Iran after deadly attack in Jordan (NPR, 2026-07-18) Trump claims US will strike Iran's Pickaxe Mountain 'probably pretty soon' (The Times of Israel, 2026-07-21) US forces sustained about 100 recent injuries in Iran war, DOD says amid scrutiny (Stars and Stripes, 2026-07-21) Nearly 100 U.S. service members injured in Iranian strikes this month (CBS News, 2026-07-21) Iran executes man over January protests, judiciary's news agency says (Reuters, 2026-07-22) Protesters Erfan Esfandiari and Gol-Mohammad Mohammadi hanged; total January protest executions reach 23 (Iran Human Rights, 2026-07-19) Over 70 protesters face execution in Isfahan (IranWire, 2026-07-13) Iran is evading U.S. defenses to kill and wound American soldiers (CBS News, 2026-07-21) Iran hit at least 3 bases hosting US assets in latest strikes: visual analysis (ABC News, 2026-07-20)

  1. Two straits and an eighty-seven billion dollar bill

The war now runs through two of the world's chokepoints at once. With the Strait of Hormuz already metered by Iranian permits and American blockade, the Houthis this week threatened Saudi oil exports through Bab el-Mandeb, the southern gate of the Red Sea, and within a day seven tankers had turned around rather than risk the passage. Reports say Tehran has asked the Houthis to be ready to close the strait outright if America strikes Iran's power grid. Oil climbed to a six-week high; American gasoline moved back above four dollars. When the world's two great oil gates swing on the same hinge, every household on earth pays a toll to somebody's war.

And the bill came due in Washington. At a Senate hearing on July 21, interrupted repeatedly by protesters, the War Secretary put the campaign's cost so far at thirty-seven and a half billion dollars and asked Congress for an eighty-seven point six billion dollar emergency package, two-thirds of it for defense, including twenty-one billion just to replenish the munitions already spent. Senators of both parties pressed the same questions: what is the objective, how long will it take, and what stops Iran from simply rebuilding when it ends. They are the questions the Lord himself said a king should ask before the first shot, not five months into the war.

What king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? The Lord's parable assumes what Washington is only now discussing: that war must be counted before it is waged, in blood and in treasure. Plans are established by counsel; by wise guidance wage war. Pray for honest answers under oath, for senators who will neither rubber-stamp nor grandstand, and for a nation that remembers every billion is borrowed against its children.

"Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace." Luke 14:31-32, ESV

"Plans are established by counsel; by wise guidance wage war." Proverbs 20:18, ESV

Sources:

Trump threatens Iranian infrastructure after Houthis block Red Sea artery (Reuters, 2026-07-22) Five takeaways from the Hegseth-Caine hearing on emergency Iran funding (The Hill, 2026-07-21) Senators grilled Hegseth on Iran. Here are three big moments from the hearing (PBS NewsHour, 2026-07-21) Could Bab al-Mandeb be the next Strait of Hormuz? Ships begin turning around in Red Sea (Forbes, 2026-07-22)

  1. Two borders: a wall rises in Gaza, a withdrawal begins in Lebanon

In Gaza the ceasefire kept killing, and now it is being poured in earth. A July 21 strike in Gaza City killed Firas al-Masri, his wife, and their four children, ages six to thirteen; Israel said it struck Hamas militants in the area and offered nothing about the family. Meanwhile satellite imagery verified by the Associated Press shows more than twenty-three kilometers of earthen barrier banked along the yellow line, in places running outside the line itself, while a proposal circulates for a pilot city near Rafah for tens of thousands of the displaced, and reporting describes Hamas quietly seeding loyalists through clan councils and camp committees. A wall of earth, a planned city, a hidden network: everyone is building for a division nobody will name.

One border north, something actually moved toward peace. Israeli forces withdrew from Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, and for the first time under the pilot-zone framework the Lebanese army marched in behind them; Prime Minister Salam raised the flag over the shattered village while sappers cleared the mines, and talks resume in Rome on August 4. It is a first mile, not a peace: Israel still holds its buffer, Hezbollah rejects both the talks and disarmament, and tens of thousands remain displaced. But after two months of frameworks failing, a flag actually raised over a village actually returned is worth recording, and worth praying over rather than sneering at.

Thus says the LORD: do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God. Hold both borders before the Lord at once: grieve the al-Masri family and every child living against a hardening line in Gaza, and give thanks for the first Lebanese village returned. Pray that the wall of earth does not become a border of despair, and that Zawtar becomes the first village of many.

"Thus says the LORD: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place." Jeremiah 22:3, ESV

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV

Sources:

Israeli airstrike kills family of six in Gaza, medics say (Reuters, 2026-07-21) Israel is building a miles-long earthen barrier inside Gaza, entrenching its division (AP News, 2026-07-21) Donald Trump's Board of Peace to set up Gaza 'pilot' city (Financial Times, 2026-07-22) Hamas strengthens grip on Gaza through clan leaders and local committees (The Jerusalem Post, 2026-07-22) In first, Lebanese army deploys in southern 'pilot zone' after Israeli withdrawal (The Times of Israel, 2026-07-21) Lebanon's prime minister visits shattered border village as deal with Israel begins (AP News, 2026-07-22) Lebanon and Israel to hold next talks in Italy on August 4 (Reuters, 2026-07-22)

  1. America: deadly stops, an election address, and the tariffs return

At home the immigration enforcement thread turned darker still. Three people were killed in encounters with immigration officers in less than a week, and outside a detention facility in Aurora, Colorado, an off-duty employee allegedly drew a personal handgun and shot a twenty-one-year-old protester in the ankle. The new Homeland Security secretary faces his first real test between a paused vehicle-stop policy, a President publicly ordering the stops to continue, and officers who mostly still lack body cameras. Lawful enforcement, officer safety, peaceful protest, and the dignity of the detained are all real goods, and this week they kept colliding at traffic stops.

Then the elections thread returned. In a July 16 primetime address the President revived his claims about past elections and pressed for federal voting restrictions; no evidence in the address established that any foreign power altered vote totals, and a member of his own staff said he had seen no such intelligence. The next day the Homeland Security secretary promised prosecutions for unlawful voting and penalties for officials who refuse federal data requests. Election integrity is a real duty and a worthy cause; it is served by evidence, audits, and due process, and corroded by certainty that outruns its proof.

And the tariff wars returned by older doors. In February the Supreme Court struck down the administration's emergency-powers tariffs, ruling that the taxing power belongs to Congress alone; this week they came back through statutes Congress itself wrote, a twenty-five percent tariff on Brazilian goods under the 1974 trade act after a yearlong investigation, and a fifty percent tariff on Canadian goods under a 1930 provision never used this way in nearly a century, effective August 19 with court challenges all but certain. We say plainly, this is civics, not prophecy; there is no beast in a tariff schedule. But a self-governing people should watch how it is implemented, whether the courts that closed one door allow the older ones, and what it does to grocery bills on both sides of two friendly borders.

You shall not pervert justice; you shall not show partiality; justice, and only justice, you shall follow. And let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. Pray for the families of the three dead, for officers doing a dangerous job lawfully, for protesters to keep their witness peaceable, and for a country that can want honest elections without needing its neighbors to be enemies. And pray for just weights in trade and honest weighing in the courts, for a false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight.

"You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the LORD your God is giving you." Deuteronomy 16:19-20, ESV

"Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." James 1:19-20, ESV

Sources:

Fatal ICE encounters and reversal over vehicle stops are first major test for DHS Secretary Mullin (AP News, 2026-07-16) Off-duty employee arrested in shooting near ICE detention center in Colorado (AP News, 2026-07-18) Trump delivers primetime address to the nation (AP News, 2026-07-16) DHS Secretary Mullin says he will pursue voter fraud after Trump revives election claims (AP News, 2026-07-17) Trump's new 50% tariffs on Canada risk igniting a fresh trade war (CNN, 2026-07-20) USTR Section 301 action on Brazil's unreasonable acts, policies, and practices (U.S. Trade Representative, 2026-07-21) Greer hints at new Trump tariffs, recreating overturned trade regime (CNBC, 2026-07-21)

  1. The age gate arrives: France bars children from social media

France became the first country in the European Union to pass a blanket social-media ban for children under fifteen, both chambers approving it on July 21 along with a phone ban in high schools. New underage accounts are blocked from September 1 and existing ones close from January, and the whole scheme rests on the same mechanism now circling the world: Australia's world-first under-sixteen ban, in force since December and this month being tightened with penalties near a hundred million dollars after a medical journal found more than eighty-five percent of underage users still slipping through; Britain's Online Safety Act age checks; Florida's under-fourteen ban, enforced since a federal appeals court cleared it; Ohio's parental-consent law, restored on appeal; Canada's pending bill; China's new rules. Platforms must verify age, which in practice means every user, adult or child, proving who they are to enter much of public digital life. The dangers to children online are real and the impulse is right; the machinery it normalizes deserves the same clear eyes we have asked of every other identity system.

The same week, the American Treasury announced its new payment-screening system had reviewed more than eight hundred and eighty-five million federal payments, some two point seven seven trillion dollars, and blocked about ninety-nine million dollars headed to deceased payees. Stopping checks to dead men is plain good stewardship. It is also a working demonstration that identity, eligibility, and money can now be checked against each other at national scale before a single payment moves, an architecture whose goodness depends entirely on the law and limits around it. None of this is the mark of the beast. All of it is practice for a world where participation is conditioned on verification.

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. The duty to guard children is the family's and the church's before it is the state's, and no age gate can do what a discipled home does. Test everything; hold fast what is good. Pray for wisdom for parents raising children in the machine age, gratitude for any protection honestly won, and vigilance about every system that teaches the world to show its papers first and participate second.

"Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6, ESV

"but test everything; hold fast what is good." 1 Thessalonians 5:21, ESV

Sources:

French lawmakers approve a sweeping social media ban for children under 15 (NPR, 2026-07-22) French parliament passes social media ban for under-15s (Al Jazeera, 2026-07-21) Treasury successfully implements new safeguard to stop payments to deceased individuals (U.S. Treasury, 2026-07-21) Australia to strengthen enforcement of under-16 social media ban (Fortune, 2026-06-27) Age checks for online safety: what you need to know (Ofcom) Florida law banning kids from social media takes effect after court rules in favor (NBC Miami, 2025-11-26)

  1. Tonight the Jewish world sits down to mourn

As this issue goes out, Tisha B'Av begins at sundown: the twenty-five hour fast on which the Jewish world mourns the destruction of the First and Second Temples and a long litany of calamities besides, sitting on low stools by candlelight to read the book of Lamentations. In a week of eleven bombing nights, a rising wall in Gaza, and a gallows in Isfahan, the old fast lands with unusual weight: it is the day a whole people rehearses, annually, that judgment is real, that temples men thought eternal can fall, and that grief itself can be commanded, ordered, and survived.

The church does not keep the fast, but it should not scorn it. The Lord Jesus wept over the same city before its second temple fell, and the prophet who wrote Lamentations planted, in the exact middle of his five poems of ruin, the words this issue opened with: the steadfast love of the LORD never ceases. Zechariah promises that the fasts of mourning will one day become feasts of joy for the house of Judah. Between the mourning and that morning stands the Messiah who was Himself the true temple, destroyed and raised in three days.

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill. Pray tonight for the Jewish people keeping Tisha B'Av in a year of war, that mourning would lead not to despair but to the One who sat where they sit and wept where they weep. Pray Zechariah's promise over them, that the fast of the fifth month becomes gladness, and pray that the church would learn from Israel's calendar what our own age forgets: that lament is not the opposite of faith but one of its languages.

"If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy!" Psalm 137:5-6, ESV

"Thus says the LORD of hosts: The fast of the fourth month and the fast of the fifth and the fast of the seventh and the fast of the tenth shall be to the house of Judah seasons of joy and gladness and cheerful feasts. Therefore love truth and peace." Zechariah 8:19, ESV

Sources:

Tisha B'Av 2026: What the Jewish summer fast day is all about (The Jerusalem Post, 2026-07-22) Watch and Pray Pray for the families of the eighteen American dead, for the hundreds wounded, and for the service member still missing. Pray for Iranian conscripts and civilians who did not choose this war, and ask the Lord who hears the cry of the afflicted to give some ruler, somewhere, the courage to stop the spiral, and for the young Iranians and believers under sentence of death in the regime's prisons.

"O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?" Habakkuk 1:2, ESV

Pray for the sailors threading two threatened straits, for the poor of every nation who pay the oil toll of this war, and for the senators weighing an eighty-seven billion dollar request. Ask the Lord to make our leaders count the cost of war the way His own parable demands, before the next night of strikes rather than after.

"Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand?" Luke 14:31, ESV

Pray for those who mourn the al-Masri family and for every child along Gaza's hardening yellow line, and give thanks for Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh, the first village returned under the Lebanon framework. Ask the Lord to keep temporary walls from becoming permanent injustice, to bring Hezbollah's weapons under lawful authority without another war, and to multiply one returned village into many.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV

Pray for the families of those killed in immigration stops, for officers who carry real danger and real authority, and for protesters to remain peaceable. Pray for elections guarded by evidence, audits, and due process rather than by fear, and for a nation slow to anger and quick to hear, and for honest weights in trade and honest weighing in the courts as the new tariffs are tested.

"Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger;" James 1:19, ESV

Pray for parents and churches discipling children in a screen-soaked age, and give thanks for real protections honestly won. Pray too for clear eyes about verification systems that condition participation on proving identity, that the church would test everything, hold fast what is good, and fear no gate more than God.

"but test everything; hold fast what is good." 1 Thessalonians 5:21, ESV

Pray for the Jewish people keeping Tisha B'Av tonight in a year of war, that mourning would lead to the Messiah who wept over Jerusalem, and that the fast of the fifth month would become, as Zechariah promised, a feast of gladness. And pray the church relearns lament as a language of faith.

"Thus says the LORD of hosts: The fast of the fourth month and the fast of the fifth and the fast of the seventh and the fast of the tenth shall be to the house of Judah seasons of joy and gladness and cheerful feasts. Therefore love truth and peace." Zechariah 8:19, ESV

Maranatha,

Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: July 15th, 2026

"Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!" Psalm 120:6-7, ESV

This was the week the war became official again. President Trump notified Congress that hostilities with Iran had formally resumed, on the same day he declared the ceasefire over, restarting the very war-powers clock both houses had voted to stop a month ago. American forces struck dozens of Iranian military targets in a seven-hour operation, reimposed the naval blockade, and announced a twenty percent fee on every cargo moving through the Strait of Hormuz; oil jumped nine percent and Iran threatened to halt the region's energy exports. In Gaza the ceasefire kept killing, a dozen dead in two days and the army now holding up to seventy percent of the strip. In Rome, Israel and Lebanon inched toward a withdrawal that neither yet trusts. Iran buried the Supreme Leader it lost in February and enthroned his son, while a Christian convert starved in Evin prison for her faith. In a Chinese desert, satellites found full-scale mock American warships and replicas of Taiwan's government buildings, a rehearsal for war, while ten nations launched a coalition to shield Europe from missiles. At home, two more men died in immigration stops, and the machinery of identity and surveillance advanced and, in one city, was pushed back. And in Congo the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record spread again, faster than it could be counted. None of this proves a date. All of it is the sound the Lord told us to expect, wars and rumors of wars, and the beginning of the birth pains.

Headlines:

U.S. reimposes blockade and steps up strikes as Iran threatens to halt Mideast energy exports (AP News, 2026-07-15) Israel's latest strikes kill a dozen people in Gaza, including police officers (AP News, 2026-07-15) Lebanon and Israel take steps toward implementing forces withdrawal (AP News, 2026-07-15)

  1. The blockade returns, and the war deepens

The peace we watched collapse two weeks ago is now, officially, a war again. In a letter dated July 10, the day he declared the ceasefire over, President Trump notified Congress that military action against Iran had resumed, restarting the sixty-day war-powers clock that both the House and the Senate had voted only weeks before to stop. Early Wednesday, after Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, United States Central Command struck dozens of Iranian military targets in a seven-hour operation of aircraft, drones, and naval forces, and reimposed its blockade of Iranian ports. Iran said an army barracks was hit, at least seven soldiers killed and hundreds wounded, and its Revolutionary Guard threatened to halt energy exports across the region.

Then the President added a toll to the blockade, announcing a fee of twenty percent on all cargo moving through the Strait of Hormuz, the passage that carries a fifth of the world's oil, and prices jumped roughly nine percent. American unmanned vessels had already struck an Iranian ship-maintenance facility and a submarine at Bandar Abbas. A waterway the June deal was built to keep open, toll-free, is now a battlefield with a tax gate, and the language of a limited operation runs alongside the machinery of a widening war.

And the threats climbed higher. On a radio program the President warned that the United States would strike Pickaxe Mountain, the fortified, deep-buried site near Natanz that intelligence agencies suspect hides a secret uranium-enrichment plant. We are going to take out Pickaxe Mountain, he said; tell the Iranians to be ready. It is one thing to blockade a strait, and another to bomb a mountain built to outlast a bomb.

I am for peace, the psalmist says, but when I speak, they are for war. Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on chariots because they are many, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel. That is the week in a sentence: great powers trusting blockades and tolls and seven-hour strikes, and forgetting the throne none of them can reach. Pray for the sailors and airmen in the Gulf, for the Iranian conscripts and civilians who chose none of this, and for rulers to remember that every command they give is heard in heaven.

"And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places." Matthew 24:6-7, ESV

"Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the LORD!" Isaiah 31:1, ESV

Sources:

U.S. reimposes blockade and steps up strikes as Iran threatens to halt Mideast energy exports (AP News, 2026-07-15) U.S. attacks Iran and Tehran retaliates across the Middle East as both vie for control of strait (AP News, 2026-07-13) Military action against Iran formally restarted last week, Trump told lawmakers (CBS News, 2026-07-13) Trump sends Congress formal notice that Iran conflict has resumed (Reuters, 2026-07-13) Trump hints at strike on Iran's Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility (The Hill, 2026-07-14) What is Iran's Pickaxe Mountain, the mystery site Trump warns he'll attack? (Al Jazeera, 2026-07-14)

  1. Gaza: a ceasefire in name only

In Gaza the ceasefire kept killing. Israeli strikes killed at least a dozen people on Tuesday and Wednesday, local health officials said, among them three members of one family, a woman, police officers, a man in a tent camp, and a child. Israel said the four officers killed at the Jabaliya police station were Hamas fighters, but offered no evidence tying them to any plot, and did not comment on the other strikes. Two Israeli sources told the Jerusalem Post that commanders informed the Security Cabinet the army now controls between sixty-seven and seventy percent of the strip, far beyond the fifty-three percent the hostage deal had anticipated.

Around the dying, the paperwork of peace went on. The European Union coordinated a billion dollars in reconstruction pledges, even as officials admitted the ceasefire is stalled, conditions are not improving, and rebuilding cannot begin while governance and disarmament stay unresolved. A billion dollars cannot pour a foundation under a war that has not stopped.

Thus says the LORD: render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor. Seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause. The believer refuses the easy cruelty of treating every Gazan as Hamas or every Israeli as guilty of every strike. Pray for the family that buried three of its own, for the child in the tent, for the hostages still held, and for a peace built on truth rather than another announcement that leaves the guns loaded.

"Thus says the LORD of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart." Zechariah 7:9-10, ESV

"learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause." Isaiah 1:17, ESV

Sources:

Israel's latest strikes kill a dozen people in Gaza, including police officers (AP News, 2026-07-15) Israel now controls up to 70% of Gaza, Security Cabinet told amid expanded IDF offensive (The Jerusalem Post, 2026-07-15) $1 billion is pledged for Gaza's rebuilding after Israeli bombardment (AP News, 2026-07-13)

  1. Israel and Lebanon inch toward a withdrawal

Not every road this week led deeper into war. In Rome, after two days of American-mediated talks, their sixth round since fighting reignited in the spring, Israel and Lebanon agreed on the mechanism for two pilot zones in southern Lebanon. Under the plan, Israeli forces would withdraw from the selected areas, the Lebanese army would move in, and those troops would clear the ground of Hezbollah's weapons. The State Department said the details should be finalized and implemented within days.

The road exists on paper; the first mile is contested. Hezbollah says it will not disarm or recognize the arrangement, Israeli officials talk of holding an extended presence in the south, and Lebanon insists withdrawal must come first. Each side waits for another to take the step it has itself refused. The pressure is coming from Washington: in a phone call this week President Trump urged Netanyahu to redeploy Israeli forces out of both Lebanon and Syria, telling him bluntly that they do not want you there, you should redeploy, though Netanyahu, citing Israel's security, pushed back. Still, a negotiated pullback is better news than another barrage, and it deserves the church's prayers rather than its cynicism.

If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. The work of righteousness will be peace, and its effect quietness and trust forever. Pray that this withdrawal becomes more than a diplomatic phrase, that families in southern Lebanon may return to their homes in safety, and that Israel's northern towns may sleep without rockets, so that for once a framework produces not a pause between rounds but a genuine quiet.

"If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." Romans 12:18, ESV

"And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever." Isaiah 32:17, ESV

Sources:

Lebanon and Israel take steps toward implementing forces withdrawal (AP News, 2026-07-15) Sixth round of Israel-Lebanon talks begins in Rome, with focus on IDF pullout 'pilot' (The Times of Israel, 2026-07-14) Israel agrees to withdraw military from two Lebanon pilot zones, U.S. official says (Haaretz, 2026-07-15) Trump tells Netanyahu to withdraw Israeli troops from Syria, Lebanon (Axios, 2026-07-14) Trump said to urge Netanyahu to pull Israeli troops from Syria, Lebanon in recent call (The Times of Israel, 2026-07-14)

  1. Inside Iran: a buried leader and a jailed believer

Two faces of power appeared in Iran this week. The first was a funeral. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader for more than three decades and assassinated in February in the opening strikes of the war, was finally laid to rest on July 9 at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, after a six-day state procession through Tehran, Qom, and Iraq. His son, Mojtaba Khamenei, long groomed and reportedly wounded and in hiding, has stepped into his father's seat, a dynastic succession in a republic that calls itself the enemy of kings.

The second face was a prison cell. Ghazal Marzban, a forty-two-year-old Catholic convert, is serving nearly ten years in Evin prison on charges of propaganda against the state and collusion against national security, her real offense being that she followed Christ; she has been on hunger strike since late May. This week the United States renewed its public demand for her release and that of Iran's other prisoners of conscience, as reporting noted that arrests of Christians there nearly doubled in a year. One man ruled a nation for a generation and is now dust at a shrine; one woman owns nothing and cannot be silenced.

The Lord brings princes to nothing and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness; he blows on them and they wither. And let the groaning of the prisoner come before you, O Lord; according to your great power preserve those doomed to die. Pray for the people of Iran under a new and hidden ruler, and for Ghazal Marzban and every believer in Evin, that the Lord would preserve their bodies, strengthen their faith, open their prison doors, and make their witness impossible to bury.

"who brings princes to nothing, and makes the rulers of the earth as emptiness. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows on them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble." Isaiah 40:23-24, ESV

"Let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die!" Psalm 79:11, ESV

Sources:

Iran begins six-day funeral for Ayatollah Khamenei nearly four months after his death (CNBC, 2026-07-04) US calls on Iran to release Catholic convert, other prisoners of conscience (The Christian Post, 2026-07-15) Catholic convert on hunger strike to protest nine-year sentence (Article 18, 2026-07-09)

  1. The nations arm: a target in the desert, a shield over Europe

While the Middle East burned, another power rehearsed a different war. Satellite images highlighted this week show that China has built a detailed, full-scale replica of a United States Navy destroyer, an Arleigh Burke, roughly five hundred feet of superstructure and radar mast, in the Taklamakan Desert at its Ruoqiang missile test range in Xinjiang. It is a marked upgrade from the flat carrier and destroyer outlines spotted at the same site in 2021: a three-dimensional target, built to the real ship's size and radar profile.

Analysts say the mockup lets the People's Liberation Army practice the whole kill chain, finding, tracking, and striking an American warship, with anti-ship ballistic missiles like the DF-21D and DF-26, with hypersonic weapons, and with AI-assisted targeting. And the destroyer is only one piece of it. A Telegraph investigation of the satellite imagery found a sprawling complex nearby, with mock fighter aircraft, naval installations, and even full replicas of Taiwan's most important government buildings. A target shaped like an American destroyer, and a mock capital a thousand miles from any sea, are not subtle about whom China imagines fighting, and the shadow they cast falls over Taiwan. Analysts caution that the site shows preparation and doctrine, not an invasion date; the war it rehearses is, for now, only practice.

The mirror image took shape in Europe. This week ten nations, France, Germany, Britain, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Ukraine, announced an anti-ballistic coalition to build an integrated missile shield over the continent, centered on a new system called Freyja, meant as a cheaper answer to the American Patriot against ballistic and hypersonic threats. They named the shield Freyja, after the old Norse goddess who gathers half the slain of every battle to her hall, an irony a once-Christian Europe would have caught. As one power builds a target shaped like an American warship, ten others race to raise a roof over their cities. From Xinjiang to the skies over Europe, the whole world is arming.

The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD. Let the peoples take counsel together, the prophet says, it will come to nothing; let them speak the word, it will not stand, for God is with us. The Lord who sits in the heavens is not alarmed by a mockup in the sand or a shield over a city, and neither, finally, is His church. Pray for peace across the Pacific and over Europe, for restraint between the great powers, for Taiwan and Ukraine and all who live under the missiles, and that the God who breaks the bow would make even these rehearsals come to nothing.

"The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD." Proverbs 21:31, ESV

"Be broken, you peoples, and be shattered; give ear, all you far countries; strap on your armor and be shattered; strap on your armor and be shattered. Take counsel together, but it will come to nothing; speak a word, but it will not stand, for God is with us." Isaiah 8:9-10, ESV

Sources:

China builds full-scale US warship replica in desert (CNN, 2026-07-11) Revealed: China's plan to bomb US warships (The Telegraph, 2026-07-15) China builds US warship 3D model for missile target practice (Newsweek, 2026-07-11) Ukraine and 9 other countries form coalition to protect Europe from ballistic missiles (PBS NewsHour, 2026-07-13) What is Europe's new ballistic missile shield plan? (Al Jazeera, 2026-07-14)

  1. Deadly immigration stops deepen unrest at home

At home the friction turned lethal on the roadside. In Biddeford, Maine, on July 13, immigration officers trying to stop a car shot and killed Joan Sebastian Duran Guerrero, a twenty-six-year-old Colombian who was authorized to work, carried a Social Security number, and, officials later acknowledged, was not even the target of their warrant. Days earlier in Houston, agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Neither officer wore a body camera. Homeland Security said its agents feared for public safety as vehicles fled; witnesses and local officials disputed parts of that account.

After the two deaths, at least the eleventh fatal shooting by immigration or border agents since the President took office, the agency announced it would pause most traffic stops and expand body cameras. The President said officers should keep making the stops anyway, and his border czar called the pause brief and minor. Hundreds protested in Maine; officials elsewhere demanded independent investigations. Christians need not choose between lawful enforcement and lawful accountability; the God who grants authority holds it accountable.

Moses charged the judges to hear the small and the great alike, to judge righteously, and to show no partiality, for the judgment is God's. He has told you, O man, what is good: to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. Pray for honest investigations and for officers who carry real danger, for the families of Duran Guerrero and Salgado Araujo, for restraint among angry crowds, and for leaders who prize truth above the advantage of a party.

"And I charged your judges at that time, ‘Hear the cases between your brothers, and judge righteously between a man and his brother or the alien who is with him. You shall not be partial in judgment. You shall hear the small and the great alike. You shall not be intimidated by anyone, for the judgment is God’s. And the case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me, and I will hear it." Deuteronomy 1:16-17, ESV

"He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Micah 6:8, ESV

Sources:

Trump says ICE should continue traffic stops despite new policy to halt them (AP News, 2026-07-15) In the aftermath of deadly shootings, ICE pauses most traffic stops (NPR, 2026-07-14) Man fatally shot by ICE in Maine was not intended target of warrant, lawmakers say (CBS News, 2026-07-13)

  1. The machinery of identity, expanding and resisted

The rails of identity kept extending, and for once someone hit the brakes. Mobile driver's licenses are now issued by twenty-one states and Puerto Rico and accepted at more than two hundred and fifty American airports, with California widening access this week, so that a glance at a phone or a face increasingly stands in for the papers in your pocket. On July 14 the White House launched an artificial-intelligence clearinghouse called Gold Eagle to pool cybersecurity flaws across federal agencies, banks, and critical infrastructure; it is defensive by design and creates no identity registry, yet it braids government, finance, and machine intelligence a notch tighter.

The counter-motion came from Los Angeles, where the police department let its contract with the surveillance company Flock expire, citing serious concerns about civil liberties, data ownership, and outside access, after an inspector general found it had never properly audited its license-plate readers. Flock's cameras quietly turn every passing car into a searchable record of where it has been. None of this is the mark of the beast; but tools built for safety become tools of control when their scope grows, their oversight fades, or their use becomes impossible to refuse.

Halfway around the world, China drew a different kind of line. Rules taking effect this week require the makers of artificial-intelligence companions, the chatbots that millions now treat as friends and even lovers, to break off sessions after two hours, to warn users who show signs of dependency, and to step in when someone in the conversation turns toward self-harm. Even Beijing, no friend of liberty, has seen what it does to a soul to pour its loneliness into a machine that only imitates a person. The tools grow more intimate, and the questions they raise are, in the end, not technical but spiritual.

God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: the Lord knows those who are his. You were bought with a price; do not become servants of men. No database confers that knowing and no outage revokes it, and no system, however convenient, has the right to your final loyalty. Use these tools to love your neighbor, question the ones that demand blind trust, keep a paper Bible on the shelf, and let your deepest security be that you are known and named by God. No chatbot's affection is love, and no database's record is knowledge like His.

"But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity." 2 Timothy 2:19, ESV

"You were bought with a price; do not become bondservants of men." 1 Corinthians 7:23, ESV

Sources:

REAL ID mobile driver's licenses (mDLs) (Transportation Security Administration) White House launches Gold Eagle initiative for cybersecurity vulnerability coordination (The White House, 2026-07-14) LAPD lets contract with surveillance giant Flock expire, citing concerns over civil liberties and privacy (TechCrunch, 2026-07-13) China introduces rules to rein in AI companion bots amid emotional dependency concerns (Xinhua, 2026-07-15) China's AI companion rules: what Beijing is really going after (AI News, 2026-07-15)

  1. In Congo, a plague spreads faster than it can be counted

In central Africa a plague kept spreading faster than anyone could count it. The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, already the fastest-growing on record, reached two more provinces this week, Haut-Uele and Tshopo, whose capital Kisangani is one of the country's largest cities. Confirmed cases passed nineteen hundred and the dead climbed past seven hundred, while the World Health Organization warned the true toll may be two to four times higher, because four of every five new cases cannot be traced to any known patient.

We will not read a prophecy off a case count, and this virus has burned through these same forests before. But the Lord named pestilence among the birth pains, and a plague spreading unseen through a nation of a hundred million, while the world's cameras point at the Gulf and the Pacific, is exactly the kind of thing a watchful church is meant to notice and to grieve. A plague that outruns its trackers is the oldest of the birth pains, and the poor of Congo groan first and loudest.

He will deliver you from the deadly pestilence, the psalmist sang; you will not fear the pestilence that stalks in darkness nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. This is not a charm against infection but a refuge deeper than any quarantine: the God who numbers our days holds the frightened and the dying in His hand. Grieve and pray for Congo, for the seven hundred already dead and the many the world cannot count, for the doctors and nurses walking into that fire, and let a groaning creation turn every heart toward the kingdom that cannot be shaken.

"There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven." Luke 21:11, ESV

"You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday." Psalm 91:5-6, ESV

Sources:

Ebola is spreading faster in eastern Congo than it can be tracked, as deaths pass 700 (NPR, 2026-07-15) Ebola continues to spread in DRC as death toll passes 500, WHO warns (UN News, 2026-07-13) Congo's Ebola outbreak spreads to two more provinces (U.S. News & World Report, 2026-07-13) Watch and Pray Pray that the Lord would restrain the spiral of strike and retaliation between the United States, Israel, and Iran, protect the sailors and civilians on every side, and bring the world's rulers to sober judgment before threats become a wider war. Ask Him who makes wars cease to give His church a peace no blockade can take.

"Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help and rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the LORD!" Isaiah 31:1, ESV

Pray for the grieving families of Gaza, for the child killed in a tent, for the hostages still held, and for aid to reach the hungry unhindered. Ask the Lord who commands true judgment and mercy to still the killing and to hold every innocent life precious.

"learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause." Isaiah 1:17, ESV

Pray that the Israel-Lebanon withdrawal becomes real and not merely another line in a communique, that displaced families on both sides of the border may return safely, and that the work of true righteousness would bear the fruit of a lasting quiet.

"And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever." Isaiah 32:17, ESV

Pray for Ghazal Marzban and every prisoner of conscience in Iran, that the Lord would sustain their bodies and faith and open their prison doors, and for the people of Iran under a new Supreme Leader, that the gospel would run freely where a dynasty has fallen.

"Let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die!" Psalm 79:11, ESV

Pray for peace across the Pacific and restraint between the United States and China, for the people of Taiwan who live under the shadow of these rehearsals, and for the church in China. Ask the Lord, to whom the victory belongs, to bring the counsel of the war-planners to nothing.

"The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD." Proverbs 21:31, ESV

Pray for transparent investigations into the immigration-stop deaths, for the grieving families of Joan Sebastian Duran Guerrero and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, for officers who face real danger, and for restraint among protesters. Ask the Lord to give the nation justice tempered by mercy and leaders who love truth above party.

"He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" Micah 6:8, ESV

Pray for wisdom as identity, finance, surveillance, and artificial intelligence knit together, for honest oversight and real privacy, and for a church that uses tools without being ruled by them. Ask that our deepest security would rest in being known by God, whose seal no state can counterfeit or erase.

"But God’s firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity." 2 Timothy 2:19, ESV

Pray for the Democratic Republic of Congo as Ebola spreads faster than it can be tracked, for the more than seven hundred already dead and the many uncounted, and for the doctors and nurses who walk into that fire. Ask the Lord, our refuge in every pestilence, to guard the vulnerable and to turn a groaning creation's eyes toward the kingdom that cannot be shaken.

"I will say to the LORD, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust." Psalm 91:2, ESV

Maranatha, Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: July 8th, 2026

"For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief." 1 Thessalonians 5:2-4, ESV

This was the week the peace deal to make a deal that was announced turned back into war. In February the United States and Israel struck Iran; in mid-June a memorandum promised to end it; and this week President Trump declared that memorandum over and called it a waste of time, after Iranian forces struck three tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States answered with a wave of strikes on Iranian air defenses and Revolutionary Guard boats, and Iran fired back at American bases in the Gulf. The Treasury revoked the license that had briefly let Iranian oil flow. In Gaza, Hamas announced it was dissolving its government to hand administration to a committee of technocrats, and Israel called it a trick. NATO's leaders met in Ankara as Russia hammered Kyiv and the President offered Ukraine the right to build its own Patriot missiles. America turned two hundred and fifty amid fireworks, record heat, a campaign speech, and a white-nationalist march through the capital. Europe's central payment system failed twice in a week. The sun threw flares and the earth shook from Indonesia to the Philippines. None of this proves a date. All of it is the pattern the apostle named: peace and security on the lips, and sudden trouble at the door.

Headlines:

1. The deal is dead, and the war is back

Two weeks ago the headlines called it peace. This week the President called it a waste of time. The memorandum of understanding signed in mid-June, the one that came apart even as it was celebrated, collapsed entirely. After Iranian forces struck three commercial tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, United States Central Command launched what it called a series of powerful strikes on Iranian air defenses, radar and anti-ship missile sites, and dozens of the small boats the Revolutionary Guard uses to swarm the strait. Iran answered by firing on American bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. President Trump declared the interim accord over.

The money moved with the missiles. The Treasury revoked the general license it had issued on June 22, the one that briefly allowed Iranian oil to be sold through August, giving Tehran until July 17 to wind down its transactions. The sixty-day window that was supposed to open the door to a lasting settlement closed instead on renewed war. Everything the deal was built to secure, an open strait, a pause in the fighting, a path to talks, is undone, and the region is back where it stood in February, under fire.

While clearly not the final fulfillment, prophetic utterances typically see partial fulfillments and echos. When they were saying peace and security, sudden destruction came, exactly as the apostle warned. This is why the believer holds every treaty loosely and every announcement at arm's length. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, and some in memorandums and sanctions relief, but our trust is in the name of the LORD our God. Pray for the American service members under fire in the Gulf, for the Iranian civilians who did not choose this war, and for rulers on every side to fear the God who alone makes wars to cease.

"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God." Psalm 20:7, ESV

"But the wicked are like the tossing sea; for it cannot be quiet, and its waters toss up mire and dirt. There is no peace,” says my God, “for the wicked." Isaiah 57:20-21, ESV

Sources:

2. Gaza: Hamas dissolves its government

In Gaza, Hamas tried a different kind of move. On July 6 it announced that its governing Emergency Committee was resigning, to hand civil administration of the Strip to a technocratic body called the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, in line with President Trump's twenty-point plan. Every civil servant, Hamas said, would stay at his post. Israel was unimpressed. Foreign Minister Gideon Saar called it a trick, and another official called it a spin with no significance, because the same Hamas men keep the same jobs, and Hamas still has not disarmed.

The announcement came as the region marked one thousand days since the October 7 attacks that began the war, with Israelis still grieving their dead and their hostages, and Gazans still displaced and hungry under a wounded ceasefire. The question underneath the paperwork is the one that never changes: not who signs the documents, but who holds the gun. A change of committee is not a change of heart, and an administrative reshuffle is not repentance.

The false prophets healed the wound of the people lightly, saying peace, peace, when there was no peace, and the Lord rebuked them for it. A whitewashed tomb is still full of dead men's bones. Pray for Gazans caught between an army and a movement that will not lay down its weapons, and for a peace that changes hearts and not merely letterheads.

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace." Jeremiah 6:14, ESV

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness." Matthew 23:27-28, ESV

Sources:

3. NATO meets in Ankara as the wars converge

NATO's thirty-two leaders gathered in Ankara this week with three fires burning at once: Russia's war on Ukraine, Iran's war in the Gulf, and the strain within the alliance itself. President Trump, who has spent months pressing the members over defense spending, this time called it a great meeting with a lot of love and a lot of unity, and reportedly told the leaders he wanted the United States to stay in the alliance. To Ukraine's President Zelensky, who came asking for more Patriot air defenses as Russian missiles fell on Kyiv, Trump offered a license to build the missiles at home, saying, this way you cannot complain that we are not giving them enough.

It is a summit that shows the age for what it is, a world trying to hold itself together with pledges, procurement, and pressure. Alliances are reaffirmed, packages are announced, weapons are promised, and still the wars grind on. The nations rage and the peoples plot, and the rulers take counsel together, but the One enthroned in the heavens is not anxious about any of it and we shouldn’t be either.

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? He who sits in the heavens laughs. The nations are a drop from a bucket to the God who lifts up kingdoms and brings them down. Pray for the people of Ukraine and Russia under bombardment, for wisdom and restraint among the men gathered in Ankara, and for a church that honors lawful authority without ever mistaking a summit for salvation.

"Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision." Psalm 2:1-4, ESV

"Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust." Isaiah 40:15, ESV

Sources:

4. America turns two hundred and fifty

At home, the United States turned two hundred and fifty years old. President Trump marked it with a campaign-style speech on the National Mall, delayed nearly two hours by thunderstorms on the hottest Fourth of July in Washington's recorded history. He praised the founders and the Constitution and brought out antique flags, including one he said had draped Lincoln's coffin, and in the same breath praised his war in Iran, railed against communists, and vowed to restrict mail-in ballots. A celebration of the nation's birth doubled as a rally.

The day carried a darker thread. The white-nationalist group Patriot Front marched through the capital and rode its trains, claiming hundreds of masked members; police reported no violence, and the Interior Secretary defended the march as protected speech in a messy democracy. A nation can give thanks for real mercies and still be summoned to repent of pride, faction, and hatred. Lawful speech protections do not make racial hatred righteous, for God made from one man every nation of mankind and by one Spirit baptizes us all into Jesus.

Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people. Give thanks for two hundred and fifty years of ordered liberty and gospel freedom, and grieve the pride and division on open display. Pray that the church would love its country without worshiping it, would tell the truth about the sins paraded through the capital, and would remember that our citizenship is in heaven, from which we await a Savior.

"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." Proverbs 14:34, ESV

"And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place," Acts 17:26, ESV

Sources:

5. Money, identity, and fragile systems

Europe offered a small parable of a cashless age this week. The European Central Bank's T2 payment system, which settles trillions of euros a day, went down twice in a single week, each time for about forty minutes, after a June software update introduced a fault. No cyberattack, the bank said, just a glitch; but such outages have delayed salaries, welfare payments, and settlements across the continent before. The more a society strips out cash, redundancy, and human fallbacks, the more a forty-minute software bug becomes a civic emergency.

The same rails keep being laid elsewhere. The European Commission presses toward a bloc-wide Digital Identity Wallet by the end of the year, the digital euro pilot is still planned, and the same warning attends them all: identity, payments, credentials, and access can be quietly braided into one system that is very hard to refuse once it is normal. None of it is the mark of the beast. All of it is worth watching with clear eyes.

The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe. A rich man's wealth is his strong city, and a high wall only in his imagination. Do not lay up treasure where a software update can freeze it or a system can lock you out. Keep a paper Bible, keep some margin outside the machine, use the resources God has given to advance His kingdom and show His love to your neighbors, and keep your heart's security in the One no outage can reach.

"The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe. A rich man’s wealth is his strong city, and like a high wall in his imagination." Proverbs 18:10-11, ESV

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Matthew 6:19-21, ESV

Sources:

6. Signs in the heavens and the earth

Creation was loud this week. The sun, near the peak of its cycle, threw an X-class flare at the end of June that hurled a coronal mass ejection toward Earth and prompted NOAA to post a moderate geomagnetic storm watch over the Fourth of July weekend, with dozens of lesser flares following, thirty-four of magnitude M or greater in the week. Below, the ground shook: a magnitude 6.2 quake near Tobelo in Indonesia's Halmahera, a 6.1 off Japan, and a string of strong shocks from the Philippines to Fiji to Vanuatu, more than a hundred of magnitude 4.5 or greater in seven days. Fresh estimates put the losses from Venezuela's late-June quakes above ten billion dollars.

We will not turn every flare and tremor into a headline of fulfillment; the sun keeps its cycles and the plates their slow grinding. But the Lord named wars, famines, and earthquakes together as the beginning of the birth pains, and the heavens and the earth alike keep testifying that man is small and his systems rest on foundations he did not lay and cannot hold.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Yet once more, he has promised, he will shake not only the earth but also the heavens, so that what cannot be shaken may remain. Let us therefore be grateful that we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and so worship. Pray for those buried and displaced in Indonesia and Venezuela, and let a trembling creation turn our hope toward its Maker.

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge." Psalm 19:1-2, ESV

"At that time his voice shook the earth, but now he has promised, “Yet once more I will shake not only the earth but also the heavens." Hebrews 12:26, ESV

Sources:

7. The gospel is not virtual

A quieter story belongs in the same watchful frame. NPR reported this week that Christian missionaries, some with the ministry Cru, have for three years gathered every Friday inside VRChat, an immersive virtual world where millions meet as avatars, to talk, pray, and share the gospel. Not everyone welcomes them; a thread on the platform's forum drew hundreds of comments worried about what the newcomers believe. As human friendship, loneliness, worship, and identity migrate into digital spaces, the church has to think carefully about presence, truth, and witness there.

There is real opportunity in it, for a lost person is lost whether in a pew, a prison, a dorm room, or an avatar-filled room, and Paul became all things to all people that by all means he might save some. But there is a warning too. The gospel is not virtual. Christ took on real flesh, died a real death, rose in a real body, and will return bodily, and the faith was delivered through real bread and cup, real baptism, and real congregations. We may use the tools; we must not dissolve into them.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory. Whatever screens we speak through, the church is a body, and its Lord is risen in one. Pray for the missionaries laboring in these strange new rooms, that they would carry a whole gospel and not a disembodied one, and that many who hide behind an avatar would meet the real and living Christ.

"To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings." 1 Corinthians 9:22-23, ESV

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1:14, ESV

Sources:

Watch and Pray

Pray for the American sailors and service members under fire in the Gulf, for Iranian and Gulf civilians who did not choose this war, and for an end to the spiral of strike and counterstrike. Ask the Lord who breaks the bow and shatters the spear to restrain the rulers and to give His church peace that does not depend on any memorandum.

"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God." Psalm 20:7, ESV

Pray for the hostages still held in Gaza and their families at one thousand days, for Gazan civilians displaced and hungry, and for a genuine laying down of weapons rather than a change of letterhead. Ask the Lord to expose every false peace and to have mercy where no human committee has managed it.

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace." Jeremiah 6:14, ESV

Pray for the people of Ukraine under Russian bombardment, for the leaders gathered in Ankara to choose restraint over escalation, and for the persecuted and the poor whom these decisions reach. Ask the Lord, before whom the nations are a drop in a bucket, to turn the hearts of kings as He wills.

"Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the coastlands like fine dust." Isaiah 40:15, ESV

Give thanks for two hundred and fifty years of ordered liberty, and pray for a nation divided against itself, that God would humble pride, restrain lawlessness and hatred, and raise up a church that witnesses to Christ above party. Ask that righteousness, not force or faction, would exalt this people.

"Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." Proverbs 14:34, ESV

Pray for wisdom as money and identity keep converging into systems that can freeze or exclude, that the church would use tools without being ruled by them. Pray for the vulnerable who depend on payments that can fail, and for hearts anchored in the strong tower of the Lord's name rather than in any wall of man's building.

"The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous man runs into it and is safe." Proverbs 18:10, ESV

Pray for those buried, displaced, and grieving after the earthquakes from Indonesia to Venezuela, for rescuers and relief workers, and for communities exposed by weak infrastructure. Ask the Lord, who shakes heaven and earth, to fix His people's hope on the kingdom that cannot be shaken.

"Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe," Hebrews 12:28, ESV

Pray for faithful witnesses in every mission field, from streets and prisons to hospitals and even virtual worlds, that the Lord of the harvest would send laborers and keep them anchored in the embodied life of the local church and the unchanging truth of Christ.

"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth." John 1:14, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: July 1st, 2026

This was a week of agreements announced faster than anyone could keep them. The money from the Iran deal moved before the deal was proven, the Treasury cleared the sale of Iranian oil while Tehran and Washington openly contradicted each other over whether inspectors will ever see the nuclear sites, and Iran pressed a fresh claim to control the Strait of Hormuz and to charge ships to pass, even as fresh strikes late in the week cracked the ceasefire the deal was built on. In Washington, Israel and Lebanon initialed a framework to end their war that hangs entirely on Hezbollah laying down arms, and Hezbollah answered that it will do no such thing, while Hamas was handed a deadline of the week's end to accept disarmament in Gaza. Farther north, Ukraine brought the war home to Moscow with its largest strike on the Russian capital in a year, and Vladimir Putin said Kyiv had offered to halt the long-range strikes, an offer he doubted even as he weighed it. At home the Supreme Court ruled twice in one morning, upholding birthright citizenship against the President's order and, by the same margin, letting stand state bans on transgender athletes in girls' sports, while Britain settled on Andy Burnham as its next prime minister. The rails of money kept multiplying, the European Central Bank advancing its digital euro while Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase launched a private dollar stablecoin, the President declared an emergency over a phosphate-fertilizer shortage and opened duty-free imports from Morocco, and a Texas officer warned street preachers they could be cited if their words gave offense. And beneath all the diplomacy the deadliest story went half-noticed, as Venezuela counted its dead from last week's twin earthquakes past nineteen hundred, with tens of thousands still missing. Set none of it on a prophetic clock. Read all of it as a lesson in the wide gap between what is announced and what is true.

Headlines:

1. Iran: the deal pays out even as it fractures

The money moved first. As part of the agreement signed the week before, the United States Treasury issued a sixty-day license permitting the production, delivery, and sale of Iranian oil, unlocking the banking, insurance, and transport that sanctions had blocked, with the crude now able to flow even directly into American ports. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the exemption as the first fruit of the deal, and it clears away the shadow networks Iran once used to move its oil. The relief is concrete, immediate, and already in effect.

The verification is neither. On June 26 the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said the agreement grants his inspectors access to Iran's nuclear sites. Iran said the opposite, that it had made no new commitments on those sites and that any access would be settled only inside a final agreement, after sanctions were fully lifted. Here were two governments negotiating in public, agreeing on sanctions relief and disagreeing on inspections in the very same breath. So the payout is real today and the accountability is a promise for later, which is precisely the order a wise buyer never accepts.

And the strait the deal was built to reopen is only partially open. Iran has pressed to be recognized as the power that controls the Strait of Hormuz and to charge ships for passage, even though the interim pact calls for sixty days of toll-free transit, and roughly a fifth of the world's oil moves through that channel. On the water the reopening is real but partial. After collapsing to a handful of ships a day during the war, transits through the strait had clawed back by late June to only about a third of the prewar norm of some hundred and thirty vessels a day, still roughly seventy percent below normal, held back by mine-clearance, steep war-risk insurance, and demands for safety guarantees, with analysts at Kpler projecting a climb back toward half of normal within a month if nothing else goes wrong. A United States-assisted corridor along the Omani coast has kept moving, the multinational maritime force overseen by the American navy counting eighty-nine transits through it in the three days to June 28, still a fraction of a normal day's flow, with one tanker passing under American air cover on June 29, even as a United Nations plan to evacuate stranded ships was suspended after a projectile struck a vessel. What one government calls a reopened waterway the other still measures ship by ship.

And then the guns spoke again. On Saturday, June 27, American forces struck Iranian targets, air-defense sites, drone stores, and minelaying gear, over what Washington called continued Iranian aggression against shipping, and within a day Iran answered by firing ballistic missiles and drones at two American bases across the Gulf, the Ali al-Salem airbase in Kuwait and the Fifth Fleet's home port in Bahrain. Kuwait intercepted most of the barrage, Bahrain reported a building damaged near its airport, and a civilian was killed by shrapnel in Qatar. Iran threatened a complete halt to the talks if the strikes continued, and the President warned that the United States could be forced to militarily complete the job, adding that if it came to that, the Islamic Republic of Iran would no longer exist. So in the very week the Treasury cleared Iran's oil to sail, the ceasefire that framed the deal was cracking under fresh fire. The check had cleared and Iran had its benefit. The peace had not.

The king is not saved by his great army, and a nation is not made safe by the size of a check. Give honest thanks for every hour the guns are quiet, and pray the roadmap reaches somewhere the last several announcements did not. But do not confuse a sanctions waiver with a change of heart, or a signed page with a settled fact. The believer follows the reality and not the press release, gives thanks where thanks is due, and rests his hope not in the word of princes but in the Lord who alone keeps what He promises.

"The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue." Psalm 33:16-17, ESV

Sources:

2. Lebanon: a framework signed, a militia refusing

After more than four days of talks in Washington, Israel and Lebanon initialed a framework deal to end their conflict on June 27, tying a lasting ceasefire to the disarmament of Hezbollah and a limited Israeli withdrawal, with Israel declaring that it has no territorial ambitions in Lebanon and that returning the south to Lebanese army control would remove any future need for its presence there. Lebanon's President Joseph Aoun insisted the Israeli military must fully withdraw, and Beirut pressed for a one-month extension of a shaky ceasefire set to expire.

The trouble is that the party who must disarm never signed. Hezbollah's leader Naim Qassem rejected the deal outright, demanding that Israel leave unconditionally and insisting on no normalization and no gains for Israel. Even as envoys initialed the framework, the Israeli military said it struck operatives in southern Lebanon. A ceasefire that rests on Hezbollah surrendering its weapons, over Hezbollah's flat refusal to surrender its weapons, is a peace built on the one plank that was never nailed down.

The psalmist knew the weariness of dwelling among those who hate peace: I am for peace, he said, but when I speak, they are for war. A framework does not disarm a militia, and a signing ceremony does not still a rocket. Pray for the families of southern Lebanon who keep burying their dead beneath one truce after another, for negotiators who will deal honestly over withdrawal and weapons alike, and for the restraint on every side that outlasts the cameras. Peace is made by peacemakers, not announced by publicists.

"Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!" Psalm 120:6-7, ESV

Sources:

3. Gaza: a clock on disarmament

In Gaza the diplomacy set a deadline. Israeli and mediating officials gave Hamas until the end of the week to accept a disarmament proposal, the same sticking point that has stalled the plan for months, according to sources close to the talks. Under the phased design, a later stage would have Israel pull its heavy weapons, tanks, and artillery from the areas it holds, but only after Hamas agrees to give up its arms, which Hamas has repeatedly refused to do. A phase is announced and a clock is started while the hardest question, who disarms and when, stays exactly where it was.

The God of Scripture tells His people to give justice to the weak and to rescue the needy from the hand of the wicked, and He does not accept the excuse that we did not know. A deadline is not bread, and a plan is not mercy. Pray for the hostages still held and their families, for civilians crushed between an army and a terror government, and for the aid that has been promised to actually reach the hungry. Where every human phase and plan keeps failing, ask the Lord who feeds the hungry to do what no summit has managed.

"Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked." Psalm 82:3-4, ESV

Sources:

4. Ukraine brings the war home to Moscow

The war reached the Russian capital. Ukraine launched its largest strike on Moscow in a year, a wave of long-range attacks that carried the war far from the front lines and to ordinary Russians who had been shielded from it. In a bitter irony, the oil-price spike from the Iran war and the related easing of American sanctions have helped refill the Kremlin's treasury even as Ukrainian drones reach deeper into Russian territory.

Then Moscow signaled an opening. President Vladimir Putin said on June 29 that Ukraine had proposed a mutual halt to long-range strikes and a meeting with Kyiv's leadership, a proposal he said he was weighing while doubting it would hold, and the Kremlin said peace talks could resume. At the same time, Russian hardliners pressed Putin to escalate and to abandon the American-brokered track altogether. Whether the next move is a negotiating table or another missile was, at week's end, still unsettled.

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; He breaks the bow and shatters the spear. The nations rage and rulers calculate, and the same week can hold both an offer of peace and a demand to escalate. The believer watches without despair and without bloodlust, prays for the civilians on both sides of a widening war, and remembers that the God who commands the storms to be still is not waiting on any summit for permission to act. Be still, He says, and know that I am God.

"He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the chariots with fire. “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!" Psalm 46:9-10, ESV

Sources:

5. Money: a state coin in Europe, a private coin in America

Europe pushed its state digital money another step forward. The European Central Bank secured key backing from a European Parliament committee for the digital euro, a project it frames as breaking the continent's dependence on American credit-card networks. Lawmakers aim to open negotiations with the member governments next month and to reach final approval by the end of the year, ahead of a planned twelve-month pilot.

On this side of the Atlantic, the private version launched. A consortium led by Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase, joined by more than a hundred and forty businesses, rolled out a new dollar-pegged stablecoin network on June 30 called Open USD, built to let companies mint and redeem digital dollars without fees or volume limits and to challenge the firms that already dominate the three-hundred-billion-dollar stablecoin market. Between Frankfurt's state euro and this card-network dollar, the money of everyday life keeps sliding off paper and onto programmable, trackable rails, whether the issuer is a central bank or a payments giant.

No one can serve two masters, the Lord said; you cannot serve God and money. None of this is the mark of the beast, and none of it is nothing either. The rails on which a cashless, trackable, permissioned economy would one day run are being laid in plain sight, plank by plank, always for reasons that sound like convenience and security. So keep a paper Bible on the table, keep your conscience unpledged to any system of men, and watch the braiding of money and identity with clear eyes and no fear, rendering to Caesar his coin while you render yourself to God whose image you bear.

"No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." Matthew 6:24, ESV

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6. At home: the Court rules twice in one morning

The United States Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds on June 30, ruling six to three against the President's executive order to end it, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the Court. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment confers automatic citizenship on a child born on American soil, and as the attorney who argued the case put it, the men who wrote the amendment deliberately chose to grant citizenship to the child and not the parent. The decision closes, for now, a central plank of the administration's immigration agenda. It is sound law, and still it leaves an uneasy result. An enemy of the republic can have a child born on American soil, carry that child abroad to raise, and count on that child arriving at eighteen a full citizen, handed the same presumption of loyalty a nation extends to someone born and bred here. It runs along the same fault line as handing a driver's license, a document meant to authenticate who a person is, to someone with no lawful place in the country: once a credential no longer certifies what it claims to, the whole system that leans on it is quietly broken.

That gap has a second door, one that needs no border crossing at all. Citizenship by birthplace is a benefit valuable enough to be gamed, and it is: birth tourism, in which foreign nationals travel to the United States to give birth so the child is born a citizen, accounts for an estimated twenty-six thousand or more births a year, and federal prosecutors have charged operators of birth-tourism rings with immigration fraud. So the foreigner's child is not merely treated as an equal; by the accident of birthplace he is handed a prize others cross oceans to obtain, a benefit conferred without the cost or the vetting the rest are made to pay. The sharper concern is not fairness but security. A birthright citizen, unlike a naturalized one, is never vetted for loyalty, yet carries the same claim to sensitive positions and clearances, and critics, including witnesses at a Senate hearing this spring, warn that hostile states could exploit the birthplace rule to seat unvetted citizens where trust is required. It is a small share of births and a real question of stewardship, and the Court has handed it back to Congress, but a finial resolution would likely require an amendment which is almost definitely not going to pass.

On the same morning, by the same six-to-three alignment, the Court moved the other direction on a different question, upholding state laws that bar transgender athletes from girls' and women's sports. Justice Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, said the Constitution and Title IX do not require an overhaul of women's and girls' sports across the country, and the Court found that West Virginia's and Idaho's laws violated neither the Fourteenth Amendment nor Title IX. Two rulings in one sitting, one widening the circle of citizenship and one drawing a line at the words male and female, and both turn on what a nation is still permitted to call simply true.

This newsletter is not a partisan tract, and the point is not a scoreboard. Scripture tells the covenant people to treat the sojourner as the native and to love him as themselves, and it tells us that God made humanity in His image, male and female He created them. But loving the stranger and guarding the household are not enemies. A man who welcomes travelers to his table still knows who holds the keys to his house, and a nation may extend real hospitality without surrendering the wisdom to guard its gate. The Lord Himself set the boundaries of the nations and the seasons of their rising and falling; a border is not merely a fluke of history. Hold all of it at once: the dignity of the sojourner, the truth of how we are made, and the plain prudence that asks who is being trusted with the keys. Pray for the justices and for leaders of both parties, for justice tempered with mercy, and remember the citizenship no court confers and no order revokes: ours is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior.

"When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:33-34, ESV

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them." Genesis 1:27, ESV

"And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place," Acts 17:26, ESV

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7. Britain settles on its next prime minister

A week after Keir Starmer resigned, Britain settled on his likely successor. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor newly returned to Parliament through a by-election, emerged as the prime-minister-in-waiting, vowing to rip up politics as usual and to shift power out of London. Starmer met with Burnham as the orderly transfer of power took shape. A leader who seemed secure a month ago is gone, and a country has changed hands in the space of a single political season.

The man stepping up stands to Starmer's left, a soft-left populist who made his name feuding with Downing Street from Manchester, and on one closely watched front he breaks from his party's direction. Burnham has been an open skeptic of the national digital identity scheme Starmer made a government priority, warning that tying a digital ID to the right to work could become a backdoor national ID card by another name, and recalling how the last Labour government poured years into an ID-card project that was finally scrapped. By several accounts his arrival could put Britain's digital ID plans in peril. Hold that lightly, for he once promoted compulsory ID cards himself, and a brake today can become an accelerator tomorrow, since politicians tend to change their convictions like outfits, to suit the fashion of the moment. But for now the incoming government is, on this one rail, a check rather than a spur, a quiet reminder that the drift toward a papers-for-everything society is not fixed by fate and can be slowed by ordinary politics.

The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will. The strongmen and coalitions of this age are on a timer they did not set. The believer watches these turns without triumph and without dread, because the hand that raises and removes rulers is on no ballot. Pray for Britain in its transition, for wisdom and restraint in whoever takes the office, and for a church there that prays earnestly for its leaders without ever bowing to them.

"The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will." Proverbs 21:1, ESV

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8. The persecuted and the pressured

As the deal reordered Iran's economy, its Christians looked past the economics to the God who does not trade in sanctions. Believers inside and outside the country are weighing what the war and the new arrangement mean for them, clear-eyed that relief for the regime's oil is not relief for the underground church, which keeps meeting under a state that has jailed dissenters by the thousands since the fighting began. The headlines were about oil and inspectors; the quieter story was of a persecuted people who have learned to look higher than the news.

In Brazil the pressure took the shape of a courtroom. A court in Sao Paulo sentenced Audato and Ieda Denardi to fifty days in prison for the act of educating their two daughters at home, convicting them of intellectual neglect because their lessons left out the state's required teaching on gender and sexuality. The prosecutor had asked for acquittal and an educational psychologist found no neglect, the girls, eleven and fifteen, were thriving, accomplished pianists who spoke several languages, and still the judge faulted the family for a supposed want of cultural diversity, holding it against the girls that they did not care for trap music or sertanejo, the Brazilian folk style, and that one of them found some song lyrics morally questionable. It is the first time Brazil has turned homeschooling into a criminal conviction, and the sentence, now suspended while the family appeals, rests on a chilling premise, that a parent may be jailed not for failing to teach a child but for teaching her the wrong values. As one of the family's lawyers put it, she was sentenced not for failing to educate her children but for educating them according to her own values. The state's deeper charge was that she would not call evil good.

Pressure took a milder form at home. At a Pride festival in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 27, a police officer was recorded warning a street-preaching team that if anyone complained their words were offensive, they could be cited for disorderly conduct, answering yes, absolutely when asked whether offense alone would bring a ticket. The video spread quickly, and the department said it would look into the officer's conduct. A citation is not a prison cell, and the two belong on very different lines of any honest ledger. But an officer treating someone is offended as the trigger for a ticket is a window into how quickly ordinary gospel speech can be recast as a breach of public order.

Remember those who are in prison as though in prison with them, the apostle wrote, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Persecution wears more than one face; a jail in Tehran, a courtroom in Sao Paulo, and a warning in Texas are not the same weight, but they run along the same road. When men command the church to be silent, or hand parents a script for their own children, the church answers as the apostles did, we must obey God rather than men, and it answers without rage and without fear. Pray for Iran's believers who gather in secret, for parents pressed by the state over how they raise their children, and for preachers at home learning where the new lines fall, and rest in the Lord who is faithful to guard His own.

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

"But Peter and the apostles answered, We must obey God rather than men." Acts 5:29, ESV

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9. An emergency over fertilizer, and the bread it grows

The government reached for emergency powers over something as humble as fertilizer. On June 29 the President signed a proclamation declaring an emergency over insufficient supplies of phosphate fertilizer, citing disrupted global supply chains, conflicts in producing regions, and trade actions by major fertilizer-exporting countries, and warning that the shortfall threatens domestic food production and the farm economy. The order authorizes duty-free importation of phosphate fertilizer from Morocco, named as a reliable alternative supplier, for up to eight months or until the emergency is lifted. It is a small-sounding action with a large meaning: the chain that runs from a mined mineral to the loaf on the table is thin enough that a government now treats a fertilizer shortage as an emergency of state.

The eyes of all look to the Lord, and He gives them their food in due season; He opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing. A fragile food supply is not a reason to hoard in fear, and it is not a reason to sleep either. It is a reason to be prudent like Joseph, who stored in the years of plenty, and generous like the Lord, who feeds the sparrows and clothes the grass. Plant a garden if you can, keep something in the pantry, learn where your food comes from, and above all remember that the God who multiplied loaves on a hillside has never yet failed to feed His people.

"The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing." Psalm 145:15-16, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Give thanks for every pause in the fighting, and pray that this roadmap reaches a durable peace rather than another false dawn, now that fresh strikes have shown how fragile it is. Pray for honest dealing over Iran's nuclear program and for the inspectors who must verify it, and for a church that rejoices at any quiet without staking its hope on the word of princes.

"The king is not saved by his great army; a warrior is not delivered by his great strength. The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue." Psalm 33:16-17, ESV

Pray for the grieving families of southern Lebanon and for restraint that lasts longer than a headline. Pray for honest negotiation over withdrawal and disarmament, for genuine peacemakers on every side, and that the Lord would expose those who speak peace with a weapon still in hand.

"Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!" Psalm 120:6-7, ESV

Pray for the hostages still held in Gaza and for their families, for the civilians caught between Israeli operations and Hamas rule, and for the promised aid to reach the hungry. Ask the Lord who rescues the weak from the hand of the wicked to have mercy where every human deadline keeps failing.

"Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?" Proverbs 24:11-12, ESV

Pray for an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine, for the protection of civilians now within reach of the strikes on both sides, and that the proposal to halt the deep attacks would bear real fruit. Ask the Lord who makes wars cease to still the guns and to give the peacemakers the upper hand.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV

Pray for discernment as state money moves toward a fully digital form, that the church would neither panic nor sleep but walk wisely. Pray for the protection of conscience and privacy, and for hearts that trust the name of the Lord rather than the security of any system that men can switch off.

"No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." Matthew 6:24, ESV

Pray for the justices and for the nation's leaders of both parties, for justice and mercy toward the stranger and the immigrant, and for truth and compassion held together where a culture fights over what it means to be made male and female. Ask the Lord to keep His church gracious and clear, its deepest citizenship in heaven.

"But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ," Philippians 3:20, ESV

Pray for Britain in its leadership transition, for justice, wisdom, and restraint in its next prime minister, and against unrest in the change of power. Ask the Lord who turns the king's heart like a stream of water to keep His church praying for its rulers without making idols of them.

"The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will." Proverbs 21:1, ESV

Pray for the believers of Iran and for the persecuted church everywhere, for boldness where confession is costly and protection for those who meet in secret. Pray for Christian parents, in Brazil and beyond, pressed by the state over how they raise and teach their own children, and for believers nearer to home facing new limits on public witness, for wisdom and grace under pressure and truthful, gentle speech, and that the Lord who is faithful would establish His people and guard them against the evil one.

"But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one." 2 Thessalonians 3:3, ESV

Pray for farmers and for the fragile chain that carries food from field to table, for wisdom in those who steward a nation's supply, and for the hungry at home and abroad. Pray too for the people of Venezuela, still digging out from last week's earthquakes, the grieving, the injured, and the many left without a home, and for the churches ministering in the ruins. And as the ground trembles and the heavens stir, ask the God who opens His hand and satisfies every living thing to supply the needs of His people, to comfort the afflicted, and to make His church generous and unafraid, a means of His mercy to a shaken and hungry world.

"And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus." Philippians 4:19, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: June 24th, 2026

"Thus says the LORD: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the LORD. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. “Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD, whose trust is the LORD." Jeremiah 17:5-7, ESV

This was the week a deal to end the war was signed, except it was not so much a deal as a deal to make a deal, and even that the two sides could not agree on. President Trump and Iran's President Pezeshkian put their names to a non-binding memorandum to halt the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and negotiators went to Switzerland to begin a sixty-day roadmap toward a final agreement. Yet the strait the deal was built to reopen never really reopened: official vessel counts that ran near a hundred and forty ships a day before the war are limping along at a fraction of that, and on June 20 Tehran declared it closed again even as American command insisted it was open. At home the Senate joined the House to rebuke the President over the war, the first time both chambers have ever passed a war-powers resolution. A renewed ceasefire in Lebanon held uneasily, with Israeli forces staying put and fresh deaths even as direct talks opened, and in Gaza phase two was announced and Hamas's disarmament refused while Palestinian authorities counted more than a thousand dead since the truce. The rails of money and identity kept being laid: Congress voting to bar a Federal Reserve digital dollar, only for the President to leave the bill unsigned, while Europe builds a digital euro, a face for a boarding pass, a quantum push, and a London borough turned into a permanent face-scanning zone. In Jerusalem a red heifer was paraded and a synagogue on the Temple Mount put back on the table. The church remembered its martyrs at Yelwata and its prisoners in Tehran. And two governments turned over, in Britain and Colombia. None of this proves a date. All of it is a lesson in the distance between what is announced and what is true.

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1. Not a deal, but a deal to make a deal

In mid-June, as promised the week before, President Trump and Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a memorandum of understanding, reported to run to fourteen points, that halted more than a hundred days of war for sixty days; NPR published the full text on June 18. But a memorandum of understanding is not a treaty, and binds no one. This one settled almost nothing on its own: it set a sixty-day clock and stood up negotiating groups, for sanctions relief, the nuclear question, some three hundred billion dollars in reconstruction, and monitoring, to be argued out at talks in Switzerland that opened June 21. It is not a deal. It is a deal to make a deal.

And the two sides cannot agree on what they have even provisionally agreed. Vice President Vance and President Trump announced that Iran had consented to readmit United Nations nuclear inspectors and to a mechanism keeping the Strait of Hormuz open. Iran's foreign ministry spokesman flatly denied it: no inspections of the bombed nuclear sites were scheduled, he said, and no protocol existed for them, the strait would remain under Iranian sovereignty, and Iran would never surrender its missiles. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said his inspectors would soon visit; Iran's deputy foreign minister said access would be decided only inside a final agreement, after sanctions were fully lifted. PBS, NBC, and the Times of Israel all reported the same strange thing, a signed page and two governments telling opposite stories about what is written on it.

At home, Congress moved to reclaim its war. On June 23 the Senate voted fifty to forty-eight to direct the President to pull American forces from hostilities with Iran absent congressional authorization, joining a House that had passed the same measure, the first time both chambers have ever approved a war-powers resolution since the law was written in 1973. Four Republicans crossed over, and the absence of a hospitalized Mitch McConnell left the leadership short. The White House called the vote symbolic and non-binding, which it is. European aviation regulators, meanwhile, extended their warning for airlines to avoid the skies over Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon into July, betting on the fragility the celebrations would rather deny.

Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring. Give thanks for any halt to the killing, and pray in earnest that this roadmap leads somewhere the last four announcements did not. But let the believer keep the apostle's caution: we say, today or tomorrow we will do this, when we ought to say, if the Lord wills. An agreement to make an agreement is not peace, and the next sixty days will tell whether anything was built on this page or whether it was, as one writer put it, a scrap of paper.

"Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring." Proverbs 27:1, ESV

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish." Psalm 146:3-4, ESV

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2. The strait that would not reopen

The centerpiece of the deal was the Strait of Hormuz, and the centerpiece is not cooperating. Before the war, official vessel counts ran near a hundred to a hundred and forty ships a day through the strait. They fell off a cliff when the war began in late February and have never recovered. The reopening produced a brief surge, a one-day record of fifty-five merchant ships on June 20 by American command's count, and then a stall, down to a dozen transits two days later, according to shipping data reported by CNBC. The traffic that does move follows the route Iran designates, registered through Tehran's own Persian Gulf Strait Authority. The main shipping lane stayed closed by mines, hundreds of vessels, including as many as a hundred tankers, were still stranded outside, and what moved did so on alternative routes Iran and Oman control. A waterway the deal calls open is, in the water, a fraction of its prewar hundred and twenty-five ships a day, metered by the very power it was meant to constrain.

Then the dispute itself went public. On June 20 Iran announced it had closed the strait again, blaming the United States for breaching the deal as Israeli strikes continued in Lebanon, while United States Central Command insisted the waterway had stayed open. Both statements cannot be fully true, and the vessel data sits closer to Iran's story than to the celebration. Whoever first tells his side sounds right, Scripture says, until another comes and examines him. The honest examiner here is the tanker tracker, and it says the strait is contested, throttled, and a long way from normal.

The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps. There is a discipline in refusing to accept a headline as a fact, and it is the same discipline Issachar's sons were praised for, understanding of the times. When the announcement and the reality diverge, the believer follows the reality, prays for the sailors caught in a militarized chokepoint, and remembers that the God who set the bounds of the sea is not impressed by a press release.

"The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps." Proverbs 14:15, ESV

"The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him." Proverbs 18:17, ESV

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3. Lebanon's ceasefire rests on contested ground

The deal's weakest seam ran through Lebanon. On June 19 Israel and Hezbollah renewed their truce, mediated by the United States, Qatar, and Iran, but Israel made plain that its forces would stay in southern Lebanon, and it had just demarcated an expanded occupation zone reaching some ten kilometers from the border in places. One day later the truce drew blood: Israeli strikes killed at least twenty people on June 20, Israel saying it was answering more than fifty Hezbollah projectiles, with five Israeli soldiers killed in the preceding days. Both sides said they remained committed to the ceasefire even as they traded fire across it.

The talks that followed exposed how little the two sides agree on. In direct Lebanese-Israeli negotiations, Lebanon pressed for a timetable for Israeli withdrawal while Israel pressed for Hezbollah's disarmament, and Hezbollah itself rejected the negotiations outright. A United States-backed pilot would hand some territory to vetted, American-trained Lebanese army units while Israel kept a security buffer, and the European Union floated a three-year mission to train Lebanese forces; even so, a further Israeli drone strike killed at least two more people. A ceasefire is in force, but the parties do not share a map, a timeline, or a definition of who must give up what, and a single incident at the line can still unravel it.

There are those who speak peace with their neighbors while evil is in their hearts, and the psalmist asks the Lord not to drag him away with them. Pray for the families of southern Lebanon who are still burying their dead under a truce, for restraint that outlasts a signing ceremony, and for negotiators who will deal honestly over withdrawal and weapons alike. A harvest of righteousness is sown in peace only by those who actually make peace, not by those who merely announce it.

"Do not drag me off with the wicked, with the workers of evil, who speak peace with their neighbors while evil is in their hearts." Psalm 28:3, ESV

"And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace." James 3:18, ESV

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4. Gaza: phase two announced, disarmament refused

In Gaza the choreography continued. Washington announced the start of phase two of its peace plan, the stage meant to bring full Israeli withdrawal, reconstruction, and the disarmament of Hamas, and President Trump said he hoped to reach it very quickly. Hamas answered by rejecting the disarmament plan outright, a Palestinian official told the BBC, insisting it would not discuss phase two until Israel fully implemented phase one. An Israeli security source said that if Hamas would not disarm, the army would restart the war to finish the job.

Underneath the diplomacy, the suffering kept its own grim ledger. Gaza's health ministry said more than a thousand people had been killed since the October ceasefire began, a toll it does not break down between civilians and fighters and that Israel disputes, as Israeli forces issued fresh displacement orders and built barriers along the so-called Yellow Line. Aid has run far below what the agreement promised, an average near a hundred and forty-five trucks a day against a pledge of six hundred. Planning for the next stage went on around the dying: Morocco, Albania, and Greece joined an international stabilization force being assembled for Gaza, even as Israeli commanders said they controlled roughly seventy percent of the strip and were preparing for the phase to come. Phase two is announced and rejected in the same news cycle, while the hungry wait on trucks that do not come.

The Lord rebukes the prophets who healed the wound of his people lightly, saying peace, peace, when there is no peace. A phase announced is not a peace achieved, and the church is not fooled by the vocabulary of progress while the trucks sit idle. Pray for the hostages and their families, for Gazans crushed between an army and a terror government, and for the Lord who gives food to the hungry and sets the prisoners free to do for that land what no summit has managed.

"Precisely because they have misled my people, saying, ‘Peace,’ when there is no peace, and because, when the people build a wall, these prophets smear it with whitewash," Ezekiel 13:10, ESV

"who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets the prisoners free;" Psalm 146:7, ESV

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5. Money and identity: a digital dollar barred, a digital euro built, a face for a boarding pass

Two of the world's largest economies gave opposite answers to the same question this week. In Washington, both chambers of Congress passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act by lopsided margins, eighty-five to five in the Senate and three hundred fifty-eight to thirty-two in the House, and tucked inside the housing bill was a ban on the Federal Reserve issuing a central bank digital currency, or anything substantially similar, through the end of 2030. Then President Trump abruptly canceled the June 24 signing, refusing to enact the popular bill until Congress passes his SAVE America Act, the voter-identification and proof-of-citizenship measure stalled in the Senate. So the digital-dollar ban has cleared Congress but is not yet law, held hostage to a fight over who may vote. In Frankfurt, meanwhile, the European Central Bank pressed ahead with its digital euro, its draft legislation clearing a key parliamentary committee and pointing toward a pilot and a possible launch in 2029. America hesitates over state money and bets on private stablecoins; Europe builds the state version. The map of digital money is splitting in two.

Identity, meanwhile, kept fusing with the body. Google Wallet became the first digital wallet partner for the Transportation Security Administration's Touchless ID, so that at dozens of American airports a traveler's face, matched against an ID stored on the phone, now serves as the boarding pass. In London, the Metropolitan Police announced it would fix live facial-recognition cameras permanently across the West End and Soho after a pilot that scanned more than four hundred and seventy thousand faces. In Ethiopia, the government is wiring its Fayda digital identity into every bank account in the country by year's end. And in Canada, a proposed Safe Social Media Act would require platforms to verify a user's age, in practice by an ID or a face scan, to keep anyone who cannot prove otherwise off social media. The activists shouting that it means digital identity to use the internet overstate it; the sober reality is narrower and still worth watching. From a terminal in America to a camera in Soho to a login in Toronto to a bank in Addis Ababa, the same architecture is rising: one identity, proven by your face, and fastened to your money, your movement, and your speech. Behind it all the plumbing was being upgraded too: on June 22 the White House signed orders to race toward a working quantum computer and to migrate federal systems to post-quantum encryption, and in Dalian the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos convened some seventeen hundred delegates around scaling artificial intelligence from breakthrough to deployment.

None of this is the mark of the beast. It is also not nothing. Scripture warns of a day when no one can buy or sell without the mark, and while that day is not this one, the rails it would run on are being laid in plain sight, plank by plank, for reasons that always sound like convenience and safety. The Lord sent His people out as sheep among wolves and told them to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. So keep a paper Bible on the table, keep your conscience out of hock to any system, render to Caesar the coin that bears his image while you render yourself to God whose image you bear, and watch this braid of money and identity with clear eyes and no fear.

"Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name." Revelation 13:16-17, ESV

"Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves." Matthew 10:16, ESV

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6. The red heifer and a synagogue on the Temple Mount

Jerusalem supplied its own headline. Rabbinic researchers studying the red heifer announced that a Galilee dairy calf named Temima, conceived by artificial insemination with a Red Angus sire, had been examined and found, for now, entirely red. To qualify she must stay uniformly red until she is two, and there is a complication: an ear tag was removed, leaving a defect that the scholars are still weighing as a possible disqualification. It is the same enterprise we noted last week, the same hope of a purity bred on a farm, and the same unsettled questions hanging over it. Reports tie the work to an institute devoted to the red heifer, though the exact sponsorship is not perfectly clear.

Around the heifer, a movement once confined to the fringes keeps drifting toward the center. Jewish ascents to the Temple Mount reached a modern record in the past Hebrew year, more than sixty-eight thousand recorded visits, and what observers long called a frozen status quo is now openly described as shifting. In recent weeks senior voices have gone further still: a member of Israel's Chief Rabbinate Council publicly urged the government to build a synagogue on the Mount itself. Whether any of it advances is uncertain, and some of the boldest claims circulating are advocacy rather than confirmed action, but the direction of travel on the most contested ground on earth is unmistakable.

The believer reads this with sober interest and without breathless date-setting. The ashes of a heifer could sanctify the flesh, but they could never finish what only the cross has finished. By a single offering Christ has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and when He spoke of the temple He meant His own body, torn and raised. No red calf and no rebuilt sanctuary advances God's timetable by an hour; you cannot engineer redemption or manufacture it in a laboratory. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, for the salvation of Israel, and that many would find the true and better Temple who is already standing in their midst.

"And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified." Hebrews 10:11-14, ESV

"Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body." John 2:19-21, ESV

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7. The persecuted and the pressured

Persecution wore more than one face this week. In Nigeria, a memorial was unveiled at Yelwata, in Benue State, to the Christians killed there in last June's Father's Day massacre, when militants overran a displacement camp and killed roughly two hundred people sheltering inside. A year on, some three thousand of the displaced remain, and the engraved names now stand among survivors still carrying grief, poverty, and fear. The blood of the martyrs is not a statistic to the God who keeps their tears in a bottle.

Pressure took quieter forms elsewhere. Iran's judiciary said it had arrested thousands, by one tally more than three thousand, on accusations of collaborating with the enemy since the war began, part of a sweeping crackdown that human-rights groups also number in the thousands, even as a former Israeli prime minister disclosed that Israel had smuggled tens of thousands of Starlink terminals into Iran to keep its people online through government blackouts. And in Canada, Parliament advanced a bill stripping a specific religious good-faith defense from the country's hate-speech law, prompting evangelical leaders to warn that broadly written speech rules can be applied unevenly, even as the justice minister insisted preaching and prayer would remain protected.

All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, the apostle wrote, and the forms range from a machete in the night to a clause in a statute. Remember those in prison as though in prison with them, and those mistreated, since you also are in the body. Pray for the believers of Yelwata and the prisoners of Tehran, for truthful and gracious speech where it is being criminalized, and for a church that is neither silenced nor made shrill. Be faithful unto death, Christ tells His own, and I will give you the crown of life.

"Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted," 2 Timothy 3:12, ESV

"Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested, and for ten days you will have tribulation. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life." Revelation 2:10, ESV

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8. Two governments turn: Britain's prime minister falls, Colombia swings right

Thrones shifted on two continents. In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer resigned on June 22, setting out a timetable for an orderly transfer of power and touching off a contest for who will lead the country next. In Colombia, voters handed a razor-thin runoff to Abelardo de la Espriella, a hard-right millionaire lawyer who ran on security and a sharp break from the outgoing left, redrawing the country's path on crime, the economy, and its long peace process. Reuters, the BBC, and the Guardian covered both.

It is a reminder that the strongmen and the coalitions of this age are on a timer. A prime minister who seemed secure is suddenly gone; a country lurches from one pole to the other in a single election night. The believer watches these turns without despair and without triumphalism, because the hand that raises and removes rulers is not on any ballot.

For not from the east or from the west and not from the wilderness comes lifting up, but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another. The Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will. Pray for Britain in its transition and for Colombia under new leadership, for justice and restraint from whoever holds power, and for a church in both lands that prays for its rulers without bowing to them.

"For not from the east or from the west and not from the wilderness comes lifting up, but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another." Psalm 75:6-7, ESV

"The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, the decision by the word of the holy ones, to the end that the living may know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will and sets over it the lowliest of men." Daniel 4:17, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Give thanks for the signing and the talks, and pray that this roadmap actually reaches a durable peace rather than a fifth false dawn. Pray for honest dealing over Iran's nuclear program, for the inspectors who must verify it, and for a church that rejoices at any halt to the killing without staking its hope on the word of princes.

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation." Psalm 146:3, ESV

Pray for clear eyes that follow the reality and not the headline, for the crews and sailors who must thread a militarized chokepoint, and for an end to the brinkmanship over the strait. Ask the Lord, who set the boundaries of the sea, to restrain the powers that meter it and to give His church the discernment Issachar was praised for.

"The simple believes everything, but the prudent gives thought to his steps." Proverbs 14:15, ESV

Pray for the grieving families of southern Lebanon, for restraint that lasts longer than a press release, and for honest negotiation over withdrawal and disarmament alike. Pray for genuine peacemakers on every side and for the Lord to expose those who speak peace while evil is in their hearts, stilling the next strike before it falls.

"And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace." James 3:18, ESV

Pray for the hostages still held in Gaza and their families, for civilians caught between Israeli operations and Hamas rule, and for the promised aid to actually reach the hungry. Ask the Lord, who feeds the hungry and frees prisoners, to have mercy where every human phase and plan keeps failing.

"who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The LORD sets the prisoners free;" Psalm 146:7, ESV

Pray for discernment as money and identity keep braiding into one system, that the church would neither panic nor sleep, but walk wisely. Pray for those whose livelihoods are being tied to a scan of their face, for protection of conscience and privacy, and for hearts that trust the name of the Lord rather than the security of any system of men.

"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God." Psalm 20:7, ESV

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem and for the salvation of Israel, that many would find in Messiah the true and finished sacrifice that no heifer and no rebuilt sanctuary can supply. Pray for restraint on the Temple Mount, where a careless act could ignite a war, and for the church to keep its hope on the Lamb who was slain, not on the calendars of men.

"For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified." Hebrews 10:14, ESV

Pray for the believers of Yelwata and across Nigeria, for the prisoners and detainees of Iran, and for Christians in the West facing new limits on what they may say. Ask the Lord to strengthen the persecuted, comfort the grieving, provide for the displaced, and keep His people faithful, truthful, and unafraid wherever the cost of confessing Christ is rising.

"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 5:10, ESV

Pray for Britain in its leadership transition and for Colombia under a new president, for justice, restraint, and wisdom from whoever holds power, and against unrest and revenge. Ask the Lord, who puts down one ruler and lifts up another, to keep His church praying for leaders without making idols of them.

"but it is God who executes judgment, putting down one and lifting up another." Psalm 75:7, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: June 17th, 2026

This was the week the war ended on paper… if it sticks. After more than a hundred days of fighting, negotiations, attacks and reprisals, the United States and Iran announced a framework to halt the war, lift the American naval blockade, and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, with a signing set for Switzerland on Friday and oil falling almost five percent in a day, even as the President and Vice President openly contradicted each other over a reported three hundred billion dollar fund for Iran. Both sides declared an end to operations on all fronts, Lebanon included. Then, one day later, Israeli drones killed four people in southern Lebanon, two of them in a second strike after rescuers had gathered, and President Trump publicly rebuked Israel for killing civilians. In Israel, a red heifer calf was born by artificial insemination and hailed as the pure animal Temple-focused Judaism has awaited for two thousand years, even as a state-mandated ear tag raised the question of whether it was already disqualified. The earth shook hard at Palu and in western China, Chinese police hauled dozens out of a Sunday service, the Senate again refused to rein in the war, and the G7 gathered on Lake Geneva to talk about Iran, Ukraine, and who gets to control the most powerful artificial intelligence. None of this proves a date. All of it asks the church to hold thanksgiving and sobriety in the same hand.

Headlines:

1. The war ends on paper, and the markets exhale

After more than a hundred days of fighting, the United States and Iran announced a framework on June 14 and 15 to end the war. President Trump said the United States would lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports immediately, and that the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran had kept closed to tanker and commercial traffic since the war's opening weeks, would reopen once the deal is signed in Switzerland on Friday, June 19, with Pakistan mediating. The memorandum extends an earlier ceasefire for sixty days and lets Iran sell oil freely again. Both sides declared an end to military operations on all fronts. Reuters, the Associated Press, and NPR carried the announcement.

It was not the first such announcement. By a conservative count, this is the fourth time the war has been declared over or paused since it began in late February. A two-week US-Iran ceasefire came on April 8, which President Trump hailed as a total and complete victory, one hundred percent, no question about it, and which his war secretary called a decisive military victory. A separate Israel-Lebanon truce followed eight days later, and on April 21 the President extended the ceasefire indefinitely. Each was announced with confidence, and each gave way to the next round of strikes, including the missile exchanges and the downed American helicopter of just last week. The President has personally declared victory at least three times over. The believer is glad for every pause and counts none of them final.

The markets believed it before the diplomats finished talking. Brent crude fell almost five percent in a day, to around 83 dollars, as traders priced out the supply shock that had hung over the world since the Strait closed. At the G7 summit on Lake Geneva, allied leaders backed the framework as a historic opportunity and said they were ready to help carry it out, even though neither Washington nor Tehran had released the text. The deal pointedly leaves Iran's nuclear program for later talks, and the head of the international nuclear watchdog warned against mistaking a handshake for a settlement, against what he called the illusion of an agreement.

And the deal's own architects could not keep the terms straight. On Monday, Vice President Vance told CBS that a three hundred billion dollar reconstruction fund for Iran was real, money he said would come from a coalition of Gulf states rather than from the United States, so long as Tehran honored its obligations. Within hours, after a backlash from his own party, he reversed himself on Fox News and insisted Iran would not see a single dime of American money. That evening President Trump went further, calling the report that the United States is paying Iran three hundred million dollars fake news, a figure off by a factor of a thousand from the one his own vice president had confirmed that morning. Iran, meanwhile, says the agreement requires Washington to unfreeze billions in sanctioned Iranian assets before nuclear talks even begin. When the text is unreleased and the president and his deputy cannot agree on whether there is a fund, how large it is, or who pays for it, the wise reader holds the celebration loosely.

Give thanks for any stay of bloodshed. A hundred days of war grinding to a halt is mercy, and the believer is not too sophisticated to be glad when the guns go quiet. But a deal is not peace, and a signing ceremony is not the Prince of Peace, especially when its own makers cannot say in one voice what it contains. Some trust in chariots and some in horses, some in blockades and some in three hundred billion dollar funds, but our confidence is in the name of the Lord our God. Pray that this one holds, and hold it loosely, because the arm of flesh has promised peace before, and rarely keeps its story straight.

"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God." Psalm 20:7, ESV

"No wisdom, no understanding, no counsel can avail against the LORD. The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but the victory belongs to the LORD." Proverbs 21:30-31, ESV

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2. Four dead in Lebanon, and Trump rebukes Israel

One day after both sides declared an end to operations on all fronts, Israeli drones struck three vehicles across southern Lebanon's Nabatieh governorate on June 16, killing at least four people. In the village of Mayfadoun, a drone hit a car, and then a second strike came after people had run to the scene to help, killing two of them. A separate strike on Shoukin killed two more. Lebanon's National News Agency reported the toll. Iran said the deal required Israel to withdraw from Lebanon entirely; Washington said that was not part of the agreement, and Israel rejected the demand outright.

Then came the rebuke. At the G7, President Trump, Israel's closest ally, publicly criticized its tactics, saying it was killing civilians and warning that the strikes could wreck his own Iran deal. You do not have to knock down an apartment house every time you are looking for somebody, he said, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they are not all Hezbollah. The detail that should not be smoothed over is the second strike at Mayfadoun. Hitting a target is the ordinary grammar of war. Waiting for the rescuers to gather and then striking again is a different thing, and Scripture does not let us file it under the same heading.

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, we did not know this, does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? To say so is not to hate Israel. The Israeli government's policy is not the same thing as the Israeli people or biblical Israel, and Lebanese civilians are not Hezbollah simply because Hezbollah hides among them. Pray for the families of Mayfadoun and Shoukin, for restraint that outlasts a press release, and for a peace that is more than a renamed war.

"Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?" Proverbs 24:11-12, ESV

"Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it." Psalm 34:14, ESV

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3. A red heifer named Unblemished, conceived by artificial insemination, and already in question

On a dairy farm in the Galilee, a red heifer calf was born and named Temimah, which means unblemished, the same term the red heifer law uses in Numbers 19:2. What makes this one notable is how she came to be. An artificial-insemination specialist named Shai Givon had bred a dairy cow with semen from a Red Angus bull nine months earlier, a crossing that almost always yields a black or dark calf. This time it produced a red one, and Rabbi Azaria Ariel, after examining her, found her coat pure in its redness. The red heifer of Numbers 19, whose ashes were required to purify Israelites from contact with death, has been absent for nearly two thousand years, and Temple-focused Jews treat its reappearance as a step toward renewed temple service.

Then there is the ear. Shortly after birth, as Israeli agricultural law requires, a tag was clipped into the calf's ear, and the law requires branding as well. Both are blemishes, and the red heifer of Scripture must be without blemish and must never have borne a yoke. The tag was removed once the animal's potential was noticed, but the rabbis are now openly debating whether the healing of that wound leaves her eligible or already disqualifies her. The calf named Unblemished bears, on her ear, the mark of a blemish, imposed by the modern state on the very animal men are straining to produce for an ancient rite. It is worth remembering that every prior candidate, including the heifers flown from Texas in 2022 with such fanfare, was eventually disqualified. This one may be too. A calf is not a temple, and a temple is not the end. There is a deeper folly in the striving itself, for you cannot artificially inseminate your way into God's timetable or manufacture redemption in a laboratory, and the attempt to force heaven's hand by technique is as old as Babel and no more successful.

For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. There is the point the headlines miss. The red heifer cleansed the body's contact with death; the blood of Christ cleanses the soul. And the calf men named Unblemished already carries one, while Christ is the Lamb without blemish or spot, the only truly spotless one, already offered once for all. Watch the Galilee herds with interest, not anxiety, and remember that the purification the world still strains toward was finished long ago on a hill outside Jerusalem.

"This is the statute of the law that the LORD has commanded: Tell the people of Israel to bring you a red heifer without defect, in which there is no blemish, and on which a yoke has never come." Numbers 19:2, ESV

"For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God." Hebrews 9:13-14, ESV

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4. Gaza's second phase keeps receding

In Cairo, a new round of talks among Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey, together with Palestinian factions, sought again to push the stalled second phase of the Gaza ceasefire forward, focused on humanitarian aid, reconstruction, and a full Israeli withdrawal. Hamas reported progress; Israel kept pressing deeper into the strip even as the talks convened, ordering expanded security control to keep Hamas from rebuilding. Officials close to the mediation told The Times of Israel they do not expect a real breakthrough before Israel's elections in the fall.

This is the second phase that was announced as begun back in January, and it is still being announced as beginning. The pattern is familiar to anyone who has watched the region, a framework, a delay, a fresh round of talks named after the same goals as the last one. The suffering in Gaza does not pause for the negotiating calendar, and neither does the responsibility of the church to pray for it.

The day of real lasting peace will not be brokered in Cairo or Geneva but will come down from heaven with the King who settles disputes for strong nations far away and makes them beat their swords into plowshares. What causes quarrels and fights among you? James asks, and answers, your passions are at war within you. Until the Prince of Peace returns, pray for the hostages and their families, for Gazans crushed between an army and a terror government, and for aid to reach the hungry through whatever door God opens.

"He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide disputes for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore;" Micah 4:3, ESV

"What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask." James 4:1-2, ESV

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5. The earth shakes again at Palu and across western China

A magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck Central Sulawesi in Indonesia on June 16, sending people fleeing into the open in and around Palu, a coastal city of some 400,000. The name carries weight, because in 2018 a quake and tsunami at Palu killed thousands. This time the early toll was lighter, at least one dead, dozens injured, and more than three hundred displaced, but the USGS estimated that hundreds of thousands of people felt strong to severe shaking. The same day, a magnitude 6.3 struck Qinghai province in northwestern China, killing one and injuring four, with rescue teams and search dogs deployed across the high Tibetan plateau.

Neither was an isolated tremor. A magnitude 6.2 had shaken the southern Philippines the day before, where Mindanao was still digging out from the magnitude 7.8 that killed forty-five the week before. Across the catalog, the earth logged more than a hundred quakes of magnitude 4.5 or greater in seven days. We do not read tremors like a codebook, but we do not sleep through them either.

The earth is utterly broken, the earth is split apart, the earth is violently shaken; it staggers like a drunken man and sways like a hut. So says the prophet, and so says the seismograph. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble; therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way. Let the shaking drive us not to panic but to that refuge, and to honest prayer for Palu, for Qinghai, for Mindanao, and for everyone tonight sleeping outdoors because the walls are no longer trusted.

"The earth is utterly broken, the earth is split apart, the earth is violently shaken. The earth staggers like a drunken man; it sways like a hut; its transgression lies heavy upon it, and it falls, and will not rise again." Isaiah 24:19-20, ESV

"According to Alamoth. A Song. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth give way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah" Psalm 46:1-3, ESV

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6. Persecution watch: police empty a Sunday service in China, and Nigeria's children stay lost

Around eleven on Sunday morning, June 14, between sixty and seventy Chinese officials, police, SWAT officers, and religious-affairs agents stormed a worship service of the Early Rain Covenant Church, meeting in a hotel conference room in Jiangyou, Sichuan. They detained thirty-three believers, including two elders, Yan Hong and Wu Wuqing, and injured three. Most were released that night after questioning, but the two elders were sentenced to fourteen and fifteen days of administrative detention. Early Rain, whose pastor Wang Yi has been imprisoned since 2018, is one of China's best-known independent churches, and this was simply the latest raid in a long campaign. International Christian Concern and ChinaAid documented it.

This is state persecution in its plain form, a government emptying a room of worshippers, and it should be named as such, even as we keep our categories honest elsewhere. In Nigeria, more than forty schoolchildren and teachers seized in mid-May from schools in Oyo State remained in captivity, with a mathematics teacher killed in custody. There the picture is mixed, banditry, ransom, and jihadist terror overlapping, and not every kidnapping is religious persecution. Discernment means weeping for every stolen child and detained believer while refusing to force every tragedy into one frame. Some of this is anti-Christian persecution. Some is the lawlessness that follows when a state cannot protect its people. Both are evil; they are not the same evil.

When the council ordered the apostles to stop preaching, Peter answered, we must obey God rather than men, and the church has been answering that way in hotel conference rooms ever since. Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. Pray by name where you can, for the elders of Early Rain, for the captives of Oyo, and for the day when every prison door the gospel touches comes open.

"But Peter and the apostles answered, We must obey God rather than men." Acts 5:29, ESV

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

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7. At home: the war powers fight, and surveillance tied to the vote

While the framework with Iran was being celebrated abroad, the Senate again declined to claim a say in the war that produced it. On June 16, senators voted 48 to 47 to block a resolution that would have required congressional authorization for further military action against Iran, the ninth such effort to fail. Four Republicans, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul, crossed over to support it, while one Democrat, John Fetterman, voted against. The constitutional question of who may take the country to war keeps losing by a single vote, and keeps coming back.

At the same time, the administration knit foreign surveillance to domestic voting. President Trump delayed his own nominee to lead the intelligence community while pressing Congress to pass a proof-of-citizenship voter bill, and tied renewal of the foreign-intelligence surveillance authority known as Section 702 to that same Save America Act. Requiring citizenship to vote is not the strange part, whatever its opponents say. A system that checks no identification, or issues the same identification to citizens and non-citizens alike, and then secures the ballot on nothing more than the honesty of people who are already breaking the law to be here, is not a safeguard; it is an honor code for the dishonest. The part worth watching is the vehicle. A sweeping foreign-surveillance power is now riding in the same bill as a rule about who may vote, and a sensible measure makes convenient cover for an expansion of the state's reach.

When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan. The believer is not required to be either a cynic or a partisan. Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, the Lord said, and what you have whispered in private rooms will be proclaimed on the housetops, which is at once a warning to the watchers and a comfort to the watched. Pray for leaders of both parties, for honest limits on the power to make war and to surveil, and for a church that keeps its conscience clear of both fear and idolatry.

"When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan." Proverbs 29:2, ESV

"Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops." Luke 12:2-3, ESV

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8. The G7's other tables: Ukraine, Russian oil, and who controls the AI

The G7 summit at Evian, on Lake Geneva in the alpine foothills, did more than bless the Iran deal. Leaders restated their backing for Ukraine, now in the fifth year of its war and already longer than the First World War, pledging more help for air defense and energy infrastructure and agreeing to tighten the screws on Russia's war economy. The economic front of that war was visible in the same days, as the International Energy Agency reported that Ukrainian strikes had pushed Russian crude output about ten percent below target, and a Ukrainian drone temporarily halted a Gazprom refinery in Moscow itself. Modern war is fought as much in refineries and balance sheets as on the line of contact.

The summit also turned to artificial intelligence, and treated it as security infrastructure. Leaders discussed a trusted partners scheme governing access to the most powerful American models, and executives from the major AI companies, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and others, sat with heads of state while Europeans pressed for more technological sovereignty. These are not ordinary tools. They are systems used for cybersecurity and potentially for cyber operations, owned by private companies and steered by national-security orders. The question for the watchful is not whether to fear the tools but who controls them, by what incentives, and what becomes of the nations and people who do not get a seat at that table. Much like atomic weapons, those who hold the most capable systems gain real leverage over those who do not, both the military edge and the enormous economic advantage of the automation they enable.

Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and kiss the Son, lest he be angry. The rulers of the earth gathered on Lake Geneva to divide up oil, allegiance, and the engines of artificial intelligence, and they too will give an account. Many shall run to and fro, Daniel was told, and knowledge shall increase. It has. Pray that the church would neither worship the machine nor fear it, but keep its trust in the One before whom every summit is a footnote.

"Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him." Psalm 2:10-12, ESV

"But you, Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, until the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase." Daniel 12:4, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Give thanks for the stay of war between Washington and Tehran, and pray that the framework signed in Switzerland would actually hold. Pray for honest dealing over Iran's nuclear program in the talks ahead, for the sailors and civilians along the Strait of Hormuz, and for a church glad of mercy yet anchored in Christ rather than in any treaty.

"Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God." Psalm 20:7, ESV

Pray for the grieving families of Mayfadoun and Shoukin, for the wounded and for those who run toward the wounded, and that the men who order strikes on rescuers would answer to the God who weighs every heart. Pray that the fragile framework would restrain the next strike rather than merely renaming the war.

"Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?" Proverbs 24:11-12, ESV

Pray for clear eyes as Temple-related signs draw attention, that the church would watch the Galilee herds with interest and not anxiety, neither dismissing the moment nor inflating it past what an ear-tagged, still-disputed calf can bear. Thank God that the purification the red heifer only pictured has been finished in the blood of Christ, and pray that many in Israel would come to see in Jesus the cleansing they still seek.

"how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God." Hebrews 9:14, ESV

Pray for the hostages still held in Gaza and for their families, for civilians caught between Israeli operations and Hamas rule, for aid to reach the hungry, and for mediators to deal honestly. Ask the Lord, who alone gives true peace, to have mercy where human negotiation keeps failing.

"He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide disputes for strong nations far away; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore;" Micah 4:3, ESV

Pray for the people of Palu and Central Sulawesi, who know exactly what an earthquake can become, for Qinghai and for Mindanao still in its aftershocks, and for rescuers and pastors walking into the rubble. Ask the Lord to be a refuge for the shaken and to fix our hope on the kingdom that cannot be moved.

"According to Alamoth. A Song. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth give way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah" Psalm 46:1-3, ESV

Pray for the elders and members of Early Rain Covenant Church and for the imprisoned pastor Wang Yi, for the more than forty children and teachers still held in Nigeria, and for the family of the teacher killed. Ask the Lord to strengthen His persecuted people, to bring the captives home, and to give His church discernment to name each evil truthfully.

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

Pray for the Senate and the courts as they weigh who may take the nation to war and how far the state may watch its own people. Pray for honest limits on surveillance and war power, for leaders of both parties, and for a church that neither sleepwalks into a surveillance state nor loses itself in conspiracy and fear.

"When the righteous increase, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan." Proverbs 29:2, ESV

Pray for the nations gathered at the G7, for a just and durable settlement in Ukraine, for civilians under bombardment on both sides, and for wisdom as rulers and corporations divide up control of artificial intelligence. Ask the Lord to keep His church from worshiping or fearing the machine, and to fix its trust in the King above every summit.

"Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him." Psalm 2:11-12, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: June 10th 2026

This was the week the region's ceasefires showed their seams. Hezbollah rejected the conditional truce Israel and Lebanon had just announced, Israel and Iran traded their worst strikes in months as the war passed its hundredth day, and after an Army Apache went down off the coast of Oman, the United States and Iran exchanged direct strikes while both sides insisted talks were still alive. In Cairo, mediators opened second-phase Gaza negotiations even as Israeli strikes continued, and a United Nations report documented Hamas-affiliated forces executing and maiming hundreds of their own people. At home, the President signed seventy billion dollars in immigration-enforcement funding, a national security memorandum pushed artificial intelligence deeper into the military and intelligence agencies, and a Treasury advisory asked banks to watch their customers for immigration-related red flags. Japan's three megabanks announced a joint stablecoin. The persecution watch runs from Nigeria, where the army freed 360 Boko Haram captives, to a mob attack on worshippers in central India, to harassment data from Jerusalem. And creation shook, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake off Mindanao that killed at least 45, and the strongest quake near western Cuba since 1880. None of this proves a date. All of it calls the church to be awake.

Headlines:

1. The Apache goes down and the US and Iran trade direct strikes

The Israel-Iran ceasefire faltered badly over the weekend, and this time the missiles flew both ways. After Israel struck Hezbollah's Dahiyeh stronghold in Beirut, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel for the first time since the April ceasefire took hold, eleven of them according to Israel's ambassador to Washington. Israel intercepted most and answered with its own first post-ceasefire strike on the Bandar Imam petrochemical complex at Mahshahr, a crown jewel of Iran's energy sector with more than fifty plants, along with a large-scale strike on Iranian air defenses. Brent crude jumped back above 97 dollars. President Trump urged restraint one day and promised the United States would soon declare total victory the next; Tehran told Al Jazeera that Washington was seeking neither ceasefire nor dialogue. The war passed its hundred-day mark with the language of de-escalation and the language of ultimatum coming from the same podiums.

Then the war touched an American aircraft. A U.S. Army Apache helicopter went down off the coast of Oman on June 9, and President Trump blamed Tehran. PBS NewsHour and AP reported that U.S. forces began retaliatory strikes against Iranian targets within hours, and NBC News reported the strikes were completed the same day. Iran said it answered by targeting U.S. bases in Jordan, Kuwait, and Bahrain. The Strait of Hormuz remains the chokepoint through which all of this flows, and every exchange now happens within sight of the shipping lanes that carry a fifth of the world's oil.

Scripture does not ask the believer to predict where this goes. It asks us to remember who ends it. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear. Pray for restraint among rulers, for the protection of American service members and Gulf civilians who live under the flight paths, and for negotiators on every side to deal honestly. Our confidence is not in deterrence. It is in the King who says, Be still, and know that I am God.

"Come, behold the works of the LORD, how he has brought desolations on the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the chariots with fire. “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!" Psalm 46:8-10, ESV

"The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will." Proverbs 21:1, ESV

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2. Hezbollah rejects the ceasefire while Dahiyeh burns

Israel and Lebanon announced a conditional ceasefire on June 3, and Hezbollah rejected it within a day. The terms required Hezbollah, but not Israel, to stop attacks, and called for a demilitarized zone in southern Lebanon administered by the Lebanese national army. Hezbollah leader Naim Kassem called the negotiations absurd, humiliating, and insulting, and said withdrawing fighters from the south while under attack would mean surrender, defeat, and achieving the enemy's goals. The Washington Post reported both sides will meet again the week of June 22, and Iran has tied any ceasefire of its own to a ceasefire in Lebanon, formally coupling the two fronts.

On June 7 the Israeli Air Force struck Hezbollah's Dahiyeh stronghold in Beirut after the group fired rockets at northern Israel. The Times of Israel reported the IDF dropped at least ten one-ton bombs on a command center; Lebanon's National News Agency reported two killed and at least eleven wounded. Washington was reportedly informed before the strike. Hezbollah threatened Tel Aviv and Haifa if Dahiyeh is hit again, and by June 8 the IDF was issuing evacuation orders near Tyre. The ceasefire is not dead on paper. On the ground it is being tested with ordnance.

The psalmist knew this exact grief. Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war. Pray for the civilians on both sides of the Blue Line, for the children who know the sirens by sound, and for the diplomats trying to hold a framework together that the gunners keep testing. And refuse the false comfort of declaring peace where there is none.

"Too long have I had my dwelling among those who hate peace. I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!" Psalm 120:6-7, ESV

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace." Jeremiah 6:14, ESV

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3. Cairo talks open while a UN report names Hamas's terror against its own people

Second-phase Gaza ceasefire talks opened in Cairo this week, bringing Egypt, Qatar, and Turkey together with Palestinian factions, and the BBC reported President Trump saying the parties are very close to a deal. The talks convened under fire. Reuters reported Israeli strikes killed nine people in Gaza on June 7 as the negotiations began, and Israeli forces continued expanding control zones inside the strip under Prime Minister Netanyahu's directive. Kerem Shalom reopened for humanitarian aid less than a day after Israel closed the crossings. Negotiation and bombardment are running on parallel tracks, and neither seems to wait for the other.

On June 9 the UN human rights office published a report documenting what Hamas-affiliated forces have done to their own people. Investigators identified 249 cases of executions and severe violence between August 2024 and January 2026, with at least 108 people killed and 384 injured. The report names three forces, the Qassam Brigades, the Sahm Unit, and the Rad'a Force, and describes public executions, kneecapping, and bone-breaking with pipes and cement bricks, framed as punishment for collaboration, looting, or rivalry, and often publicized deliberately to instill fear. The Washington Post and The Times of Israel both carried the findings. Cruelty in Gaza did not run in only one direction, and honest watching requires saying so.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem without hardening your heart toward any people made in the image of God. The same report that indicts a terror government's cruelty is a window into what ordinary Gazans have endured from both the war above them and the rulers among them. Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Compassion is not compromise, and discernment is not hatred.

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! “May they be secure who love you!" Psalm 122:6, ESV

"Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked." Psalm 82:3-4, ESV

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4. Seventy billion dollars for enforcement as the Supreme Court's biggest month looms

President Trump signed the Secure America Act on June 10, directing roughly seventy billion dollars to immigration enforcement through the end of his term in fiscal 2029. The House passed it 214 to 212 the day before, ending a 115-day standoff. The White House says 38 billion goes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 26 billion to Border Patrol operations, and about five billion to contingency costs. NPR, CBS News, and PBS NewsHour all noted the bill funds enforcement agencies whose operations, like the Delaney Hall detention flashpoint we covered last week, are already among the most contested ground in American civic life.

The signing lands as the Supreme Court enters its final and most consequential stretch. NPR reports decisions are expected beginning June 11 on birthright citizenship, Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, and the President's power to fire officials Congress tried to insulate, all of which will shape the same enforcement landscape the new money funds. Whatever the rulings, the machinery of enforcement and the law constraining it are both being rebuilt in the same season, ahead of the midterms.

The Bible holds two commands together that American politics keeps tearing apart. Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, and, you shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself. Lawful order is biblical. So is love for the sojourner. Pray for laws that are just, enforcement that is restrained and humane, and a church that refuses to outsource its conscience to either party.

"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God." Romans 13:1, ESV

"When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:33-34, ESV

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5. NSPM-11 sends AI into the war machine while FinCEN deputizes the banks

On June 5 the White House issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 11, directing the military and intelligence community to accelerate adoption of artificial intelligence across warfighting, intelligence, and procurement. The memorandum rescinds the prior administration's framework, sets a 90-to-120-day timeline for onboarding frontier models from multiple vendors, orders a buildout of high-security computing facilities, and creates an AI National Security Strategic Reserve of outside experts. One provision deserves a careful read aloud, a framework ensuring that AI systems deployed in national security contexts cannot be disabled or altered without federal government approval. The privacy group EPIC reads the memo as removing guardrails; the Council on Foreign Relations calls its open questions unresolved. Both can be true.

The same day, Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued advisory FIN-2026-A002, jointly with the IRS and the federal banking regulators, implementing the May 19 executive order called Restoring Integrity to America's Financial System. It asks financial institutions to watch customers for eighteen red-flag indicators tied to unlawful employment of non-work-authorized populations, things like shared addresses, mismatched Social Security numbers, and foreign-passport accounts claiming self-employment, and to file suspicious activity reports under a dedicated keyword. Whatever one's view of immigration enforcement, the structural fact is that banks are again being asked to serve as the state's eyes. Add the week's smaller items, Meta quietly stripping unactivated facial-recognition code from its always-on glasses after public scrutiny, and New York requiring ads to label AI-generated people as synthetic performers, and the picture is one fabric tightening, identity, money, enforcement, and AI braided closer together.

This is not the mark of the beast, and we should not say it is. It is what the Preacher saw long ago, man having power over man to his hurt, now at machine speed and banking scale. The prudent see danger and take refuge, without panic and without pretending. Pray for believers who work inside these systems, in uniform, in intelligence, in compliance departments, that they would keep both their integrity and their tenderness of conscience.

"All this I observed while applying my heart to all that is done under the sun, when man had power over man to his hurt." Ecclesiastes 8:9, ESV

"The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it." Proverbs 22:3, ESV

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6. Japan's megabanks announce a joint stablecoin and the rails keep converging

Japan's three largest banking groups, Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui, and Mizuho, announced this week that they will jointly issue a stablecoin, with a yen-pegged token targeted by March 2027 and a dollar version to follow. The token will run on Progmat, the digital-asset platform built by MUFG and NTT Data, and the banks' combined enterprise base of more than 300,000 companies gives it immediate scale without retail onboarding. Japan's Financial Services Agency has supported the pilots since November 2025. CoinDesk and The Block both carried the announcement.

Set this beside last week's items, China widening the digital yuan's footprint and the European Central Bank arguing for a digital euro to counter dollar-pegged stablecoins, and the direction is unmistakable. Money keeps becoming institutional software. The World Economic Forum's new Technology Pioneers cohort, announced June 10, even highlights startups building identity and payment rails for AI agents, commerce infrastructure where the customer is not a person but a piece of software acting for one. None of this is sinister in itself. All of it is programmable, traceable, and governable in ways cash never was.

A just balance and scales are the Lord's; all the weights in the bag are his work. The believer's posture toward money that is becoming software is the same as toward money that was metal, hold it with an open hand, keep out of debt's slavery where you can, and remember that no one can serve two masters. Care practically for neighbors, especially the elderly, who cannot easily navigate rails that assume a smartphone and an app.

"A just balance and scales are the LORD’s; all the weights in the bag are his work." Proverbs 16:11, ESV

"No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money." Matthew 6:24, ESV

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7. The chatbots have theological leanings, and the household needs a paper Bible

The Christian Post reported June 7 on new research into how leading AI models handle questions of faith and ethics. Across fourteen faith and non-faith traditions, the models gave a positive response about 45 times in 100, but the distribution was anything but even. Agnosticism drew positive treatment 70 percent of the time, with the Baha'i faith and Catholicism close behind, while Jehovah's Witnesses sat at 3 percent and Sunni Muslims and evangelical Protestants near 32 and 33 percent. Whatever the methodology's limits, the headline finding stands, the machines people increasingly consult for moral counsel have leanings, and they were not chosen by you, your pastor, or your church.

The infrastructure for that consultation keeps growing. The World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions convenes June 23 to 25 in Dalian under the banner Innovating at Scale, and its new Tech Pioneers class is explicitly building the plumbing for autonomous AI agents. The question Yuval Noah Harari raised at Davos in January, what happens to book-based religion when an AI is treated as the expert on the holy texts, is no longer hypothetical. It is a product roadmap. The church's answer is not panic and not a boycott. It is formation, the slow, stubborn discipline of a household that reads the Book itself.

Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens. The Bereans were commended because they examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so, and the habit that made them noble is available to every family with a paper Bible and a kitchen table. Read it aloud at home. Let your children hear the Word in your voice, not a synthesized one, and let every other voice, including the machine's, be tested against the page.

"Lamedh Forever, O LORD, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens." Psalm 119:89, ESV

"Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so." Acts 17:11, ESV

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8. Persecution watch: 360 freed in Nigeria, a mob in India, harassment data from Jerusalem

There was good news from Nigeria this week. The army freed 360 people abducted by Boko Haram, recovering them from a mountain hideout in Borno State after clashes with the militants, Al Jazeera and the BBC reported June 7. Many had been taken in the group's devastating March raid on a village in the northeast. Their families have prayed through three months of silence, and the church worldwide can give thanks while remembering that others remain in captivity.

In India, International Christian Concern reported June 8 that a Hindu-nationalist mob attacked a Sunday worship service in Sadrapal village, Sukma district, Chhattisgarh, on May 31, injuring some 25 worshippers. And in Israel, advocates presented data on June 4 documenting a sharp rise in harassment of Christians, more than 88 incidents recorded so far in 2026, 63 of them in the second quarter alone, ranging from spitting to vandalism of church property in and around Jerusalem. Three countries, three different shapes of pressure, militant abduction, mob violence, and street-level harassment the authorities are slow to restrain. The taxonomy matters because the prayers differ, but the family is one.

Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body. The comfort of the American church is the historical exception, not the rule, and all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. Pray by name where you can, Borno, Sukma, Jerusalem, and let the freed captives of Nigeria remind you that the Lord still opens prison doors.

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

"Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted," 2 Timothy 3:12, ESV

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9. A magnitude 7.8 levels part of Mindanao and Cuba feels its strongest quake since 1880

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck off the southern coast of Mindanao early Monday morning, June 8 local time, the strongest to hit the Philippines since 1990. By midweek the toll stood at 45 dead, 17 missing, roughly 490 injured, and more than 25,000 displaced into 45 government shelters. AP reported rescuers scrambling out of a partially collapsed grocery in General Santos, the country's tuna capital, as one of more than 2,100 aftershocks, some up to magnitude 6.4, rattled the city. Tsunami warnings briefly covered coastlines from Indonesia to Japan. USGS recorded the main shock at 7.8 with major aftershocks of 6.5 and 6.0 within hours.

Half a world away on June 8, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off northwest Cuba, 104 kilometers from Mantua at a shallow 26 kilometers depth. USGS data show nothing that strong has hit within 322 kilometers since a magnitude 6.0 near San Cristobal in 1880. The shaking reached Havana, the Yucatan resort towns, and Tampa Bay, and it rolled across an island whose electrical grid was already in collapse when we covered its diesel crisis two weeks ago. No major damage was reported, which on an exhausted grid is its own mercy. For completeness, the week's space weather amounted to storm watches issued and then cancelled when the solar ejection arrived mild, a forecast that fizzled, and that is worth saying plainly too.

The mountains quake before him; the hills melt; the earth heaves before him. And the same prophet says in the next breath, The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him. Earthquakes are not a codebook. They are a summons to humility and to prayer for General Santos's churches, Cuba's weary households, and every place where the ground itself preaches that only one kingdom cannot be shaken.

"There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven." Luke 21:11, ESV

"The mountains quake before him; the hills melt; the earth heaves before him, the world and all who dwell in it. Who can stand before his indignation? Who can endure the heat of his anger? His wrath is poured out like fire, and the rocks are broken into pieces by him. The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him." Nahum 1:5-7, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Pray for restraint between Washington and Tehran, for the family of every service member in harm's way, for Gulf civilians who live beneath the flight paths, and for honest dealing at whatever table the negotiators still share. Ask the Lord to make wars cease and to keep our hope anchored in Him rather than in deterrence.

"He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the chariots with fire." Psalm 46:9, ESV

Pray for the people of southern Lebanon and northern Israel, for the children who know the sirens by sound, for restraint in Beirut and Jerusalem alike, and for the negotiators meeting the week of June 22. Ask the Lord to give true peace rather than a managed pause, and to strengthen believers on both sides of the border as witnesses.

"I am for peace, but when I speak, they are for war!" Psalm 120:7, ESV

Pray for the hostages and their families, for Gazans who have suffered under both bombardment and their own rulers' cruelty, for the mediators in Cairo to deal honestly, and for the Lord to restrain evil on every side. Ask Him to give justice to the weak and to open gospel doors where grief has hardened many hearts.

"Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked." Psalm 82:4, ESV

Pray for just laws and humane enforcement, for the justices weighing birthright citizenship and protected status, for officers and detainees alike at facilities like Delaney Hall, and for a church that honors lawful order while loving the sojourner. Ask the Lord to keep His people from outsourcing conscience to any party.

"You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God." Leviticus 19:34, ESV

Pray for discernment as artificial intelligence moves deeper into the military, the intelligence agencies, and the banking system. Pray for believers who serve inside these institutions to keep integrity and tenderness of conscience, and for the church to watch without panic and speak without carelessness.

"The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it." Proverbs 22:3, ESV

Pray for honest weights and measures in a world of programmable money, for believers working in banking and fintech, and for practical care toward neighbors who cannot navigate digital rails. Ask the Lord to keep His people free from the love of money in every form it takes.

"A just balance and scales are the LORD’s; all the weights in the bag are his work." Proverbs 16:11, ESV

Pray that every household in our congregation would own and read a paper Bible, that children would hear Scripture in their parents' voices, and that the church would test every voice, human or machine, against the written Word. Ask the Lord to guard a generation from being discipled by its tools.

"Lamedh Forever, O LORD, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens." Psalm 119:89, ESV

Give thanks for the 360 freed from Boko Haram captivity and pray for their restoration, for those still held, for the wounded worshippers of Sukma, and for believers in and around Jerusalem facing harassment. Pray for the persecutors too, that the Lord who turned Saul into Paul would do it again.

"Remember those who are in prison, as though in prison with them, and those who are mistreated, since you also are in the body." Hebrews 13:3, ESV

Pray for the people of General Santos and southern Mindanao, for rescuers working through aftershocks, for grieving families and the displaced in shelters, and for Cuban households shaken on an already dark grid. Ask the Lord to make local churches the first light people see, and to fix our hope on the kingdom that cannot be shaken.

"The LORD is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; he knows those who take refuge in him." Nahum 1:7, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: June 3rd 2026

This was a week in which the language of peace and the language of pressure were spoken by the same officials on the same day. Gaza ceasefire talks stalled while Israeli strikes continued and Israel formally eliminated the newly appointed head of Hamas's military wing. Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel on the day Lebanese officials traveled to the Pentagon to keep the U.S.-mediated deal alive. Iran struck Kuwait's main airport with drones and missiles, killing at least one, even as Secretary Rubio testified before the Senate that nuclear talks remained on the table. Newark's ICE detention flashpoint deepened with restricted zones, a hunger strike, and a mayoral lawsuit. The White House issued a sweeping AI cybersecurity executive order, China kept widening the digital-yuan footprint, the ECB warned that stablecoin growth could entrench dollar dominance, and the World Economic Forum previewed a Summer Davos meeting framed around AI and weakening global growth. A deep M6.2 earthquake struck offshore Italy, a 4.1 quake hit California's high desert, and NOAA's solar prediction center moved from R1 to R2 radio-blackout conditions as an M9.5 flare erupted. None of this proves a date. All of it calls the church to be awake.

Headlines:

1. Gaza ceasefire stalls as Israel takes out the new Hamas military chief

Talks over the next phase of the U.S.-brokered Gaza ceasefire remained stalled through the week, with the unresolved issues, Hamas disarmament, Israeli withdrawals, aid access, and post-war governance, still sitting on the table. Israeli strikes continued across the strip, hitting dozens of targets and killing Palestinians on June 3. Coverage outside the wires has documented more than two thousand recorded violations of the October 10 truce between October 2025 and March 2026, and roughly nine hundred Palestinian deaths since the agreement was signed. The cease-fire is not a stop; it is a slow grind under a different label.

On May 27 the IDF announced it had killed Mohammad Odeh, the newly appointed head of Hamas's military wing in Gaza, in an airstrike on Gaza City. PBS NewsHour reported that Hamas confirmed the death; CBS News and UPI carried the same confirmation. Earlier in the same window, Israeli media reported that Prime Minister Netanyahu had instructed the IDF to expand operational control toward roughly seventy percent of the strip, beyond the line the ceasefire had set. The land of Israel is once again the center of the world's anxious headlines.

The believer who has watched this region for any length of time knows two failures to avoid. The first is to grow cold to suffering because the war is familiar; the second is to grow reckless in speculation because the region is prophetic. Compassion with clarity and intercession without panic. Pray for Israelis and for Palestinians, for hostages and their families, for soldiers and civilians, and for the gospel to go forward in places where grief has hardened many hearts.

"And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains." Matthew 24:6-8, ESV

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! “May they be secure who love you!" Psalm 122:6, ESV

"Behold, I am about to make Jerusalem a cup of staggering to all the surrounding peoples. The siege of Jerusalem will also be against Judah. On that day I will make Jerusalem a heavy stone for all the peoples. All who lift it will surely hurt themselves. And all the nations of the earth will gather against it." Zechariah 12:2-3, ESV

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2. Lebanon: rockets, strikes, and a Pentagon track running parallel to the fighting

Hezbollah launched rockets toward northern Israel on June 3 and Israeli forces intercepted multiple incoming threats. Israeli strikes hit targets across southern Lebanon over the preceding days, including reported casualties in residential areas. Al Jazeera's regional liveblog tracked Lebanese military officials traveling to the Pentagon for talks aimed at keeping the U.S.-mediated arrangement alive even as the violence continued, with political negotiations scheduled for the following week. The April ceasefire is being tested every day at the line.

U.S. officials publicly pressed Israel for restraint, particularly around any operation that could reach Beirut's southern suburbs. The Jerusalem Post reported that the political track is now the focus, after a season of strictly military contacts. The ceasefire is not dead; it is also not a peace, and the difference is paid for in homes and ambulances on both sides of the border.

Scripture warns against crying "Peace, peace" where there is no peace, not because peace is undesirable, but because false confidence is deadly. The same wires that report calm one hour announce intercepted drones the next. The church refuses two temptations here. We must not grow cold to suffering because the conflict is familiar, and we must not grow reckless in speculation because the region is prophetic.

"They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace." Jeremiah 6:14, ESV

"While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape." 1 Thessalonians 5:3, ESV

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3. Iran: Kuwait airport attack, nuclear talks, and internal pressure

Iran struck Kuwait and Bahrain with drones and missiles on June 3, hitting Kuwait's international airport, killing at least one person, and damaging terminal facilities. Al-Monitor and U.S. News confirmed Kuwaiti state news agency reports; The National News reported that the same volley targeted Bahrain, framing the attacks as a test of failing diplomatic talks; Al Jazeera and Newsday carried similar coverage. Kuwait suspended commercial flights and diverted incoming traffic. The fact pattern is plain. Tehran's confrontation with Washington is not contained inside any one border. It now touches Gulf states, U.S. forces, shipping lanes, and energy markets.

In the same days, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the first time since the start of the Iran war, tying any sanctions relief to Tehran's nuclear program rather than to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. PBS NewsHour carried the testimony. Inside Iran, AP coverage in this window reported that ordinary Iranians were only gradually regaining internet access after a prolonged government shutdown, with heavy restrictions still in place. Outward war and inward control travel together.

When justice stands afar off and truth is fallen in the street, the believer remembers that the Lord is a refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Pray for the underground church inside Iran, for women and dissidents living under coercive power, for hostage families, and for restraint among rulers on every side. Our hope rests not in diplomats or sanctions but in the King whose throne is established in righteousness.

"Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. The LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice." Isaiah 59:14-15, ESV

"The LORD is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble." Psalm 9:9, ESV

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4. Newark: Delaney Hall hunger strike, a mayoral lawsuit, and a strained civic fabric

Tensions around immigration enforcement deepened in Newark, New Jersey, where the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility has become the focal point of protests, expanded police restricted zones, an imposed curfew, and litigation. The Intercept reported on May 29 that ICE officers pepper-sprayed detainees during a hunger strike; Truthout documented a broader pattern of retaliation against both detainees and protestors. Scripps-owned Lex18 reported arrests of demonstrators who defied the curfew. ABC7 New York reported that Mayor Ras Baraka was preparing a lawsuit against the facility's operators citing health and safety concerns, while activists alleged police were actively blocking demonstrators from approaching the site. The White House released a public message stating that ICE operations "will not be deterred."

This is not merely a policy dispute. It is a sign of a strained civic fabric, in which federal authority, state leadership, the city, activists, law enforcement, and detained persons each treat the others as adversaries. The line between accountability and obstruction is being drawn and redrawn by court order and by crowd. None of this is the gospel's enemy; all of it is the soil in which the gospel works.

James says that where envying and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil work follow; but the wisdom from above is peaceable, gentle, and full of mercy. Pray for the vulnerable without despising lawful order. Pray for law enforcement without excusing cruelty. Pray for leaders without making idols of them, and so far as it depends on us, live peaceably with all.

"First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way." 1 Timothy 2:1-2, ESV

"But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace." James 3:17-18, ESV

"If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." Romans 12:18, ESV

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5. Trump's AI cybersecurity executive order and a survey of Christian unease

On June 2 the White House issued an executive order on advanced AI innovation and security. The order directs deeper cooperation between the federal government, AI developers, cybersecurity agencies, and operators of critical infrastructure, including hospitals, community banks, utilities, and state and local partners. Lawfare and the American Hospital Association both reported that leading AI firms will be invited to voluntarily submit powerful models for federal cybersecurity testing before public release. The White House fact sheet frames the move as a national-security imperative.

In the same week, Christian Post survey coverage reported that many pastors and practicing Christians are worried about AI replacing God in the lives of believers, while admitting that they themselves use AI tools daily. The tension is worth pausing over. Tools can assist; tools can also disciple or deceive if you let them. Convenience can quietly become catechism when people begin asking machines for moral clarity, spiritual growth, and meaning. This is not the mark of the beast, and we should not say it is. It is the slow normalization of a system in which artificial intelligence, public authority, private industry, and essential services are being braided into one fabric.

A prudent person sees danger and hides himself; the simple keep going and suffer for it. Refuse the two cheap moves. Do not pretend the church can outrun this conversation by ignoring it, and do not pretend a software roadmap is the same as a prophetic timetable. Test every spirit. Cling to Scripture. Disciple your children in person.

"The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it." Proverbs 22:3, ESV

"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world." 1 John 4:1, ESV

"Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name." Revelation 13:16-17, ESV

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6. Digital money: yuan footprint widens, ECB warns on stablecoins, UK pushes softer rules

China broadened its digital yuan footprint in fiscal spending, lottery draws, green-electricity tracking, healthcare disbursements, and cross-border transactions. Reuters reported that Beijing is now allowing more banks to handle the e-CNY, extending the rails outward from the pilot cities to the broader system. India's Reserve Bank laid out plans to expand the digital rupee through welfare schemes and cross-border pilots. These are not isolated technology stories. They are coordinated moves in a wider global push toward programmable, traceable, and politically strategic financial rails.

On the Western side, U.K. lawmakers urged the Bank of England to weaken planned stablecoin rules. The European Central Bank's Isabel Schnabel warned that rising stablecoin use could entrench dollar dominance and erode European monetary sovereignty, pressing the case for a digital euro. The point for believers is not to fear every financial innovation. It is to understand that money is increasingly becoming software, and software is conditioned, surveilled, and restrictable in ways paper and coin are not.

A false balance is an abomination to the Lord, and a just weight is His delight. The believer should hold money with an open hand and a clear conscience. Get out of debt where you can. Diversify what you can. Care for neighbors who cannot navigate these systems on their own. And remember that the Lord judged Babylon's merchants long before the seal vials, and He will judge ours.

"A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight." Proverbs 11:1, ESV

"Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have corroded, and their corrosion will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure in the last days." James 5:1-3, ESV

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7. Summer Davos, AI as religion, and the case for paper Bibles

The World Economic Forum previewed its Summer Davos 2026 meeting set for June 23-25 in Dalian, China, and published a chief economists outlook for the same window. The framing covers innovation at scale, AI adoption, geopolitical headwinds, inflation pressure, and weakening global-growth expectations. These are the categories that shape the world's governing imagination, the language in which our nominal rulers talk to one another about what the future is allowed to look like.

The relevance to the believer is not the dot-connecting tweet thread. It is the quieter pattern Yuval Noah Harari raised at an earlier WEF session this year, when he asked what happens to book-based religion when an AI is treated as the greatest expert on the holy texts. That question is worth holding seriously, not nervously. Realistically, we are probably already there. The answer the church gives is not panic about the WEF; it is the spiritual discipline of reading the Bible, the physical book, at home, out loud, in family devotions, with the kids, with the elders, until the Word lives in the bones of the household and you don't need to ask a computer to get its opinion. Digital Bibles are tools. Paper Bibles are insurance against tools that change.

The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Let the Word dwell richly in your home, in your memory, in your children, and in the discipline of Lord's Day worship. Beware of being taken captive by philosophy and empty deceit, however well-funded its conference is.

"The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever." Isaiah 40:8, ESV

"All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." 2 Timothy 3:16-17, ESV

"See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ." Colossians 2:8, ESV

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8. Deep M6.2 quake off Italy and a high-desert California shake

A deep magnitude 6.2 earthquake struck off the coast of southern Italy at 22:12 UTC on June 1, with USGS placing the epicenter about 22 km west-southwest of Scarcelli in the Tyrrhenian Sea and a hypocenter at roughly 243 km depth. Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology classified the event as a typical deep quake of the Calabrian arc, where the Ionian lithosphere is subducting beneath Calabria. Euronews and BNO News reported the shaking was felt across Calabria, Basilicata, Puglia, Sicily, and as far north as Naples and the Vesuvius area. Because the focus was deep, no significant damage or injuries were reported.

On the same window, a magnitude 4.1 earthquake hit the high desert about eleven miles west-southwest of Johannesburg in Kern County, California, on June 1 at 3:34 p.m. local time, followed by smaller aftershocks of M2.6 and M2.7 in the same area. People reported feeling the quake as far as Wofford Heights and Canyon Country. No major damage was reported. These are not headlines on their own; they are reminders.

The Lord includes earthquakes in the long list of signs of a troubled age, not as a codebook for date-setting but as a school of humility. The ground beneath us can shake; economies can shake; governments can shake; and when our bodies shake with fear there is still a refuge that does not move. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. We will not fear, though the earth give way.

"There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven." Luke 21:11, ESV

"According to Alamoth. A Song. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth give way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. Selah" Psalm 46:1-3, ESV

"Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe," Hebrews 12:28, ESV

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9. M9.5 flare pushes NOAA from R1 to R2 radio-blackout conditions

NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center issued back-to-back updates this week. On June 2, low-level M-class flares produced R1 radio-blackout conditions. On June 3, an M9.5 flare erupted from Active Region 4455, lifting conditions to R2. NOAA noted a continued chance of additional M-class flares through the following days. R1 affects high-frequency radio communications on the sunlit side of Earth; R2 reaches further into the radio spectrum and can affect low-frequency navigation used by ships, aircraft, and some power-grid timing systems.

Satellites, communications, aviation, power systems, financial networks, and the GPS that quietly steers our daily routes all lean on a created order we do not command. Modern technology makes us aware of solar activity in a way previous generations could not be; the underlying message is that the heavens and the earth are not stable apart from their Creator.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims His handiwork. When the sun erupts, the believer's answer is not superstition and not denial. It is worship. The same God who set the lights in the firmament holds His people in His hand.

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun," Psalm 19:1-4, ESV

"And there will be signs in sun and moon and stars, and on the earth distress of nations in perplexity because of the roaring of the sea and the waves, people fainting with fear and with foreboding of what is coming on the world. For the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, straighten up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near." Luke 21:25-28, ESV

"And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years," Genesis 1:14, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, for hostages and grieving families on both sides, for believers in Israel and Gaza, and for the protection of children caught in cycles of violence. Ask the Lord to restrain evil, expose lies, and open doors for the gospel where human peace has so plainly failed.

"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! “May they be secure who love you!" Psalm 122:6, ESV

Pray for civilians in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, for the children who hear the sirens, for restraint among armed groups and states, and for the diplomats trying to keep a fragile arrangement from collapsing. Pray for our brothers and sisters in Lebanese and Israeli churches to be faithful witnesses in a season of grief.

"First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way." 1 Timothy 2:1-2, ESV

Pray for believers and ordinary families inside Iran, for women under coercive law, for restraint among rulers, and for hostages and conscripts of every nation pulled into this conflict. Ask the Lord to be a refuge for those who are afraid and to bring hidden cruelty into the light.

"The LORD is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O LORD, have not forsaken those who seek you." Psalm 9:9-10, ESV

Pray for lawful order and humane treatment, truth in public claims, and restraint among federal, state, local, activist, and law-enforcement actors. Pray that Christians in Newark and across the country would refuse rage as a political language and would serve neighbor and stranger alike.

"If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." Romans 12:18, ESV

Pray for discernment in the age of artificial intelligence. Ask the Lord to keep His church from fearing tools, worshiping tools, or being discipled by tools. Pray that pastors, parents, teachers, and young people would test every spirit, cling to Scripture, and refuse any counterfeit wisdom that reduces God's truth to data.

"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world." 1 John 4:1, ESV

Pray for honest commerce in your own household and church, for biblical stewardship, for freedom from the slavery of debt, and for clear eyes about systems that can be gated and surveilled. Pray for believers who already work under digital-currency rails to be salt and light without becoming silent.

"A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight." Proverbs 11:1, ESV

Pray that every household in our congregation would own paper Bibles, would read them daily, and would teach the children Scripture in our own voices, not delegated to a screen. Pray that the Lord would keep us from being discipled by anything other than His Word and His Spirit.

"The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever." Isaiah 40:8, ESV

Pray for the people of southern Italy and the high desert of California, and for the first responders and pastors who walk into the rubble in places we never hear about. Pray that the shaking of the earth would turn hearts to the kingdom that cannot be shaken.

"Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe," Hebrews 12:28, ESV

Pray for steady hearts when communications systems fail, for crews aloft and at sea, for grid operators, and for the wisdom to worship the One who set the sun in the sky rather than fearing what He has made. Pray that every household would have a paper Bible, a flashlight, and a plan.

"The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them he has set a tent for the sun," Psalm 19:1-4, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: May 27 2026

"Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths." Proverbs 3:5-6, ESV

The past week was busy across every front the watchful Christian tracks while still lacking concrete movement in most areas. Trump moved to widen the Abraham Accords as a condition of any new Iran agreement, while U.S. forces struck targets inside Iran in the middle of fresh talks. Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, an unusual and substantive Catholic statement on artificial intelligence. The federal government took another equity stake in a major private company, continuing a shift that has now produced eleven such deals since mid-2025. Elon Musk publicly described Neuralink's roadmap as "Jesus-level miracles." Two separate armed incidents at the White House landed in the same news cycle as the President's $250-million ballroom construction. The WHO confirmed an Ebola outbreak in the DRC that has crossed into Uganda. Congress held another UAP transparency hearing. And global strategic fuel reserves continued to thin while Cuba ran out of diesel and the lights went out across Havana. None of this proves a calendar. All of it needs careful discernment, but our focus needs to remain on Jesus.

Headlines:

1. Trump pushes a wider Abraham Accords as Iran talks tighten and U.S. forces strike

President Trump said this week that more nations joining the Abraham Accords should be a "mandatory" condition of any new Iran nuclear agreement. The framing tied the Accords directly to the bargaining table with Tehran, signaling that broader Gulf and Arab normalization with Israel is being treated as the price of de-escalation. Coverage from outside the U.S. flagged the push as a non-starter for several governments in the region, and Republicans in Congress publicly warned against making concessions to Iran in any deal to end the wider war.

While the Abraham Accords expansion was being floated diplomatically, U.S. Central Command struck missile launch sites and small boats near southern Iran around May 25, describing the actions as self-defense against threats including attempts to emplace naval mines during a fragile ceasefire. Iranian negotiators were in Qatar at the same time. Tehran called the strikes bad faith and warned of further response. Trump's stated bottom line in earlier rounds has been "complete dismantlement" of Iran's nuclear program, an objective Iran has repeatedly rejected.

The language of peace and the language of pressure are again being spoken by the same officials in the same week. Christian witness here is not to predict the outcome. It is to pray for restraint, for honest negotiators, for the protection of civilians on every side, and for our own posture not to harden into either reflexive hawkishness or reflexive cynicism. Peace is a real good. Coercion dressed as peace is a real danger. The believer reads both with sober eyes and remembers we won't see peace until we see the Prince of Peace.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV

"The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will." Proverbs 21:1, ESV

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2. Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on artificial intelligence

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on May 25. Its title is Magnifica humanitas, subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. He signed it on May 15, deliberately chosen as the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, the 1891 social encyclical that addressed the dignity of labor under industrial capitalism. The new text runs roughly forty-two thousand words across five chapters. Its underlying premise is that technology is not "a force antagonistic to humanity" and not "inherently evil," but that AI must be "disarmed" from a mentality of military, economic, and cognitive competition that allows it to dominate human persons rather than serve them.

The encyclical warns explicitly that control of AI must not remain "in the hands of a few," ties the current trajectory of AI to the fueling of present global conflicts, and frames AI deployed without restraint as a threat to human dignity and to the rights of workers. It also urges the safeguarding of truth in an information environment increasingly shaped by machines, the dignity of work as a participation in the work of the Creator, and the pursuit of social justice and peace. In an unusual production choice, the Vatican announced the encyclical alongside an Anthropic co-founder, one of the heads of a leading AI lab, signaling that Rome intends the document as the opening of a sustained negotiation with the AI industry rather than as a closed-door pronouncement.

A Catholic pope writing an encyclical on AI is itself a sign of the times. Whatever one's posture toward Rome, the fact that the largest body of nominal Christians on earth has now made a binding-level statement about AI is worth Protestants noticing. Much of the substance, particularly the insistence on human dignity rooted in being made in the image of God, on labor as more than productivity, and on the danger of placing decisive moral judgment in the hands of machines, is consistent with the Scriptural account. The deliberate echo of Rerum novarum also matters: Leo XIII addressed an industrial revolution that had outrun the moral imagination of its participants; Leo XIV is naming an information-and-cognition revolution that has done the same.

Christian discernment here does not require either applause for Rome or reflexive dismissal. It requires the recognition that the AI question is genuinely religious. It asks what a person is, what work is, what truth is, and who has authority to decide (God and not man in all those cases). Those are not engineering questions. They are theological ones. The church should be teaching about them in our own pulpits, not waiting for the Vatican to set the conversation.

"Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." Genesis 1:26, ESV

"See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ." Colossians 2:8, ESV

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3. The federal government keeps buying private companies

The Trump administration has now taken or agreed to take equity positions in at least ten private companies since mid-2025, continuing a pattern that critics across the political spectrum have publicly characterized as a quiet, ongoing nationalization. The largest investment is Intel, where the administration converted 8.9 billion dollars of CHIPS and Science Act grant money into a 9.9 percent stake in the troubled chipmaker. Other named deals include two rare-earth startups, Vulcan Elements and ReElement Technologies; Atlantic Alumina, a Louisiana-based gallium producer that received a 150-million-dollar federal equity injection in January; USA Rare Earth, which agreed to issue shares and warrants giving the U.S. an eight-to-sixteen percent stake; xLight, a Silicon Valley lithography startup with a commitment of up to 150 million; and L3Harris Technologies, the defense firm, which is in a proposed one-billion-dollar Pentagon partnership in its rocket motor business. Total federal funds committed to equity positions in private firms now approach ten billion dollars, with most concentrated in the Intel deal. A new House Republican bill has been introduced to codify the practice in statute.

The Cato Institute, which is not a friend of nationalization in any administration, called the trajectory "a seismic and disturbing shift." The Center for Strategic and International Studies framed it more sympathetically, as a response to Chinese supply-chain leverage. Both readings can be true at once. The dependencies being addressed are real. Chinese chokeholds on critical inputs, particularly in rare earths and advanced semiconductor lithography, are not invented. And yet the answer is now arriving as direct federal ownership of pieces of named private companies, on a scale unprecedented outside of full-blown financial crises like 2008. The legal authority for many of these deals is contested. The political precedent is open to abuse by any future administration of any party.

God endorses property rights and private ownership in Scripture. Believers did work in a collective environment in Jerusalem after Pentecost during persecution, but the world is not the church, and consolidation of power by the state usually goes poorly for the people living under it. This is not the mark of the beast and we should not speak carelessly. Regulation and even ownership are not, in themselves, evil. Honest weights and measures matter. But the pastoral question is the gradient. Each step toward concentrated state ownership of named private firms is a step toward a system in which political alignment matters more than business soundness, and in which the ability to participate in the economy depends on the favor of whoever currently holds the office. The wise believer does not flee every tool. The wise believer also does not pretend that nothing is changing.

"A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight." Proverbs 11:1, ESV

"The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it." Proverbs 22:3, ESV

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4. Elon Musk's "Jesus-level miracles" claim

Speaking at a Forbes innovation event in Silicon Valley and again at the Samson International virtual conference this week, Elon Musk described Neuralink's brain-computer interface roadmap as capable of "Jesus-level miracles," explicitly including the restoration of sight and movement. Coverage in mainstream tech outlets reported the phrasing in full. Clip reels on Instagram and TikTok pushed it into wider circulation. Futurism summarized the moment with the dry observation that Musk had compared his company's work to miracles performed by Jesus Christ.

The technical work behind Neuralink is real. There are genuine medical possibilities in restoring some sensory and motor function via implanted electrodes for specific kinds of injury and disease. We should be grateful for any reduction of suffering. We are not grateful for the theological positioning. Jesus did not heal a few people to demonstrate that some future engineer would catch up. Christ's miracles announced who He was, that the kingdom of God had drawn near, and that authority over disease, death, demons, and matter belonged to Him in His person. They are not, in Scripture, a benchmark for a billionaire's pitch deck.

The Christian response here is neither outrage nor mockery. It is to keep saying what we have always said. Jesus' miracles point to Messiahship. They are signed by His resurrection and verified by His ascension. A brain implant, however genuinely useful, does not raise a man from the dead, does not forgive sin, and does not seat anyone at the right hand of the Father. The miracles of Jesus are not a brand to borrow. These implants are scheduled for widespread adoption with nearly fully automated installation. I will not say this is the mark, but it is a step further along a road that leads to a system that can control who can buy and sell, mediated by something carried in the right hand or forehead.

"Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal." John 6:26-27, ESV

"For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen." Romans 11:36, ESV

"Also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name." Revelation 13:16-17, ESV

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5. Three rounds of gunfire near the President in a month, and the ballroom that crowded them out

This week brought the third incident of gunfire in the vicinity of President Trump in a single month. On May 23, around 6 PM EDT at the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, a 21-year-old man from Maryland named Nasire Best pulled a weapon from his bag and opened fire near a White House security checkpoint. Secret Service officers returned fire and killed him. A civilian bystander was struck by gunfire during the exchange and was reported in serious condition; whether the bystander was hit by the suspect's initial rounds or in the return fire is still unclear. Best was already known to the Secret Service from previous attempts to enter the White House complex, with prior charges and an outstanding warrant for his arrest, and had a documented history of mental health treatment. Trump was in the residence and was unaffected.

The May 23 shooting follows the April 26 White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting at the Washington Hilton, in which 31-year-old Cole Tomas Allen was arrested after running past a screening area outside the banquet hall. The Department of Justice has charged Allen with the attempted assassination of Trump administration officials. According to court filings, Allen made his hotel reservation on April 6 and traveled by train from his home near Los Angeles in advance, indicating premeditation of several weeks. Both 2026 incidents fall within the same broader pattern as the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania campaign rally shooting and the Mar-a-Lago golf-course incident later that summer.

In the same news cycle, the lead political-aesthetic story has been the construction of a 250-million-dollar, 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the White House grounds, financed privately, marketed by the White House Rapid Response account as a continuation of presidential modernization, and challenged in writing by congressional Democrats and by the Society of Architectural Historians. The ballroom has drawn detailed visual and architectural-history coverage. The three shootings, by contrast, have received the standard short-cycle treatment and largely faded by the next day.

One thing worth pondering is the contrast in protective response across the two White House events. In both cases people other than the attacker were shot, but the Secret Service response to the May 23 checkpoint shooting was exactly what you would expect: very rapid and very lethal. The response to the April 26 press-event shooting played out differently. The two are worth comparing.

The contrast is worth naming. A nation is in serious trouble when its political life produces three armed incidents in a month against a sitting president and the response is processed, archived, and moved past, while a ballroom addition draws sustained outrage. Both stories have a place. But a culture trains itself by what it lingers on. The Christian response is to mourn the violence without inflaming it, to refuse the satisfactions of partisan blame, to pray for officials and for the men and women guarding them, and to keep the seriousness of human life uppermost when the news cycle moves on.

"If you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? And if in a safe land you are so trusting, what will you do in the thicket of the Jordan?" Jeremiah 12:5, ESV

"Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good." Romans 12:9, ESV

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6. Ebola flares again in the DRC, treatment centers are being torched, and 18 suspected patients are missing

The World Health Organization was alerted on May 5 to a high-mortality outbreak of an unknown illness in the Mongbwalu Health Zone of Ituri Province, in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, including deaths among health workers. Laboratory analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a species of Ebola for which there is currently no vaccine and no specific treatment. As of late May the outbreak has grown to roughly 750 suspected cases and 177 suspected deaths, with imported cases reaching Uganda. This is the 17th Ebola outbreak in the DRC, beginning only five months after the close of the previous one.

The harder story this week is the local response. There have been at least three attacks on Ebola treatment facilities in eastern DRC in the last week. One center was set on fire after authorities declined to release the body of a young man believed to have died of Ebola; a group of his friends stormed the building and torched parts of it. Eighteen suspected Ebola patients ran out into the surrounding area during the fire and are still unaccounted for. A treatment tent in another site was set on fire a second time. WHO has publicly warned that the violence is threatening the entire response. The State Department has activated an Ebola Response Task Force, mobilized about twenty-three million dollars in initial bilateral assistance, and announced funding for up to fifty Ebola response clinics.

Underneath the violence is rumor. Reporting from the ground describes residents in remote villages who say openly that "Ebola is a lie," or that the disease is "a White man's invention" that does not really exist. Long-standing distrust of outside health authorities, combined with strict and to outsiders bewildering burial protocols, makes the rumor catch fire faster than the truth. A doctor on the response put it plainly: when an epidemic breaks out, if accurate information does not move quickly, people believe whatever is loudest, and that is when violence takes hold. We know from COVID that this is true at home as well as abroad.

The pastoral note is sharper than a generic prayer card. The bottleneck in Ituri right now is not money or vaccines. It is trust. In places where outsiders are believed last, the local church is one of the few institutions still trusted, because it has been there long before the cameras arrived and will be there long after they leave. Pray specifically that the Congolese church in Ituri would be a voice of clear, calm, biblical truth about what is happening, that medical missionaries and Christian doctors would not be among the next casualties, that the eighteen patients who ran into the bush would be found and cared for, and that the eternal souls of the dying would meet the One who really did heal lepers and raise the dead.

"He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction." Psalm 107:20, ESV

"But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe." Mark 5:36, ESV

"Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." Galatians 6:2, ESV

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7. UAP disclosure hearings continue and the witness list keeps growing

The House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, chaired by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, held another hearing this week titled "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection." Testimony came from journalist George Knapp, who described a pattern in which whistleblowers and witnesses who step forward are "routinely insulted, belittled, or worse" and risk careers, clearances, and reputations. Chief Alexandro Wiggins addressed the safety dimension, noting that when crews observe objects that maneuver or accelerate near ships and aircraft in ways inconsistent with known profiles, the matter is first and foremost an aviation and maritime safety problem. Documents shared with the task force argued that the former Soviet Union conducted what may have been the largest state-run UAP investigation in the world.

The witness pool now includes thirty-four senior military, government, and intelligence officials who have publicly broken silence on the topic, including the current Secretary of State, two sitting senators, a former Director of National Intelligence, a former Head of Aviation Security for the White House National Security Council, and a former Secretary of Defense. Members from both parties pressed for stronger whistleblower protection and for the release of records currently held under restricted classification, and members continued to scrutinize the effectiveness of the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, the congressionally mandated body Congress established to coordinate the government's UAP work. The BBC carried portions of the proceedings live.

The Christian posture here should be neither dismissive nor breathless. We do not know what every reported phenomenon is. Some will eventually have ordinary explanations of advanced foreign craft, classified U.S. programs, optical artifacts, or instrument errors. Some will not. The Scriptural account already insists that the unseen world is real, that there are powers and principalities that are not flesh and blood, and that not every spirit is to be trusted. A serious doctrine of angels, demons, and the heavenly host does not require chasing every video, but it also does not need to feign embarrassment when the topic comes up.

What the church should care about, specifically, is two things. First, government transparency about what is genuinely known is a good in itself, and protecting the witnesses who carry that information is a real concern of justice. Second, the rising cultural appetite for "contact" with non-human intelligence is its own pastoral problem regardless of what is finally disclosed. Many of the people most invested in the topic are looking for meaning, for cosmic friends, and for hope. The Gospel speaks directly to that hunger. Read your Bibles, and you will not be shocked when what they describe begins to surface in the world.

"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world." 1 John 4:1, ESV

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." Ephesians 6:12, ESV

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8. Strategic fuel reserves drained at home, full at the rival's; Cuba runs out of diesel

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is at roughly 400 million barrels against a maximum capacity of about 700 million, the lowest level in roughly forty years. The current drawdown is being driven by the Iran crisis: in response to Iran's effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz since the February 28 onset of the U.S.-Israeli war, the International Energy Agency coordinated a release of over 400 million barrels from member-state reserves, with the U.S. contributing approximately 172 million barrels over 120 days beginning in late March. Reporting from energy-trade outlets indicates that Europe has emerged as the lead buyer of the released U.S. crude, with nearly 50 million barrels going to the UK's Vortexa Ltd. alone and discounts of about five dollars per barrel relative to local grades.

The contrast with China is sharp, and worth dwelling on. While the United States is drawing its strategic reserve down to sell into a global crisis, Beijing has spent the same window building. The EIA estimates that China added roughly 1.1 million barrels per day to its strategic stockpile through 2025, reaching about 1.4 billion barrels, and continues to build through 2026. In the standard "days of import cover" measure that governments use to gauge energy security, China's strategic reserve alone now sits at about one hundred and ten days of cover and rising, while the U.S. Department of Energy reports the SPR itself provides about fifty-nine days, and only about one hundred and fifteen days even when private commercial stocks are added in. Policy commentary across the political spectrum has described the prior decade's U.S. drawdowns as a "legislative ATM," used to soften consumer prices in election seasons rather than rebuilt for genuine strategic emergency. The trajectories of the two largest economies are now pointing in opposite directions: one selling cheap into Europe, the other quietly stocking.

In the same week, Cuba's energy minister publicly stated that the country had run out of diesel fuel oil amid the ongoing U.S. oil blockade. Reuters reported widening protests across Havana as rolling blackouts deepened, the latest stage of the 2024-2026 collapse in Cuba's electrical grid. The country imports nearly all of its petroleum products, and previous Venezuelan and Russian supplies have not kept pace with demand. The humanitarian impact, on hospitals, on food preservation, on basic sanitation, is being borne primarily by ordinary Cubans, not by the regime.

The pastoral note is both practical and theological. Practically, chokepoints in fuel are how chokepoints in everything else become visible. A nation ninety miles from Florida cannot keep its lights on. The United States has run down the cushion it spent fifty years building, while the largest peer competitor has spent the same window quietly stockpiling. That is not a partisan complaint; it is a fact in a spreadsheet that any honest person can read. The believer is not commanded to panic, but is commanded to take dominion of the home with some prudence, which historically has meant having a little stored away, knowing your neighbors, and not building a life that breaks the instant the grid hiccups. Theologically, the Lord remains over princes and reserves alike. Cuban Christians have been praying through worse for sixty years. We do well to pray with them now, and to learn from them.

"Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. Without having any chief, officer, or ruler, she prepares her bread in summer and gathers her food in harvest." Proverbs 6:6-8, ESV

"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation." Psalm 146:3, ESV

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Watch and Pray

Pray for restraint in the negotiations over Iran, for officials with the courage to choose long-suffering over short-term wins, for the protection of civilians on every side, and for the Christian witness in the wider Middle East not to be flattened into partisan reflex.

"First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way." 1 Timothy 2:1-2, ESV

Pray for clarity in the church on AI and on the doctrines of personhood, image, and work that are now being argued out in encyclicals, executive orders, and product launches. Pray that our pulpits would be teaching ahead of, not behind, the cultural debate.

"But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere." James 3:17, ESV

Pray for wisdom over the gradient of state and economic power that is being woven together in our generation, that Christian families would not build their lives on systems whose access rules can change without notice, and that we would steward what is in our hands soberly and generously.

"And those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away." 1 Corinthians 7:31, ESV

Pray that the church would not be embarrassed by the miracles of Jesus, nor lend His name to the technology of any man, however bright. Pray that we would tell the old story plainly: that He healed because He is God in the flesh, that He died for our sin, that He rose, that He is coming.

"Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." Hebrews 13:8, ESV

Pray for the families of those targeted, harmed, or killed in the recent attempts on the White House perimeter, for the men and women in uniform who stand between the door and the gun, and for our political life to be tempered by truth rather than consumed by it. Pray for the next news cycle to find the church still grieving the right things.

"Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." James 1:19-20, ESV

Pray for Ituri Province, for medical missionaries and Congolese pastors and the local churches there, and especially for the eighteen suspected Ebola patients who fled into the bush during the fire at the treatment center and have not been found. Pray that the Lord would protect them and the communities they may have gone home to, that rumor and fear would give way to truth, that health workers in Bundibugyo isolation units would be spared further violence, and that the swift containment of this outbreak before it crosses further into Uganda or beyond would be granted in mercy.

"Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved, for you are my praise." Jeremiah 17:14, ESV

Pray for honesty in how the government discloses what it knows, for the protection of whistleblowers, and for the church to be a place where a hungry generation can bring its strange questions and find Christ, not embarrassment.

"For nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light." Luke 8:17, ESV

Pray for Cuban brothers and sisters in Christ, who have been praying through hardship longer than most of us have been alive, for power and food and medicine and the local pastors carrying the weight of communities by hand. Pray that our own preparedness would be wise without becoming hoarding, and that the Lord would teach us through what Cuba is bearing this week.

"Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you.'" Hebrews 13:5, ESV

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

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Justin Scaggs Justin Scaggs

Sons of Issachar: May 20, 2026

"The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations." Psalm 33:10-11, ESV
The past week was busy on every front the watchful Christian tracks. The Iran-Hormuz situation shifted between threats of fresh U.S. strikes and claims of diplomatic progress. Israel intercepted a Gaza-bound flotilla while strikes in southern Lebanon continued under a freshly extended ceasefire. A hate-crime shooting at a San Diego mosque left three guards dead. The White House signed two financial orders moving fintech and customer-identification toward a tighter regulatory frame, while the U.K. revived a national digital-ID push. Nothing about the week proves any single end-times schedule, but the pattern fits a season in which sober watchfulness, faithful prayer, and steady work are the right Christian posture. The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; our task is to know the times and act accordingly.
Headlines:

1. Gaza flotilla intercepted, Lebanon ceasefire holds and breaks at once

Israeli naval forces intercepted a Gaza-bound flotilla carrying hundreds of activists from dozens of countries this week. The activists were taken first to Ashdod and then to detention facilities while Israel confirmed it would continue to enforce the blockade. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly rebuked Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir after taunting videos of the detained activists were released, supporting swift deportation but objecting to the mockery.
Civil life in Gaza stayed deeply constrained. Gazans were barred from Hajj travel and unable to carry out customary animal sacrifices for the third consecutive year because of border restrictions, livestock losses, and the broader humanitarian collapse around the war. The irony is hard to miss: Hamas named the prospect of Israel performing the red heifer sacrifice as a major reason for the war they launched, and now find themselves unable to carry out their own animal sacrifices.
On the northern border, Israel and Lebanon agreed to extend a U.S.-facilitated ceasefire by 45 days. Within the same week Israeli strikes in southern Lebanon killed 19, including women and children. A ceasefire extension and an active strike campaign can sit on the same page in the same week.
A diplomatic pause is not the same as healed hearts, and a paper-based ceasefire is not the same as peace. The church is right to honor Israel's security concerns and also right to grieve over Palestinian civilian suffering. Mockery of captives is not zeal for truth, even when the captives are wrong; they all need the same Saviour we need. Believers can pray for the peace of Jerusalem and weep for women and children in Lebanon in the same breath without ignoring either. We are called to seek peace with all, so far as it depends on us, and to remember the image of God in every detained activist, soldier, and grieving family.
"If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all." Romans 12:18, ESV
"Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute. Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy." Proverbs 31:8-9, ESV
Sources:

2. Iran, Hormuz, and the nuclear file under both threat and talk

President Trump said this week that the United States could strike Iran again while also asserting that Tehran wanted a deal. Vice President Vance said negotiators had made 'a lot of progress' and described a framework aimed at preventing Iran from rebuilding nuclear weapons capacity.
Oil prices slumped on Trump's comments that the conflict could 'end very quickly,' even as analysts continued to flag supply-disruption risk tied to the Strait of Hormuz. U.S. and Iranian negotiators exchanged 'formulas' for Iran's nuclear program for the first time, alongside continuing concerns about mines reportedly planted in the strait.
Around the same window, Trump met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, with Iran featuring prominently. Xi offered to help broker peace; both sides expressed opposition to Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, while concrete breakthroughs on broader bilateral issues stayed limited. There were some vague promises to buy American food products and specific numbers of Boeing jets, but China has a history of not following through on these agreements, so the reality is that nothing concrete was established.
The language of threat and the language of progress are being spoken by the same officials in the same week. This is the ordinary shape of statecraft under pressure: peace is pursued under the shadow of weapons. The believer's response is not cynicism, which assumes diplomacy is theater, nor naivete, which assumes signed words can carry hearts. It is steady intercession for kings and all in authority, that they would be granted the wisdom to choose restraint, and steady trust that the king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord.
"The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the LORD; he turns it wherever he will." Proverbs 21:1, ESV
"a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace." Ecclesiastes 3:8, ESV
"The LORD brings the counsel of the nations to nothing; he frustrates the plans of the peoples. The counsel of the LORD stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations. Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!" Psalm 33:10-12, ESV
Sources:

3. Tehran's arms demonstrations and a twelfth week without internet

Inside Iran, pressure was not only diplomatic. Weapons demonstrations in Tehran placed civilians around displays of rifles, drones, and weapons training as officials signaled readiness for further conflict. When governments stage arms displays in public squares, the audience is not only those abroad.
Iran's internet blackout has now entered its twelfth week. A 'class internet' has emerged in which preferred groups and approved users receive expanded access while ordinary citizens stay cut off from much of the global web. This parallels the system in China, and it is easy to see how it may morph into a system where government approval is needed for all aspects of daily life.
Tyranny does not always announce itself with prison bars. Sometimes it begins with throttled access, approved speech, and a quiet fear of saying what is true. The end of that road is self-censorship, the very pattern we watched at home during the 'dis-, mis-, and mal-information' phase of COVID, when ordinary people learned to keep certain sentences off the page out of fear of what speaking them aloud would cost. The pattern itself is old: Babylon's furnace and Rome's edicts both began as ordinary administration before they became persecution. The church should learn from this not to gloat over Iran but to hide the Word in our hearts while there is daylight, and to teach our children to read, memorize, and love Scripture in physical copies that no switch can revoke.
"I have stored up your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you." Psalm 119:11, ESV
"Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. The LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice." Isaiah 59:14-15, ESV
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4. San Diego mosque attack, a national prayer rally, and tense election politics

The most grievous domestic news of the week was the attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego, where three men were killed defending the mosque while roughly 140 children were inside. Authorities are treating the shooting as a hate crime; writings tied to the suspects reflected a mix of racist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, and misogynistic beliefs. Much confusion still remains about the attackers themselves. Claims have circulated describing them variously as Hispanic, as neo-Nazi, and as trans-identifying men; some of those claims may turn out to be true and some are assuredly false. Regardless of who they were or what they thought, killing people who pose no threat is clearly sinful and illegal. From a Christian point of view, even those deluded into following Muhammed need the Gospel, not to be gunned down.
At the National Mall in Washington, thousands gathered on May 17 for an America-themed prayer event called Rededicate 250. Prayers focused on mercy on the land, and the turnout was large enough to draw national attention. It shows how far our culture has shifted that a gathering to highlight the Christian nature of the founding of our nation gets national attention precisely because of the Christianity aspect, as that is now unusual.
Election tension also remained visible. Trump called for a Justice Department probe into a Maryland mail-ballot dispute that state officials attributed to a vendor error and replacement ballots with duplicate-vote safeguards. In Kentucky, Representative Thomas Massie lost a Republican primary to a Trump-backed challenger after months of high-profile conflict. Massie has been one of the few Republicans who has stood up to all administrations on civil liberties, government overreach, and unbridled spending, which has made him unpopular with many who follow the president rather than their principles.
Christians can reject false religion and still grieve when worshipers are murdered. Hatred is not zeal for truth; murderous rage is not discernment. The same week we pray for revival on the National Mall, we should also pray for the families of three guards who died facing gunmen at a mosque door. A church shaped by the news cycle becomes anxious and reactive. A church shaped by the Word becomes steady, watchful, and useful. Pray for rulers without worshiping them; speak truth without becoming cruel; care about justice without surrendering to rage.
"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." Matthew 5:9, ESV
"For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace." James 3:16-18, ESV
"But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare." Jeremiah 29:7, ESV
Sources:

5. Two White House orders and a Senate crypto bill move money and ID closer together

The White House issued a fact sheet on a new order integrating financial-technology innovation into federal regulatory frameworks, framed as promoting fintech, digital assets, electronic payments, and closer coordination between financial firms and federal regulators. Trump told the Federal Reserve to consider fintech access to payment accounts.
A second White House order moved in the direction of strengthened customer-identification requirements and closer attention to the citizenship status of bank clients. Critics warned the order could push undocumented residents and vulnerable people out of the banking system; supporters frame the move as financial-integrity and immigration enforcement.
On May 14, the Senate Banking Committee advanced a major crypto-market structure bill, moving digital assets another step toward formal U.S. regulatory architecture.
None of this is the mark of the beast and we should not speak carelessly. Regulation in itself is not evil; honest weights and measures matter, and a banking system that knows its customers is a system that can be held accountable. The pastoral concern is the direction of the gradient: money, identity, citizenship, and regulatory compliance are being woven into one increasingly interoperable mesh. The wise believer does not flee every tool, but does not sleepwalk into dependence on systems whose access rules can change without notice. Keep records. Keep some practical reserves. Do not let convenience become captivity.
"The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it." Proverbs 22:3, ESV
"and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away." 1 Corinthians 7:31, ESV
Sources:

6. UK digital-ID bill and AI's growing demand on the power grid

The 2026 King's Speech, delivered on May 14, placed a Digital Access to Services Bill in the U.K. government's program. The Local Government Association briefing described the bill as a way to modernize access to public services, with supporters emphasizing convenience and reduced reliance on physical documents.
On the same week, the U.S. PJM grid was confirmed to be able to curb data-center power usage in emergencies, and state-level battles continued over rising utility costs and grid pressure driven by AI data centers. There are data centers planned nationwide, some are absolutely massive in size and power requirements. One in Texas is projected to consume a significant percentage of all power generated in the state, which will require new expansions, which require capital, which will raise rates further. Many of these are being placed in areas with very rural populations, and the jobs largely go to those from other areas. The strain on water, small businesses, schools, and so on will likely drive many away and into cities, which seems to be either a goal or a happy side effect from the view of those in charge.
The two stories are part of one larger picture: societies are being trained to need digital permission before they can work, prove identity, or receive services, while the physical infrastructure underneath all of it strains under the weight of AI's appetite for energy.
Christians should not fear technology, but we should refuse technological salvation. The Lord gave us truth, not merely information. He gave us wisdom, not merely data. He gave us a Shepherd, not merely an algorithm. The pastoral counsel is concrete: possess physical Bibles, read them aloud in your home, mark them, and teach your children to use and know them. Digital Bibles are useful and convenient, but screens mediate almost everything else in modern life, and any text that lives only on a screen can be hidden, altered, or made unreachable by systems outside your control, or be unavailable during a power outage or natural disaster.
"Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish. Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD his God," Psalm 146:3-5, ESV
"Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." Psalm 119:105, ESV
"See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority." Colossians 2:8-10, ESV
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7. Birthpains by the numbers: what a century of records actually shows

I've been keeping a side project that tracks the kinds of things Jesus mentioned in Matthew 24: wars, famines, earthquakes, plagues, floods, and a few others. Twelve indicators in all, going back about a century, longer where records are reliable. The question is honest. Are these things actually rising, and do they tend to happen together?
Three things from this past week's update are worth the church's attention.

Finding 1. The last few years really were unusual.

If you've felt that 2019 through 2022 was just one thing after another (COVID, the Ukraine war, the Israel-Hamas war, Sudan, Tigray, the Turkey-Syria earthquake), you weren't imagining it. By every measure the project tracks, that stretch is the most intense multi-year window since the records begin in 1900. No other window has had this many big things landing at once.
Multi-year contraction strength, 1900-2026
This does not tell us anything about the clock. It just confirms that the felt sense of "this season is heavier than usual" is matched by the actual count. The data agrees with the gut.

Finding 2. Wars and famines move together. Almost nothing else does.

I tested every possible pairing among the twelve indicators to see which ones tend to rise together. After being honest about the fact that running many tests will throw up false coincidences, exactly one pairing held up: wars and famine deaths. They rise and fall together, strongly enough that it cannot be chance. The reason is the obvious one Scripture has always known: armies cause hunger.
The popular pairings you may have heard pushed in prophecy media (solar flares causing earthquakes, the solar cycle driving wars, eclipses lining up with seismic activity, terrorism connected to anything) did not survive the test. They are not visible in the data. The pairing that is visible is the one the Bible itself draws, again and again from Jeremiah to Ezekiel to Revelation: war brings famine.
Wars vs famine deaths, yearly scatter

Finding 3. Ethnos rises. Basileia stays flat.

Jesus uses two different Greek words in Matthew 24:7. Ethnos against ethnos refers to people-groups, the kinds of conflicts we now call civil wars and internal ethnic conflicts inside a country. Basileia against basileia refers to kingdoms, the big country-versus-country wars between major powers.
A century of records shows the two moving very differently. Civil and ethnic conflict years (the ethnos side) are clearly rising. The big country-against-country wars (the basileia side) are not. They have stayed roughly flat across the whole period.
That fits the world we actually live in: more internal collapses, more civil wars, fewer classic peer-on-peer wars between major nations. The Greek of Jesus' sentence is doing real work; only half of what He named is on the move so far.
Intrastate (ethnos) vs interstate (basileia) war-years

What this means for the church.

The honest picture today is not a single end-of-the-world ramp where everything spikes at once. There are some specific indicators clearly rising, others staying flat, and one stretch of years standing out as the heaviest in over a century. That is not a reason for panic. It is also not a reason to wave Jesus' words away. It is a reason to do what He told us to do: stay awake, keep working, and pray that the day of the Lord finds us at our post.
For the underlying methods, datasets, and all of the supporting charts, see the project repository at github.com/Biblejustin/correlations.
"For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains." Matthew 24:7-8, ESV
"Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming." Matthew 24:42, ESV
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Watch and Pray

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem and for mercy on every household in Gaza, southern Lebanon, and the wider region whose ordinary life is bent under the weight of war. Pray that Christian witness in this conflict would be neither partisan reflex nor evasive silence, but truth carried with tears.
"Pray for the peace of Jerusalem! May they be secure who love you!" Psalm 122:6, ESV
Pray for Iran, for its rulers, for its people, and for believers inside the country living under censorship and the threat of war. Ask the Lord to humble proud men, to keep ordinary negotiators honest, and to spare lives in any decision made over the Strait of Hormuz.
"First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." 1 Timothy 2:1-4, ESV
Pray for Iranian believers who have lost twelve weeks of human connection to the wider church, and praise God we can't be isolated from His love. Ask the Lord to multiply house-fellowship, to protect printed Scripture in homes, and to shame the wicked devices of those who try to ration truth.
"Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you." Matthew 5:10-12, ESV
Pray for the families of the three men killed at the San Diego mosque, for the children who watched their guardians die, and for the church to be peacemakers in the cooling-down work no headline will photograph. Pray for our political life to be tempered by truth, not consumed by it.
"Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." James 1:19-20, ESV
Pray for wisdom in the church as money, identity, and permission are increasingly bundled together. Pray that Christian families would steward what they have soberly, give generously, refuse to build lives on platforms that can be shut off, and remember that the fashion of this world is passing away.
"Keep your life free from love of money, and be content with what you have, for he has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you.' So we can confidently say, 'The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?'" Hebrews 13:5-6, ESV
Pray for Christian families to be unhurried in adopting digital convenience, to keep printed Scripture central in their homes, and to train their children with the kind of patient attention that algorithms cannot reproduce. Pray for engineers and policymakers shaping the new infrastructure to fear God in small decisions.
"And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates." Deuteronomy 6:6-9, ESV
Pray for honesty in how the church speaks about the times. Pray that we would neither inflate the headlines nor minimize them, but receive each week's signs as a call to faithful work, patient watching, and the kind of hope that does not need every prediction to be right.
"Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells." 2 Peter 3:11-13, ESV
Maranatha,
— Sims Corner Church

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