Sons of Issachar: August 12th, 2026

Written By Justin Scaggs

"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

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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

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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

Justin Scaggs https://simscornerchurch.com
Next

Sons of Issachar: August 5th, 2026