Sons of Issachar: August 26th, 2026

Written By Justin Scaggs

"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

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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

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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

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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

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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

Justin Scaggs https://simscornerchurch.com
Next

Sons of Issachar: August 19th, 2026