Sons of Issachar: September 16th, 2026

Written By Justin Scaggs

"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

 

Justin Scaggs https://simscornerchurch.com
Next

Sons of Issachar: September 9th, 2026