Sons of Issachar: September 23th, 2026

Written By Justin Scaggs

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

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

Headlines:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Watch and Pray

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maranatha,

— Sims Corner Church

Justin Scaggs https://simscornerchurch.com
Next

Sons of Issachar: September 16th, 2026