“I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you” (Genesis 12:3)
I asked a lot of “whys’” when I was a child. I’m sure you did too. I also asked, “why can’t I” a lot.” Most of it was to challenge my mother when she told me I couldn’t do something I wanted to do. It never worked. Her answer would always be, “because I said so.” It was the answer that told me she didn’t need to give me a reason for saying no; and if I wanted to live to see puberty, I should not ask again.
I learned early that whoever had the authority controlled the circumstances. That’s why it is so important to surrender to the authority of our God. God chose one little piece of land in the entire world to claim as his own. It’s not very large. Only 8,630 square miles. The United States is 473 times larger than the land of Israel. In fact, Israel is only 2 percent larger than the state of Massachusetts. I wonder sometimes why God chose such a small stretch of land to call his. But then, I realize that the power is not in the territory. It’s in the One who has authority over the territory.
Israel has been at the center of the news recently. That happens quite often. They are in an intense conflict with Hamas. As of this writing, both sides have agreed to a truce. By the time you read this, who knows what will be happening. Israel is at the center of everything that happens in the world because it is God’s chosen piece of property. He made that clear when he called Abraham to be the father of the nation of Israel and told him that he would “bless those who bless him and curse those who cursed him.” That has certainly been proven throughout history. In the second millennium BC, the world’s preeminent empire was Egypt. But Egypt oppressed the children of Abraham, and poof! Somewhere around the time of the Exodus and the peak of Hebrew oppression, the Egyptian Empire collapsed, never to rise again. In the modern age, Great Britain became a refuge from persecution for the Jewish people. As a result, Great Britain became an expansive world empire. But then the British Empire reversed its position and turned against the Jewish refugees who were fleeing the Holocaust. Suddenly, the great British Empire collapsed.
Now, America is the ally and protector of Israel and its’ people. Around the same time America became their most ardent ally, America became the most blessed, prosperous, and powerful nation on earth. What this tells us is that we need to pray that America never turns against Israel. We need to be a blessing to God’s chosen nation and people. If we turn against Israel, we will find ourselves in the same condition both Egypt and Great Britain found themselves. We will be great no more. The future of our nation depends on how we treat our friends in that little nation on the other side of the world. Why? Because God said so!
Darlene