On Nationhood and Prayer

I’ve been praying for Canada lately. If you’ve been following our political scene, we got rid of one failing, bitterly disliked Prime Minister and replaced him with the behind-the-scenes architect of his most abject failures. It’s been 17 months since we had a federal budget, gas prices and food prices are through the roof, youth unemployment is soaring, immigration is wildly out of control and I’m seeing drug addicts and homeless people in every city in Ontario that I visit.

In short, lots to pray about. But how to pray is a good question.

Mining the Minors: Amos (37)

There is a short, somewhat mysterious passage in the final speech Moses made to Israel before his death in which he declares that when God divided mankind — presumably referring to the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, which ends with the words “the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth” — that God also “fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God”.

Now, we know what the phrase “sons of God” means to believers from the teaching of the New Testament. However, in the Old Testament, the same expression is consistently connected with angelic beings.

Does God Judge Nations?

A question from a list of what Andy Stanley refers to as “old covenant leftovers”, various ways he believes the modern church mixes what he calls “obsolete” theology with the New Testament teaching of Christ and his apostles:

• “Why would a Christian believe God judges nations at all?”

Stanley intends this as a zinger, but I’m not at all sure it zings. It may be a bullet point in a bulleted list, but it has the pinpoint accuracy of a wet snowball lobbed by a lethargic six-year-old in a too-tight snowsuit.