Prayer as a Blessing

Deuteronomy 21

If one is found slain in the land which the Lord your God gives you to possess, lying in the field, and it is not known who has killed him, ...

... And all the elders of that city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley,

And they shall testify, Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen it.

Forgive, O Lord, Your people Israel, whom You have redeemed, and do not allow the shedding of innocent blood to be charged to Your people Israel. And the guilt of blood shall be forgiven them.

So shall you purge the guilt of innocent blood from among you, when you do what is right in the sight of the Lord.

Even though Moses does not relate the intercessory prayers of the priests, we do have this report of prayer and intercession by the city elders.  This form of government is called a theocracy - rule by God - and it will remain in effect from the time of Moses until Saul is named as king over Israel.

Theocratic law and rule (Divine Law) comes from God to the priests, and then to the people.

America is not a country ruled Divine law, instead (until recently) we were under the rule of man-made civic law.  The rule of law implies that there is legal equality among all classes of people - the common person is under the law in the same way a rich person, a judge, a policeman, or a senator or president is under the same law.  That form of representational government lasted from the Founding Fathers until the 1960's.

The rule of equal treatment under the law mutated into a series of guarantees of equal outcome under the law.  On the playground, that means no one loses and no one wins. Instead, all become participants. In the business world, that means imposed hiring quotas - making certain that favored classes of people are given opportunities denied to others.  That is now called equality; not too long ago that was called discrimination.

More recently, a movement has arisen and the group of people attached to it are calling themselves Social Justice Warriors (SJW).  The early noises in this arena came from churches like the one Obama attended.

The current, full-blown SJW players cast the world as a struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. For them, the oppressors are white, male, Christian, heterosexuals.  The oppressed are everyone else.

And the oppression was first seen in actions and behaviors - real or imagined. The SJWs (Second-wave feminists) posited a Rape Culture in our society, where sex within marriage is rape, where the Male Gaze is considered visual rape, Man Spreading is an acceptable reason for arrest; whistling at a woman is street harassment (a form of rape); and on the other side - obviously false rape accusations are now termed "victim blaming".

Now, we are inside a bizarre, Kafka-esque nightmare where words that are written into law are treated as if they are not written, while words not written into law are magically constituted into laws where they do not exist.

Meanwhile, in the church - where Divine law is (supposed to be) in control - entire denominations fall (or run) into sacrilegious practices, striving to become more like society. If a church wants to be more like the world, why bother to be a church in the first place?

What if it became a regular practice in our church for the elders to make public intercession for the congregation once per month (like our Communion Sunday) - as they pray individually for the blessings of God on our lives, and for the safety of our families, and for God's guidance for our church leaders, and wisdom for our elected leaders at the city, state, regional and federal levels, and for the safety of our military forces - along with wisdom and discernment in the leaders who would deploy them, and all the special prayer requests that are submitted by the church members from the previous months.