Jonathan Cahn - The Harbinger Companion with Study Guide

Write Down

1. Your thoughts, notes, and insights

2. What you believe the Lord is calling you to do

3. Your mission for the days ahead

Chapter 12

The CALL

If My People

IS THERE HOPE?

Consider this. If there were no hope, there would be no harbingers. What is the point of warning if there’s no hope of responding to that warning? If there are harbingers, there is hope.

Even the fact that The Harbinger has become a national best seller, spreading across the nation, can be taken the same way. If there were no hope, what would be the point?

Then if there is hope, what is it?

Is there a scripture linked to the mystery ground that, though given to Israel, speaks and calls to us now and provides the answer? And does each of us have a part in all of this? And if so, what is that part? This study explores the hope, the chance, the keys for revival, and the very concrete part we all have in that hope and in being an agent for redemption.

In a prior study we saw the connection between Israel’s dedication ground and America’s. We saw King Solomon’s prayer to God, one of prophecy about apostasy and judgment but also one of intercession for future generations. Solomon beseeched the Lord to show mercy and favor on those future generations who, having experiencing calamity due to their repeatedly turning from God and their refusals to turn back, would come to their senses and repent.

When the dedication of the Temple Mount was completed, God answered King Solomon’s prayer in this way:

If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

—2 CHRONICLES 7:14

Who are “My people”? As given to Solomon, this can refer both to the nation of Israel as a whole and specifically those within the nation who know the Lord. It’s the call of God for a nation, once dedicated to His purposes but now defying His will, to return.

With the connection we’ve already seen between Israel’s dedication ground and America’s, as well as the manifestation of all Nine Harbingers in America, we can take it as well as a call to America. Even without this connection, it lays a very sure foundation that in the face of judgment God’s people are called to pray, to seek, and to repent—and God will hear, forgive, and heal.

The Keys to Redemption and Revival

If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves . . .

This means we must come before God with no claims, no rights, no self-righteousness, no standing, no goodness of our own, nothing but the hope of His mercy. It means we must abandon any notion and any reliance on our own power, our own righteousness, or our own sufficiency and acknowledge God’s all-sufficient power.

And pray . . .

America was founded on prayer. Thus the removal of prayer from its public life was a key part of its falling away from its foundation in God. A nation that rejects prayer will find itself desperately needing it. The calamity of 9/11 returned America to its ground of consecration. The nation was being called to return to God in prayer.

And seek My face . . .

To seek God’s face is to desire His presence and His will above all else. It requires spending time turned away from everything else but His presence.

And turn from their wicked ways . . .

To “turn from wicked ways” means to repent, to change your mind completely about sin. America must face the magnitude of our moral and spiritual descent. We must face the enormity of the degrading of our culture. We must face our downward spiral into ever-deeper levels of defiance and immorality. We must face the proliferation of our idols, from carnality and impurity to greed and materialism. We must face our love of vanity and our drive toward self-obsession. We must face our cruel mockery of the pure and our mass sacrifice of the innocent and helpless.

My People = Us

Revival does not begin with government, with culture, with politics, with economics, or with anything else. Revival begins with the people of God and then touches every area of life. If not us, who? If not here, where? And if not now, when? Revival must begin with us, it must begin here, and it must begin now.

The call is to the people of God; the call is to us.

We are the ones being called to repent of our apathy and our complacency. We must repent for all of our compromises with the darkness. God is calling us to repent of our own sins, sins of omission —that which we have been called to do but have not done—and sins of commission —that which we have done, that which we do but have been called to stop. We ourselves must repent of failing to tear down the high places, the idols of our own hearts, for indulging in secret sins, sins of the flesh, sins of the mind, sins of the heart, for partaking in the sins of our culture that stand under the judgment of God. We ourselves must repent of withholding the light of the gospel from the unsaved, for not sharing His Word. We ourselves must repent of not standing against what is wrong and for what is right, for seeking our own comfort instead of His righteousness. We ourselves must repent of failing to rise to the high calling that God has given us and to which the Spirit has called us continually.

And if believers repent and lead the nation in repentance, then there is a promise:

I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

Revivals Past . . . and Future?

Will America repent and be revived?

As noted in earlier chapters, the landscape of our history is dotted with great revivals, starting with the very first colonists. Revivals in Britain led to the Pilgrims and Puritans arriving on America’s shores, becoming the forerunners of the nation.

America’s first great homegrown revival, referred to as The Great Awakening, sowed the seeds in the 1740s for the emerging of a brand-new nation. Revivals in the 1800s unleashed the abolitionist movement that stirred the nation’s conscience against slavery. Revivals of the past century turned millions of baby boomers, those from a generation that had once declared God dead, into godly people of faith who continue to stand against America’s moral and spiritual decline.

Judgment, Salvation, and the Day We Stand Before Him

Every story of national revival begins with repentance and prayer.

But a nation’s repentance rests on the repentance of individuals within it. Since nations are temporal and souls are eternal, individual repentance remains paramount.

Within even the purest of hearts evil is real. The Bible says that there are none who are righteous. All have fallen. All must repent. Even the seemingly best human beings are closer to the most wicked of people than they are to the perfect goodness of the God who created them.

Every sin and every evil will be judged. Every soul that is joined to sin stands in danger of judgment. The final judgment will be eternal separation from God—hell. In the end there are only two roads, heaven or hell. But the Bible declares in John 3:16 that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever would believe in Him would not perish but have everlasting life.” The greatest love we can ever know is that of the God who gave His own Son, His own life, to stand in our place, to receive our judgment, that we would not be judged but saved, that we would have eternal life. That, in a nutshell, is the gospel. The word Yeshua in Hebrew means “salvation.” From the same root word comes the name Jesus . Jesus is salvation and remains the answer. The gospel message is that He died for our sins and rose again that we might be saved.