Why the Land needs you now, and what you can do
I want to write this chapter carefully, because it is the one chapter in the book that is not about the past.
I live on a farm in the Golan Heights, on the eastern edge of the land this book walks through. From my door I can see Mount Hermon, where Moses looked north, and on a clear morning the whole Hula valley down to the lake. Since the seventh of October 2023 our farm has been a quiet shelter for people who came out of that day and the war after it with their nerves shredded. They come for a few days. They plant something, or pull weeds, or sit under a tree and say nothing. Then they go back. I say this not for sympathy but so you know where these words come from. They come from the ground.
What God says about this land
I will not build a political argument here. This is a book about the Bible, and the Bible has its own argument, and it is older and stronger than any I could make.
At the very beginning, at the first stop of this book, God says to Abram: "I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who treats you with contempt. All the families of the earth will be blessed through you." (Genesis 12:3). Every reader of this book, whatever nation you come from, is one of those families. The blessing came through this people and this land, and the Bible ties the two together from the first page to the last.
Moses, on the far side of the Jordan, describes the land the people are about to enter as "a land which Yahweh your God cares for. Yahweh your God's eyes are always on it, from the beginning of the year even to the end of the year." (Deuteronomy 11:12). His eyes are on it still. When you pray for this land you are looking where he is looking.
David tells the pilgrims coming up the road to Jerusalem: "Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Those who love you will prosper." (Psalm 122:6). And Isaiah gives the prayer a job title: "I have set watchmen on your walls, Jerusalem. They will never be silent day nor night. You who call on Yahweh, take no rest, and give him no rest, until he establishes, and until he makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth." (Isaiah 62:6-7).
A watchman is not a soldier and not a politician. He is a person who stays awake and speaks up. That is the whole request of this chapter.
Why now
Because the land is hurting, and because the people who love the Bible are the ones who can help it most.
The war that began in October 2023 emptied this country of visitors. The guides, the drivers, the hotel workers, the families who run the small guesthouses in the Galilee and the Golan, the vineyards and the farms that fed the groups: all of it stopped, and much of it has not come back. I am one of those guides. The places in this book are as beautiful as they ever were. They are also, many of them, very quiet.
There is a deeper reason too. Paul, writing to the church in Rome about a collection he was carrying to Jerusalem, put it in one sentence: "For if the Gentiles have been made partakers of their spiritual things, they owe it to them also to serve them in fleshly things." (Romans 15:27). The whole Bible came to you through this people and this ground. Everything in these eighty-five stops was lived here first. When the land is in trouble, the people who received its book have a reason to stand with it that is older than any headline.
And there is the plain fact that Isaiah gives, in the chapter every Jewish child knows: "Comfort, comfort my people," says your God. "Speak comfortably to Jerusalem." (Isaiah 40:1-2). The command is not to argue about Jerusalem. It is to comfort her.
What you can do, this week
Four things, and none of them requires a passport.
1. Pray, and pray by name. Not "for the situation." For the land, stop by stop. Take this book and pray through it: for Shechem and the people who live between those two mountains today, for the lake and its fishermen, for the Negev, for the Golan, for Jerusalem. If you want company in it, there is a wall of people around the world who pray for this land every week from letters I send from the Golan. The website of this book will show you where to join it. Nobody's name is ever published. It is a wall, not a list.
2. Come. Not when things are calm. Now. The sites are open, the roads are safe in the places I take people, and there is no gift a visitor can give this land right now that is bigger than showing up. I guide small groups through the very stops in this book, at a walking pace, with the Bible open at every one. If you have ever wanted to stand at Shechem and read Genesis 12 aloud, this is the year. If you cannot come, send your pastor.
3. Buy from the land. This book is one thing you can buy. Wine from the Golan and Galilee is another. Olive oil, dates, honey, the work of the small farms and studios that keep the villages of the Bible alive. Every purchase is a family that stays.
4. Tell one person. The Bible went out from this land by people telling other people. Give this book to someone. Read a stop aloud with your family on Sunday. Put the map on the wall of a Sunday-school room. The land has never been kept alive by governments. It has been kept alive by people who remembered it.
A last word
Ruth was a foreigner. She had no obligation to this land and every reason to go home. She said to an old woman on the road from Moab: "Where you go, I will go; and where you stay, I will stay. Your people will be my people, and your God my God." (Ruth 1:16). Her great-grandson was David, and the road she took ends at Bethlehem, which is stop 47 of this book.
Every reader of this book is standing on that road. You do not have to be born here to belong to this story. You only have to decide, like Ruth, which way you are walking.
I am on the Golan. Come and find me.