If I shut up heaven that there be no rain, or if I command the locusts to devour the land, or if I send pestilence among my people; If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.
2 Chronicles 7:13-14 (KJV)
Fire had fallen on the altar in front of the whole nation and the priests could not get back inside the building. Years after that, with the palace finished too, God appeared to Solomon by night and said this. The famous sentence starts a verse earlier than the poster version, and its condition is not the one people think.
The if is in the verse above
Verse thirteen carries three conditional words in the Hebrew. Verse fourteen carries none. It opens with a plain and, and the If the King James prints there is the translators supplying in English what the Hebrew is continuing from the sentence before.
The whole thing is one conditional period with two halves. If I send the drought or the locusts or the plague, and my people humble themselves, then I will hear. The first half is God announcing what he does, and nobody prays their way into it.
Notice also who is doing the disasters: I shut up heaven, I command the locusts, I send pestilence. Nobody in the passage is asking to be spared an accident.
The other history does not have it
The same night is recorded twice. First Kings tells the story of Solomon finishing the house and God appearing a second time, and then runs two verses that belong side by side.
And the LORD said unto him, I have heard thy prayer and thy supplication, that thou hast made before me: I have hallowed this house, which thou hast built, to put my name there for ever; and mine eyes and mine heart shall be there perpetually. And if thou wilt walk before me, as David thy father walked, in integrity of heart, and in uprightness, to do according to all that I have commanded thee, and wilt keep my statutes and my judgments:
1 Kings 9:3-4 (KJV)
Chronicles has both of those sentences too, almost word for word. Chronicles opens them up at the seam and puts three verses inside.
The three disasters are not in it. The four conditions are not in it. The promise to hear and forgive and heal the land is not in it. Whatever else is true about this verse, one of the two men who wrote the story down did not include it.
What Solomon had actually asked
At the dedication, Solomon had prayed through a list, at 6:26 and 6:28. When the heaven is shut up and there is no rain. If there be dearth in the land, if there be pestilence, if there be blasting, or mildew, locusts, or caterpillers. God’s answer takes his list and gives it back to him item by item, with the building he had just finished named as the place the praying happens.
Verse fifteen says it out loud: mine ears attent unto the prayer that is made in this place.
Chronicles reports how it went
Twenty-nine chapters later, in 36:15 and 36:16, the same book reports what happened. God sent messengers, rising up betimes and sending, because he had compassion on his people. They mocked the messengers, till there was no remedy.
And they burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem, and burnt all the palaces thereof with fire, and destroyed all the goodly vessels thereof.
2 Chronicles 36:19 (KJV)
That is the end of the house the promise was attached to, written by the man who recorded the promise.
Reading it wider, honestly
The evidence for a broader reading is real.
None of the four conditions is about ancestry or ceremony. Humble yourselves, pray, seek my face, turn from your wicked ways. Nothing on that list is closed to a person born anywhere else. Whatever marks these people out is in the subject of the sentence, not in the terms.
The phrase called by my name is used elsewhere of people outside Israel. Amos 9:12 has the LORD speaking of the heathen which are called by my name, and James quotes that line at the council in Acts 15, applying it to Gentiles in so many words.
And Daniel prays this exact posture centuries later, in Babylon, with the house already burnt: he sets his face to seek by prayer and supplications in 9:3, and in 9:19 he asks on the ground that the city and the people are called by God’s name. Somebody inside the Bible treated the promise as still live after its address had been destroyed.
I find no generalizing clause inside the passage itself. No any nation, no all peoples. The widening, if it happens, is a thing the rest of the Bible does to this verse rather than a move the verse makes.
And in one scene the same idiom turns against the people using it. Jeremiah stands in the temple gate and uses the phrase three times, asking at 7:11 whether the house which is called by my name has become a den of robbers in their eyes. He is addressing people who were stealing and swearing falsely and then coming to stand in the building. Being the people the name is called over was the argument he was demolishing.
Where I have used it badly
I have quoted this at a room to make people feel that a bad season was fixable if we were serious enough. That is a way of promising an outcome on other people’s behalf, and I was not the one who would have to live with the bill if it did not arrive. Jeremiah 29:11 gets borrowed the same way, and so does the verse about two or three gathered.
What the verse attaches to those conditions is a specific land, a specific house, and a king who had just built it, and the book that records the promise also records the fire that took the building down.
The four conditions are another matter. Humble yourself, pray, seek his face, turn from what you know is wrong. Nobody has to be Solomon to do those. Nothing in the passage makes them wait on a nation doing them with you.