It is printed on banners and church bulletins, usually starting at “If my people.” God said it to Solomon at night, after the temple and the palace were finished: a promise about Israel, its land and that house. Chronicles recorded it for people who lived after that house had burned. Healing the land belonged to that land. The four things it asks are open to anyone.
That second fact matters for anyone who loves this verse. The book that kept it was written for people who no longer had the temple, the throne or the land as Solomon knew them, and it still set this word in front of them, with its four conditions intact.
God’s answer, by night
The fire had come down on the altar, and the priests could not enter the house for the glory that filled it. Later, with the temple and the king’s house both finished, “the LORD appeared to Solomon by night.” The famous sentence begins a verse earlier than the banners do.
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)
Notice who is doing the disasters: I shut up heaven, I command the locusts, I send pestilence. Then come four conditions, humble, pray, seek, turn, and three promises: hear, forgive, heal the land.
What Solomon had asked
The words were an answer. At the dedication, in 2 Chronicles 6:26-27, Solomon had prayed, “When the heaven is shut up, and there is no rain, because they have sinned against thee; yet if they pray toward this place, and confess thy name, and turn from their sin… Then hear thou from heaven, and forgive the sin of thy servants… and send rain upon thy land, which thou hast given unto thy people for an inheritance.” Two verses on, at 6:28, he listed dearth, pestilence and locusts among the troubles he had in mind.
God answers in Solomon’s own terms and adds two of his own: humble themselves, seek my face.
Two books, one appearance
The same appearance is told in 1 Kings 9, and the two accounts run side by side until Chronicles adds three verses Kings does not have. Kings keeps the drought, the prayer, the turning and the forgiving where they first appeared, in Solomon’s request at 1 Kings 8:35-36. The humbling, the seeking and the healed land are only in Chronicles.
Chronicles also tells how the house ended. God sent messengers, “because he had compassion on his people,” and they mocked them “until the wrath of the LORD arose against his people, till there was no remedy.” Then God brought the king of the Chaldees on them, and “they burnt the house of God, and brake down the wall of Jerusalem.” That is the end of the house the promise was attached to, told by the book that recorded the promise. The book’s last verses have Cyrus sending the exiles home to build again, so the book was completed after the fire, for people living in what it left.
Who else the verse reaches
Solomon’s prayer, the one this verse answers, already asked God to hear the stranger “which is not of thy people Israel,” in 2 Chronicles 6:32-33, “if they come and pray in this house.”
Centuries later Amos spoke of “all the heathen, which are called by my name.” When the first church argued in Acts 15 over whether Gentiles who believed had to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses, James quoted that line of Amos and said God was taking “out of them a people for his name.” The phrase in this verse, “called by my name,” was being used of people far beyond Solomon’s kingdom.
And Daniel, in Babylon with the house in ruins, prayed, “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly,” in Daniel 9:5, close to the words Solomon gave the captives in 2 Chronicles 6:37. God still heard prayer after the house was gone: in 9:23 the answer came “at the beginning of thy supplications.”
What does not move is the land. The verse names “my people” and “their land,” and the same speech then names the house and Solomon’s throne. Nothing in it moves the promise of a healed land to another country.
Nor does the name do the work by itself. In Jeremiah 14, during a drought, a prayer in the people’s name says, “we are called by thy name; leave us not,” and God answers that this people had not refrained their feet: “When they fast, I will not hear their cry.” In both places the turning was the condition, not the name.
So pray for your country, and leave its outcome with God. Jeremiah told the exiles in Babylon to “seek the peace of the city… and pray unto the LORD for it,” in the letter that Jeremiah 29:11 actually comes from, and he promised them no quick return.
Four things anyone can do
In its thirty-third chapter the same book shows one man doing them without a nation behind him. Manasseh, a king it says made Judah “do worse than the heathen,” was taken to Babylon in fetters, “and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, And prayed unto him: and he was intreated of him.” Back in Jerusalem, “he took away the strange gods, and the idol out of the house of the LORD.”
Humbling yourself, praying, seeking his face, which is more than seeking his help, and turning from what you already know is wrong need no king, no temple and no nation. Manasseh humbled himself and prayed in fetters, far from home, turned once he was back, and did not wait for anyone else to turn.