This is part of a communication I wanted to share. The names and initials have been changed or removed for safety reasons.
8/5/20
While preparing the Weekly Summary earlier this week, I was struck by a particular prayer request from D. H. of Intercessors for Israel. He was bringing the troubling developments among Hezbollah chief Nasrallah who “threatened revenge against Israel over a Hizbullah officer whom Israel accidently [?] killed in Syria.” D.H. wrote that “Lebanon is under Hizbullah’s mafia-style control and is in deep distress. Recently, many Lebanese have rightly pointed fingers at Hizbullah as the main reason for their nation’s horrid situation.”
Then as D.H. began to get into his prayer points he wrote, “God please help the Lebanese to overthrow their wicked Hizbullah tyrants (Zech. 11:1). Move Lebanon into a position of being able to live in peace with Israel (1 Kin. 5:1-12). Pour out the fear of Israel’s God on all Hizbullah’s leaders – especially Nasrallah (Isa. 2:19). Save many Hizbullah members but destroy that wicked organization (Matt. 5:44; Isa. 14:30).”
Then came the zinger that struck me at the time so much that I put that prayer point in bold: “Let Hizbullah fall into the trap it constantly tries to set for Israel (Psa. 9:5-6, 15, 19-20).”
Hours later my Twitter feed began to be filled with news out of Beirut and horrifying pictures that I thought must be doctored because in the third great blast was a clear mushroom cloud with a massive shock wave emanating out from it over the city. It was very real though and the mushroom cloud came not from being nuked – which Israel would surely have been blamed for – but it was from ammonia tanks being stored in a Hezbollah weapons warehouse. This was same substance that was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The blast, which struck with the force of a 3.5 magnitude earthquake, according to the German Research Centre for Geosciences. The blast damaged half the city, destroying windows and entire homes, with damage estimated at $3-5 Billion and has left up to 300,000 people temporarily homeless. The death toll from the explosion has risen to at least 100 with at least 4,000 wounded. Many are still missing, including people thrown into the sea by the blast. Families went to the port looking for relatives, and workers are still looking for people under the rubble. The tragedy comes as Lebanon suffers a major economic crisis, with poverty levels nearing 50%.
Many on Twitter pointed out that the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened in the past to destroy Israel by causing a massive explosion in the port of Haifa using ammonia tanks that he said would be like a “nuclear” explosion. Now the disastrous explosion that Nasrallah mean for Israel, has instead befallen Lebanon, and as I also read yesterday from Twitter reports, many Christian families, pastors, charitable workers and other NGO’s who lived and worked in the immediate area that was flattened by the blast. This is nothing new for Islamist terrorists organizations to situate weapons caches in heavily civilian populations, knowing that Israel would refrain from bombing anything that would create massive civilian casualties.
As great as this tragedy, it is also an opportunity for Lebanon to finally throw off the rule of Hezballah over its country. The Lebanese will need much prayer and much help from the world community to recover from this blow. It is an opportunity for people of the faith of the LORD Yeshua to make a powerful expression of God’s love for the Lebanese.
As D. H. continued in his prayer points, “Give wisdom to the believers in Israel’s north and in Lebanon on how to pray (Col. 1:9). Remove all anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist influences from the true Lebanese Church (Num. 24:9b). We bless You for the angelic protection You have placed on all of Israel’s borders (Psa. 34:7).