"And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplication. They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son." -- Zechariah 12:10

These days, biblical prophecy is largely the province of charlatans. Religious fakes, frauds, impostors, quacks and swindlers. There isn't much left of chicanery that hasn't been passed off as legitimate biblical prophecy.

Enter the lonely Jew.

As a Christian, my heart aches for the Jew. The Jew has received the scorn and prejudice of non-Jews for millennia. Even in our modern age, too often the Jew is the subject of persecution, ridicule and derision. This is incredibly sad since the peoples of Christendom owe the Jew their very life. Their very existence. The depth of our indebtedness to the Jew exceeds our imagination.

Now, two-thousand years since God became flesh and dwelt among us, the Jew as a nation, or as a people, has yet to accept the Messiah. It is a quintessential irony that non-Jews have formed a church which includes millions who worship and accept the Jewish Messiah which the Jewish religion rejects.

But if this sweet prophecy from Zechariah is to be believed, this will not always be so. There is promised for them a spirit of grace and supplication. A time for awakening. A time for realization. A time for awareness. According to this prophecy it will be a time when they feel the enormous sense of loss from never having understood. Indeed, for bearing the guilt of looking upon the One whom their first century leaders pierced.

But we Christians needn't feel smug. Too many of us have followed the charlatans -- those who make a circus out of faith. Too many of us have wasted God's money on their trinkets and literature. Too many of us have made them rich and famous, with private jets and mansions, satisfying their endless greed.

I do not claim to be a prophet. But here is a "prophecy" for your consideration: Unless we Christians summarily halt the exploitation of our faith by the charlatans and fakes, we will be programmed for strong delusion. Unless we target the benefits and blessings God has bestowed upon us toward real needs like starving people, disease research, poverty, homelessness, the human trafficking of women and children, and building strong families, perhaps it is we who will most need the outpouring of the spirit of grace and supplication.

We need to direct our energies and resources toward charitable churches and ministries who focus their energies on these things in their preaching of the precious Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Enter the productive believer.