Tisha B’Av began at sundown, Wednesday, July 22 and concludes at nightfall tonight, Thursday, July 23, 2026.
If you began fasting last evening at sundown, you are already in the heart of Tisha B’Av—the Ninth of Av on the Hebrew calendar. This ancient fast began at sundown last night, Wednesday, July 22, and concludes at nightfall tonight. From that first sunset through this evening’s darkness, Jewish people around the world are fasting, mourning, and remembering. I want to tell you why this should matter deeply to every follower of Christ.
The God we serve is a promise-keeping God. And the story of Israel is the story of those promises being tested—violently, repeatedly, and across millennia—and yet, never breaking.
The tragedies commemorated by this one calendar date surpass the horrors suffered by any one tribe of people because the enemy hates those whom God loves.
In 586 B.C., the magnificent Temple built by King Solomon—the dwelling place of God’s glory and the center of Israel’s entire worship life—was pillaged and burned to the ground by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonian army. Centuries later, on the very same calendar date, the Second Temple—rebuilt under Ezra and Nehemiah—was destroyed by Rome in 70 A.D., scattering the Jewish people into a prolonged and brutal exile. Jesus wept over Jerusalem and foretold it:
“For the days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment around you, surround you and close you in on every side, and level you, and your children within you, to the ground; and they will not leave in you one stone upon another, because you did not know the time of your visitation.” (Luke 19:43–44)
But the devastation continued. On August 4, 135 A.D., the Roman army captured the fortress city of Beitar and massacred approximately 580,000 Jewish civilians in a single day. The Roman commander Turnus Rufus then leveled the very ground where the Temple had stood, and Jerusalem itself was destroyed in 136 A.D. Then, the First Crusade launched on August 15, 1096, killing 10,000 Jews within the first month alone. The Jewish people were expelled from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492. And on August 2, 1941, Heinrich Himmler received Nazi Party approval for what would become the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jewish lives, nearly one-third of the world’s entire Jewish population.
One date commemorates centuries of unspeakable tragedy, representing the enemy’s evil spiritual warfare throughout the history of God’s people. The enemy of God has been unrelenting in his effort to erase Israel because he knows what is written. He knows the promises God made to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. He knows that God’s redemptive plan for all of humanity ran directly through the Jewish people. And he has spent centuries trying to make God a liar.
God’s enemy has failed. He will continue to fail.
Yet, in the midst of devastation, God promised through the prophet Jeremiah:
“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” (Jeremiah 29:11)
And again, the words of God came through the prophet Jeremiah silence every doubt:
“Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for a light by day, the ordinances of the moon and the stars for a light by night, who disturbs the sea, and its waves roar — the Lord of hosts is His name: ‘If those ordinances depart from before Me, says the Lord, then the seed of Israel shall also cease from being a nation before Me forever.’” (Jeremiah 31:35–36)
As long as the sun rises, the seed of Israel will exist. That is God’s word. Paul, who was Jewish, wrote:
“I say then, has God cast away His people? Certainly not!” (Romans 11:1).
God’s covenant is irrevocable. God has turned the enemy’s efforts at total annihilation into a story of survival and ultimate victory. In 1948, after the Holocaust, and after centuries of exile and expulsion—Israel became a nation again in a single day. Isaiah had prophesied it, and so had Ezekiel, who saw it centuries earlier in his vision of a valley of dry bones rattling back to life—a picture of a nation declared dead, breathing again. (Ezekiel 37:1–14) Isaiah put it this way:
“Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things? Shall the earth be made to give birth in one day? Or shall a nation be born at once? For as soon as Zion was in labor, she gave birth to her children.” (Isaiah 66:8)
Never in the annals of human history had a people been uprooted from their land, dispersed across the face of the earth, survived, and returned to their country of origin to resume national existence. This unparalleled phenomenon has baffled historians, politicians, and scholars alike and cannot be fully understood or explained without the Bible.
Tisha B’Av is a day of mourning. But for the believer, it is also a day of awe, because embedded inside every catastrophe is the undeniable evidence that God has not abandoned His people.
Why should this matter to you and me personally?
Because Romans 11:17 tells us that we who are born again have been grafted into the rich root of God’s covenant. We are beneficiaries of the same promises. The God who kept Israel through Babylon, through Rome, through the Crusades, and through the Holocaust is the same God who holds your life in His hands today.
If you have not yet joined the fast, there is still time—it concludes at nightfall tonight. Let the hunger remind you of what is at stake. Let the grief of this date sharpen your prayers for Israel and for the peace of Jerusalem—which God Himself commands us to seek:
“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: may they prosper who love you.” (Psalm 122:6)
The enemy of God may be unrelenting, but he is not winning. Every born again believer is on God’s side—so let’s live like our victory is secure!
Prayer:
Father, in the midst of this solemn fast, I come before You humbled and sobered by the weight of this history. I grieve the suffering of the Jewish people, and yet I stand in awe of You, because through every attempt to silence Your promises, You have been faithful. Deepen my love for Israel as a reflection of Your own heart. Let hunger sharpen my prayers of intercession. Let it remind me that You, who have kept every promise to Your covenant people, are the very same God who holds every promise You have made to me. I trust You with what I cannot see. You are faithful. You have always been faithful. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
