Ten - Intercession
Ten
Intercession
And Abraham came near and said, “Would You also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there were fifty righteous within the city; would You also destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous that were in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing as this, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous should be as the wicked; far be it from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”
So the Lord said, “If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.”
Then Abraham answered and said, “Indeed now, I who am but dust and ashes have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord: Suppose there were five less than the fifty righteous; would You destroy all of the city for lack of five?” So He said, “If I find there forty-five, I will not destroy it.”
And he spoke to Him yet again and said, “Suppose there shall be forty found there?” So He said, “I will not do it for the sake of forty.” Then he said, Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Suppose thirty should be found there?” So He said, “I will not do it if I find thirty there. And he said, “Indeed now, I have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord: Suppose twenty should be found there.”
So He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of twenty.”
Then he said, “Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak but once more: Suppose ten shall be found there?”
And He said, “I will not destroy it for the sake of ten.” So the Lord went His way, as soon as He had finished speaking with Abraham; and Abraham returned to his place (Genesis 18:23–33).
The great difficulty in intercession is myself, nothing less or more. The first thing I have to do is to take myself to school. My first duty is not to assert freedom, but to find an absolute master. We think that to be without a master is the sign of a high type of life. Insurgent, impertinent human beings have no master; noble beings have. I must learn not to take myself too seriously. Myself is apt to be my master; I pray to myself.
We are all Pharisees until we are willing to learn to intercede. We must go into heaven backward. That phrase means we must grow into doing some definite thing by praying, not by seeing. To learn this lesson of handling a thing by prayer properly is to enter a very severe school. A Christian’s duty is not to himself or to others, but to Christ. We think of prayer as a preparation for work, or a claim after having done work, whereas prayer is the essential work. It is the supreme activity of everything that is noblest in our personality. We won’t bring down to earth what we see in vision about our Master. We move around it in devotional speculations, but we won’t bring it straight down to earth and work it out in actualities.
The Strength and Self-Limitation of Intercession
If anyone sees his brother sinning a sin which does not lead to death, he will ask, and He will give him life for those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death. I do not say that he should pray about that (1 John 5:16).
How are we going to know when a man has sinned a sin unto death and when he has not? Only through intercession. If we make our own discernment the judge, we are wrong. We have it all on an abstract truth divorced from God. We pin our faith on what God has done and not on the God who did it, and when the case begins to go wrong again, we do not intercede, we begin to scold God. We get fanatical. We upset the court of heaven by saying, “I must do this thing.” That is not intercession, that is rushing in where angels fear to tread. It is fanatical frenzy, storming the throne of God and refusing to see His character while sticking true to our assertions of what He said He would do.
Beware of making God fit the mold of His own precedent. Just because He did a certain thing once does not mean He is sure to do it again. This truth becomes an imperceptible error when we subtly leave God Himself out of it. Frenzy—no strength and no self-limitation. We have taken ourselves so seriously that we cannot even see God; we are dictating to God.
The redemption of our Lord Jesus Christ mirrored in the Atonement embraces everything. Sin, sickness, limitation, and death are all done away with in redemption, but we have to remember the Atonement works under God’s dispensational sovereignty. It is not a question of whether God will sovereignly permit us to be delivered from sin in this dispensation. It is His distinct expressive will that we should be delivered. When it comes to the question of sickness and limitation, it is not a question of whether we will agree with God’s will, but whether God’s sovereignty is active—that predispensational efficacy of the Atonement on our behalf just now.
When people come to the Atonement and say, “Now I have deliverance in the Atonement, therefore I have no business being sick,” they make a fundamental confusion, because there is no case of healing in the Bible that did not come from a direct intervention of the sovereign touch of God. When it comes to deliverance from sin, it is not a question of going to God to ask Him to deliver us from sin, it is a question of accepting His deliverance. If we forget that, we take the Lord out of the Atonement and make it an abstract statement and instantly do the pharisaic dodge of putting burdens on people that they cannot bear.
Logically they are perfectly correct. It is all in the Atonement. But if it is true that in the Atonement there should be no sickness, it is also true that there should be no death. We have no business dying. We have no business having any human limitations and we should be in complete unbroken communion with God. The people who teach the present resurrection are logically consistent with the folks who say the health of the body depends entirely on our acceptance of the Atonement. To say we are in resurrection bodies now means a moral pig-sty, and makes a burlesque of the whole thing. The mistake is putting an abstract truth deduced from God in the place of God Himself.
Abraham had none of the fanatical in him. He did not stand true to what God said, but to God who said it. God said, “Offer up Isaac,” and then God said, “Don’t.” A fanatic would have said, “I will stick to what God has said. This other voice is of the devil.” Watch when some providence of God is going against what we have asserted God will always do. One of the most significant lessons is to see the rod of rebuke come on the people who insist that they know the meaning of the providential working of Christ’s atonement in the times in which we live. God does give wonderful gifts of the Atonement before their dispensation. There are innumerable cases of healing. But if I make that the ground on which God must work, I intercede no longer. I cannot. I become a dictator to God. When anyone is sick, I do not pray, I say, “They have no business being sick,” and that means I have destroyed altogether my contact with God.
The Sagacity and Submissiveness of Intercession
Therefore do not be like them. For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him (Matthew 6:8).
Our understanding of God is the answer to prayer; getting things from God is God’s indulgence of us. When God stops giving us things, He brings us into the place where we can begin to understand Him. As long as we get from God everything we ask, we never get to know Him. We look upon Him as a blessing-machine that has nothing to do with His character or with ours. “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask Him.” Then why pray? To get to know our Father. It is not sufficient for us to say, “Oh yes, God is love.” We have to know He is love. We have to struggle through until we see that He is love and justice. Then our prayer is answered.
The nearer Abraham comes to God in his intercession, the more he recognizes his entire unworthiness. There is a subtle thing that goes by the name of unworthiness, which is petulant pride with God. When we are shy with other people it is because we believe we are superior to the average person and we won’t talk until they realize our importance. Prayerlessness with God is the same thing. We are shy with God not because we are unworthy, but because we think God has not given enough consideration to our case. We have some peculiar elements He must be pleased to consider. We have to go to school to learn not to take ourselves seriously and to get the genuine unworthiness which no longer is shy before God. A child is never shy before his mother, and a child of God is conscious of his worthiness, namely, his entire dependence.
“Then he said, 'Let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak but once more: Suppose ten should be found there?' And He said, 'I will not destroy it for the sake of ten'" (Genesis 18:32). Abraham does the interceding while the angels go for the final test. After the final test, prayer is impossible. Abraham knew the stopping point because he was in complete and entire communion with God throughout his intercession. When we come against things in life, are we going to cave in and say we cannot understand them? We understand them by intercession. By our intercession God does things He does not show us just now, although He reveals more and more of His character to us. He is working out His new creations in the world through His wonderful redemption and our intercession all the time, and we have to be sagacious, not impudent.
The Shamelessness and Strenuousness of Intercession
I say to you, though he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence he will rise and give him as many as he needs (Luke 11:8).
Strenuousness means whipping ourselves up and jeering at ourselves till we sit down no more. We never give ourselves any encouragement; we only encourage ourselves in God. “Then He spoke a parable to them, that men always ought to pray and not lose heart” (Luke 18:1). It is a pleasant business to faint; everyone else has all the bother. “God will give it to me in His good time.” He cannot until we intercede. Be at the business, use some perspiration of soul, get at the thing, and all of a sudden we come to the place where we will say, “Now I see,” but I defy you to tell anyone what you saw until they come to where you are—
Oh, could I tell, ye surely would believe it!
Oh, could I only say when I have seen!
How should I tell or how can ye receive it,
How, till He bringeth you where I have been?
The point is that we have come to understand God. It is never God’s will for us to be dummies or babies spiritually. It is God’s will for us to be sons and daughters of God, but He does not prevent us paying the price of being sons and daughters. He makes us sons and daughters potentially, and then sends us out to be sons and daughters actually.
Are we prepared to go into the shameless business of prayer? That is, are we prepared to get to the right understanding of God in this matter? We can only get it one way—not by disputing or controversy, but by prayer. Keep at it. We have no business remaining in the dark about the character of our Father when He has made His character very clear to us. The Sermon on the Mount has more to do with prayer than anything else. It means an end of self-indulgence in the body, in the mind, in the spirit, self-indulgence in anything and everything, and a strenuous determination to get to understand God in this matter.
The Sacrament and Substitution of Intercession
Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping, and said to Peter, “What! Could you not watch with Me one hour?” (Matthew 26:40).
It is a great thing to watch with God rather than to put God to the trouble of watching us in case we burn ourselves. We tax the whole arrangement of heaven when we expect God to watch us. God wants us to come and watch with Him, to be so identified with Him that we are not causing Him any trouble, to give Him perfect delight because He can use us instead of taxing some other servants of heaven to look after us.
O Lord, my Lord, I come to You this morning with a sense of spiritual failure. Cleanse me by Your grace and restore me to the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. O that the sweet kindness of Jesus were more and more manifest in me.
O Lord, You know, in eager helpless trust I look up. O that in power and peace and purity and grace thou would shine forth in power, in grace and glory this day.
O Lord, the range of Your power, the touch of Your grace, the breathing of Your Spirit, how I long for these to bring me face to face with You; Lord, by Your grace cause me to appear before You.