The Awesome Power of Intercessory Prayer
“So I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it; but I found no one.” Ezekiel 22:30
In dark and difficult times God looks for intercessors. In Ezekiel 22 we see that God intends to bring horrific judgment upon the land and He is looking for an intercessor who will “stand in the gap” before Him on behalf of the land. The picture is obvious and daunting. God is willing to reconsider His intentions if someone would stand before Him and intercede for the land.
An intercessor can cause God to change His mind.
We have the example of such intercession in Genesis 18. Abraham “stood before the Lord” (vs. 22) knowing that God’s intentions were to bring horrific judgment upon Sodom and the cities of the plain. His nephew Lot lived in Sodom and Abraham wants God to spare him. He intercedes asking God to show mercy. God still brought destruction upon Sodom but before He did He sent two angels to take Lot and his family out, “the Lord being merciful to him” (19:16). And verse 29 says, “When God destroyed the cities of the plain that God remembered Abraham, and send Lot out of the midst of the overthrow.”
Lot’s life was spared because Abraham interceded.
A contemporary of Ezekiel, the prophet Isaiah, bemoaned the fact that in the face of great spiritual darkness, “There is no one who calls on Your name, who stirs himself up to take hold of You” Isaiah 64:7. How does one “take hold of God”? John Gill in his Commentary on this verse says, “The phrase, ‘that stirs up himself to take hold of thee;’ is to exercise faith on God, as their covenant God; to lay hold on the covenant itself, the blessings and promises of it, and plead them with God... as it were, take hold of the hands of God, and will not suffer him to strike his children; just as a friend lays hold on a father's hand when he is about to give his child a blow with it for his correction; and such is the amazing condescension of God, that he suffers himself to be held after this manner.”
The instance of staying the hand of God from striking His children refers to Moses’ intercession before the Lord in Exodus 32 after he heard God say, “Now therefore, let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them. And I will make of you a great nation.” Listen to Moses’ bold prayer.
Then Moses pleaded with the LORD his God, and said: “LORD, why does Your wrath burn hot against Your people whom You have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians speak, and say, ‘He brought them out to harm them, to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from Your fierce wrath, and relent from this harm to Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants, to whom You swore by Your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven; and all this land that I have spoken of I give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’” So the LORD relented from the harm which He said He would do to His people.
Gill also refers to the time Jesus said to the disciples on the Road to Emmaus that it was getting late and He must be going but they constrained Him to stay with them a little longer. (Luke 24:28-29) And Jacob when he heard the angel of the Lord say, “Let me go for the day breaks” persistently insisted saying, “I will not let you go until you bless me” (Genesis 32:26)
Have you ever so prayed?
I believe God is still looking for intercessors. People who feel the burden and weight of a current need in the life of a son or daughter; or the great distress in a family, or the spiritual deadness in a church or the fire circumstances in a nation and is willing to step into the gap and stand before the Lord and intercede and continue interceding until the desired answer is received.
Who of us will lay hold of God and say, “I will not let you go until you bless me”?
Pastor Dan