A Nation's Need an Intercessor — E.A. Johnston

A Personal Crisis Requiring Intercession

I recall a time in the life of my family when my teenage daughter was being plagued with demonic nightmares that were getting worse and worse. My own prayers for her at the time seemed futile and we were getting nowhere in a deliverance.

Well a friend of mine who lived outside this country was visiting America and he learned of my situation. He made it a point to drive to my city and to meet with me and my daughter with a holy determination to drive off these nightmares.

My friend is a man of prayer and he sensed the urgency of our situation. I needed an intercessor for my daughter and he determined to be that man. He holed up in his motel room for two days while he entered a time of fasting and intercession for my teenage daughter.

I never saw him for two days as he was shut up with God and prayer. When he finally emerged he came over and asked if the nightmares had left my daughter and I answered joyfully yes. They never bothered her since that time because I had a holy man of God as our intercessor and God heard his desperate pleas and saw his humility by his fast and the Almighty answered in delivering prayer.

Moses Intercedes for a Sinful Nation

I want to read us an example today, friends, from my Bible where the people of God needed an intercessor to stand between them and God. The title of my message today, friends, is A Nation's Need an Intercessor.

My text can be found in the Book of Deuteronomy. You can turn in your Bibles there now, friends. We will be in chapter 9 and in verses 11 through 29. In our passage we see the fiery prophet Moses intercede on behalf of a sinful people.

Let me read us a striking passage of scripture right now. Here now is the word of God and may the spirit of the Lord attend the reading of his holy word. And it came to pass at the end of forty days and forty nights that the Lord gave me the two tables of stone, even the tables of the covenant.

And the Lord said unto me, Arise, get thee down quickly from hence, for thy people which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They are quickly turned aside out of the way which I commanded them.

They have made a molten image. Furthermore, the Lord spake unto me, saying, I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Let me alone that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven, and I will make of thee a nation mightier and greater than they.

Let me pause here, friends. Here we see the sad and tragic example of a people who flagrantly sinned against all the favors and deliverances God had graciously given them at the very time the finger of God is writing his law upon the two tables of stone atop Sinai.

The people of God below are provoking God through aggravated sin. Moses is beside himself. God only wants to destroy them as Moses climbs down that mountain as quickly as he can while hanging on to the Ten Commandments in his hands.

His anger boils to a fever pitch by the time he makes it to the bottom of Sinai, and the shocking scene that the eyes of Moses sees of a naked orgy before a golden calf of idolatry overcomes him. We'll pick up our text in verse 15.

Moses' Fasting and Prayer After the Golden Calf

So I turned and came down from the mount, and the mount burned with fire, and the two tables of the covenant were in my two hands. And I looked, and behold, ye had sinned against the Lord your God, and had made you a molten calf.

Ye had turned aside quickly out of the way which the Lord had commanded you. And I took the two tables, and cast them out of my two hands, and break them before you rise. And I fell down before the Lord, as at the first forty days and forty nights I did neither eat bread nor drink water, because of all your sins which ye sinned, and doing wickedly in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger.

For I was afraid of the anger, and hot displeasure, wherewith the Lord was wroth against you, to destroy you. But the Lord hearkened unto me at that time also, and the Lord was very angry with Aaron to have destroyed him.

And I prayed for Aaron also the same time, and I took your sin, the calf which ye had made, and burnt it with fire, and stamped it, and ground it very small, even until it was as small as dust. And I cast the dust thereof into the brook that descended out of the mount.

I will pause here, friends. What a terrible scene, the indignant Moses, burning and melting the calf of gold, stamping and grinding it to dust. The people of God stand back as they watch in horror and dismay and guilt and shame, as Moses labors with all his might to remove every trace of the evil they had created.

The Nation's Need for an Intercessor

Now I want to turn your attention, friends, to two things here in our passage today. Number one, God wants to destroy a sinning people. Number two, a man is needed to stand between the people and Almighty God.

The desperate need of that hour was an intercessor in our nation today. People sin grievously hour upon hour and provoke a holy God whose patience has plum worn out and whose righteous indignation is ready to be poured out in a destroyed judgment upon the land.

A nation's need is an intercessor who will stand in the gap between a sinful man and a holy God. I want us now to take a look, friends, at how Moses intercedes on the people's behalf and how he triumphs with God through prevailing prayer.

Moses' Forty Days of Intercession

Look at verses 25 through 29 and we'll see a prostrate prophet on his face before Jehovah God. Thus I fell down before the Lord forty days and forty nights, as I fell down at the first, because the Lord had said he would destroy you.

I prayed therefore unto the Lord and said, O Lord God, destroy not thy people and thine inheritance which thou hast redeemed through thy greatness, which thou hast brought forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand.

Let me pause here, friends. Moses intercedes on the people's behalf, first by humbling himself before God through a time of fasting and prayer. Then Moses reminds God of his great deliverances with a mighty hand of his people whom God refers to as thine inheritance.

Moses says, Lord, they're your inheritance. Thus he reminds God of his covenant with Abraham. Then Moses continues along these lines. Remember thy servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Look not unto the stubbornness of this people, nor to their wickedness, nor to their sin, lest the land whence thou broughtest us out say, because the Lord was not able to bring them into the land which he promised them, and because he hated them, he hath brought them out to slay them in the wilderness.

Intercession and God's Reputation

Let me pause here, friends. Moses is telling God that his reputation is at stake, and he is challenging God to defend his reputation. Let me tell you something, friends. I've never seen a time where the Holy Spirit was challenged that he didn't deliver.

God wants us to sue him, if I may so speak, to sue him with his own promises, to cry out to God in desperate prayer and inform him that he has to act because his reputation is at stake. Now see how Moses finishes his final argument, like a lawyer in a courtroom who presents his case before the judge.

Yet they are thy people and thine inheritance, which thou broughtest out by thy mighty power and by thy stretched out arm. O friends, how the nations of the world at this hour need an intercessor. England gave us our Bibles and the Puritans.

Scotland gave us great preachers and the Covenanters. Wales gave us Evan Roberts and Revival. Each lies in the shadow of their former glory. China had her John Song and India her Brian Hyde. Polynesia had her Titus Cohen and Africa had her C .T. Studd.

America Under Judgment and the Call to Revival

America had her mighty spiritual awakenings that propelled a missionary enterprise that covered the heathen globe. America, once favored by God, is now under the judgment of God for her great wickedness and sins.

Ah, how the world cries out today for an intercessor. The greatest need in our land today is a prophet, a man sent from God, a God's man who will stand in the gap between heaven and earth, between mortal man and almighty God, a holy man who is so wholly sold out to God, so intoxicated with Christ, and so consumed with eternity, that his very footprints leave a smoky trail of the lingering fire of God, a man whose desperate life of prayer has left fingerprints on the horns of the altar in glory, a man whose emboldened faith and Enoch-like walk with God moves mountains of resistance and proves that the God of the Bible is alive and interested in the most minute requests of man.

Oh, friends, who among us will rise up and be that man to intercede on behalf of a nation? Heaven help us for our lack, let us pray.