What intercession looks like

     Kill my people? Kill me, Esther effectively said, but this isn’t because the Jews so deserved to be saved (Esther 8:3). The Jews were in exile because of their sins. Likewise, Christians need saving but not because we deserve it more than others. The Church too is ugly. It’s full of self-serving, judgmental, greedy people like me. We can’t see in front of our own noses to care for those around us. We are hypocrites talking about how important marriage is, all the while going behind our spouses’ backs to “get our wants met” in other ways and hurting others in the process.

     So why not live to expose the hypocrisy in the Church? It’s because of the children—those sweet, innocent stars in the sky who will not understand and may be lost in the process (Luke 17:2, Mk 9:42). It’s God who separates the wheat from the chaff because only He alone can do it without harming the true wheat since they can look so much alike from the outside (Matt 13:29-30). Only God knows peoples’ motives. Only God knows what their pasts are and how they’ve been hurt and what they struggle with. Therefore, humans are not to judge before the time, playing God (1 Cor 4:5). Our job is to intercede for God’s mercy upon us all that we would voluntarily repent and turn from our self-serving ways to the true God who alone can change us to be like Him.

     You see this theme of intercession in Genesis and Exodus. Abraham intercedes for God to spare Sodom in the off-chance that there may be some righteous living there (Gen 18). Rebekah manipulatively intercedes for Isaac to spare Jacob, that deceiving patriarch who eventually even became Israel (Gen 27:13 and 46).  The Bible shows that Jacob’s only virtue was that he actually wanted the birthright blessing of pursuit of God, over his twin, who revealed that he could care less about it and chose his stomach instead (Gen 25:34). And Moses intercedes for God to spare Israel, the country that quickly embraced the idolatry of the golden calf, sitting down to eat and drink and rising up to play, over waiting for the gifts of God (Ex 32:6-14).

    So why shouldn’t we prompt humiliation and, instead, offer clemency to those who sin against us? Why shouldn’t we perpetuate the hate and put our energies into exposing hypocrites? Because love covers a multitude of sins, even those who massively sin against us. People don’t change by receiving the full consequence of our sins against others, otherwise we’d all be dead. We change through being shown mercy: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Jesus was harshest on his own: He may have sweat blood for those who wouldn’t ever get it like Judas, but He voluntarily died especially for the sake of the Pharisees. Jesus didn't let the Romans kill him, He let His friends.