Tuesday, March 3

Scripture: Then I lay prostrate before the Lord as before, forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all the sin you had committed, provoking the Lord by doing what was evil in his sight. (Deuteronomy 9:18).

Observation: Moses is remembering Israel’s first great act of betrayal against the Lord and his first prayer of intercession on the people’s behalf. While Moses was at the top of Mt. Sinai hanging on God’s every word, the people of Israel camped in the valley below took up a collection of gold jewelry, melted the metal, and cast a golden calf to be their new 24-carat bright and shiny god. The one true God is furious, so enraged that God is close to destroying Israel and ending their story right here, right now. For precedent, remember when God was so enraged with the evil of humanity that God ended human life save for Noah and his family with forty days straight of rain? But in the case of the golden calf, Israel had an advantage that humanity didn’t have last time: Israel has an intercessor, a pray-er who will advocate for Israel before God. Moses prays for Israel for… wait for it… forty days. Instead of Israel being on the pointy end of forty days of God’s wrath, Israel is on the receiving end of forty days of prayer. This time, Israel has an intercessor they don’t deserve but direly need more than they know, and the intercession works. God listens to Moses. God’s checks his wrath. God prefers the forty days of prayer to the forty days of destruction. God lets the story of Israel continue.

Application: God chooses to work through a mercy circuit. Like the electrical circuits in my home, there is a closed loop connecting the pray-er with the people who are prayed for with the God of mercy, and the energy coursing through the circuit is prayer. Or is it mercy? Or are mercy and prayer the same thing? In Deuteronomy, it sure seems so. Moses prays for mercy for his people, and God responds with mercy in kind. Does that mean that when we pray for mercy for other people that God will grant what we ask? Yes, and no. When we pray prayers of intercession, which are simply prayers for God’s mercy for other people, then yes, God will answer those prayers and close the mercy circuit, but will God show mercy in the way that I would like mercy to be shown? Usually, no. God’s mercy is bigger than my mental capacity to understand it. It is not for me to understand exactly how and in what form God’s mercy reaches where I beg mercy would go. It is for me to play my part in the circuit. It is for me to pray prayers of intercession.

Prayer:

Here is my running list of people who need Your mercy if you would please find the bandwidth in your heart which I’m sure is overloaded with requests of all kinds and pain for people who are hurting more than me and a universe to hold together and a parent’s rush to help, but these people are important and need Your mercy, so here they are. The beautiful soul whose body is failing her, would you please ease her passing? The ministers of the gospel I know and love and mostly agree with, give them enough resources and patience and resilience to do Your work. The young man whose name was whispered to me by a kind lady on her way out of church, asking for prayers because chemo is harsh and she wants the chemo to be worth it: Lord, kindly make it happen. For the soldiers deployed to war, the soldiers who are lost to war, the innocent who are lost to war, the innocence damaged by war, and for a quick end to war of all kinds and everywhere: Lord, have mercy. For a sweet woman who watched her husband of half a century take his last breath; the person with the sobbing face who took Holy Communion remembering the husband who was taken from her and would otherwise be receiving the bread and juice containing Your mercy directly behind her; the baby boy I saw at church with the chubby cheeks and strong grip; the college student learning quickly how difficult adulting is and how quicker your peace can comfort: for these and those I didn’t write down but should have done, and those my heart remembers while my brain doesn’t, with my words and my intentions and my inner strength and my attending, I give you my plea for mercy and ask for the fortitude to keep pleading. Onward we go: amen.