Reproach and Intercession

For even Christ did not please Himself; but as it is written, "THE REPROACHES OF THOSE WHO REPROACHED YOU FELL ON ME." (Romans 15:3)

This verse and the ones following this that enhance it remind me of a most important revision of a word that I learned not long ago. I heard someone explain from the Bible the true meaning of the word intercessor and it brought a great deal of light into my heart and wonderfully enhanced my growing, changing understanding of the truth about God.

Yesterday I took a look at the context in Psalms from which this quotation was lifted and saw that it describes an identification with God so closely that the insults and reproach directed at Him fall on anyone who identifies that closely with Him as well. I also saw that in applying this principle of identification, Paul is instructing us to treat others around us with such an attitude of acceptance that the reproaches directed at them will be shared by us even though we may not agree with their viewpoints. But in doing so we are following the example of Jesus who identified Himself with all of humanity so closely that we could sense that He really cares about us.

The active ingredient that makes this so powerful is the element of joy. Based on the understanding that joy is the description of what we feel whenever someone is genuinely glad to be with us, Jesus is the perfect demonstration of how to live in the most joy. In Hebrews we are told that Jesus endured the cross and despised the shame for the sake of the joy that was set before Him. That joy was discussed at length in the last hours with His disciples before Jesus was taken away from them to die on the cross. It was the thing He focused on obsessively because it is the part of the human brain that is most important for successfully enduring trauma of every kind.

But what does this all have to do with the concept of an intercessor?

What amazed me the most in my update on the true function of an intercessor was the purpose of intercession and who it benefits and who it is designed to change. I grew up assuming like nearly everyone I know that Jesus was our intercessor for the purpose of convincing God to allow sinners to be saved in Paradise. I was not quite sure how it was all supposed to work, but from what I was taught I came to believe that basically Jesus was running interference for us to give us time to improve our lives with God's help to the point that heaven would approve of us and finally relent to allow us to join the rest of those in heaven.

This assumed belief system or some close variation on it is the basis for what is known as perfectionism and also for legalism. I am very well acquainted with these lifestyles though I have absolutely no desire to be involved with them again. The weight of fear and guilt and obsession with focusing on ferreting out every little supposed sin in one's own life is very debilitating, and the greatest danger in that way of life is the lack of joy and peace which are the most important preparations needed to endure hardship. Those caught up in this kind of fear-based philosophy tend to cultivate to a fine art the practice of fault-finding whether it be faults in their own life or in other's.

One of the biggest problems with fault-finding is that the principle of assimilation cannot be avoided in the process. This principle states that you become like what you dwell upon. So if I spend time focusing on the faults of those around me or even if I am obsessing about finding any little sin within my own heart in order to satisfy the demands of a perfect God in heaven, the undesired results will be that my own heart becomes more and more infected with the very things I am attempting to eliminate.

As a result, the people who follow the plan of perfecting themselves in order to get to heaven by working to eliminate what they believe is sin in their life end up adopting one or two means of making “progress”. They either work hard enough at this to blind themselves to their real shortcomings and end up in a self-deception that is extremely dangerous in the light of heaven and believe that they are far more righteous that how God sees them, or they become very discouraged and depression takes over their soul and spirit as they realize that they can never accomplish the task of becoming perfect. Either way their heart becomes hardened and they fail to grasp the real truth about God's attitude toward them.

Am I asserting that a person can never become righteous in the sight of God? Well, that depends on the definition a person is using for the word righteous. But what I have begun to see more and more clearly is that our real problem is the direction from which we view all of these elements of Christianity, religion, righteousness and salvation. What I have come to see so much more clearly is that for most of my life I have been taught nearly everything backwards, and trying to achieve righteousness or live as a Christian by doing it backwards will never produce real righteousness.

What is most liberating for all of this confusion about how to get right with God and find peace for my soul is to understand the true role and purpose of an intercessor. While it is very true that an intercessor lives for the purpose of changing someone's mind about another person, the problem most of us have with correctly understanding the part Jesus plays in this is knowing who it is that He is working to change or convince.

You see, if I think for a moment that God is the one whom Jesus is working to change in His attitude about me, then by extension I also am assuming that God is the problem that has to be fixed in order for me to get into heaven. It is assumed that if Jesus can do whatever it takes to change God's mind about me effectively enough then I have a shot at being saved under the merits of Jesus' intercession. But is that the real purpose of Jesus as my intercessor? Is He really running interference for me before the presence of God until I am good enough to impress God with my level of absorbed or achieved righteousness?

Putting it this way begins to expose the real fallacy of this kind of thinking. Jesus stated unequivocally that He and the Father had identical attitudes about us. So if that is the case then there is absolutely nothing that Jesus could do to change the Father's mind or else He would be denying that they already felt the same about us. Jesus came to reveal to us how passionately the Father and the Son both love us, not for Him to get tuned into understanding our predicament better so that He could go back and explain things more convincingly before the Father's throne.

So what is the real truth about intercession? First of all we must realize that the one's with all the misunderstanding are humans, not God. The antagonism in this relationship is all on our side with none of it on God's side. There is not one particle of bitterness, resentment, anger or misunderstanding in the heart of God toward us. (Yes He is very angry about sin, but not because He hates us but because sin is the lies that keeps us from believing the truth about His love for us and keeps us away from Him.) Any belief to the contrary comes straight from the father of lies, Satan himself who is known as the accuser. The sooner we divest ourselves of these false beliefs about how God feels about us the sooner we will be reconciled to His heart that is yearning for us to be united in total intimacy with Him.

And that is the whole reason and function of the intercessory work of Jesus. Jesus came for one purpose only – to change our minds about God by any means possible no matter how costly it was to Him personally. We are the ones holding on to myriads of lies about God, not God holding grudges against us that need to be resolved. We are the ones in all the need of intellectual and emotional adjustment by exposure to the real truth about God's constant and irrevocable love and forgiveness for us. And as we begin to accept this truth about reality and begin to believe the truth as it is in Jesus, we will also begin to experience this thing called joy. For joy is the experience that fills our heart as we begin to sense that both Jesus and God are always intently glad to be with us no matter how we feel or even how much we misunderstand or even hate them.

In these verses are described more accurately the role of Jesus as our intercessor. The reproaches and insults and lies that we have believed and directed toward God all of our lives have landed on Jesus, the one who is totally identified with God in spirit and heart. But Jesus gladly accepts all of this in hope and faith that it will open our minds and hearts to see the real truth about Him and His Father and that we will begin to change our minds about how they feel toward us. Intercession is 100% directed toward changing our minds about God and not at all about changing God's mind about us.

The more this truth sinks into my own heart – and I have to say I need to understand it much more clearly than I yet do – the more sense my mind can make of the real reason that Jesus came to live and die on this earth. I am still praying for a much clearer revelation of this truth, but what little I have grasped so far has produced moments of intense joy and amazement for me. It has also discounted nearly everything taught by religious people which continues to be a source of confusion for my heart. But the more focused I am on listening to the voice of God through His Word and His Spirit to my heart, the more all of this makes sense and more importantly the more my heart is warmed and drawn to love Him in return.

I am the object of Jesus' intercession in heaven. I am the one that needs my mind and heart transformed in my opinions about how God feels about me. I am the one with all the lies and hostilities toward God that need exposure and healing. And I pray that Jesus will continue to completion His work of intercession in my own life so that I too can enter into His joy and embrace His love for me unreservedly. Maranatha!

(next in series)