Intercession
During this despensation Christ’s work is mainly intercession. He calls us to take a subordinate part in the holy office, standing, like Phinehas between the living and the dead to stay the plague; like Elijah, between Heaven and Earth to unlock Heaven’s floodgates of blessing and command the fire and flood of God. Is this true? Then what can be more awful and august than such dignity and majesty of privilege! Ignatius welcomes the Numidian lion in the arena, saying, “I am grain of God; I must be ground between the teeth of lions to make bread for God’s people.” He felt in the hour of martyrdom the privilege of joining his dying Lord in a sacrifice that Bushnell would call “vicarious.”
Who will join the risen Lord in a service of intercession? The greatest difficulty in the way of practical conversion of men may not be in God’s eyes so much a barrier of ungodliness among the heathen as a barrier of unbelief among His own disciples.
The sixteenth century was great in painters, the seventeenth in philosophers, the eighteenth in writers, the nineteenth in preachers and inventors; God grant that the twentieth may be forever historically memorable as the century of intercessors.
— A. T. Pierson.