p. 9 | Christ's Intercession

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 20, 1903

Christ's Intercession

The ordinary notion of intercession is not the New Testament idea. We tend to limit it to prayer for others. There is no such thought in the New Testament use of the phrase. It is a great deal wider than any verbal expression of sympathy and desire. It has to do with realities, not with wishing for another, that some blessing may come upon him; but the intercession of the great High Priest who has gone into the holiest of all for us, covers the whole ground of all the acts by which, by reason of our deep and true union with Jesus Christ through faith, he communicates to his people whatsoever of blessing and grace and sweet tokens of ineffable love he has received from the Father. Whatsoever he draws in filial dependence from the divine Father, he, in brotherly unity, imparts to us. And that, the real communication of real blessings, and not the verbal petitioning for gifts, is what he is doing from within the veil. The great High Priest has “passed into the heavens,” and is “able also to save . . . to the uttermost . . . seeing he ever liveth to make intercession” for us.—Dr. Maclaren.