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This verse is taken from:
Amos 7. 1-6
“search the scriptures” John 5:39
The intercessory prayers of God’s servants have mightily prevailed down through the ages.
Here is one of the mysteries of prayer. Prayer really does change things by moving the heart and hand of God. Prayer or asking, as petitionary prayer, is the justification and encouragement for the whole exercise of appealing to God in this way.
We do not live in a rigid sphere of unalterable fatalism. This was demonstrated by Isaac who, when his wife proved barren, ‘intreated the Lord for his wife and the Lord was intreated of him, and Rebekah his wife conceived’, Gen. 25. 21. And Moses, by intercessory pleading with the Lord, averted the certain annihilation of the whole of Israel when they made their golden calf in rejection of the Lord. The prayer of intercession was all that stood between Israel and oblivion, and it was wholly effectual for, ‘the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people’, Exod. 32. 7-14.
Thus, it was with Amos here in chapter 7, with its three visions of the judgements God would bring upon Israel. First, the locusts (grasshoppers), devouring and destroying the nation of Jacob, vv. 1-3. Second, the fire which even destroyed the great deep - a more drastic judgement even than the locusts, vv. 4-6. Finally, the plumbline testing the wall, against which there could be no effective intercession, and judgement upon Israel and the house of Jereboam be made final, vv. 7-9.
The power of the prophet’s intercessory prayer, ‘O Lord God, forgive, I beseech thee’, in the case of the locusts, turned God’s wrath and produced His promise it should not happen, v. 3. The same with the devouring fire judgement: when Amos cried, ‘O Lord God, cease, I beseech thee’, God again repented and turned from judgement. It is instructive to see that Amos’ intercession presented the argument of Israel’s helplessness and littleness, v. 2, and thus the necessity of God’s mercy or else His people were lost. How swiftly and graciously does God respond in both cases, ‘It shall not be’, when He is presented with such petitioning prayer.
May the example of these great intercessors of old grip our souls today, and may we learn the lesson, ‘The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much’, Jas. 5. 16.
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