Moses once famously stopped God from destroying Israel. To do it, he disagreed completely (and vocally) with the Creator of the heavens and the earth, and we Christ-followers are called to have the courage to pray for ourselves and others with that kind of boldness.

Exodus 32 tells us the tense moment between God and His people, whom He had just liberated from Egypt. While Moses stayed at the top of Mount Sinai, where the narrative tells us that God was giving to him the Law, the children of Israel—newly freed from slavery— got itchy. They convinced Aaron, Moses’s brother and the first priest, to make a golden calf that they could worship.

From the mountain, God tells Moses what’s happening: “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves…. I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you” (Exod. 32:7, 9b-10).

God tells Moses to go away so He can end the people of Israel and start over with Moses. But Moses disagrees:

Exodus 32:11-13. Moses implored the LORD his God and said, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. Remember Abraham,
Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’”

Moses is God’s servant, not His equal. From my perspective, serving someone well means agreeing with them about everything. That, to my mind, is humble submission. But here, Moses disagrees with God—begs Him: Don’t do it, God! This isn’t like You! The Hebrew Bible, which keeps many speeches relatively brief, presents this as an extended oration where Moses begs Yahweh to change His mind from multiple angles.

God agrees with Moses’s reasoning. Here, He relents; He does not destroy the people. When Moses next ascends the mountain, Yahweh will show Moses His glory, defining Himself as a God of mercy and faithful love.

Psalm 106 recalls Moses’s actions in a hymn of praise to Yahweh for His deliverance of the children of Israel:

Psalm 106:19, 23. They made a calf in Horeb and worshiped a metal image.
……………………………………………………………
Therefore he (God) said he would destroy them— had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him,
to turn away his wrath from destroying them.

This section calls what Moses did for the people of Israel “standing in the breach”. According to Ezekiel, standing in the breach is an important function of a prophet. In Ezekiel’s indictment against false prophets, he lists a lack of this intercessory prayer as one of the characteristic failures of Israel’s false prophets leading up to the deportation to Babylon:¹

Ezekiel 13:4-5. Your prophets have been like jackals among ruins, O Israel. You have not gone up into the breaches, or built up a wall for the house of Israel, that it might stand in battle in the day of the LORD.

By criticizing false prophets for their failure of it, Ezekiel is claiming that part of the job of a prophet is to stand in the breach. It’s to intercede to God for mercy and grace on others’ behalf. These false prophets, he says, aren’t just liars, they’re liars who don’t even pray for people.

Perhaps Moses’ actions in Exodus are part of why Peter and Stephen both call Jesus the “prophet like Moses” in Acts.² Jesus, the New Testament tells us, is empowered to speak to God for us. Romans 8:34 tells us that he “indeed is interceding for us.” Jesus is praying for us to God, and as his followers, we should be praying for each other, too.

Can your local community count on you to be like Moses? When your friends or family are in dire straits, when it looks bleak and they are off the path, do you ask God for an extra measure of mercy? Might you have the courage to disagree with God about how long an answer to prayer is taking, how much support a friend is getting, how much strength a mentee has for the task at hand? God needs people in our day and time to do what Moses did.³

After Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, you do not need to be God’s prophet to pray boldly for others. On the contrary, Hebrews tells us that it is because of Jesus’ completed work that we can speak to God with boldness:

Hebrews 4:14-16. “Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

It is our business to be the kind of disciple who stands in the breach and to value others who do the same. When your community needs an extra helping of grace and mercy, will you step up?

1. Ezekiel 22:30 uses the same phrase to represent pleading God’s mercy: “And I sought for a man among them who should build up the wall and stand in the breach before me for the land, that I should not destroy it, but I found none” (emphasis mine). [↩]
2. See Acts 3:22 and 7:37.[↩]
3. It’s worth pointing out that when Moses stood in the breach, it did not mean that he approved of, participated in, or liked Israel’s sin of the golden calf. Even though he, too, was frustrated with the people’s actions, he reminded God of His mercy and asked Him for it.[↩]