Moses personally did one of the most amazing things in all of the Old Testament – he got God to change His mind!

When Moses was up on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights with God the Father getting the 10 commandments and many of the other basic laws and commandments that God was wanting His people to live by, the Israelites were down at the bottom of the mountain making a false idol by way of a golden calf.

When God sees this, He becomes so furious that He literally wants to consume the Israelites right there on the spot. However, when Moses sees how mad God is getting and what He is wanting to do to these people, Moses immediately “step into the gap” for his people and begins trying to reason and plead with God as to why He should change His mind and not kill them.

Here is the verse that tells you word-for-word what Moses said to God to get Him to change His mind:

Then Moses pleaded with the Lord his God, and said: “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 speak, and say, “He brought them out to harm them, to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’

Turn from Your fierce wrath, and relent from this harm to 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 descendants as the stars of heaven; and all this land that I have spoken of I give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.” “So the Lord relented from the harm which He said He would do to His people.” (Exodus 32:11-14)

This part of Moses’ story shows you the power of intercessory prayer and what prayer can accomplish if God is properly approached. God can be moved to answer prayer, especially prayers that come from the heart. Standing in the gap means you personally stand in the gap for someone else. You are praying to God for someone else.

Sometimes people may be to weak to pray for themselves. Other times some people are either not saved or they have no real personal relationship established with God and are not confident enough to get God to answer their personal prayers. There could be many different reasons as to why you would have to stand in the gap for someone else and go to God and ask Him to do something specific for that other person.

Moses gives a perfect example on how to step into the gap to intercede for someone else. If Moses can do this, so can any other Christian who has established a good, working relationship with the Lord. This type of prayer can save lives, transform lives, and alter the course of natural events. There are other Scripture verses that say we can approach God to reason with Him, to state our case before Him. This means God can be talked to, reasoned with, pleaded with, and sometimes persuaded to change His mind on something.

Moses is a very good role model and example on how to go into intercessory prayer with God the Father for someone else.

(From Bible Knowledge)

Read more about intercessory prayer in my posts about from a book by Dutch Sheets here.