The Intercession of Christ
I. While Christ's advocacy for us is a valuable part of His mediation and a comfort to timid petitioners, there is no doubt that it is very much exposed to serious and perilous misconception. Nothing is more easy than to push an analogy, drawn from human life, beyond that point at which it ceases to apply to the Divine. There is a false idea, according to which Jesus becomes the influential Patron to whose voice, pleading for His unfortunate clients, the ear of the Eternal is open, because He is the Father's Beloved and Jehovah's Fellow. The worst result of this perversion of the doctrine is that it splits the Divine character in two, and apportions its features between the First and Second of the blessed Persons. For the tendency of such a representation is to gather into the remoter Father, at whose judgment seat Jesus pleads, all the sterner attributes of anger, rigorous justice, and hardness to be won; while Jesus Christ becomes the peacable and gentle Friend, full of pity for our case, on whose good offices with His Father we have to build our hope.
II. How are we to represent to ourselves the intercession of Christ, while guarding with jealousy like Christ's own the spontaneous love of the Father? The Scriptural representation of Christ as an intercessor strengthens the faith of penitents, by holding before their mind the ceaseless virtue of His atonement as the sole ground of their acceptance. The Father has assuredly no need to be either prompted, or coaxed, or entreated to extend that mercy which it is the joy and glory of His Fatherhood to extend to every penitent. But we have need to be encouraged to trust in His mercy. Evermore, therefore, is that Man who bore our sins to be thought of as the right hand of advocacy. Beside the Father "of an infinite majesty," as well as infinite love, there is One above whose love is not more, but whose majesty is less. He lies closer in to a man than any one who is not a man can do. Let Him search us, and when by the mysterious link of human brotherhood He has thus known us in our adversity, let Him tell to the Father what we cannot tell. Let Him justify us, if He can, or confess for us, or pray in our name, as to His supreme gentleness shall seem meet; and it shall be well.
J. Oswald Dykes, Sermons,p. 176.