The Friend of God

Three different books of the Bible call one man the same thing. A king, praying in a crisis, calls him “Abraham Your friend forever” (2 Chronicles 20:7). God Himself, speaking through Isaiah, says “Abraham My friend” (Isaiah 41:8). And James, writing to Christians, says “he was called the friend of God” (James 2:23). Nobody else in the Bible carries that title.

So what does a friend of God look like? Genesis 18 shows us. The visitors are leaving for Sodom, and before a word is said to Abraham, God asks Himself a question: “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing?” (18:17). God does not owe anyone an explanation. He tells Abraham anyway.

That is what friendship is in the Bible: being told. Moses had something like it — “the Lord spoke to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11). And Jesus puts it in exactly these terms: “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). A servant is given jobs. A friend is let in on the plan.

Jesus said something important in the verse just before. “You are My friends if you do whatever I command you” (John 15:14). Genesis teaches the same thing. God says He chose Abraham “in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice” (18:19). Friendship with God is never just a warm feeling. It comes with a way of living.

Abraham used what God told him to pray. He did not keep the secret to himself, and he did not run off to warn Lot. He stayed standing in front of the Lord (18:22) and began to pray for the city. The first thing God's friend did with God's plan was ask God for mercy.

Abraham spoke to God humbly. He did not talk like a servant who must stay silent, or like an equal who can make demands. “I who am but dust and ashes have taken it upon myself to speak to the Lord” (18:27). He knew he was small, and he spoke anyway. That is how a friend of God prays.

There is a phrase in Ezekiel that describes exactly what Abraham did in Genesis 18. God says: “I sought for a man among them who would make a wall, and stand in the gap before Me on behalf of the land, that I should not destroy it” (Ezekiel 22:30). Standing in the gap means putting yourself between God and people in trouble, and asking for mercy for them.

Abraham is the first person in the Bible to do it at length. The city was not his. The people were not his. He stood before the Lord and asked, from fifty all the way down to ten, that the place be spared. He did not base his prayer on how good the city was, or on how hard he kept asking. He based it on who God is: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (18:25).

Moses did it next, and for people who had just made a golden calf. “Turn from Your fierce wrath, and relent from this harm to Your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants” (Exodus 32:12-13). Moses leaned on the promises God had made to Abraham. And the Bible says, “So the Lord relented from the harm which He said He would do to His people” (32:14). Then Moses went further still: “Yet now, if You will forgive their sin—but if not, I pray, blot me out of Your book” (32:32).

Then, in Ezekiel, nobody. “But I found no one” (Ezekiel 22:30). It is one of the saddest lines in the prophets. God was looking for an Abraham, for a Moses, and there was no one standing in the gap.

And then Someone stood there who never stepped out of it. Isaiah said the Servant “made intercession for the transgressors” (53:12). On the cross, with the soldiers still at work, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34). And He has not stopped. Christ is “at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us” (Romans 8:34), and “He always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25).

So where does that leave you? Paul writes, “I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men” (1 Timothy 2:1). Praying for other people — even people who are not yours, even people who have done wrong — is not a special job for a few. It is what friends of God do. And when you do it, you are doing it alongside the One who is already standing in the gap for you.