#549 THE VISION OF THE HOLY (An awesome privilege)
Isaiah 6:1-13 (NASB) Isaiah 6:8 ”Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ And He said, ‘Go, and tell this people: “Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking , but do not understand.” Render the hearts of this people insensitive, Their ears dull, And their eyes dim, Lest they see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand with their hearts, And return and be healed.’” Message One
Introduction
My sense of “oughtness” for our time together leads me to Isaiah 6 on the theme of the “The Vision of the Holy.”
[Isaiah 6:1-13 is read with vv. 8-10 emphasized as the heart or theological intention of the chapter in the context of the prophecy of Isaiah.]
Our Scripture passage for this week is the vision report narrated in chapter 6 of the marvelous prophecy which bears the name of the eighth century Isaiah of Jerusalem. It is significant that this vision, reported somewhat in the form of a call narrative, does not occur at the beginning of the book as do the calls of Jeremiah (1:1-4) and Ezekiel (1:1—3:27), and therefore designed to legitimize them as messengers of God—the normal function of the call narrative. Rather as we have already vividly seen, Isaiah’s vision follows five chapters of prophecies of judgment and oracles of hope, thus closing the introduction to the Book of Isaiah and serving as a transition to what follows.
This means that we are to view Isaiah 6 not so much as a call narrative legitimizing Isaiah as a prophet, but more as a vision report, legitimizing Isaiah’s message of judgment to Israel as suggested by God’s instructions to him in verse 9:
And He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking, but do not understand.’”
Almost incomprehensible to our religious sensibilities, Isaiah’s commission was “not merely to proclaim judgment upon his people, but to bring it on them by this very message.”
Seen from this perspective it is obvious that Isaiah’s VISION OF THE HOLY in chapter 6 “is intended to authenticate the entire Vision” of Isaiah. Isaiah’s own role in this unusual chapter even for Scripture can be said to be “in some important sense, paradigmatic,” that is, he stands for Israel itself. In the context of Isaiah’s prophecies in a real though brief way this chapter answers then the question posed by the first five chapters, the question that “the rest of the book answers it in a more involved way. How can this Israel become that Israel?”
So Isaiah 6 “clearly fundamental to the entire course of Isaiah’s ministry and to the shape of his book.” This revelation of the glory of God to Isaiah and his searing conviction of God as holy determined the character of his ministry and defines the prophetic book which bears his name. In Isaiah God is supremely the “Holy One of Israel” (1:4; 5:24; 10:17).
So the theme we will be exploring with you in this powerful Old Testament passage in the messages to come is
THE VISION OF THE HOLY
As we work our way through Isaiah 6 our sub-topics will be the Vision of the Holy is . . .
A Vision of the Transcendent, vv. 1-4 A Vision of Sin and Grace, vv. 5-8 A Vision of Judgment and Hope, vv. 8-13
I.
The hub around which the wheel of this significant chapter turns is verse 8:
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for Us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I, Send me!’”
The contemporary question for us out of this text is clear and simple: What is our calling from God as a Church, as a people set apart for ministry in the world? Two things appear obvious in this regard from Isaiah’s vision:
First, and most significant, God call us to be a “holy” people and to a “holiness” ministry. These are a cliché perhaps to us, but overwhelmingly and fearfully profound in the context of Isaiah. But what does this mean? As I observe the Church of the Nazarene in the midst of the 20th century American culture and as an integral part of its pop evangelical Christianity, the answer is far from obvious! So I am not sure I know who we are as I have watched us in action for the years that have transpired since my ordination as an elder in the Church of the Nazarene in 1956 in Nebraska. As I get faint glimpses of what is going on in our church culture as generated by the ethos of our post-modern age, there may even be two Nazarene churches, a spiritual left and a religious right!
In the1980’s I entered on a personal quest in some agony of soul as to the essence of my own “holiness” heritage. I asked myself what does it mean to minister in a “holiness” tradition? To be a “holiness” person, a member of a “holiness” church?
My most penetrating personal insights have come from the Old Testament, particularly Exodus 20:18-21. Verse 21 struck me: “The people remained at a distance, while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was” (NIV). In these verses I am finding a perspective within which I am able, at least to my mind, to see more satisfactorily the fulfillment of the holy in the person and ministry of Jesus. I am intrigued as well by Hosea 11:1-9, the focus of the exegetical task in my Hebrew class.
I was intrigued as well by Hosea 11:9, which was the focus of the exegetical task in my Hebrew class a time or two:
I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not destroy Epraim again. For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, And I will not come in wrath.
I find the Old Testament relevant to the concerns of my New Testament faith, for we would have a far less pagan Christian faith if we did more justice in our pulpits to the Old Testament witness to the person and character of God! We need to be reminded that the declaration of Moses to the Israelites that “the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24), characterizes as well the God of the New Testament Christian. As the writer to the Hebrews exhorts:
Therefore, since we receive a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show gratitude by which we may offer to God an acceptable sacrifice with reverence and awe; for our God is a consuming fire (12:28-29. Bold is mine).
In recent years Isaiah 6 has become one of the passages I cannot leave alone. I have been coming back to it again and again for several years in an attempt to probe its depth for my own heart and ministry. It leads me directly in a very concrete way to the biblical essence of the holy as it permeates the prophetic ministry of Isaiah and the great book that bears his name. So if our calling by biblical and theological heritage is to be a “holiness” people on the evangelical scene, if our calling is to a “holiness” ministry in an unholy world that has lost its moral footing, perhaps Isaiah can help us with his vision at the heart of his great book.
II.
Second, in verse 8 we are called to be a “servant” people of God in the world. But how is this to be? How can it happen to us?
Isaiah declares in his prophecy that “sinful, arrogant Israel is going to be the holy people of God to whom the nations will come to learn of God.” How can sinful Israel become servant Israel, for they were indeed a sinful people? Isaiah’s opening words in 1:2-3 declare:
Listen, O heavens, and hear, O earth: For the LORD speaks, “Sons I have reared and brought up, But they have revolted against Me.
An ox knows its owner, And a donkey its master’s manger, But Israel does not know, My people do not understand.”
These verses begin-a litany of judgment that continues for twelve more verses—until verse 15.
And yet . . .
“You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “And My servant whom I have chosen” (43:10a).
“I will also make you a light of the nations So that My salvation may reach to The end of the earth” (49:6b).
How can sinful Israel become servant Israel? The solution to this problem is found here in chapter 6, in the vision of Isaiah, for only when the experience of the prophet Isaiah, articulated in this chapter, becomes the experience of the people as a nation will they be able to fulfill their servant calling as a holy people. This Scripture declares that only when a people has a true vision of the holy, only when they have seen themselves against the backdrop of the holiness and glory of God, and are exposed to his judgment and to his grace can they be a servant people to a broken and hungry world.
May I suggest that our need is no different than was theirs. When we have a true vision of the holy as a people, and as individuals, when we can see and continue to see ourselves vividly and unforgettably in the context of the holiness and the glory of the transcendent God in our world and we have become totally vulnerable to his judgment and to his grace, then and only then, will we in or individual and corporate lives be the servant presence of God to a morally lost society and in the midst of a spiritually confused people, as we Americans are today who see the cross of Jesus primarily in the light of the subtle pagan motifs of American culture. As Teresa of Avila put it, “We are fonder of consolations than we are of the cross.”
So we look to the vision which is essential to a “holiness” people whose calling is to be a “servant” people. This morning THE VISION OF THE HOLY is
Message Two
In our opening message we took an introductory look in Isaiah 6 at the Vision of the Holy that is essential to be a “holiness” people, whose calling, therefore, is to be a servant people. We saw in Isaiah that
THE VISION OF THE HOLY is
A Vision of the Transcendent One (6:1-4) A Vision of Sin and Grace (6:5-8) A Vision of Judgement and Hope (6:9-13)
So this today we look at the Vision of the Holy as
A Vision of the Transcendent One (6:1-4)
In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said, “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, The whole earth is full of His glory.” And the foundations of the thresholds trembled a the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke.
We suggested that although Isaiah 6 serves certainly to legitimize Isaiah as a prophet, it most importantly reinforces his message of God’s judgment on Israel:
“Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking, but do not understand”
as that judgment is expressed in 6:9.
[Read 6:1-4. Get the scene in your mind, lips, ears, sacrament of the Word]
John Oswalt, suggests that whether Isaiah’s vision was actual, ecstatic, or mystical, has no bearing on its reality for Isaiah’s ministry. What matters is that he saw the LORD in such a way as to change the shape of the rest of his life. But most probably Isaiah had a real vision, “I saw!” he writes. “the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted” (6:1).
Simplistically in my mind Isaiah was in church, at least he was where the church in worship ought to be—in the presence of a holy God! Physically he was probably at the entrance of the Jerusalem temple, but his vision was of the throne room of God in the heavenly palace of the King, God surrounded by his heavenly council.
From this scene it is obvious that Isaiah experienced God that day as
I. A holy mystery! (vv. 1-2)
Isaiah “saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted . . .”
1.
For an Israelite like Isaiah it was a monstrous conception. Isaiah knew of Yahweh’s admonition to Moses in Exodus 33 when Moses in his desperate and daring intercession for golden calf Israel (c. 32) had asked Yahweh, “show me Thy glory!” (v. 18), Yahweh responded, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live” (v. 20; cf. Deuteronomy 5:2-26). Visualizing this awesome scene, the sensitive Jewish and Christian reader “is with Isaiah and feels the raw edge of terror at being where humanity dare not go.” R. C. Sproul, a contemporary theologian, author, and popular conference speaker, opens his treatment in The Holiness of God with the report of a midnight college experience. “I was alone with God. A holy God. An awesome God. A God who could fill me with terror in one second and with peace the next.”
“I saw the Lord”: For Isaiah it was first of all a vision of “the Lord,” `”Lord” in Hebrew is Adonai not Yahweh or LORD. It was not the untranslatable sacred name, the tetragrammaton, that we render “LORD” or “Yahweh.” Oswalt suggests that the title “Lord” refers to God as the Sovereign One, “the absolute overlord of the earth with whom all people have to do.” It was a vision of absolute sovereignty! Significantly Isaiah does not describe Yahweh himself, for he is exalted so high that just the hem of his royal robe fills the palace, nor does he describe the seraphim. Isaiah saw only his robe and the seraphim. As reported in the covenant ceremony on Mount Sinai in Exodus 24:10 the nobles of the Israelites:
they saw the God of Israel, and under His feet there appeared to be a pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself.
As Oswalt comments,
It is as though words break down when one attempts to depict God himself. . . . Did the robe fill the temple? No, God did! The import is clear. There is a barrier beyond which the simply curious cannot penetrate. The experience is too personal, too awesome, too all-encompassing for mere reportage. Each one of us must aspire to our own experience of his presence.”
2.
For Isaiah, it was also an overwhelming sight, intensified in verse 2 with the sight of the flying fiery seraphim. Since fiery was probably the chief meaning of the term for seraphim (Numbers 21:6) we can say that the presence of the seraphim speaks to us of fiery presence of God’s holiness. Stressed is God’s separation and difference as holy from the merely human realm—the “Wholly Other” in the language of Rudolf Otto.
For the prophet Isaiah that day, although intensely aware in that sacred moment of Yahweh’s presence in what he has seen, the holy remains Yahweh’s “hidden and innermost being.” So first and most of all as Kaiser suggests “the Holy One is the wholly other, whom man cannot reach by himself, who remains far away and terrible, unless each man turns to Him in His free grace, which cannot be forced and cannot be merited.” God is a holy mystery indeed!
To worship is to discover oneself in some real sense in the presence of a holy mystery. Like Moses before the burning bush, it is to stand on holy ground (Exodus 3:5); like the disciples on the Emmaus Road, it is to have our hearts burning within us because of the presence of the Risen Christ as he opened the Scripture to them (Luke 24:32). In a class one day years ago at Claremont Graduate School, I was startled to hear the little German Bultmannian scholar, Hans Dieter Betz, declare that there is no worship without ecstacy!
Sproul writes that “a recent survey of ex-church members revealed that the main reason they stopped going to church was that they found it boring.” The response of the evangelical church to this yuppie phenomenon has been in part “entertainment as worship” in full contemporary TV style!
I have to ask, can there be such a thing as a “holiness” church and a “holiness” ministry without “the experience of the holy” as the essence of our worship? Why is it often difficult for our “people to find worship a thrilling and moving experience” and therefore leave our fellowship for more liturgical or charismatic styles of worship—or even a so-called “Bible” church?. I am becoming convinced that there is no such thing as a “holiness” people or a “holiness” church without the presence of the holy. And it takes more than enthusiastic reminders that “God is here!” mixed with the typical Protestant moralism to make for a meaningful worship experience. What is the implication of Isaiah’s vision for our corporate and individual worship times? Is it not the absolute necessity of a sense of the Transcendent among us?
So back to Isaiah’s Vision of the Transcendent. I find it significant that Isaiah’s vision took place “in the year of King Uzziah’s death” for it was a time of crisis in the mind of the prophet. Uzziah’s reign had been a long and good reign of 52 years, politically stable, accomplished in part by paying tribute to a militant Assyrian power, but the kind of king in whom one could focus one’s hopes and trust. He had been a better king than many, “marvelously helped until he was strong” (2 Chronicles 26:15).
So now what will happen
when such a king dies, and coupled with that death there comes the recognition that a resurgent Assyria is pushing nearer and nearer? In moments like that it is easy to see the futility of any hope but an ultimate one. No earthly king could help Judah in that hour.” It was in such a day of national and personal crisis that Isaiah’s vision brought to him
II. A Holy Perspective! (vv. 3-4)
The personal crucial times in our lives demand a holy perspective, and we do live in a crucial time in our heritage and in our church--in our beloved land whose freedom we celebrate this very day!
1.
The seraphim sang called out,
“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory.”
Here is the crux of Isaiah’s vision. The threefold repetition, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” is “the strongest form of the superlative in Hebrew.” Sproul spins it out:
To mention something three times in succession is to attach to it emphasis of super importance. For example the dreadful judgment of God is declared in the Book of Revelation by the eagle in mid-air who cried with a loud voice: “Woe! Woe! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth. . . .” Or we hear it in the mocking sarcasm of Jeremiah’s temple speech when he chided the people for their hypocrisy, by which thy call out, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.” Only once in sacred Scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree. Only once is a characteristic of God mentioned three times in succession. The Bible says that God is holy, holy, holy. Not that he is merely holy, or even holy, holy. He is holy, holy, holy. The Bible never says that God is love, love, love, or mercy, mercy, mercy, or wrath, wrath, wrath, or justice, justice, justice. It does day that He is holy, holy, holy, the whole earth is full of His glory.
As the seraphim praise the holiness and glory of God, the divine designation moves from ‘Adonay to Yahweh Sabaoth, the covenant name of Israel’s God and commander-in-chief of the heavenly armies. It is a personal name, Israel’s own name for their God.
It is significant that the vision also proceeds from eye to ear, from sight to hearing, for “the content of this experience is not merely numinous, emotive, and nonrational. . . . revelation does not come merely through raw experience, but also through divinely given cognitive interpretation of that experience (see also v. 7).” Revelation is meant to be understandable! “Hear, O Israel” (Deuteronomy 6:4) is basic to the faith of the Old Testament, and “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Mark 4:9) is at the heart of the New Testament faith.
What was the “Holy, Holy, Holy” that Isaiah saw, that Isaiah heard? What did the holy mean for him? Against the backdrop of the concept in the ancient world, Oswalt summarizes that
For Isaiah the announcement of God’s holiness meant that he was in the presence of One distinct from—other than—himself. But for Isaiah as a Hebrew, it also meant that the terrifying otherness was not merely in essence but in character. Here was one ethically pure, absolutely upright, utterly true.
As always before a holy God we are faced with the mystery of revelation which “at the same time both unveils and increases the mystery of God. For God ‘can be glorified aright only when he is known as the Holy One, when he, the mysterious One, proclaims his mystery.’” The saints discovered that often the closer you get to God the farther away he seems. It is difficult to glorify a domesticated God as it seems we so often try—my heart hungers for a holy God!
2.
And according to the song of the seraphim the Holy One proclaims his glory in the earth:
“The whole earth is full of His glory!”
“God’s ‘holiness is his hidden, concealed glory. . . But his glory is his holiness revealed.’” “’holy’ denotes God’s innermost nature. . . . his ‘glory describes the appearance of his being. God is known through his work.” But in many ways we are “blind to the glory of God to which all reality bears witness, until [we are] convinced of his holiness,” for “only someone who know his holiness recognizes his glory.” In the language of the 16th century John of the Cross,
Here lies the remarkable delight of this awakening: the soul know creatures through God and not God through creatures. . . . where God is unknown nothing is known.
In that supreme moment Isaiah senses in all around him the reality of a holy God, the revelation of the glory of the Transcendent One. A vivid awareness of the holy was penetrating Isaiah’s view of all human and earthly reality. Everything now spoke to him of the Holy.
3.
But the vision continues . . .
“the foundations of the thresholds trembled” (v. 4): “The heavenly song of praise is too much for this earth: it makes the temple shake on its foundations, so that the doors, with their pivots set in corner-stones, shake (cf. Kings 6.31, 33f.; also Amos 9:1).” Just like a California earthquake! “I am glad I am a Christian!” was the exclamation of a lady setting by me in the Bethel Baptist Church in East San Diego, a black congregation, on the Sunday morning of one of our more severe earthquakes.
My mind goes to Acts 4:31 to another experience of the reality of the Holy when Luke tells us that when the apostles
had prayed, the place where they had gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak the word of God with boldness.
My mind goes also to the Negro spiritual which takes us all the way to the heart of the holy in its lyric:
Were you there when they crucified my Lord, . . . O sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble . . .
We notice one more detail: the temple was filling with smoke—“holy smoke” (incense!). Alan Krieder in his stimulating study, Journey Towards Holiness, written out of the Anabaptist tradition, gives the smoke a meaningful context for us as he summarizes holiness as
A living force, unseen but very real. This force is a mysterious power, an awesome reality which fits into no normal human categories. To describe it, people have compared it to physical substances—light, fire, smoke, power. They have described its quality—powerful, pure, radiant, sublime. They have reported their own emotional responses to it—fear, joy, awkwardness, awareness of guilt, fascination, reverence. But the reality of holiness has always transcended language. It is “a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures . . .that which is beyond conception or understanding, extraordinary and unfamiliar.”
It was a time in the life of Isaiah when his sight and his insight were lifted above the affairs of daily life to the presence of the transcendent! And the whole of his own life and all the affairs of the nation were seen in a new perspective, the perspective of the awe-full reality of a holy God! We too need the perspective of a holy, transcendent God. Perhaps we cannot have an experience as powerfully vivid as Isaiah’s, but we can have one just as real in essence. After all WHY do we come to church? I believe it can happen as we lead our people honestly, forthrightly, humbly, and prayerfully through the Word to the foot of the Cross where the Holy has touched our world most profoundly—“the lifted up Son of Man!”
Its inner reality should happen to us weekly, and I fully believe that it can happen to us daily in an effective devotional discipline, a daily renewal of the vision of the Holy for our on lives, an encounter with the reality of
I the chief of sinners am, But Jesus died for me.
This can be so even if our devotional times seem “useless” like those Henri Nouwen describes in Gracias! Where he writes in Bolivia of his daily hour in the Carmelite chapel:
Still the Lord speaks to me, looks at me, and embraces me there, where I am still unable to notice it. . . . Yes, I notice . . . that my days and weeks are different days and weeks when they are held together by these regular ‘useless’ times. God is greater than my senses, greater than my thoughts, greater than my heart. I do believe that he touches me in places that are unknown even to myself. . . . I realize that something is happening that is so deep that it becomes like the riverbed through which the waters can safely flow and find their way to the open sea.
As we get in touch with the holy, without which there is no holiness life or witness, we are lifted above . . . and can see above, beyond, and through . . . ! That is what I want to happen to me when I hear you preach! All in our individual worlds seen in the perspective of the reality of the Transcendent One!
Thomas Merton with penetrating insight pens our closing word concerning the Transcendent:
It is dangerous to talk glibly about the infinite God. It is sometimes dangerous to talk about Him at all, unless talking of Him brings you deeper into His mystery, and finally flattens you into silence in the face of his transcendence!
Hardly a domesticated God, but a holy Presence! A holy Mystery! A holy perspective—the Vision of the Transcendent! To what extent is the bottom line our prayerlessness?
We close with a story first told by Anthony Bloom in Beginning to Pray, then cited by Richard Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, who writes,
Anthony Bloom tells the story of an elderly woman who had been working at prayer with all her might but without ever sensing God’s presence. Wisely the archbishop encouraged the old woman to go to her room each day and “for fifteen minutes knit before the face of God, but I forbid you to say one word of prayer. You just knit and enjoy the peace of your room.” The woman received this counsel, and at first her only thought was, “Oh how nice. I have been fifteen minutes during which I can do nothing without being guilty!” In time, however, she began to enter the silence created by her knitting. Soon, she said, “I perceived that this silence was not simply an absence of noise, but that the silence had substance. It was not absence of something but presence of something.” As she continued her daily knitting, she discovered that “at the heart of the silence there was He who is all stillness, all peace, all poise.” She had let go of her tightfisted efforts to enter God’s presence and, by doing so, discovered God’s presence already there.
Message Three
Introductory Transition
Since we left off with Thomas Merton we begin with him, with a word that shatters our domesticated God: That the most important consequence of God’s transcendence is “the necessity of faith” is his programmatic statement for our return to Isaiah’s vision
In our examination of Isaiah 6 thus far we have seen that it is the Vision of the Holy as a vivid sense of the reality of the Transcendent that must characterize a “holiness” people. We saw that the Vision of the transcendent (vv.1-4) was
an encounter with a Holy Mystery (6:1-2) that graces to us a Holy Perspective (6:3-4)
We explore further its necessary impact on us as a people, on our lives, and on our ministries. So as we give our attention to verses 5-8 we see that THE VISION OF THE HOLY becomes . . .
A Vision of Sin and Grace (6:5-8)
Then I said, “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, with a burning coal in his hand which he had taken from the altar with tongs. And he touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.” Then I heard the voiced of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
Isaiah’s vision of the holy penetrated to the very core of his moral and spiritual life. May we ask, are we ready for that to take place in our lives? Or are we more often like the Israelites that day at Sinai when God gave them the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:
When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear. They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, “Speak to us yourself and we will listen. But do not have God speak to us or we will die. Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid. God has come to test you, so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” The people remained at a distance while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was (Exodus 20:18-21, NIV).
Tragic words! But are we like them content to live by charisma—a charismatic leader between us and the soul-penetrating reality of the holy?
I am intrigued by how Phineas Bresee speaks in his Sermons on Isaiah of the effect on the prophet:
This revelation to Isaiah was so sudden, vast, and deep, and so far-reaching that it overwhelmed him. It is difficult for us to appreciate his situation, for these things have come to us gradually. We spell out these great truths syllable by syllable, and we can hardly conceive the bursting of this full-orbed sun upon his twilight, like a glowing, shining, burning revelation by the personal appearance of the divine Christ. He says, “the house was filled with smoke”—it was really the darkness of eyes turned suddenly toward the sunlight. It was the confusion of the conflict in his own soul. Probably few men ever got a view of their greater need of a more perfect transformation. But the first effect was dimness of vision in his own soul as his own spiritual temple was filled with smoke. But Isaiah abode in the vision and his eyes began to get accustomed to the new light—and he began to see some things, and those things were in reference to himself. He says, “Woe is me! for I: am undone.”
So as we move through the text see first—
I. The condition of Isaiah! (v. 5)
Then I said, "Woe is me, for (ki) I am ruined! Because (ki) I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For (ki) my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts."
We begin to see the effect of the vision of the holy on the prophet.
1.
“Woe” is a strong word of prophetic denunciation. It is an announcement of doom, used by Jesus to pronounce judgment on the heads of the Pharisees. When Isaiah
saw the Lord, he pronounced the judgment of God upon himself. ‘Woe to me!’ he cried calling down the curse of God, the utter anathema of judgment and doom upon his own head.
It was one thing for a prophet to curse another person in the name of God; it was quite another for a prophet to put the curse upon himself. The prophet was bearing witness to the fact that his very existence was threatened. As Childs comments, Isaiah is “awestruck, not because he is only a mortal before the infinite, but because he is a sinful human being, sharing the impurity of an entire nation. In the presence of the Holy One he perceives his true state.”
In the Hebrew text Isaiah’s “Woe is me” is defined by three ki (“because”) clauses, parallel to one another and consequential on each other—
Why? Because, why? Because, why?
Because, “Woe is me!” Why?
Because—“for I am ruined”! Or cut off, destroyed, silent, “undone” (KJV)--the prophetic protest? Isaiah is suddenly and brutally aware of himself. Radical confrontation with himself has brought him to despair. He came apart at the seams, unraveled. As a man of integrity, respected by his contemporaries as a paragon of virtue, Isaiah
caught one sudden glimpse of a Holy God. In that single moment all of his self-esteem was shattered. In a brief second he was exposed, made naked beneath the gaze of the absolute standard of holiness. As long as Isaiah could compare himself to other mortals, he was able to maintain a lofty opinion of his own character. The instant he measured himself by the ultimate standard, he was destroyed—morally and spiritually annihilated. He was undone. He came apart. His sense of integrity collapsed.
Such an experience does not fit the self-sufficient spirit of our age!
Because “I am cut off” . . . Why?
”Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips”
This is clearly a reason clause.
Why? Because “for my eyes have seen the king, the LORD of Hosts [Yahweh Sebaoth].”
As Moses heard the voice of God in Exodus 33:20: “no man can see Me and live.” Isaiah “and all his contemporaries were certain that no man can survive the vision of God.” And there is a real sense in which none of us can! Strange indeed to our ears who have grown accustomed to the domesticated God of our cultural scene—a God who forgives us any old time for any old thing! This is a modern perverted version of Martin Luther’s famous dictum, ”simul justus et peccator—at the same time justified but still a sinner.”
2.
At the heart of Isaiah’s confession is the emphatic “I,” as indicated by the order of the Hebrew and the use of the personal pronoun `anoki—“a man unclean of lips am I, and among a people unclean of lips I am living!” Isaiah took full responsibility for his condition! It is “not the recognition of his finitude which crushes Isaiah; it is his uncleanness.” The element of the holiness of the God of Israel that is distressing to Isaiah is not so much God’s message as it is his character that engulfed him like a cloud of smoke! And where there is smoke, there is fire! Isaiah “recognizes with sickening force that his character is not, any more than is his people’s, in keeping with God’s character.”
Note the language Isaiah employs (v. 5): “I . . . a people” (1:5b; 2:7f.), Isaiah experienced sin as personal and corporate, as intensive and extensive! He saw himself as a responsible part of the society of his day. We face two dangers before the vision of the holy, the danger of saying “not ‘I’” or the danger of saying “not the ‘people’”! In the flash of the moment Isaiah had a new and radical understanding of sin. He saw that it was pervasive, in himself and everybody else.
“Unclean lips” signifies that one is “cut off from any contact with the holy.” Isaiah was suddenly awareness of how far he really was from God! Like the saints through the centuries, the closer they came to God, often the further they felt they were from God. Their use of the darkness metaphor was a testimony to this. Light becomes darkness! The more that evidences of so-called spiritual “success” grace our lives, the more aware we become of our spiritual failures!
“Lips” represent the whole person. Why else do lover’s kiss? Here “lips” are symbolic of the “uncleanness of the whole person, whose condition and disposition they express (Matthew 15:18ff. Cf. James 3:6-12).” ”For the mouth speaks out of that which fills the heart” (Matthew 12:34; cf. 12:33-37): If our mouth is dirty, Jesus says, we are dirty! Perhaps here is a clue to our lack of anointing! The ability of others to sense God’s presence in our lives! Too many off-color jokes, too much talk about others not motivated by love and edification! Too much unnecessary gossip? Too much ecclesiastical cynicism? Ever wake up, reflecting on your words of yesterday, and feel dirty? And what do we do with the words of Jesus?
“And I say to you, that every careless word that men shall speak, they shall render account for it on the day of judgment. For by your words you shall be justified, and by your words you shall be condemned” (Matthew 12:36-37).
These words call for an identity with Isaiah’s cry of moral and spiritual anguish,
“Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.“
Isaiah, “for the first time in his life Isaiah really understood who God was. At the same instant, for the first time Isaiah really understood who Isaiah was.”
What are we church folk, we proclaimers of holiness, doing about the lack in our culture of a sense of a moral universe, the absence of the sense of the holy as an ethical sanction? We work on the symptoms, but what about the cultural cause? Are we doing justice to the majesty and holiness of God in our services—in our own lives—until there is a consciousness of the Transcendent? Until the moral is mandated by the Holy!
Or are we preaching a God more designed to meet man’s needs rather than a holy God who has his demands on us—A God of psychological adjustment rather than God in a God of holy ethical reqjiremets? No wonder even in our so-called holiness churches morality is a relative matter in the lives of our people, there is little awareness of a holy God and consequently little convicting! Conviction of sin, of ultimate right and wrong—all behavior becomes merely pragmatic and expedient! The right ends justifies the means.
For biblically the Vision of the Holy meets us as a vision of radical sinfulness! We become aware that we have no place to stand before God. Like the Psalmist
If thou, LORD, shouldst mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee, That thou mayest be feared (Psalm 130:3f., KJV)
With Isaiah we are reduced to utter silence!
God is inescapable. There is no place we can hide from Him. Not only does He penetrate every aspect of our lives, but He penetrates it in his majestic holiness. Therefore . . . there can be no worship, no spiritual growth, no true obedience without it [the Holy].
But look now at II. The Cure of God (vv. 6-7)
Then one of the seraphim flew to me, with a burning coal in his hand which he had taken from the altar with tongs. And he touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.”
1.
The holy God is a God of grace! But Sin is so absolutely serious it needs the action of a holy God—Our God is “a consuming fire, a jealous God” (Deuteronomy 4:24; see Hebrews 12:29)—that is how serious sin is in your life and mine!
The imagery of the temple continues, and once again the earthly temple is absorbed in the heavenly. We are placed not in the courtyard where the altar of whole burnt offering is located, but in the main chamber of the temple containing the altar of incense, placed even closer to the Holy of Holies. There Isaiah saw “one of the seraphim” flying to him “with a burning coal in his hand which he had taken from the altar with tongs.” This altar, standing midway between the altar where bloody sacrifices were made for the sins of the people and the Mercy Seat in the Holy of Holies where the blood for atonement was sprinkled, speaks powerfully to us of the Cross of Christ. Here “holy” equals “Cross.” The Cross is holy fire “from off the altar’ for it is applied to our hearts out of the fiery heart of the Holy God.
”The seraphim,” Isaiah says, “touched my mouth with it.” Only the “lips” of Isaiah were touched, not those of the people. The message of Isaiah to the nation was to be that of judgment, yet a prophetic message in the person of the prophet himself! “Lips,” one of the more sensitive and intimate parts of human flesh, the meeting point of the kiss, meant that “for Isaiah this was a severe mercy, a painful act of cleansing. Isaiah’s wound was being cauterized. . . . He was being refined by holy fire.” The man “of unclean lips” is “touched” at the point of his uncleaness, his “lips”! The action of grace is penetrating and transforming. Fire is an age-long symbol of transformation in all cultures. It is most significant that Isaiah, a prophet with a message to speak, was touched on the “mouth,” for “lips” are the vehicle of the word. We move our lips to speak
The healing word from the arena of the Holy to the person of Isaiah was, “your iniquity is removed and your sin is covered.” The chiastic construction in Hebrew (“removed . . . iniquity . . . sin . . . covered” in Hebrew order) contains a defining parallelism indicating a comprehensive work of forgiveness, cleansing and sanctification—a permeating all encompassing work of grace in the heart and life! No “cheap grace” or easy forensic utterance here! Gone are all the barriers in Isaiah’s life to the presence of God in his life and to a life of obedience among the people. Phineas Bresee writes:
Isaiah stood face to face with Divine love and power. He pressed his needy spirit up to God. And that thing occurred which always will occur when human need and Divine love meet and mingle in the revelation of Jesus Christ. The fire touched him. The seraph flew bearing a live coal from off the altar, and, touching his lips said, “Lo, this has touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is purged.”
Listen to the increasing intensity of Bresee’s rhetoric
O the mystery, the power, and the glory of that touch of fire. How it kissed Isaiah’s soul into new and nearer relation to God! How it whitened the dark lines out of his being! How it burned in its purifying power through his spirit! How it cleared the clouds of smoke away! How it prepared him to stand for God witnessing to His great salvation! Isaiah trod the way just before us. He entered into the Holy of Holies just ahead of us, but we too are come unto Him who baptizes with fire.
2.
Isaiah’s vision is one of radical sinfulness. Sin is so subtle, so permeating, that it takes a piercing vision of the Holy for us to see, and to continue seeing—all that is unlike Christ in our day-to-day living. Hopelessly inadequate are our pet moralisms, our rules or little legalisms by which we so easily justify ourselves. Those behaviors that were so “right” for us yesterday, we see so differently today in the light of new glimpses of the Holy. As Kreider puts it
the experience of God as Living Force—as light, power, joy-giver—is literally life-giving. This puts other things in perspective. How pure and loving God is! When, we like Isaiah, have seen the Holy One, we will also see ourselves as we are—both unholy and infinitely loved. Without this experience of God as Living Force, “holiness” can produce a religion that, although rational and moral, is cramped and dessicated.
As we write our lives, like every writer, we need an editor, the Divine editor! I need a discipline of heart that brings me daily into the presence of the holy, I must have a burning bush, a live coal, a burning heart! As a Trappist novice master once said, the reality of the Holy means that “to be a Christian is not to know the answers but to be a person who is able to live in the part of the self where the question exists.”
Not one day can I afford to be without a vision of the holy. Steve Harper in his delightful little study, Devotional Life in the Wesleyan Tradition, tells us that Wesley in addition to his morning and evening prayers had
trained his mind to pray on the hour. These prayers were usually brief, sentence prayers of praise. They were Wesley’s way of bring the events of his life before God. After this . . . he normally spent the next five to seven minutes in meditation.
We need to get where Moses was in Exodus 33, “If Thy presence does not go. . . “ (v. 15). We need to allow God to prove himself holy in our lives (Ezekiel 36:23). ). In his sermon on verse 8 Phineas Bresee observes that
The men who see farthest into the heavens, see farthest into human need. . . . The depths of our gaze into heaven is the measure of the strength to do God’s work. . . . A man is never quite so active as when he is gathering into his bosom the lightnings which play around the throne.
Now we have a context fully adequate context for
III. The Call of the Prophet (v. 8)
Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I, Send me!”
Sproul writes that Isaiah
Was not Humpty Dumpty. . . . Isaiah was shattered into as many pieces as any fallen egg. But God put him together again. God was able to take a shattered man and send him into the ministry. He took a sinful man and made him a prophet. He took a man with a dirty mouth and made him God’s spokesman.
1.
Isaiah heard! As the seventeenth century poet put it,
Your ports are all superfluous here, Save that which lets in faith, the ear.
Isaiah’s response was a most unusual response. A strong objection is the normal first response in a call narrative, Moses in Exodus 3-4, Gideon in Judges 6, Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1, Amos in Amos 7, and Ezekiel in Ezekiel 1-3 all objected. Moses when he heard God’s call at the burning bush objected not once but four times to the call, beginning with, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” (3:10), and ending with “Please, O Lord, send anybody else” (Exodus 4:13). The absence of an objection, however, is normal in the descriptions of the heavenly throne-room. In 1 Kings 22:19 the prophet simply follows through on the word of the LORD given him:
Then Micaiah said, “Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him to the right and to the left of him.
Watts interprets,
In all these cases in which the prophet is allowed to be present through visionary experience during discussion or decisions in the throne room of God, and thus know the ‘knowledge of God,’ and thus know the ‘knowledge of the Almighty’ . . . he is claimed and empowered to make an unusual and overwhelming proclamation—unusual in it shocking harshness or in its great expectation.
The call of Isaiah differs in its detail from both kinds of narrative. It is unique in the usual prophetic call narratives that the prophet volunteers. No doubt here it was due to the character of his experience, an experience characterized by his raw vision of the Holy: “I am ruined . . . your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is forgiven” (6:5, 7):
There is an interesting word play in the Hebrew of verses 7 and 8: “Behold (hinneh) this has touched your lips . . . Here am I (hinni). Send me!” Also in “I heard the voice of the Lord” the title used is `Adonai as in verse 1 where “Lord” refers to God as the Sovereign One, “the absolute overlord of the earth with whom all people have to do.” In contrast, “LORD,” the covenant or personal name of Israel’s God was used in verse 5.
The radical removal of the sin barrier is evident in Isaiah’s call, for “only one who has recognized his sin and has been set free can do the will of God.” Only when sin is honestly dealt with is one free to fully respond to the call of God. As Kreider writes on the Holy as a Living Force:
genuinely significant initiatives—initiatives which lead to new departures in faithful living—grow out of a powerful experience of God’s otherness. Francis of Assisi and John Wesley, like Isaiah, knew that an experience of God is the source of endless of energy and imaginative power.
Needed for the moral and spiritual crisis of our day—both in the church and in the nation—is the Vision of the Holy, A Vision of radical sinfulness and an equal vision of radical grace! To serve Christ, to be his obedient servant in all of our relationships and responsibilities we need to seek daily the touch of the Holy at the foot of the Cross—the lifted up Son of Man! We dare not let a day go by without making use of the means of grace available to us like true Wesleyans. And we are not talking about ecstasy or intensive emotion, but simply a faith reality!--the necessity of faith, for ”only in the submission which is faith can we ‘know’ God.”
Message Four
III. A Vision of Judgment and Hope (6:8-13)
Introductory Transition
We repeat the words of Phineas Bresee:
The men who see farthest into the heavens, see farthest into human need. . . . The depths of our gaze into heaven is the measure of the strength to do God’s work. . . . A man is ever quite so active as when he is gathering into his bosom the lightnings which play around the throne.
Isaiah 6:8-13 express the true function of Isaiah’s vision. Most sermons end at verse 8 (not Bresee! But Sproul does) and miss the heart of the chapter in its prophetic context! Context! Context! Context! I scream this at my students. If our majors learn only one word from me about interpretive method and biblical preaching, I want it to be this word, CONTEXT!
So far we have seen that Isaiah’s Vision of the Holy was A Vision of the Transcendent (vv. 1-4) bringing him face to face with A Holy Mystery (vv. 1-2) that granting him A Holy Perspective (vv. 3-4). This led to A Vision of Sin and Grace (vv. 5-8) in which he saw The Condition of the Prophet (v. 5), experienced The Cure of God (vv. 6-7), and heard The Call of the Prophet (v. 8).
THE VISION OF THE HOLY as seen in the call, message and ministry of the prophet Isaiah is now third
III. A Vision of Judgment and Hope (6:8-13)
Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!” And he said, “Go and say to this people: ‘Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking, but do not understand.’ Render the hearts of this people insensitive, Their their ears dull, And their eyes dim, Lest they see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand their hearts, And return and be healed.” Then I said, “Lord, how long?” And he answered, “Until cities are devastated and without inhabitant, Houses are without people, And the land is utterly desolate;, The LORD has removed men far away, And the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. Yet there will be a tenth portion in it, And it will again be subject to burning, Like a terebinth or an oak Whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.”
Isaiah’s vision was
I. A vision of an inescapable judgment (vv. 8-9)
Judgment was the prophet’s message (vv. 8-9):
Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
Out of an overwhelming experience of personal judgment came the call and response of Isaiah! A startling, scandalous commission!
And He said, “Go and say to this people: ‘Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking, but do not understand.’”
Isaiah’s vision was a call to proclaim judgment—a message of judgment. The prophet and his message—the message is reinforced in the person of the prophet—the prophet is called up into his message. In this message of failure is seen the certainty of the coming calamity of 586 B.C. on the people of Judah!
It all came down to the fact that Isaiah was called to fail! There is a place for failure in the world in obedience to God! One commentator on Isaiah has written that
. . . the preacher of the gospel, who faces the apparent failure of his ministry, and who is therefore tempted to despair, may recognize from the example of Isaiah that he is required to be wholly on the side of God in his heart, and to let himself be used by him as a tool, in whatever way God pleases (cf. Mark 4:1-9). In the readiness which is expressed in the twofold ‘Here am I!’ of the prophet (cf. 6:8 and 8:18), there are revealed in the hour of grace a peace and a freedom which are independent of outward success or failure.
As Teresa of Avila insists, “for the Lord gives when He desires, as He desires, and to whom He desires,” writing about “the fourth dwelling places” in “The Interior Castle” (IV.1).
To get to the holy place is to get to a place before God beyond success or failure. Isaiah’s commission, like that of all the servants of God, was “not to be successful in a merely human sense but to be faithful.”
‘Keep on listening, but do not perceive; Keep on looking, but do not understand.’”
In our contemporary American “holiness” subculture--more American than holiness!)-- we need to catch again the spirit of our California founder, Phineas F. Bresee, whose sermon on verses 9 and 10 is entitled, “Fidelity is Better than Fruit.” Listen to his understanding:
[Isaiah] was prepared for his work by a clear vision of the truth and the touch of fire upon his lips. He was called to stand for God, to declare the will of God. He was not called to succeed as the world counts success, he was not called to popularity. He was called to find his work in being true to God, to find his success in the divine favor, to do God’s work for God’s sake, and leave the work and himself in God’s hands. . . . Many of us are such children that we have to be petted with success. We must have the following and acclaim of the multitude. . . . some of us look to results rather than to God. . . . Divine favor and approval are to you and me the very best possible results. Christ’s “well done” is infinitely more than all else. . . . The Word of God has not only a saving power, but even its gentlest pleadings, and purest gospels, even from the mouth of Him who came not to condemn but to save, has a judicial, a hardening, condemning power [get more, 53f., 55, 56-57]. . . . I love the cause of Christ with an intensity begotten of the fire off heaven’s altar. It drew me from my home in early youth. It has increased and strengthened and become fore fervent as the days have gone by. My antagonism to worldliness and formality and earth-seeking becomes more and more intense. My soul looks up to God for heights and depths of anointings such as my ealier ministry knew nothing about; but yet I am continually being disappointed in the results of my own ministry. . . . Our piety is all too shallow. How possible that in the last analysis you may find your motives and ends are selfish.
As evidenced in the opening chapters of Isaiah’s prophecy, made known to Isaiah in his call, is a divine decision already made concerning Israel. Therefore the purpose or intention in the context of the story of Isaiah’s call as Otto Kaiser expresses it is not “merely to legitimize the prophet himself, but to testify that God’s judgment was already decreed when he called him to a task that went beyond all feeling and understanding.” The vision is taken up into the service of the message of judgment!
The call is the message! The function of the narrative is caught up in God’s irrevocable judgment on Judah for their apostasy. Hear again the charge that begins Isaiah’s prophecy:
Listen, O heavens, and hear, O earth: For the LORD speaks, “Sons I have reared and brought up, But they have revolted against Me. An ox knows its owner, And a donkey its master’s manger, But Israel does not know, My people do not understand.”
Alas sinful nation, People weighed down with iniquity. Offspring of evildoers, Sons who have acted corruptly! They have abandoned the LORD, They have despised the Holy One of Israel, They have turned away from Him (1:2-4).
--a litany of judgment that continues for twelve more verses—until verse 15 and then through cc. 1-5 [3:8-9; 5:18f.]. In 10:23 the prophet declares, ”For a complete destruction, one that is decreed, the Lord God [Yahweh] of hosts will execute in the midst of the whole land.”
The call of Isaiah, writes Brevard Childs, “is not to be interpreted psychologically (. . .), nor does his message derive from the prophet’s own sense of discouragement. Rather the role of hardening (vv. 9f.) rests on the divine decision for the destruction of the nation.” So Kaiser continues: Isaiah “had not merely to proclaim judgment upon his people, but to bring it upon them by this very message, which would harden the hearts of their contemporaries.” We too can be instruments of hardening (2 Cor. 3:15-16)!
Not only does Isaiah’s Vision of the Holy constitute judgment as his message, but also
Judgment is the prophet’s ministry (v. 10).
“Render the hearts of this people insensitive, Their ears dull, And their eyes dim, Lest they see with their eyes, Hear with their ears, Understand with their hearts, And repent and be healed.”
This has been called Yahweh’s strange work: “It was awe-inspiring—Yahweh presiding over the destruction of his own holy city, Jerusalem.” The message and therefore the ministry of the prophet effects a hardening, and therefore judgment: “For the word of God is not merely withdrawn from the sinful people. It continues to be uttered through the prophet, but only in order to speed the coming judgment.”
Isaiah’s preaching will is to make it more difficult for people to believe. The messenger plays “an active part in hardening and dulling so that repentance will not take place, now that the decision to destroy has taken place.” “It is evident,” writes Oswalt, “that something is more important than healing. . . . it is a pure revelation of the character of God and of the human condition”:
And let the purpose of the Holy One of Israel draw near And come to pass, that we may know it!“ (5:19).
The Vision of the Holy as worked out in the ministry of the prophet convinces of the consequences of sin—sin will be judged! That is the nature of the holy! As sure as God is holy!
But the LORD of hosts will be exalted in judgment, And the holy God will show Himself in righteousness (5:16).
And the light of Israel will become a fire and his Holy One a flame, And it will burn and devour his thorns and his briars in a single day (10:17).
The holiness of God means that there is no escape from the judgment of God on sin! There is no cheap grace: “the soul who sins will die” (Ezekiel 18:4). Sin releases death into our existence (Romans 5:12).
Sin has its inescapable consequences! It is not to be played with! I can look back as a Christian, as I believe a“sanctified” Christian in the ministry . . . my wrong attitudes, my wrong words, my wrong actions, which I though were so “right,” so “justified” at the time—now in what I trust is a clearer vision of the holy. . . I have suffered the consequences of my pride, egocentricity, etc. . . . I did not get away with it . . . the holy means you cannot get away with sin! Who are you trying to fool, the Holy Transcendent One, God? There is only one way for sin to be dealt with, and that is God’s way. God’s judgment on sin whether sin properly or sin improperly so-called! Sin has to be suffered out of existence!
A meaningful and effective vision of the holy convinces me of that! Judgment is inevitable! Inescapable! So I eagerly seek a vision of the holy, and just as eagerly submit to God’s judgment on my life, in fact I seek it, for at the heart of the holy is “a burning coal,” an “altar,” the purging cross of Jesus! Judgment was what Isaiah himself submitted to—“burning judgment”! “a burning coal touched my mouth.” I want God to reveal it—to burn it out! Sunday by Sunday. Morning by morning. A burning bush heart!
But judgment is not the last word in the purposes of go, for out of Isaiah’s experience of God in his call there arises
II. A vision of a transforming hope (6:11-13)
For the Vision of the Holy is
A vision of grace certain in judgment
With such a message, such a ministry, no wonder Isaiah cried out,
Lord, how long? Or Until when Lord?
The reference is probably both—to the task of judgment, and to the duration of judgment. Isaiah is already pleading—exercising the office of a true prophet, as he begs for mercy for the people – hope! In fact he is himself a sign of hope, of eventual grace in the very fact of his own forgiveness and cleaning.
Judgment is not spared as verses 11-12 indicate, but there is a distinctive hint of mercy in verse 13:
Yet there will be a tenth portion in it, And it will again be subject to burning. Like a terebinth or an oak Whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump” (13).
The key phrases are
“a tenth . . . whose stump remains . . . the holy seed”
Oswalt remarks that “there will be an offering holy to the Lord, for the Lord is not finished with Israel. God’s promise to Abraham to bless the nations through his offspring is not to be forgotten (cf. 49:19, 32).”
So the holy means that judgment as such is not God’s last word! For the Vision of the Holy is
2. A vision of grace only after judgment!
Grace follows judgment
The vision of the holy means that grace is God’s final word: Hope for the unclean, cut off (the lost, undone, ruined, silent) people! A certainty! The certainty of grace is grounded in the essence of the holy! If it is not grounded there, it is not certain!
What was there in verse 7—the “burning coal”—for Isaiah is eventually for the nation. It is there in the hidden mystery of the being of God—in his holiness! For the cross is at the heart of the holy. Isaiah declared in 8:17-18,
And I will wait for the LORD who is hiding His face from the house of Jacob; I will even look eagerly for Him. Behold, I (hinneh `anoki) and the children whom the LORD has given me are for signs and wonders in Israel from the LORD of hosts, who dwells on Mount Zion.
And out of the midst of judgment Isaiah speaks the invitation of Yahweh,
“Come now, and let us reason together,” Says the LORD, “Though your sins be as scarlet, They will be as white as snow; Though they are red like crimson, They will be like wool” (1:18).
But remember . . .
Grace is experienced only after judgment!
An unknown mondern monastic insists:
If modern spirituality lays stress on the immanence of God and the sweetness of his intimate relationship with man, it cannot, without tilting into error, ignore the demands of God’s transcendence. Only superficial minds, strangers to the real problems of the interior life, can suppose that God’s mercy has disarmed his justice.
So much so that my hope is only in God! So again I sincerely seek the judgment of God on my life because in the end judgment is grace!--given the nature of the holy! There is where I find the ever-flowing stream of grace! The true function of worship! At the heart of the holy is the cross: So Hosea . . .
How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I surrender you, O Israel? . . . My heart is turned over within Me, All My compassions are kindled. I will not execute My fierce anger; I will not destroy Ephraim again. For I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst, And I will not come in wrath (11:8-9).
So Moses,
“If now I have found favor in thy sight, O LORD, I pray, let the LORD go along in our midst, even though [because ci] the people are so obstinate and do Thou pardon our iniquity, and takes us as Thine own possession” (Exodus 34:9).
We have got to find a way! A way to have the presence of the holy in our lives daily and in our ministries, or all our glib talk about the holiness movement and the Wesleyan tradition and our great church is so much ecclesiastical hot air, totally lacking in credibility! The holy is most present at the point of the radical grace of the cross! Therefore I seek the vision of the holy first of all at the foot of the cross and so I structure all my spiritual disciplines to this end that I may experience both judgment and grace in the vision of the holy!
Conclusion
In order for me to be able to respond to God with
“Here am I, Send me,”
my need is continually for a Vision of the Holy, for
a vision of the transcendent One a vision of sin and grace a vision of judgment and hope!
for an awesome vision of the transcendent, a penetrating vision of sin and grace, an inescapable vision of judgment and hope,
for the transcendent as real as the immanent, for grace as penetrating as sin, for hope as inescapable as judgment.
My need is desperate for that kind of a vision of the holy in my life—that I might live like brother Lawrence of the Resurrection in The Practice of the Presence of God—My need is for a perception of grace permeated by a vision of the transcendent holy—“the Lord . . . high and lifted up.”
Then I will be able to see grace as grace in my life, for I will have encountered sin as sin, and will have experienced judgment as judgment! And I will have received grace as grace. As Sproul confesses,
No minister is worthy of his calling. Every preacher is vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In fact, the more faithful a preacher is to the Word of God in his preaching, the more liable he is to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful a man is to the Word of God the higher the message is that he will preach. The higher the message the further he will be from obeying it himself. I cringe inside when I speak in churches about the holiness of God. I can anticipate the response of the people. They leave the sanctuary convinced that they have just been in the presence of a holy man. Because they hear me preach about holiness they assume I must be as holy as the message I preach. That’s when I want to cry, “Woe is me.”
If this quote offends you, listen to the lines of Charles Wesley [We close with the poetic lines of Charles Wesley]
If perfect I myself profess, My own profession I disprove; The purest saint that lives below Doth his own sanctity disclaim; The wisest own, I nothing know, The holiest cries, I nothing am!
Oft times we feel like Thomas Merton:
If we said only what we really mean we would say very little. Yet we have to preach God too. Exactly. Preaching the Word of God implies silence. If preaching is not born of silence, it is a waste of time.”
“Woe to me, for I am silent!”
11/7/85 Sacramento District Pastor’s Retreat 7/20/86 Pixley Church of the Nazarene 10/19/85 Chula Vista Korean Church of the Nazarene 3/17/87 Anaheim First Church of the Nazarene (two identical services) 2/24-26/88 Nazarene Theological Seminary (three presentations for their spiritual Awakening week) 2/28/88 1:1-4 Escondido Free Methodist Church 3/12-13/90 (2) Fresno Trinity Church of the Nazarene 6/28/93 Introduction: Spring Valley Church of the Nazarene 7/4/93 A Vision of the Transcendent One: Spring Valley Church of the Nazarene 7/11/93 A Vision of Sin and Grace: Spring Valley Church of the Nazarene 7/11/93 A Vision of Judgment and Hope: Spring Valley Church of the Nazarene 6/12 & 26, 7/31 & 8/7/05 Modified for presentation to the Come & Go class at San Diego First Church of the Nazarene. Check record sometime. John D. W. Watts, Isaiah 1-33: Word Biblical Commentary (Waco, Texas: Word Books, 1985), 76. But see Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 1-12: A Commentary, tran. Thomas H. Trapp (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991).. Kaiser, Isaiah, 1972, 73. Ibid., see 70, 76f. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 55. Oswalt, Isaiah, 1-39, 176. That study was eventually published as “The Quest for the Holy: The Darkness of God” in the Wesleyan Theological Journal as the Presidential address at the 1987 meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society.
Ibid., 174. Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle,III. 1, 9. Ibid., 176. So Wildberger, Isaiah 1-12, 260 argues convincingly. The New Testament speaks of the “lifted up” Son of Man. John 3:14; 12:32-34. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 177. R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1987), 14. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 177. Ibid., 178. Ibid., 179. He comments that “fire is everywhere associated with God’s holiness (Exod. 3:1-6; 13:21; 19:18; Lev. 10:1-2; Num. 11:1-2; 1 K. 18:24; Isa 5:6-7) so that it would be entirely appropriate for those who declare that holiness (v. 3) to be ‘fiery’in their appearance.” Otto Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12, A Commentary: The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976), 77. Sproul, Holiness, 40. Sproul, Holiness, 40. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 177. This message was last delivered in sermonic form on July 4, 1993. Ibid., 181. Sproul, Holiness, 39-40. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 180. Ibid., 181. See also 180. Otto Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12, A Commentary: The Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 2nd ed., 1983), 127. The quote is from E. Brunner, Revelation and Reason (1945), 45. Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12 (1976), 79. Watts, Isaiah 1-33, 74. Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12 (1976), 78-79. Quoted from Thomas Dubay, Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel—on Prayer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 189, cf. pp. 148, 180, 188. Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12 (1983), 128.
Alan Kreider, Journey Towards Holiness: A Way of Living for God’s Nation (Scottsdale, Pennsylvania, 1987), 37-38. The quote is from Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 2nd ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 6, 10. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Gracias! A Latin American Journal (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983). 69-70. Directed to Nazarene Theological Seminary seminarians, 2/25/88. Thomas Merton, The Ascent to Truth (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1951, 1979), 105-106. Anthony Bloom, Beginning to Pray (New York: Paulist Press, 1970), 92-93. Foster, Prayer, 96-97. Ibid., 107. He introduces our earlier quote, 105, with “the knowledge of all else than God makes us the masters of what we know. But knowledge of God makes Him the Master of the soul that knows Him. If it does not, then the soul has not really known Him. Only the submission which is faith can we ‘know’ God and find, in that knowledge.” See his whole passage, 105-107. Phineas F. Bresee, Sermons on Isaiah (Kansas City, Missouri: Nazarene Publishing House, 1926), 34-35. Sproul, Holiness, 43. Wildberger, 268. Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah, The Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), 55. Widely adopted. Ibid., 43-44. Watts, Isaiah 1-33, 69.. , Isaiah 1-12 (1972), 80. See Exodus 19:21; 33:20; Judges 6:22f., 13:22. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 183. Ibid. See Kreider, Journey, 111-115. Sproul, Holiness, 45. Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12 (1983), 128f. Ibid., 129. Sproul, Holiness, 44. Ibid., 45-46. Ibid., 25f. See Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 184. Sproul, Holiness, 46. Ibid., 47. “Guilt” or “iniquity” designates “Isaiah’s sinful nature as such” created “by individual sinful acts.” “Sin” refers to specific offenses which grow out of Isaiah’s condition and “threaten the existence of the human being.” “”Blotted out” or “covered” is the Hebrew verb capher which is the much used word for “making atonement” in the Old Testament. Here “the fact that the atonement does not take place solely within the realm of the spoken word but, so to speak, takes place within a sacramental action serves to underscore the reality and authentic power inherent in the action.” Wildberger, Isaiah, 269-270. Bresee, Sermons, 39-40. Kreider, Journey, 38. Wendy M. Wright, “Reflections on Spiritual Friendship,” Weavings, Volume II, Number 4 (July/August, 1987), 21. Steve Harper, Devotional Life in the Wesleyan Tradition (Nashville: The Upper Room, 1983), 21. Bresee, Sermons, 41, 45-46. Sproul, Holiness, 48f. Robert T. Petersson, The Art of Ecstacy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw (New York: Athenum, 1974), 119, quoting lines from Richard Crashaw. See Romans 10:14-17. Brevard S. Childs, The Book of Exodus: Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974), 49. Watts, Isaiah 1-33, 75. Cf. verses 20-28, also Exodus 24:9-10. Watts, Isaiah 1-33, 71f. He is quoting F. Horst, “Die Visionsschilderungen der alttestamentlichen Propheten,” Expository Times 20 (1960), 98. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 177. Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12 (1972), 81. Kreider, Journey, 38. Ibid., 105. See his whole passage, 105-107. Bresee, Sermons, 41, 45-46. These words were taken up into the NT by Jesus in the Synoptics, in John 12, and by Paul in Acts 28 to account for the mystery of unbelief--a problem left for the Calvinists and Arminians to solve! So we with our Western rationalism have solved the mystery and forfeited the power, each in our own way. Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12 (1972), 86. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, trans., The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Volume Two (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1980), 317. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 190. Bresee, Sermons, 51-59. Kaiser Isaiah 1-12 (1972), 73. Israel fell in 721 B.C. and Judah in 586—are these prophecies directed to Israel, to Judah, or to both?
Brevard S. Childs, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1979), 331. Kaiser, Isaiah 1-12 (1972), 73. Kreider, Journey, 117. Ibid., 83. Watts, Isaiah 1-33, 75. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 189. See 5:13-16. See Psalm 18:4-24; 97:3). Analysis as a Call Narrative: 6:11a: The Prophet’s Question. Isaiah’s Lament when he understood his message and ministry Then I said, “Lord, how long?” 6:11b—13: Yahweh’s Answer: Assurance 6:11b Sign And He answered, “Until cities are devastated and without inhabitant, House are without people And the land is utterly desolate.” 6:12-13 Interpretation “The LORD has removed men far away, And the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. Yet there will be a tenth portion in it, And it will again be subject to burning. Like a terebinth or an oak Whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.” See Torah rendering, but compare Watts, Isaiah 1-33, 76f. Oswalt, Isaiah 1-39, 191. The Hermitage of the Desert: Spirituality of the Desert, tran. Alan Neame (New York: Paulist Press, 1977), 56. See L. T. Corlet’s “Devotional Essay.” Sproul, Holiness, 49-50. Franz Hildebrandt and Oliver A. Beckerlegge, ed., A Collection of Hymns for the use of the People Called Methodists, The Works of John Wesley, Volume 7 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 16, n. 6. Sign of Jonas, 166. But not on that page in my edition.
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