Sermon on Isaiah 6; Leviticus 19:1-2; and John 12:34-41. Delivered 16 November 2014 (Heritage Sunday for my denomination) at Pequea Evangelical Congregational Church. The fifth installment of a sermon series on the Book of Isaiah; see also sermons on Isaiah 1, Isaiah 2, Isaiah 3-4, and Isaiah 5.
If
the first five chapters of the Book of Isaiah serve as an
introduction to its themes, now here we have the real crux of the
book. The sixth chapter is a gamechanger; it's Isaiah's call to
ministry; it may be the most significant event in Isaiah's life. All
sixty chapters that follow hinge upon this one and are in answer to
this one. Isaiah has already spoken of “the fearful presence of
the LORD,
and the splendor of his majesty” (Isaiah 2:19), but does he really
know what it means to call God “the Holy One of Israel” (Isaiah5:24)? What will happen when, like Job, Isaiah can finally say, “My
ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you” (Job 42:5)?
When confronted with a vision of God, one might have expected Isaiah
to, at least in retrospect, writing or editing his prophecies years
later, give some sort of description. Even if just symbolized in a
vision, what did God look like? But Isaiah doesn't tell us anything
about his face, his hands, anything. Much earlier, in Exodus 24, the
elders of Israel “went up and saw the God of Israel” – and the
sole detail they could report back was that his feet rested on
something like blue pavement, blue as the sky. If their gaze could
even go higher, they gave no indication. Neither does Isaiah – he
only says that the lowest hem of God's robe filled the entire temple.
For
the elders, and for Isaiah, the holiness of God was far beyond
anything they could adequately put into words. Unquestionably, God
was Other than they had ever imagined, totally beyond comparison,
beyond description, defying explanation, immense. The holiness of
God manifested itself to Isaiah in a terrifying purity – not just
ritual purity, but raw and unadulterated righteousness – that
struck fear in his heart and made his hair stand on end. But that
very same holiness, that very same blazing sanctity, naturally evokes
a response. From the impure Isaiah, it calls for an anguished outcry
– he is overwhelmed, he is undone, the dice are cast, the fate is
sealed, the mortal wound is dealt. But from the seraphim, those
six-winged flames of fire that shield even their sinless eyes from
gazing directly on God, it calls for “songs of loudest praise”
without ending. It calls for “some melodious sonnet / sung by
flaming tongues above”. It calls for a declaration that God is not
merely holy, but holy three times over, holy to the uttermost
extreme: “Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts! The whole
earth is filled
with his glory!”
I saw the Lord in light array'd,
And seated on a lofty throne,
The Invisible on earth displayed,
The Father's co-eternal Son.
The seraphim, a glittering train,
Around his bright pavilion stood,
Nor could the glorious light sustain,
While all the temple flamed with
God.
Six wings each heavenly herald wore;
With twain he veil'd his dazzled
sight,
With twain his feet he shadowed o'er,
With twain he steered his even
flight.
One angel to another cried,
“Thrice holy is the Lord we
own,
His name on earth is glorified,
And all things speak the great
Three One.” (Charles Wesley, in Poetical
Works
3:133)
Isaiah
isn't left to be merely overwhelmed; the cry of the seraphim
interprets the awe and majesty of the event. Only at the interpreted
vision does the temple shake; the real power is in the fusion of
experience and verbal witness. It's no accident, by the way, that
Isaiah tells us when
this happened to him. It was in the year when King Uzziah died. One
of the precious few decent kings – more than a decent king, a good
king, a righteous king, an inspiring king who brought restoration to
the land – and now he was no more. In his days as in ours, a good
leader is hard to find, and hard to replace. For someone like
Isaiah, the loss of Uzziah's noble influence must have raised some
powerful questions. But there in the temple – the very temple that
Uzziah had unwisely invaded eleven years earlier, and punished with
leprosy – Isaiah sees, not just one more mortal king, but the
King, the LORD
Almighty, who reigns as king forever (cf. Psalm 10:16).
Incidentally,
when John takes up Isaiah's commission and applies it to the gospel
of Jesus Christ, he does something radical: he says, “Isaiah said
this because he saw his glory and spoke about him”. Who is 'him'?
Jesus. The glory Isaiah saw? That belonged to Jesus. The LORD
Isaiah beheld? Behold the one we know as Jesus. Jesus is not some
created being, nor even some second-tier god. He's “the Father's
co-eternal
Son”. Jesus is bound up intimately and eternally in the unique
life of the one and only God, Yahweh, the God of Hosts, the one
enthroned between the cherubim. My Jehovah's Witness friends haven't
showed much success in whittling Isaiah 6 and John 12 down small
enough to fit into their beliefs.
But back to Isaiah. He had probably done at least some preaching
before this vision – but here, confronted with the holy presence of
God himself, everything changed. Before, he had lambasted Judah as a
sinful nation, as if he stood outside of it, as if he were some
neutral observer. He rightly denounced sin, he rightly taught
righteousness – but he was right in the way that a Pharisee is
right, which only goes so far. As one Old Testament scholar and
gifted commentator, John Oswalt, writes, “Prophetic anouncement is
not enough. Personal confrontation is necessary” (Oswalt 1:182).
But now, now Isaiah sees the holiness of God. Now, overwhelmed with
a holy God, he sees that the difference between righteous prophet and
the wicked masses is nothing compared to the gap between any sinful
creature and the All-Consuming Fire that had to be gentle in
breathing the stars into their slow simmer. All Isaiah's
righteousness, he at last saw for filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). He's sickened to his
stomach as he realizes with revulsion how far he falls short. He
wasn't set over against the people, somehow above them, looking down
from a self-made throne; he was of a piece with them: a man of
unclean lips, living amidst a people of unclean lips.
He spake: and all the temple shook,
Its doors return'd the jarring
sign;
The trembling house was fill'd with smoke,
And groan'd beneath the Guest
Divine.
Ah woe is me! aghast I said,
What shall I do, or whither run?
Burden'd with guilt, of God afraid,
By sin eternally undone!
A man I am of lips unclean,
With men of unclean lips I dwell;
And I the Lord of Hosts have seen,
The King of heaven, and earth,
and hell.
I cannot see his face and live;
The vision must my death foreshow
– (Poetical
Works
3:134)
Isaiah
recognizes his impurity, his sin, his guilt – and he gives up hope.
He harbors no illusions about the prospect of works-righteousness,
no illusions about earning or meriting anything from God. Seeing
God's holiness leaves no room for that. This being Heritage Sunday,
I'd be remiss if I didn't relay the words of Jacob Albright when he,
too, found himself convicted of his radical impurity before a holy
God (Reuben Yeakel, Albright
and His Co-Laborers,
26-27):
My condition struck me with fear. God's judgments appeared before my
imagination; I was very much depressed in spirit, so that none of the
attractions of sensuality afforded me pleasure. The feeling of my
unworthiness increased daily, until finally, in my thirty-third year,
upon a certain day in the month of July, 1791, it reached a crisis
which bordered on despair. I felt so weak, and my sins so many, that
I could not comprehend how a Judge, who judgeth a righteous judgment,
could possibly allow me to escape the abyss of damnation. The
anxiety of my soul increased every moment, so that I was ready to
exclaim: “Ye mountains, fall upon me, and ye hills, cover me.”
How deeply I regretted my past life, and how widely different I would
have lived, could I have lived it over again! I not only realized my
great sinfulness, but this knowledge of sin was followed by keen
sorrow, whereupon I immediately formed the resolution in future to
forsake my evil ways, and so to order my life, that I could at least
quiet my conscience, although I had no hope of pardon for the
offences which I had committed against my Creator.
Like Albright, Isaiah gave up that seemingly vain hope. But God
doesn't! Then as now, God is the God of hope. A messenger from God
comes to him, because God takes the initiative. A fiery messenger
brings a fiery cure: a coal from the altar. God sears Isaiah's sins
away – I bet it was painful, I bet it burned and scorched, just as
tearing away sinful habits often does to us – and Isaiah becomes
something he hadn't been before: clean. A pure message should come
by way of a pure mouth – and henceforth they could. Clean lips
can't help but join the seraphim in praising this godliest of gods,
the one God. Isaiah's life would never be the same. Meeting the
holy terror of God undid him, but the mercy and grace of God made him
new.
I cannot see his face and live;
The vision must my death foreshow
–
A seraph turn'd, and heard me grieve,
And swift to my relief he
flew....
Upon my mouth he gently laid
A coal that from the altar
glow'd;
“Lo!
This hath touch'd thy lips,” he said,
“And thou art reconciled to
God.
His offering did thy guilt remove,
The Lamb who on that altar lay;
A spark of Jesus' flaming love
Hath purged thy world of sin
away.” (Poetical
Works
3:134-135)
Once
clean, Isaiah is ready to actually, directly hear God – the first
time the LORD
speaks in this chapter. The prophet is ready to become a prophet in
the fullest sense: a human member invited into the inner circle of
heaven itself, the Divine Council, the deliberations of Almighty God
among his angels. The Lord asks who should be sent, who would be
willing to go. Isaiah isn't asked directly, nor is he commanded; he
volunteers. To quote John Oswalt again (Oswalt 1:186):
Having believed with certainty that he was about to be crushed into
non-existence by the very holiness of God and having received an
unsought for, and unmerited, complete cleansing, what else would he
rather do than hurl himself into God's service? Those who need to be
coerced are perhaps too little aware of the immensity of God's grace
toward them. … Such a grateful offering of themselves is always the
cry of those who have received God's grace after they have given up
hope of ever being acceptable to God.
How
true that is! Now that Isaiah's clean, he's gratefully eager
to serve. Millennia later, as the years went by, Jacob Albright's
own conversion, his own encounter with both the holiness and the
grace of God, bore similar results. Albright said (Yeakel, 48-49):
A
burning love to God and all his children, and towards my fellow-men
generally, pervaded my being. Through this love, which the peace of
God shed abroad in my heart, I came to see the great decline of true
religion among the Germans in America, and felt their sad condition
very keenly. I saw in all men, even in the deeply depraved, the
creative hand of the Almighty. I recognized them as my brethren, and
heartily desired that they might be as happy as I was. In this state
of mind I frequently cast myself upon my knees, and implored God with
burning tears, that he might lead my German brethren into a knowledge
of the truth, that he would send them true and exemplary teachers,
who would preach the Gospel in its power, in order to awaken the dead
and slumbering religious professors out of their sleep of sin, and
bring them again to the true life of godliness, so that they, too,
might become partakers of the blessed peace with God and the
fellowship of the saints in light. In this way I prayed daily for
the welfare of my brethren. And while I thus held intercourse with
God, all
at once it seemed to become light in my soul;
I heard, as it were, a voice within, saying: “Was it mere chance
that the wretched condition of your brethren affected your heart so
much? Was it chance, that your heart, yea, even your
heart, was so overwhelmed with sympathy for the salvation of your
brethren? Is not the hand of Him visible here, whose wisdom guides
the destiny of individuals, as well as that of nations? What, if his
infinite love, which desires to lead each soul into Abraham's bosom,
had
chosen you,
to lead your brethren into the path of life, and to prepare them to
share in the mercy of God!” I now began to realize more peace and
more assurance. I felt a holy confidence that my prayers were
acceptable, and I heard, as it were, the voice of God: “Go, work in
my vineyard; proclaim to my people the Gospel in its primitive
purity, with energy and power, trusting in my fatherly love, that all
those who hear and believe shall have part in my grace.”
As for Albright, so too for Isaiah: Faith doesn't stop short of
mission.
I heard him ask, “Whom shall I send
Our Royal Message to proclaim,
Our grace and truth, which never end?” –
Lo! here, thy messenger I am.
Send me, my answering spirit cried,
Thy herald to the ransom'd race:
“Go
then,” the voice divine replied,
“And preach my free unbounded
grace.
Go forth, and speak my word to all,
To every creature under heaven;
They may obey the gospel call,
And freely be by grace forgiven.
They may, but will not all believe:
Yet go, my truth and love to
clear;
I know they will not all receive
The grace that brings salvation
near.” (Poetical
Works
3:135)
Isaiah's calling wasn't an easy one. His commission was not rosy.
He was called, first and foremost, not to heal the people against
their will, but to reveal God's true character to them – everything
about God that they didn't want to accept. He had the promise, right
up front, that his message would not help his generation; it would
only make them more stubborn to resist God. Though his heart would
surely break for them, his words would seal their doom. They were
addicted to idolatry, and they would cling to it all the more,
preferring the seeming safety of the idols to a God who shakes his
temple and strips forests bare. As is only natural, those desperate
for blind idols would become blinder and blinder; those itching for
deaf idols would be “never understanding”; those yearning for the
hard rigor of their idols would be just as stony and inanimate,
insensible to the living whispers of God's grace.
But
through it all, Isaiah persevered. His generation would fall, true,
except for the smallest remnant. Success in his lifetime was not the
goal he was called to meet. Faithfulness – that's the goal he was
first and foremost called to meet, just as for us today. Yet his
glorious message, though hurtful to his contemporaries, would bless
generation after generation to come. For them,
it would be a great witness, and stand as a lasting testimony.
Isaiah
has a lot to teach us. As a church – I'm not talking about Pequea
EC, I'm talking about American Christianity in general – we've lost
sight of God's holiness. Sure, we give it lipservice just fine. We
profess that God is a holy God. But do we viscerally grasp, with
every cell in our bodies and every meditation of our minds and
hearts, the overwhelming intensity
and immensity
of God? We
aren't called to conform to this world. We aren't called to make the
gospel easy and inconsequential, as if carrying a cross were a
light-hearted matter. We aren't called to cater to the fashionable
tastes and preferences of a sin-addicted age. Neither was Isaiah,
nor Albright. Now, true, we're called to contextualize the gospel,
to communicate it effectively and persuasively and lovingly, and to
help the wounded and vulnerable tenderly approach the God of mercy
who welcomes them with open arms. But this same God, revealed in
Christ, is the God high and exalted, the God whose very robe dwarfs
his temple, the God whose holiness shakes the earth and enraptures
wary angels. It's that balanced tension – the God of this exalted
glory really is
the God of such humble and compassionate mercy – that blows my
mind, and it should do the same for you too. But playing with fire
is infinitely safer than playing around with God's holiness. The
only safe path is the road strait and narrow: we are called to be
pure, to be other – to be in
this present age, yes, but not of
this age.
But this call to be holy comes hand-in-hand with confession: In
ourselves, we aren't. In ourselves, we are, each and every one of
us, unclean. We're moths divebombing a high-voltage bug zapper. Our
iniquity needs first to be taken away by the burning ember of the
Spirit, brought from the altar of Christ's cross. Freshly made
clean, we are called to say together, “Here we are; send us!”
But is it any surprise when Jesus answers us, “As the Father has
sent me, so I am sending you” (John 20:21)? Is it any surprise
when Jesus adds, “As you're going, disciple all the nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit and
teaching them to obey everything I've commanded you” (Matthew28:19-20)? Through this Great Commission, “Here we are; send us!”
becomes “Here we go, the sent ones!” We're sent – but are we
going? Compelled by God's holiness, touched by the purifying flame,
how can we not join the seraphic witness? May we, too, be cleansed
and enraptured by the unfathomable holiness of God; and may we not
neglect to persevere in our commission. Let us pray:
Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
Heaven and earth are full of your glory!
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest!
Holy God, holy mighty, holy immortal, have mercy on us!
Holy God, holy mighty, holy immortal, have mercy on us!
Holy God, holy mighty, holy immortal, have mercy on us!
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and
ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.
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