In that passage from Isaiah we heard this evening, we are presented with the vision the prophet had in the Temple of God in all his holiness, glory and majesty. That vision concludes in verse 8 with the call of Isaiah:
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?"
If we take the three major prophets of the Old Testament, that is Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, each receives his calling in a unique way, and here just note how God treats each one of us individually. There’s something quite different about this calling of Isaiah.
Jeremiah is called in an incident which is presented to us right at the beginning of his book.
The word of the Lord came to me, saying, "I appointed you as a prophet to all the nations"
to which Jermiah replies, "Sovereign Lord, I said I do not know how to speak. I am only a child." But the Lord said to me, "Do not say, ’I am only a child’, but go to everyone I send you to and say whatever I command you." Then the Lord reached out and touched my mouth and said to me, "Now I have put my words in your mouth"
Ezekiel’s calling begins with a vision of the glory of God, and comes right at the beginning of the book. Ezekiel’s book begins:
In the thirtieth year and the fourth month and the fifth day while I was among the exiles by the
Kebar river, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God.
Then once the vision is described in chapter one He begins with God saying to him:
Son of man, stand up on your feet, and I will speak to you. As he spoke, the Spirit came into
me and I rose to my feet and I heard him speaking to me. He said to me, "Son of man, I am
sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me.
And then in verse 7
You must speak my words to them whether they listen or fail to listen, for they are
rebellious.
Now, if we turn to the call of Isaiah (and I’ve gone into the calls of the other prophets to highlight some differences).
First of all his calling doesn’t come until chapter 6. If we go to the beginning of the book, it does start with the vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem, which Isaiah saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jothan, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. Then we’re launched straight away into the words of the vision, words of prophecy. We have five chapters, ending in chapter five with a long list of woes, God pronouncing his judgment, and saying that because the people aren’t going to listen, because they’re going to continue rebelling, that judgment will eventually become inescapable. One ’woe’ follows another: in verse 5, in verse 8, then verses 11, 18, 20 and 21 and 22, and then we come to chapter 6.
Here, I think, we have a big question, one which has probably had a lot of ink spilled on it, as to whether chapter 6 is in a chronological sequence and coming after the previous five chapters. Personally I would say, ’Yes, there is that time-sequence’.
Isaiah had received all these visions of God’s judgment, but now comes a major different sort of vision. Not a vision concerning the state of the nation, but a vision of God himself- a vision of God which is going to lead to, if you will, the main calling of Isaiah.
So, what is going on here in chapter 6? First of all, of course, Isaiah has this vision of God in the Temple. This is one of the pinnacles of the Old Testament, this description of the vision of God. It is a key in the preparation of Isaiah for his main work of prophecy. He had received visions, he had received words of God, but now something different is going on
This is the year that king Uzziah died. At the end of Uzziah’s reign, Isaiah has this vision of God. I thin what Barry Webb says in his commentary on Isaiah in The Bible Speaks Today series is quite helpful. He says that chapters 1 to 5 were very general in character, laying out the broad themes of judgment and salvation, without relating them to specific historical events. Chapters 7 to 12 show the judgment passed on by the Lord in chapter 6 began to be worked out in the specifics. We move from one stage of Isaiah’s ministry to another definitely called stage.
Isaiah was almost certainly a priest in the Temple, and in the year that Uzziah dies he has the vision where he sees the King. He sees the Lord seated on a throne and exalted, the train of his robe filling the Temple. Isaiah sees seraphs and their words to one another:
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory.
and here immediately we think of those words in Revelation describing John’s vision of the worship of heaven
Day and night they (the seraphs) never stopped saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God
Almighty, who was and is and is to come.
Isaiah is seeing God and the heavenly worship. He is seeing things given to very few to see. He sees the holiness of God. We generally associate the word ’holy’ either with a very moral quality of life (we call someone a ’holy Joe’, or we say someone is ’holier than thou’ if they’re trying to make themselves out to be better than the crowd. There’s that moral aspect of holiness. There’s a holiness which we associate with church worship, but when we speak about God’s holiness we use a rather different aspect- we concentrate on God’s uniqueness, his glory, his sovereignty, upon the fact that he is high and lifted up. Holiness has very much to do with God who is the very essence of moral goodness and moral purity- really with his difference Words of Faber’s hymn come to mind
How wonderful, how beautiful
the sight ot Thee must be.
Thine endless wisdom, boundless power
and awful purity
There is that orge theos- that awe and dread of the holy. We speak of theses things; we would perhaps better stand in awe and fear and trembling.
Consider Isaiah’s response, his feeling. He tells us:
The door posts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.
Isaiah experienced God’s holiness and his glory. Verse 3 says that the whole earth is full of his glory. When we come into the realm of holiness, the realm of glory we are speaking of things that language can’t properly express. There is that about God which defies our language, defies description. We so often try to fit God into a box. As J B Phillips put it in his classic half a century ago ’Your God is too small’. We try to shrink God down into human proportions, and that is one failure of modern Christianity. We try to contain him into human categories, we try to be too familiar with him. Yes, God through Jesus calls us ’friends’ but he is still Creator, the Sovereign One and the Holy One and the Glorious One. As we shrink God down, so too we shrink the Gospel.
In Ezekiel’s vision where he sees God’s glory he says he can’t really describe it. At the end of Ezekiel chapter 1 we have this:
This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God.
Ezekiel can’t describe God’s glory. He can’t even describe its ’likeness’. He can only describe how the likeness of God’s glory appeared to be. Such was it that when he saw it he fell down on his face. Today we claim to experience God when we fall down on our backs and go to sleep!
When Isaiah experiences God’s glory he cries out Woe to me. I am ruined. I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty. Isaiah, the man who in chapter 5 had been calling our one ’woe’ after another on the people, one cries out ’Woe to me’. Isaiah sees that, in the face of God’s glory, in the face of God’s holiness he is on the same level as the people he has been denouncing. He is as them. But he has been granted a vision of the Lord.
What is going on here?
Isaiah, as a man, has been broken. Perhaps he had been relying upon his own strength, his own rectitude, ’one up’ but now he sees himself brought down to their level. And this is a fundamental process in anyone who is going to undertake any work for God. First of all, that person has to be broken. That’s the point I really want to come to tonight, this matter of broken-ness. That we have to be broken as people before God. I don’t think God was giving Isaiah just a nice experience, just something to enjoy. Isaiah was feeling thoroughly wretched. He probably wished, in a way, that it would all end.
But God doesn’t just break us down and then leave us there. He didn’t do that to Isaiah, for we read in verses 6 and 7 of Isaiah being cleansed. The seraph flies to him with a live coal, touches Isaiah’s lips, saying see this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.
God breaks down, but then he builds up, and builds up in a new way with sin atoned for, with that wonderful assurance in the place of the weight of our sin, of its weight being lifted. If you read the history of revival time and again it begins with this devastating experience of God’s holiness, this weight of God’s glory, but then the wonderful liberation of forgiveness. God only breaks down to build up.
Isaiah has been built up in this new way, almost, as it were, reconstructed. He is a fit vessel now for God to speak to the nation, in a much more specific way. So Isaiah hears the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us?. And Isaiah replies Here am I, send me.
God’s work can only be undertaken because God sends us. We don’t send ourselves. Any Christian work to have any value is done because God has appointed us, because he has equipped. Before this can begin we have to be brought to the end of ourselves, so that God can build us up in his way.
God grant that if we have not yet come to the end of ourselves, yet been broken down, are not aware of his glory and holiness, that he may do so. May he break us down, build us up, so we can be fit vessels for the work of his Kingdom.
