In one church I pastored I asked various small groups
to give me lists of attributes of God.
Every group included love on their list, and that is good. God is love. But I was surprised that none of the groups
wrote ‘holy’. As we see in today’s
passage the seraphim who surround the throne of God cry out, ‘holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God almighty.’
The word translated ‘holy’ signifies that God is set
apart or different. As Ray Ortland
points out, ‘… God alone is God. He is not like us, only bigger and nicer. He is a different category altogether.’
If God is holy, how can you and I approach him with
confidence? How do we live before a holy
God? That is what we will see as we
study these verses.
But first let us familiarize ourselves with what the
book of Isaiah has been saying up to this point.
Background—A people who have
deserted God (chapters
1-5)
The most important thing to remember as we read this
book is that the main theme is shown in the prophet’s name. Isaiah means, ‘God saves.’ He doesn’t save good people, he saves those
of us who can see that we have been wicked.
We don’t know a lot about the person of Isaiah other
than he was a prophet who was married and had children. It is the eighth-century B.C. The kingdom has been divided, and Isaiah is
called to speak primarily to the southern kingdom, whose capital is
Jerusalem. Although his words will
contain messages for the whole world.
The book opens with our broken-hearted God. His children have rebelled against Him. He had planted a beautiful vineyard but it
produces rotten grapes. His people love
religion, but they don’t love God. Their
worship is meaningless because it is not rooted in justice. If we love God, we will care about those who
are created in His image. God calls them
to ‘learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed, take up the cause of
the fatherless and plead the case of the widow’ (1:17).
Yet God’s anger is not the last word. Grace runs right throughout this long
book. Right at the beginning God
promises that He will recue a people. He
will cause a remnant to return. It is
not that anyone deserves His favor. But
God saves sinful people. ‘Though your
sins are like scarlet they shall be white as snow; though they are as red as
crimson, they shall be like wool’ (1:18).
God had called Judah to walk in the light of the Lord,
but at the end of chapter five we see that ‘if one looks at the land, there is
only darkness and distress; even the sun will be darkened by clouds’ (5:20).
Now we come to Isaiah’s commissioning.
True faith begins with a realization of God’s holiness
Times of revival generally begin with a fresh
awareness of the holiness of God. In the
eighteenth-century a revival began in America following Jonathan Edward’s
sermon, ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry God.’
The Holy Spirit is one who convicts us of our unrighteousness.
It was the year King Uzziah died. I don’t know if the king had just died or was
on his deathbed. Uzziah’s reign had been
long and prosperous, but came to an end because of his pride and
arrogance. It had been a time of
wealth. Jesus might have said to the
kingdom of Judah what He would later say to the church of Laodicea, ‘You say,
“I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.” But you do not
realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked’ (Rev. 3:17).
Isaiah was worshipping in temple when he has a vision
of heaven. The Lord was sitting on a
throne, high and lifted up. The train of
His robe filled that place. Seraphim
sang to one another, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD God almighty, the whole
earth is filled with his glory!’
When the apostle John gets to see the throne, in the
book of Revelation, he says that there were ten thousand times tens of
thousands of angels (Rev. 5:11). The
word ‘seraphim’ means something like ‘burning ones’. This is an awesome scene!
In Hebrew repetition provides emphasis and speaks of
totality. So, when we read of solid gold
(in 2 Kings 25:15) it is literally ‘gold, gold’. But only once do we find an adjective used
three times of something. ‘Holy, holy,
holy is the Lord God almighty.’ Even
sinless angels marvel at God’s holiness.
Tozer writes, ‘we must not think of God as highest in
an ascending order of beings, starting with a single cell and going on up from
the fish to the bird to the animal to man to angel to cherub to God. God is higher above an archangel as above a
caterpillar, for the gulf that separates an archangel from a caterpillar is but
finite, while the gulf between God and the archangel is infinite.’
The whole earth is full of God’s glory, and that glory
is spreading. One day ‘the earth shall
be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea’ (Is. 11:9). God desire is that His will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.
In response to seeing the glory of God Isaiah cried,
‘Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a
man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for
my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty’ (6:5). Haven’t we all been flippant, crude and
irreverent with our words, and haven’t our words revealed a problem with our
hearts? Seeing the holiness of God makes
us aware of our own sin. One night the
apostle Peter had been fishing and came back with empty nets. When Jesus showed his divine wisdom and
enabled them to have a mighty catch, he fell down at Jesus’ knees and said, ‘Go
away from me, Lord; for I am a sinful man’ (Luke 5:8).
True faith begins with a realization of God’s
holiness.
Forgiveness
is dependant of divine action
What hope was there for
Isaiah and his sinful tongue before a perfectly pure and holy God? His only hope was in his name, Isaiah means
‘God saves.’
The word ‘seraphim’ means
something like, ‘burning ones’. These
burning ones don’t use a tong to lift the coal from the alter because it is a
holy thing. When the coal touches Isaiah’s
sinful mouth it does not hurt him but heals him. That alter reminds us that a sacrifice must
be substituted for our sin. That burning
coal points us ahead to the word of Jesus as our sin-bearer on the cross. Because of Jesus’ work on the cross those who
trust in Him approach the throne of grace with confidence to find grace and
mercy in their time of need (Heb. 4:16).
God’s
grace prompts us to action
I remember once doing an
all-age service on the parable of the sower.
When it came to the reading, from Mark 4, I left out the bit where Jesus
explains that He spoke to the people in parables in order that they would not
understand and come to repentance. It
seemed too hard a word for the children.
Of course, Jesus was quoting from this part of Isaiah. ‘They will keep hearing … but they will not
perceive … lest they see with their eyes … turn and be healed’ (vv. 8-10).
Isaiah responds to God’s
grace with great enthusiasm. ‘Here I
am! Send me.’ Then God gives him this difficult assignment. He will preach, but the vast majority will
not respond. In fact, his words will
only confirm the people in their unbelief.
It was similar in Jesus’ day. God
never hardens that which has not already hardened itself. To a people who have persistently rejected
God’s truth there comes a time when God uses that word to confirm them in their
own choice. The same sun that melts the
ice can harden the clay. Be careful when
God challenges you about some cherished sin.
Every time you hear God’s word you are either drawing closer to Him or
moving away from Him. Some who seem to
start well eventually harden themselves to a place where God can no longer make
an impact on them.
‘Then I said, “How Long,
O Lord?” Like Jesus weeping over
Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44), like Paul mourning the unbelief of his fellow Jews
(Rom. 9:2), Isaiah anguishes over the fact that his people are going to get the
judgement they deserve. Doesn’t it just
break our hearts when people we love stubbornly refuse to come to Jesus? One of my favourite things about the book of
Isaiah is that the holy God who is pleased to exercise His righteous judgement
also grieves of those who get what they deserve. After pronouncing judgement on Moab God
laments, ‘therefore my inner parts moan like a lyre for Moab, and my inmost
self for Kir-hareseth’ (16:11). God is a
righteous judge, but He is not an uncaring tyrant.
Look at the very last
words of this chapter. ‘The holy seed is
its stump.’ Grace gets the final
word. Judah will be invaded. But a remnant will remain. The forest will be burned over but a single
stump will remain. Next time we look at
Isaiah we will see how a shoot will come forth from the root of Jesse—the line
of King David—, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit … for the earth
shall be full of the fruit of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the
see’ (Isaiah 11:1,9). As Ray Ortland
explains, ‘God was finished with Isaiah’s generation, but they did not defeat
salvation. Jesus did come, and his grace
will remake the whole world.’
Conclusion—How
do we live before a holy God?
We live humbly. We know that we are nothing without His grace. We know that we only belong to Him because
Jesus bore our sins upon the cross. We
cannot even begin to approach God on our own merit. We see that we are broken and we let Him fix
us. But we live confidently. Because Jesus said on that cross, ‘it is
finished.’ We have been cleansed by His
blood. We can know approach the throne
of His grace expectantly. We live
enthusiastically. Seeing God’s amazing
grace causes us to cry out, ‘here I am!
Send me.’ We live
realistically. Isaiah was given a hard
task. Our heart will be broken many
times as we share the gospel with people.
We live hopefully, for grace has the final world and God has promised to
win a great multitude from the nations.
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