Isaiah 6:1-8
“If God would show himself to me personally, I may believe”. On one level this is absurd; like refusing to pay your taxes until the Queen herself personally asks you to sign the cheque. On another level it is understandable – we have seen the Queen a thousand times on telly and we know she is real, it’s not just Gordon Brown cross dressing to fool the nation. But is God really there?
Imagine what you may ask God if he put in a personal appearance for your benefit?
A moment in time (Isaiah 6:1)
We know when this happened, in around 740 BC. Just five years earlier the Assyrian empire had crowned a new king: Tiglath Pileser III. With his accession the mood changed, TP III was an imperialist. Imagine Britain in the summer of 1939 – knowing that war was a certainty and you get the picture. Isaiah is a nervous man, he knows it’s a phoney war.
Isaiah remembers this day vividly, it was unforgettable, like the feeding of the five thousand or the raising of Lazarus. We are reading a memoir, not a carefully constructed metaphor. On a certain day around 740 BC Isaiah went to worship and pray in the temple and God showed up.
Yahweh – face to face
Every child’s drawing of ‘god’ shows him thus (1). But this is not a powerless constitutional monarch on a decorative throne – this is the command centre of the universe.
Captain James T Kirk or Jean Luke Pickard have a seat on the bridge of the USS Enterprise – from that chair they can command a Federation star-ship to boldly go where no man has gone before; they speak and it happens. This is the picture: Yahweh sits in the command centre of the universe served by beings of unimaginable power and majesty – the Seraphim[1]. He speaks and it happens.
These creatures are hovering like hummingbirds and making an enormous racket. “Holy, holy, holy…” (2). Holy is one of the Bible’s most important ideas. It expresses three things:
First, God’s infinite greatness and power, compared with our smallness and weakness.
Second, his white hot purity and perfection, compared with our grubby sinfulness.
Third, his righteous rule over the universe. We may choose to live without this God but we cannot ignore him forever – one day every knee will bow before his awesome holiness and we will face the King of the universe. When the Bible says that God is holy, it also means that we are not.
So you can see that in Hebrew writing, to say that God is holy is an enormous statement. The Seraphim are crying out to one another, ‘Holy, holy, holy!’ As unimaginable as holiness is, these creatures are proclaiming the superlative holiness of God, his super-superlative holiness if you like. The Seraphim have run out of words, he is beyond imagination!
Well, it’s time for those questions!
Prostrate (5)
Whatever Isaiah would have asked, it never occurs to him to do so, in a moment he is flat on his face crying in desperation. As far as he is concerned, he is a dead man.
Curiously, he is most concerned with what he has said, rather than what he has done. He is concerned that his whole culture is guilty with respect to what they have said. We tend to regard words as pretty weightless; so much hot air. Think again, what you say is important!
The great British philosopher and agnostic, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would say to God if he ever met him face to face. Russell said that he would ask, “Sir, why did you not give us more information?” What if God did put in a personal appearance, just for you, not in a temple but as you went about your everyday life? Here is another moment in time when it happened: read Luke 5:1-11.
When Russell did meet God I am pretty sure he never got to ask his question, I am pretty sure that he said something like, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man”. Peter was not obviously evil, he was just an ordinary bloke, but even he was crushed with a sense of his own guilt. This is what it is like to meet God face to face – questions don’t seem to matter, you are more likely to find yourself prostrate.
Atonement
What happened to Isaiah is highly significant (7-8) The Seraph took a hot coal and seared Isaiah’s mouth with it. Then he declared him guiltless. The altar was the place sacrifices were consumed, people brought an animal and killed it to atone for their sin. The coal was taken from this significant place – sacrifice and forgiveness go together.
You may wonder how Peter was forgiven; no altar, no tongs, no coal, and no searing. If you know the gospels, you will know that Jesus did this all the time. He forgives an adulteress, a tax farmer, gangsters and terrorists, as if it did not cost anything!
I remember my first credit card, buying stuff with the exhilarating feeling that it was not really using up my money. Then one day the credit card bill hit my doormat. What a shock that was! For Jesus, the bill hit the doormat when he died on the cross: you and I owe a debt we cannot pay, Jesus paid it for us.
That is called atonement – the price of the debt you and I owe to God is paid by Jesus – he died instead of you.
Service
Isaiah and Peter have one more thing in common (8) both are recruited to serve the king they have seen. God always saves us so that we can serve him.
Isaiah was to take God’s word to the nation about to be swallowed by an Assyrian invasion.
Peter was to take the message of the gospel to Jerusalem and on to Rome.
Any you – where is he sending you?
[1] Lit. ‘shining ones’