Isaiah 6:1-13 In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LORD sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.… 1. The experience that made Isaiah a prophet took the form of a vision. It happened in a period of distressing perplexity and gloom. Wrestling passionately with the darkness, craving wistfully for light, the yearning to see God in the man's soul became so intense and sensitive, that the great Heart in heaven answered the longing of the heart on earth, and aspiration leapt into realisation, and faith flashed into vision That sight of God — the living, holy, loving God — made Isaiah a prophet. Preachers and teachers of today! if we are to be prophets, we need lust such a sight of God. 2. The vision of God made Isaiah a prophet; but the immediate result was something different. The first effect of contact with God was to produce in his soul an intolerable sense of sin. Had Isaiah been Pharisee, he would have seized the opportunity of his sudden vicinity to the Almighty to direct the Divine attention to his virtues and superiority over other men. Had he been one of those philosophers in whom the heart has been overlaid by the intellect, he would have calmly proceeded to make observations of the Divine for a new theory of the absolute and unconditioned, in sublime insensibility to the deepest problem of existence, the awful antithesis of human sin and of Divine holiness. Because Isaiah was a good man, his new proximity to God woke within him a crushing horror of defilement and undoneness. And it was so, precisely because, he had never been so near to God before, and had never felt himself of so much importance. Away down here, sinning among his fellow men, the blots and blemishes of his soul seemed of little moment. But up there, in the stainless light of heaven, with God's holy eyes resting on him, every spot of sin within him grew hot and horrible, every defiling stain an insult and a suffering inflicted on the sensitive holiness of God. These two things are linked together, and no man can divorce them — the dignity of humanity and the damnableness of sin. 3. The ethical process by which, in the imagery of the vision, Isaiah's sense of sinfulness came home to him, is finely natural and simple. It was at his lips that the consciousness of his impurity caught him. "I am a man of unclean lips." That, judged by our formulas and standards, might seem a somewhat superficial conviction of sin. We should have expected him to speak of his unclean heart, or the total corruption of his whole nature. But actual conviction of sin is very regardless of our theories, and is as diverse in its manifestations as are the characters and records of men. Sin finds out one man in one place, and another in a quite different spot, and perhaps the experience is most real when it is least theological. 4. Isaiah, in the presence of God, felt within him the pang of that death, which must be the end of unpardoned sin in contact with the Divine holiness. He felt himself as good as dead, yet never in all his life had he so longed to live as now, in sight of God and heaven and holiness. He did not ask to escape. He was too overwhelmed to pray or hope. But to God's heart that cry of despair was an infinitely persuasive ]prayer for mercy. Pagan sages and Christian saints alike unite in proclaiming the overmastering strength of sin. 5. Is there, then, no possibility of recovery? no way of cleansing? One there is, and one alone. Aye, if only God so loves our sin-stained race as that His stainless purity enters really into our humanity, and wrestles with our impurity in a contact that must be suffering to the Divine holiness, and is sin cleansing to us — that were salvation surely; that were redemption. But is it a reality! Jesus Christ has lived, and died, and lives again, and we know that His Holy Spirit dwells in us and in our world. That, and that alone, is salvation; not any theories nor any rites, but God's Holy Spirit given unto us. 6. It was at Isaiah's lips that the sense of sin had stung him, and it was there that he received the cleansing. He, too, might now join in heaven's praise and service; no more an alien, but a member of the celestial choir and a servant of the King. That act of Divine mercy had transformed him. 7. He was a new creature, and instantly the change appeared. The voice of God sounds through the temple, saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And the first of all heaven's hosts to offer is Isaiah A moment before, he had shrunk back, crushed and despairing, from God's presence, feeling as if the Divine gaze were death to him. Now he springs forward, invokes God's attention on himself, and before all heaven's tried and trusty messengers proposes himself as God's ambassador. Was. it presumption! was it self-assertion? I think, if ever Isaiah was not thinking of himself at all, and was conscious only of God and goodness and gratitude, it was then, when his heart was running over with wonder, love, and praise for God's unspeakable mercy to him. It was not presumption; it was a true and beautiful instinct that made him yearn with resistless longing to do something for that God who had shown such grace to him. (Prof. W. G. Elmslie, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. |
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