Isaiah 6:8 Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. "Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?" Why does the Lord ask that question with such anxiety when He has all those shining seraphs standing at His side, and each one of them with six wings? Why was Isaiah, the son of Amoz, a man of unclean lips, and a man woeful and undone, so accepted, and so sent? Seraphs, not sinners, should surely be the preachers of such holiness as that of the God of Israel, and the heralds of such a Saviour — that is what we would have expected. But God's thoughts in these things are not as our thoughts. This has always been God's way in choosing and in ordaining and in sending both prophets, and psalmists, and priests, and preachers for His Church on earth. Only once did God choose a completely sinless preacher. Always, but that once, God has chosen sinful men; and, not seldom, the most sinful of men He could get to speak to their fellow men about sin and salvation. Gabriel might come with his six wings and his salutation to announce to Mary that the fulness of time had come and that the Word was to be made flesh, but it was John, the son of Zacharias, who was not that light, who was sent to preach repentance to the vipers of his day, and to urge them to flee from the wrath to come. And just as for the awakening and the warning of sinners, so for the edification and the comfort of saints. "For every high priest is taken from among men, who can have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way; for that he himself also is compassed with infirmity." Isaiah, accordingly, of all men on the earth at that moment, and of all angels in heaven, was the man chosen of God to preach repentance to Jerusalem, and to prophesy to her the coming of her Messiah. And he preached on all these matters as no angel in all heaven could have preached, he preached as only a leper could preach to his brother lepers, and as only one undone man could preach to other undone men. Just hear him in his first sermon. "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib. Ah! sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, a seed of evil-doers. Why should ye be stricken any more? The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds and bruises and putrifying sores." All God's seraphs taken together could not preach like that. It takes a great sinner to preach as well as to hear like that. You must have a man of men to see, and to feel, and to say things like that. And then, on the other hand, no seraph of them all, with all his wings, had seen down so deep, and had come up so close to the holiness of God as Isaiah had seen and had come close. The seraphs cry Holy, holy, holy, to one another, but they do not know what they are saying. The seraphs are innocent children. And He whom they so innocently praise charges His seraphs with folly. But, "Woe is me! for I am undone!" The Lord likes to hear that. This young preacher, then, having seen both sin and holiness as no seraph ever saw these terrible things, proceeds in his sermon in this way: "Wash you, make you clean; cease to do evil, learn to do well; judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord. Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow: though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." Every syllable of all that is out of Isaiah's own experience. Preaching like that never yet came out of the schools of the prophets, any more than it ever came out of the mouth of an angel. Isaiah had done it all to himself, and had had it all done unto him of God. (A. Whyte, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. |
    |