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.… The contemplation of the majesty of God is the source of the largest hope for all His creatures. For beings pure and holy that vision is the call to unfaltering adoration and limitless faith; for men "of unclean lips" — sin-stained, and labouring in a sin-stained world — it is the reassuring call to the prophet's work I. The vision of God THE CALL OF THE PROPHET. 1. Nowhere is the thought presented to us in the Bible with more moving force than in this record of Isaiah's mission. The very mark of time by which the history is introduced has a pathetic significance. It places together in sharp contrast the hasty presumption of num and the unchanging love of God. The king died an outcast and a leper because he had ventured to take to himself the function of a priest in the house of God; and in close connection with that tragic catastrophe an access to God, far older than that which the successful monarch had prematurely claimed, was foreshown to the prophet in s heavenly figure. Isaiah, a layman, was, it a appears, in the heavenly court, and he saw in a trance the way into the holiest place laid open. The veils were removed from sanctuary and shrine, and he beheld more than met the eyes of the high priest, the one representative of the people, on the one day on which he was admitted, year by year, to the dark chamber which shrouded the Divine presence. For an eternal moment Isaiah's senses were unsealed. He saw that which is and not that which appears. For him the symbol of God dwelling in light unapproachable, was transformed into a personal presence; the chequered scene of human labour and worship was filled with the train of God; the marvels of human skill were instinct with the life of God. The spot which God had chosen was disclosed to his gaze as the centre of the Divine revelation; but, at the same time, he was taught to acknowledge that the Divine presence is not limited by any bounds, or excluded by any blindness, when he heard from the lips of angels that the fulness of the whole earth is His glory. Now, when we recall what Judaism was at the time — local, rigid, exclusive — we can at once understand that such a revelation taken into the soul was for Isaiah an illumination of the world. He could see all creation in its true nature through the light of God. So to have looked upon it was to have gained that which the seer, cleansed by the sacred fire, was constrained to declare. Humbled, and purified in his humiliation, he could have but one answer when the voice of the Lord required a messenger: "Here am I; send me." 2. Isaiah's vision and call are for us also, and they await from us a like response. When he looked upon that august sight, he saw Christ's glory; he saw in figures and far off that which we have been allowed to contemplate more nearly and with the power of closer apprehension. He saw in transitory shadows that which we have received in a historic Presence. By the Incarnation God has entered, and empowered us to feel that He has entered, into fellowship with humanity and men. As often as that truth rises before our eyes, all heaven is indeed rent open, and all earth is displayed as God made it. For us, then, the vision and the call of Isaiah find a fuller form, a more sovereign voice in the Gospel than the Jewish prophet could know 3. What does "the mystery," the revelation "of God, even Christ" (Colossians 2:2), mean, the mystery of which we are ministers and prophets, the mystery which brings the eternal within the forms of time, the mystery which shows to us absolute love made visible in the Incarnate Word? It means that the outward, the transitory, is a yell woven by the necessities of our weakness, which half hides and half reveals the realities with which it corresponds; that the changing forms in which spiritual aspirations are clothed from generation to generation and from life to life, are illuminated, quickened, harmonised in one supreme fact; that beyond the temples in which it is our blessing to worship, and beyond the phrases which it is our joy to affirm, there is an infinite glory which can have no local circumscription, and an infinite Truth which cannot be grasped by any human thought; that man, bruised and burdened by sorrows and sins, was made for God, and that through His holy love he shall not fail of his destiny; that all creation is an expression of God's thought of wisdom brought within the reach of human intelligence; that God's Spirit sent in His Son's name will interpret little by little, as we can read the lesson, all things as contributory to His praise; that we also, compassed with infirmities and burdened with sins, may take, up the song of the redeemed creation, the song of the unfallen angels, and say, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the fulness of the earth is His glory. It means this, and more than this. II. The vision of God THE MESSAGE OF THE PROPHET. It is this vision which the prophet has to proclaim and to interpret to his fellowmen, not as an intellectual theory, but as an inspiration of life. The prophet's teaching must be the translation of his experience. The Gospel of Christ Incarnate, the Gospel of the Holy Trinity in the terms of human life, covers every imaginable part of life to the end of time, and is new now as it has been new in all the past; as it will be new, new in its power and in its meaning, while the world lasts. True it is that such a vision of God — Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier — entering into fellowship with the beings whom He has made, "gathering up all things to Himself," "making peace through the blood of the Cross," shows life to us, as Isaiah saw it, in a most solemn aspect: that it must fill us, as it filled Isaiah, with the sense of our immeasurable unworthiness in the face of Christ's majesty and Christ's love: that it must touch us also with something of a cleansing power. And because it is so we can take heart again. For such emotion, such purification of soul, is the beginning of abiding strength. III. The vision of God THE CHASTENING OF THE PROPHET. In the fulfilment of our prophetic work we need more than we know the abasing and elevating influences which the vision of Isaiah and the thoughts which it suggests are fitted to create or deepen. In the stress of restless occupation we are tempted to leave too much out of sight the inevitable mysteries of life. We deal lightly with the greatest questions. We are peremptory in defining details of dogma beyond the teaching of Scripture. We are familiar beyond apostolic precedent in our approaches to God. We fashion heavenly things after the fashion of earth. In all these respects then for our strengthening and for our purifying, we must seek for ourselves aria strive to spread about us the sense of the awfulness of being, as those who have seen God at Bethlehem, Calvary, Olivet, and on the throne encircled by a rainbow as an emerald: the sense, vague and imperfect at the best, of the illimitable range of the courses and issues of action; the sense of the untold vastness of that life which we are bold to measure by our feeble powers; the sense of the majesty of Him before whom the angels veil their faces. If we are cast down by the meannesses, the sorrows, the sins of the world, it is because we dwell on some little part of which we see little; but let the thought of God in Christ come in, and we can rest in that holy splendour. At the same time let us not dare to confine at our will the action of the light. It is our own irreparable loss if in our conceptions of doctrine we gain clearness of definition by following out the human conditions of apprehending the Divine, and forget that every outline is the expression in terms of a lower order of that which is many-sided; if in our methods of devotion we single out the human nature of the Lord, or rather the manifestation of His unascended manhood, as the object of our thoughts, and forget that He leads us to the Father; if we rest in things visible and do not rather strive to read ever more clearly the spiritual lessons to which they point; if we concentrate our worship in isolated rites and fail to bear to the world of daily thought and action the teaching and the promises of sacraments. (B. F. Westcott, 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. |
    |