by Art Katz
In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and His train filled the temple.Above Him stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, “Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.”And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of Him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke.Then said I, “Woe is me! For I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, Jehovah of hosts.”Then flew one of the seraphim unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: and he touched my mouth with it, and said, “Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin forgiven.”And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?”Then I said, “Here am I; send me.”And He said, “Go, and tell this people, ‘Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not.’ Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they sea with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed.”Then said I, “Lord, how long?” And He answered, “Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste, and Jehovah has removed men far away, and the forsaken places be many in the midst of the land. And if there be yet a tenth in it, it also shall in turn be eaten up: as a terebinth, and as an oak, whose stock remaineth, when they are felled; so the holy seed is the stock thereof” (Isaiah 6:1-13)
Too many of us have been guilty of lightly dismissing this account as an unimportant mystic vision of a God who is in some kind of hyper-state of glory. Why then did it affect the prophet so radically? My own suggestion is that the prophet saw the King in the greatest moment of His majesty. In other words, God chose to express His deepest essence and being in a moment of time in the life of Isaiah, and that anyone who would contemplate that moment rightly will be altogether devastated and undone. With that in mind, I am led to believe that Isaiah saw the crucifixion of the King, because nothing reveals the majesty of God more than in the depth of His suffering, experienced and borne for us as atonement! You may ask how Isaiah could have seen the crucifixion of Jesus six or seven centuries before the actual event. Let us not forget that the Lord was “slain from before the foundations of the earth were laid.”
This is not just a chance episode in the life of the prophet; it is the unfolding of a remarkable pattern; a sequence of events by which the prophet, who already had a ministry, and was already cautioning and warning the nation of its sin from the very first chapter of his book, now enters a new dimension. His subsequent ministry as one sent was no longer merely to warn or to caution, but to judge. His word would now constitute judgment: Israel will not hear, will not see, and their hearts will be dulled because the prophet has spoken to them in a new depth of urgency, weight and authority as one sent.
How many of us have sufficiently dwelt on the word sent as we ought? Do we understand the significance of the difference between one who went and the one who is sent? However well-meaning it might be, is not most of our Christian activity self-initiated or committee determined? Do we know, and I mean really know, what it is to be sent from the One who is enthroned?
How many of us have a self-motivated itch to go and to do, and to cut a swathe for ourselves and our ministry? How many sendings are there of the kind that initiated the early history of the church? Those that were sent turned the world upside-down. Do we sufficiently honor and esteem the phenomenon of sending? Do we understand the difference between the consequences of the work that results from one sent in comparison to the work of one who is self-initiated in his going? Are we even assured that the world needs to be turned upside-down? Or do we see the world as needing merely to be modified and have some of its excesses reduced? Do we see the world as being evil? Are we chafed by its immorality?
Everything hinges upon seeing the Lord as the Lord. My greatest grief over the condition of the church, its leadership and its prominent ministers is that they do not know God as God to any significant degree; they do not know Him as He in fact is. Without this knowledge of God, we are condemned to a hollow counterfeit much more in harmony with our own approving ambition and intentions. Consequently, there is no fear of God, and we will find ourselves taking liberties and initiating conduct that was not sent from heaven. Everything rests on seeing the Lord high and lifted up and enthroned in His majestic glory, but brought to perfection in the moment of His most excruciating suffering at Calvary. That is what this prophet saw, and he cried out “I am undone! I am a man of unclean lips!”
