Isaiah 6:1-8 [Trinity Sunday-CWS B]
Pastor Ron Koehler
Grace-Benson/Vail, AZ
May 27, 2018
Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, Today I’d like to talk with you about some things that are awesome. And I don’t mean awesome in the sense of “Dude, that video game is awesome!” or “Have you met Ashley? She is so awesome!” I realize that these days anything can be “awesome.” Even things that are not awesome are awesome. A guy rear-ends your car at a stoplight. Your response? A sarcastic “Oh, that’s just awesome.” Today though, we leave cultural usage and classifications behind and view things spiritual as we read the words of Isaiah the prophet. When I read these words, all I could say was AWESOME. SIMPLY AWESOME. And I mean awesome in the truest sense: inspiring an overwhelming reverence…or even fear. If you can imagine it, if you can put yourself in Isaiah’s place, the vision given to him and shared with us does create an overwhelming reverence and fear of God. It is—in the truest sense of the word—awesome. Here are those words again. Listen for two things that are truly awesome: 1. THAT GOD IS WHO HE IS and 2. THAT HE HAS CALLED US In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
Isaiah was the government official who recorded the events of King Uzziah’s reign as ruler of Judah, the southern kingdom of God’s people. But Isaiah tells us here about the vision the Lord used to call him to another kind of work. He calls him to be a mouthpiece for the Lord, to be his prophet. As Isaiah describes the vision, he reveals the first thing that is truly awesome: THAT GOD IS WHO HE IS. Isaiah was privileged to see the Lord himself. What an awesome and majestic scene as the Lord is on a high, high throne with a flowing robe that filled the temple of heaven. And Isaiah looked and saw angels. To be specific, he saw angels called “seraphs.” We don’t know much about the classification of the uncountable multitude of angels which serve God in heaven, but perhaps these are the same kinds of angels we read about in Revelation chapter 4, which also have six wings. They may be highranking angels. What Isaiah saw though was that these unique creatures serve the Lord and worship him. They understand the glory of God and the praise he is due and they give it to him. They revealed the greatness of God in their actions too, as they would not even look at God but covered their faces, and as they called out “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.”
Their praise to God, “Holy, holy, holy,” reveals the triune nature of God—he is three times holy! Father, Son and Holy Spirit are worshiped as the seraphim fly around the throne where the pre-incarnate Christ sits. Isaiah’s vision reminds us that before he came into this world as the promised Messiah, Jesus did exist as the eternal God and it is he that the prophet sees on the throne. We know that this is actually Jesus because the apostle John, in his gospel, quotes from this chapter of Isaiah and says: Isaiah said this because he saw Jesus’ glory and spoke about him (John 12:41). How awesome it must have been to get this glimpse of heavenly glory! The angels call God, “the LORD.” When you see the name LORD in all capital letters in your Bible, it should bring to mind that he is the Savior-God because that is what this particular Hebrew name for God means This is the name Yahweh or Jehovah. So the angels are praising the God who loves us and saves us! The fact that God is our Savior IS awesome! In addition to that, the angels call him “Almighty.” He is the allpowerful God, the God of justice and might, who can do anything at all. We cannot begin to imagine the divine power held by God. It is too awesome to grasp! His glory fills the earth, the angels cry out! And as if God were not awesome enough all by himself, and the sight of heavenly creatures flying around and singing praises to the Triune God were not enough, the entryway to the temple of heaven violently shook and rattled and the entire place filled with smoke! Isaiah could not stand the awesomeness! A mere human, even getting just a glimpse of God’s divine glory and the things of heaven, knows his or her place before the Lord. Imagine if it was you actually seeing all of this! It was so awesome that it did inspire an overwhelming reverence and even fear! Isaiah cries out, not in praise like the angels, but with fearful awe: “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” The sight of the LORD Almighty was too much to take. He was certain that he could not stand in God’s presence and would certainly die. So awesome is God that Isaiah feared for his life! He could not stand the awesomeness of the Lord! This vision and this sinful human being’s reaction to the Lord’s glory reveal how AWESOME it is THAT GOD IS WHO HE IS. The other awesome—truly awesome—thing is THAT GOD HAS CALLED US. That becomes clear as we consider what happened to Isaiah as he sat there trembling and afraid before the awesome spectacle in front of Him. At the sight of the holy and almighty God, Isaiah’s thoughts turned immediately to his unworthiness. Was he a believer? Yes. He even worked for the Lord’s anointed king. But the perfection of God, the stunning, indescribable glory of the Lord, the magnificent seraphs who even had to shield their eyes from the Lord on his throne—all that immediately moved Isaiah to realize that he had no business being anywhere near God!
Who was he that he should be allowed this vision of God? He was a sinful man faced with the holy, holy, holy God! So what did he say? “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” He knew he was done for. He was a sinful man and he lived among sinful people. Any good things he might have done as a believer, any helpful things he may have done as he served God’s king and his people—none of that was worth anything. It was so obvious as he viewed the divine glory of the King, the LORD Almighty. And yet, what did God do? Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.” With undeserved love—and I say “undeserved” because Isaiah was totally right in his assessment of his place before the holy God—with undeserved love, God sent his angel messenger to show Isaiah that his sin was gone; it had been paid for! His sin had not been ignored by God; he didn’t look the other way. Notice that it was atoned for; it was paid for. And look at the symbolism there. With vivid imagery, he showed this sinful man that his guilt was truly removed. Do you appreciate the imagery? The altar is where the coal came from. The altar, the place of sacrifice, provided the forgiveness of Isaiah’s sin. That coal touched his mouth personally, applying that forgiveness to him. Perhaps we also see significance in the fact that it touched the very lips which would now speak the actual words of God to his people. The lips of the prophet would perfectly proclaim the damning law of God and the precious, saving gospel of love and salvation. Then the Lord asks, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” The reaction of the cleansed sinner? Immediately he responds, “Here am I. Send me!” The glory and the grace of God prompted a grateful, forgiven man to accept the call to serve the Lord. What is truly awesome is that God would call a sinner to service like that! He takes a sinful man and makes him holy by forgiving his sins, then he calls him to serve. You know, God gets a pretty bad rap from people sometimes. They don’t like the idea of a holy God who has high standards…and things that please him…and who can justly condemn people for not being perfect like he is. But what they don’t understand is the loving nature of God—that he loves people, that he wants to forgive, that he wants to pull everyone close to him and keep them as his own, that he has chosen to use sinful, forgiven people to be his messengers in this world. The holy, holy, holy God—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—does this though! The Father sent his Son to be the one to atone for sin, to make the necessary sacrifice. It’s interesting that the image of God Isaiah sees is Jesus, because this is long before he would enter this world and take our sins upon himself, taking them to the altar of the cross. Isaiah would later proclaim Jesus’ suffering and death as if they had already occurred. But when the Father promises something, it is as good as done even before it happens, so maybe it should not surprise us that Isaiah sees Jesus on the throne
and that Isaiah speaks that way about his atoning work. And finally, it is the Holy Spirit who calls a person to faith and who calls them and moves them to serve the Lord. Holy, holy, holy is the Triune God who forgives and calls us too! We’re not so different from Isaiah. We too are sinful. Like Isaiah, we are believers, but we still sin. We are not perfect. We have the Word of God which tells us what God is like. We even get to read about what Isaiah saw. And though we have to imagine what it was like to see that vision, we are still impacted by the truth that God is so awesome that we could not possibly stand before him and not be mindful of our sin. We too can be moved to reverent awe and even fear. We too can understand that we have no business anywhere near the holy God. If we do not respond like Isaiah— “Woe to me! I am ruined!—then we are not reading the Bible, we are not listening in worship, we are not paying attention to what the holy God says! The difference between the perfect Lord and sinful us ought to be so obvious that we respond with repentance for all that we have done to offend our God. And when we come to the Lord like that, what a comfort it is to know that the awesome and gracious God responds to us like he did to Isaiah. He brings us the assurance that our sins have been paid for. Jesus Christ, sent by the Father, atoned for our sins. At the altar of the cross, the sacrifice was made. The coal has touched our lips too--we are forgiven; we are made holy. And the Holy Spirit calls us like he called Isaiah. We don’t all have the exact same calling—to publicly proclaim the Word of the Lord as a prophet did then, like a pastor does now, but we are all called to share with the world the love of God, to repeat the praise of the angels: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” It is the will of our Triune God that each of his children, made holy by his undeserved love, would respond to that grace and to the call of the Lord and would say “Here am I. Send me!” AWESOME. SIMPLY AWESOME. THAT GOD IS WHO HE IS and THAT HE HAS CALLED US. Give that some thought today. Consider how glorious our God is. Reflect on the fact that he has called you. Give him praise and answer his call. Amen. Now the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.