Isaiah 6 is very short. Do not let that fool you! There is a lot here, as I've found out in the last several days. This is maybe the longest post I've written. It would be wrong for me not to mention that nearly all of this comes from an out-of-print commentary on Isaiah by the 19th century scholar George Adam Smith. (Thank you, Half-Price Books!)
Isaiah begins chapter 6 speaking about the death of King Uzziah. We think he had burned incense in the temple, which only priests were allowed to do. (2 Kings 15). Why is this important? He worshipped his way, not God's way. His act was "one of presumption, the expression of a worldly and irreverent temper, which ignored the infinite distance between God and man. It was followed, as sins of willfulness in religion were always followed under the old covenant, by swift disaster." (Smith, 59)
Isaiah and the people had also ignored the infinite distance between God and man. Smith calls this the "besetting sin" of God's people. Gathered in the temple for worship, they have calloused hearts, they "trampled the courts of the Lord with careless feet" (65), and the disease of their hearts has blossomed into lifeless speech. They worship their way, not God's way: "Isaiah had been listening to the perfect praise of sinless beings, and it brought into startling relief the defects of his own people's worship." (69)
"Holiness" is who God is. Holiness is also the angels' great response to Israel's sin. "Holy" for the callousness of their worship, so careful yet so hard-hearted. "Holy" for the carelessness of their life, for the routine which makes them oblivious to "the shuddering sense of the sublimity of the Divine Presence." (65). "Holy" for the self-indulgent use of forms, rituals, and worship space which veils us from God's presence rather than impressing us with it. "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." (6:3). Smoke fills the temple, smoke that is "the obscurity that envelops a weak mind in presence of a truth too great for it, and the darkness that falls upon a diseased eye when exposed to the midday sun." (68). This is the smoke that occurs when holiness and sin meet.
"Unclean lips" indeed. The worship that God's people offer to him should be a beautiful blossom. Instead, compared to the angels' worship, it is a "rotten leaf" which falls to the ground beneath the "stainless beauty" of the angels' praise. (69) Isaiah repents - "Woe is me! I am lost..." He invites disaster and rightful judgment upon himself.
Now comes the sequence of consecration, call, and commission. Consecration means cleansing. The angel heals Isaiah's unclean lips with a hot stone - an ordinary household means of conveying heat - instead of with a traditional Jewish sacrifice. The process is swift and domestic rather than painstaking and laborious. The effect is all the same. The new reality which is so often missed about the lengthy ceremonies of sacrifice is captured in this swift purging: total forgiveness. Isaiah is fit for the presence of God.
What kind of call does Isaiah then receive? It is not a compulsory call like being drafted into the military. It is not the wooing of a recruiter who says, "you're the kind of person we want for the job". Neither is it an escape from responsibility, a vacation, a honeymoon, or a lost weekend in Vegas. "Isaiah got no such call. After passing through the fundamental religious experiences of forgiveness and cleansing, which are in every case the indispensable premises of life with God, Isaiah was left to himself...He heard from the Divine lips of the Divine need for messengers, and he was immediately full of the mind that he was the man for the mission, and of the heart to give himself to it." (75)
The person God creates and the person God redeems is destined to become the person God sends. And yet for the maturity that is essential to reach this point, there is something childlike and free about the one who knows this forgiveness: "Here am I; send me!"
Then Isaiah receives his commission. He is sent to a people to tell them, "look, but do not understand." "How awful!" we think. "Doesn't God love these people?" This passage is more about a truth that Isaiah came to understand through his preaching: The Word of God repelled more people than it convicted. The Word of God has not only a saving power, but also "a power that is judicial and condemnatory." (80) Smith puts it well: "It marks the direction, not of (God's) desire, but of a frequent and a natural sequence." (79) This is a sequence which is found in Jesus' and Paul's ministry as well. The one who loves God's Word and who speaks God's Word finds the Word trampled on. Isaiah looks back on years of ministry. He hasn't failed. He hasn't been a bad prophet. This was his commission: "Go and say to this people: Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand." (6:9)
Finally, hope comes in the form of the stump which persists and lasts through all the tribulation: "'Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak whose stump remains standing when it is felled." The holy seed is its stump.'" (6:13). At the close of this magnificent chapter, hope is found in a people who will last through all of this. All the judgment, sin, disappointment, and defeat that would come for Israel and Judah in their future exile was already explained on this day when God encountered Isaiah in the temple. "He has had the worst burned into him; henceforth no man nor thing may trouble him. He has seen the worst, and knows there is a beginning beyond." (86-87)
There is a new beginning for us too. As with Isaiah, it is on the far side of judgment. Our new beginning is in Jesus, who was judged for our sins on the cross, and has now entered into a resurrected life that we will share with him. Comforted with this, let us allow the Word of God to judge us and to cleanse us of sin so that we may know its salvation.
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