Here I am! Send Me (Isaiah 6:1-13)
There are some moments in life that you don’t need to work to remember — they are ingrained in your mind in a way that remains even after other things fade from your memory. It could be something momentous like a graduation or a wedding or the birth of a child, perhaps something sad like a funeral of a loved one. But some memories remain not because they are a momentous life event, but because some realisation came over you at a point in time, some new awareness that you had previously been blind to.
I was 20 years old and it was summer, I was an employee of the McDonald’s corporation working in a resort town in New Jersey on the East Coast of the United States. People would flock to this town called Ocean City for vacation, and young people like me were needed to do things like put frozen hamburger patties on a hot grill and flip them over 45 seconds later. My shifts were 5am-1pm, I would work and then walk back to the place I was staying, perhaps to take a nap or as I did on this particular day try to find a shady spot to sit and read in the afternoon.
On this particular day I walked a few blocks over to the local high school, a half a block from the ocean, you could see the water stretching out to infinity. Next to the school building there was a football pitch and track around it. And inside the chain link fence was a picnic table under an oak tree. I sat down at the table to read the Bible. I was a new Christian, I had heard the gospel from a fellow student the previous year, he had given me my first Bible, which I had begun to read voraciously. I had it there on the table, and I think a journal and a pen to write down my thoughts. I assume this sort of scene happened many times in my life that I’ve forgotten about, but I remember this one 30 years later with crystal clarity.
I was sitting and looking at the tree and the grass and the sky. And then it was as if everything became focused on a single point, a single thought — I am not alone here. God is here. I don’t really know how to describe it … But I don’t mean that I was thinking about this concept that God is there and knows things and sees things. I mean that I didn’t want to move or speak or do anything except sit and be conscious of Him.
And I don’t think I am overexaggerating to say that I was never the same. It was like a hearing about God and knowing about God changed into more of a knowing God as one who was actually there, who saw me and communicated with me.
Now I want to be careful because experience is only a reliable guide as it is interpreted by God’s word. I wouldn’t have known how to explain or understand what happened to me sitting under that tree in the summer of 1993 if I hadn’t been reading the Bible. And I also don’t want to say to you that your religious experience has to look the same was as mine.
But on the other hand we want to be really clear that the God who is there is not an idea or a concept, He is person, who can be known, indeed who has made Himself known. He doesn’t want us just to know about Him, but to know Him as He really is. He wants us to know Him rightly. We are here this morning because He is in the business of revealing Himself to us, so that we can know Him and serve Him rightly.
The text we are going to look at this morning is a crucial one in the book of Isaiah, after his introductory 5 chapters he tells us how it is that he was called to be a prophet in the first place. And I am persuaded that he has done this rather unusual thing of not placing his calling narrative at the beginning for a reason. He spent 5 chapters telling us how bad things are in Israel because he wants us to say — What can be done?
Though Israel as a whole may be headed for exile, individual Israelites can still find their way back to God. How can they do that? In the midst of a wicked and depraved generation, how could they return to knowing and serving God?
Knowing God rightly leads to serving God faithfully
The main idea of our text is this: Knowing God rightly leads to serving God faithfully
It’s my prayer that our time together in God’s word will help us all to know and serve this God who is there.
Knowing God rightly (Isa 6:1-7)
This first section breaks down into Isaiah’s vision of God in Isaiah 6:1-4, Isaiah’s response in Isaiah 6:5 where he pronounces woe on himself, and then in Isaiah 6:6-7 with God’s gracious act of atonement. Let’s observe a few things:
First, Isaiah gives us an important time stamp that this vision happened in the year that King Uzziah and died. This is the 8th century BC. Uzziah was basically a good king who sought the Lord and received blessing for it early in his reign. But he didn’t finish well. At the end of his 52 year reign he grew strong and proud and experienced God’s judgement in the form of leprosy. 2 Chronicles 26 would be a good quiet time for you this afternoon or this week — to think about the dangers of pride. But geopolitically his death meant that the looming Assyrian threat was even more dangerous. The king is dead! What is going to happen?
Isaiah is in the temple and he sees this amazing vision. Look at all the detail we get.
The Lord is sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, with the train of His robe — hem of His robe is a better translation, filling the temple. The idea is that the very bottom of His robe is enough to fill Solomon’s grand temple. So the ceiling of the temple must be transparent to allow Isaiah to see this enormous throne stretching from earth up to heaven. There is no doubt what this means. The king is actually not dead, because earthly rulers and monarchs are not like this. This is the true king.
Like a true king, He has attendants around Him. When it says above Him stood the seraphim, He is seated, they are hovering on the same plane as Him but not seated, they are actually flying not standing. Now we don’t know what exactly seraphim are — they are clearly angelic beings. The root is the same root as for snakes in Hebrew, so some have speculated that they are serpentine in appearance, but it is also a cognate with the word “fiery” so fiery snakes is what some have proposed — I’m not sure. What is clear is that the imagery of their wings powerfully communicates that these perfect angelic beings are still unable to even look on the glory of this king, they have to cover their faces to shield themselves from his glory. And they cover their feet — reminiscent of Moses being told to take of his sandals for he is standing on holy ground in the presence of Yahweh in Exodus 3. This king is too holy and too glorious even for angels.
And these attendants have a job, they are calling to one another in an antiphonal song. “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of armies ” (Isa 6:3) — that is what hosts means. It refers to the angelic armies of the Lord, the legion and myriad angels who do his bidding. And they are also saying the whole earth is full of His glory.
Now what does this word “Holy” mean? You know it is never fully defined in scripture in part because holy is by definition what God is — He is transcendent and distinct from his creation, and that transcendence and distinctness is described by holiness. When you are looking at a sunset or a newborn baby you are not looking at God—you are looking at the creation of God — He is transcendently above all he has made. In addition to transcendence, in the Old Testament, holiness is often connected with the divine attitude towards ethical behaviour. God’s law draws the parameters of His holiness, of what it means to be God. Israel is supposed to be a holy nation because they keep God’s law — “Be holy because I am holy” (Lev 11:44). He does what is right, what is good, what is pure — in that sense all the attributes of God are holy attributes. Holy love, holy wrath, holy wisdom. Maybe that is why this is the only thrice repeated attribute in scripture.
But these angels don’t just tell us that He is holy, they model for us the right response to God’s holiness. They don’t look directly at the creator, for that would be too overwhelming, they cover themselves in humility but at the same time sing his praises.
The vision here finishes with an earthquake and smoke — both typical of theophanies, appearances of God to humans.
One of the things people will often say is that they would believe in God if he did something to reveal Himself to them — if they could see a miracle or maybe some vision of this sort. And maybe we could feel the same as we come to a text like this — Isaiah saw the Lord in a way that you and I haven’t. But friends realise that while God is under no compulsion to reveal Himself in a certain way to anyone — the history of redemption is a history of God’s gracious self-revelation. He is in the business of revealing Himself to people — that is what the Old Testament prophets were all about — they received revelation from God to deliver to the people. And supremely that is what the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ was about — Jesus was God in the flesh so that people could see who God is, what He is like, and the preaching of the apostles and the writing of the New Testament was about helping people see the Lord.
You and I put ourselves in position to know God when we pursue Him — in the fellowship of his people, by opening his inspired word and sitting under the teaching of it.
While you and I can’t demand God to reveal Himself to us, we can take a lesson from Isaiah here in his pursuit of God. Notice that this revelation happened while he was in the temple. In this time of great political and I assume personal instability, he had gone to the temple to seek God, wanting to know Him. You and I put ourselves in position to know God when we pursue Him — in the fellowship of his people, by opening his inspired word and sitting under the teaching of it.
Your spiritual life can only progress to the level that you understand who God is. Is that why you are here? Would you describe yourself as someone who is seeking to know God?
So that is the vision, now look at the effect. Now there is an immediate and spontaneous effect on Isaiah here, we see it in Isaiah 6:5. He says “woe is me.” Woe is a pronouncement of doom. Older translations say, “I am undone.” I am coming apart at the seams. This is a shattering vision for him. Why? Well, this vision of God somehow shines a spotlight on him. This glorious vision of God produces horror as he then turns to himself. Look at what he says: “I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips — for my eyes have seen the king, the LORD of hosts” (Isa 6:5).
The Hebrew people always assumed that to see God was to die. You may remember Jacob wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32, afterward he can’t believe he saw God face to face and is still alive. Remember in Exodus 19 the people of Israel see a theophany on Mt. Sinai and plead with Moses not to led God appear to them because they are sure they are going to die.
We even see this in the New Testament — in the miraculous catch of fish when it dawns on Peter what just happened and who he is standing next to in the boat — he doesn’t say “hey this is awesome, let’s do this every day.” He says — go away from me, for I am a sinful man. The unholy is repelled by the presence of the holy. Isaiah is terrified, and he thinks he is going to die, which is exactly how you or I would feel.
Except something happens — one of the angels has taken a burning coal from the altar of burnt offerings there in the temple-and he takes it and puts it on the lips of Isaiah. Now why lips? Why did Isaiah say he is a man of unclean lips rather than an unclean heart? Some have proposed that it is because this is a part of Isaiah’s calling to be a prophet and speak for God, I’m not persuaded of that view because he said he lives among a people of unclean lips who were not called to be prophets. I think more to the point is Jesus teaching that out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks — our words are the external expression of our hearts — and thus the first place that Isaiah locates his sin. He thinks about the words he has said that are untrue and unkind and unworshipful and unclean. Like the person who realises that their chat history can’t be deleted, and their social media posts are still there — except this is his whole life laid bare before the omniscient and the holy. He is unclean. Unworthy. He can’t stand.
But God says, Isaiah, your lips are unclean, well now I will cauterise them with burning fire. I will refine you with the fire of judgment from my holy altar — where the blood of sacrifice has been shed. That is where that coal came from. The angel says “this has touched your lips, your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for” (Isa 6:7). The word atone is a precious word, it means covered, done away with, rendered moot.
Isaiah is telling us that this is the burning revelation that changed everything for him. And it should be the burning revelation that changes everything for us. For every one of us if we are to know God have to pass through this same channel — of seeing who God is and ourselves as undone in light of that revelation. The person who is clinging to this idea that they can somehow work their way to God through good deeds, and by being a little better than the person next to them is believing a fiction. One glimpse of God’s holiness should dispel any thought of that. You and I have to come to the end of ourselves if the work of Jesus Christ as the atoning sacrifice for sin is going to make any sense to us.
We live in an age where psychological therapy and discussions of mental health have taken centerstage. And the common approach to understanding what is wrong with us is quite different than what we see here. So if you do much reading on the web or in popular books and journals the discussion often surrounds the concept of self-esteem. So Web MD recommends this approach to low-self esteem:
“Adjust your mindset: You’ve been able to identify the times where you’ve felt a blow to your self-esteem. You’ve become self-aware about how and why you have the thoughts and feelings towards those events. Now you can take a step back and analyse those thoughts and emotions. You now have the power to change your thought patterns to raise your self-esteem. Remember to think and feel hopeful statements, focus on the positive aspects of all situations, and don’t be afraid to relabel upsetting thoughts. And most importantly, don’t hesitate to forgive yourself. No one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes. It doesn’t make you a bad person—it just makes you human.”
You can see the strategy there is to try to deal with what we know is wrong with us, what we’ve done wrong, and thought wrong and felt that is wrong. You can try to relabel upsetting thoughts — I am a greedy anxious person, but let’s call that good money management! Or focus on the positive not the negative — I have been unkind to Uncle Tony, but I’m pretty nice to Aunt Doris! And you can try this strategy of forgiving yourself.
But friends the Scriptures tell us this is all a dead end. It is trying to put more gauze on a wound that is improperly stitched up. You can’t relabel what is wrong, you can’t get rid of it by not thinking about it, and you can’t forgive yourself when you are not the offended party, God is!
What if you found your worth not in a relabeled fiction or a hopeless comparison with others or a myopic focus on the positive but on the atoning love of God.
Beloved, God offers the better solution, the true solution — it’s atonement. God is more holy than you have ever dared realise. And you are more sinful than you every dared face. But in Christ you are more loved than you ever dared believe. What if you found your worth not in a relabeled fiction or a hopeless comparison with others or a myopic focus on the positive but on the atoning love of God. Two wonders here that I confess, my worth and my unworthiness. My value fixed, my ransom paid. At the cross.
John Bunyan pictures this beautifully in Pilgrim’s progress: Christian is carrying this massive burden on his back through the whole first part of the book, you realize is the burden of his sin and guilt. His woe. Then you read, “Christian ran till he came to a hill; upon it stood a cross, and a little below was a tomb. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up to the cross, his burden loosed from off his shoulders, and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of the tomb, where it fell in, and I saw it no more.
So I wonder as we conclude this first point and think about application — do you see yourself rightly in the light of the holiness of God? Sometimes we are afraid to say we are wrong and undone when in reality that is what will bring us healing—because it is the precursor to understanding the atoning grace of God. Surround yourself with counsellors who knowing God through atonement is knowing Him rightly.
Serving God faithfully (Isa 6:8-13)
For the first time God speaks here. And there is something quite unique to the call of Isaiah as a prophet — God asks who will go — rather than tells him to go. With Jeremiah, or Ezekiel or Hosea or Jonah — God just tells them to go or calls them to go. Some suggest Isaiah is different because of how difficult his ministry will be.
The “us” there in the phrase “who will go for us”" in Isaiah 6:8 may be a hint at the Trinity. God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one God in 3 distinct persons is largely a New Testament revelation, but we get hints of it in the Old Testament like in Genesis 1 where God says “let us make man in our image” (Gen 1:26).
God is asking who will be His ambassador, who will go as a spokesperson for Him. And Isaiah doesn’t need any time to consider. The person who has seen God’s holiness and his sinfulness and been redeemed by grace needs no convincing, no coercion, they are ready to volunteer for whatever God wants.
We should let that question rest on us — who will go for us? If you struggle with the idea of serving God, if it feels like a great burden or duty to you, consider going back to study the character of God and the nature of the atonement. Maybe pick up a book like R.C. Sproul’s “Holiness of God”, “The Cross of Christ” by John Stott or “Knowing God” by J.I Packer at the bookstall.
We should have a ready “Send me! I’ll go!”. What a delight to serve the one who has saved us!
Isaiah 6:9 is what Isaiah is to say to the people: “keep hearing, but do not understand, keep seeing but do not perceive”. This obviously not the sum total of what he will preach, the book of Isaiah is a fraction of all he would have preached — I take this to be a summary of his message. He is to tell Israel that in the midst of their idolatry and hoarding and hedonism and replacing God, despising His Word — they will now no longer be able to understand or perceive the spiritual truth he and other prophets bring.
Isaiah 6:10 is the result — His preaching will make their hearts more dull, ears heavy, eyes blind, so that they will not turn and be healed. In other words his preaching is not going to bring about an awakening of the people, but rather a hardening of the people.
In Isaiah 6:11 the heart of the prophet shows through when he asks the Lord how long this would be for. And the words are not encouraging. Until the land is an uninhabited waste, and the people taken away — speaking of the exile to come.
And then it closes in Isaiah 6:13 with this image of a tree that has been cut down and there is only a stump left.
So what does all this mean? We’ve thought about things thus far from the perspective of Isaiah and how that relates to us, the more challenging thing we need to do is to ask what this teaches us about God.
Most times Isaiah 6 is read people stop in Isaiah 6:8, I’ve heard this passage used at many a missionary commissioning and they always leave off Isaiah 6:9-10 because they seem so discouraging. Why tell Isaiah that his ministry is going to be largely unfruitful?
We have to face what is being taught here squarely. Of the more than 80 times that Isaiah is quoted in the New Testament, Isaiah 6:9-10 are by far the most quoted. Every one of the gospels and Acts, Romans all quote it, so we need to dig in and understand it.
We described last week the place that Israel had reached — we looked at the 6 woes. Hoarding wealth, hedonism and self indulgence, mocking the idea of judgment, redefining right and wrong, enthroning self. For many years they had heard prophetic warnings, there had been temporary reprieves and judgment delayed, but none of that worked to bring Israel to repentance. God has now decided that what is needed is the complete rock-bottom cleansing that only exile can bring.
With God there is a point of no return. A series of decisions to ignore Him, harden yourself to His word, reach a point where you no longer have ears to hear.
So what that means for us is that with God there is a point of no return. A series of decisions to ignore Him, harden yourself to His word, reach a point where you no longer have ears to hear. Jesus quotes this in Mark 4 to explain how the disciples are enable to understand the parables but the uncommitted crowds do not. Luke quotes it at the end of Acts to explain how the Jewish leaders in Rome refuse to respond to Paul’s preaching but the Gentiles do. Paul himself quotes it in Romans 11 again to explain the same thing. In every case it is not that people didn’t have the chance to hear and respond at some point — but rather that having heard and refused to respond God gives them over to their hardness of heart to a tragic end.
I wonder if you’ve thought about how serious a thing it is to listen to the word of God. Whether it is read or preached, you are always either letting it shape you or hardening yourself against it. If you harden yourself today, maybe the preacher is talking about not making money your God and using it compassionately and not being dishonest with it…but you have this area you aren’t ready to confess to Him and begin to live rightly. Or maybe you are dallying in a relationship that you know is ungodly, but you tell yourself that this is just one area, and anyway you don’t intend to live that way forever, but for now you’d rather not go there. So somehow you do it, you rationalize or just tune out, try to forget it. How do you know whether that is the last time you will even be able to make a choice? How do you know that your action hasn’t vaccinated you to the truth. That the next time it comes up and the Spirit is speaking to you, the same wall doesn’t come crashing down. A little faster. With more finality. Beloved, it is a serious thing to hear the word of God. Don’t harden your heart to the words of eternal life!
These are sobering words, but I want you to notice God does not leave us without a glimmer of hope. That last sentence gives us a ray of light amidst the darkness of impending judgement. The tree is pictured in Isaiah 6:13cut down to a stump, but we are told that “the holy seed is its stump”.
Now what does that mean? Saying that the stump is actually a seed points to the possibility that it will grow again. And the fact that it is a holy seed points to the fact that the remnant of true believers will remain after judgment. So Isaiah should take heart that his ministry is not in vain.
Now let’s put the pieces of the chapter together. We’ve said that Isaiah wants us to see his own call as a prophet as a model for us. A model of discipleship. He is telling us that knowing God rightly leads to serving Him faithfully. That all of us need to go through this same process —
Seeing God rightly in all his holiness and majesty.
Despairing of our own utter inability to do anything except pronounce doom on ourselves.
Receiving then from his hand atonement.
Rising to the question who will go for us and saying—me Lord, send me! I will serve you!
Persevering through all the hardship that faithfulness to God requires—even when things don’t turn out like we might like.
It is natural for us to ask — how did all this play out in Isaiah’s life? Did knowing God rightly lead to serving God faithfully? Did it give him staying power in a life of faithful service to the Lord?
Well his life wasn’t easy. He began his ministry married and then had 2 kids as we’ll hear about in the next chapters. His ministry didn’t make him very popular as we can imagine from the content of what he was to preach about the coming exile. He has to watch Israel decline spiritually, he would see the exile comes on the northern tribes and then looms for the southern. I don’t know when he died exactly but he perseveres in this difficult work for 6 decades of ministry. 60 years. Eventually tradition has it he is killed during the reign of Manasseh — but it is a bit stronger than tradition. When Hebrews 11 speaks of those of whom the world was not worthy and says, “they were stoned, they were sawn in two” that is referencing the rabbinic tradition that Jeremiah and Isaiah were killed in those two ways, respectively. However Isaiah met his end, I don’t think we would conclude that he lived his best life now.
Because Isaiah saw God rightly, he was able to serve Him faithfully — regardless of how things went.
But beloved he was indeed faithful. And I think it all goes back to what we read about here. Because he saw God rightly, he was able to serve Him faithfully — regardless of how things went.
I don’t know where you are at this morning — whether in a time of plenty or a time of want. Whether what God is calling you to feels overwhelming.
Maybe to love a prodigal child over years and decades of unresponsiveness.
Maybe to try again to share the gospel at Chinese New Year with family members who have shrugged you off again and again.
Maybe to do the often thankless work of a caregiver to an ageing relative.
Maybe to keep teaching 7 and 8 year olds in Children’s ministry — you know when they don’t pay attention but are no longer cute.
Maybe much harder things than these — what will sustain you? What will give you staying power?
Beloved knowing God will. Seeing the King will. There is a wonderful verse in John 12 when John quotes the verses about blinded eyes and hardened hearts he says that they are fulfilled in the unbelief of most of the Jewish people. But then he says something interesting. He says “Isaiah said these things because he saw the glory of Jesus and spoke of him” (Jn 12:41).
Now how could Isaiah have seen the glory of Jesus 700+ years before He was born? What John means is that the King on the throne high and exalted that Isaiah saw was King Jesus Himself. The second person of the Trinity. He was the king on the throne in the year Uzziah died. He would come as the Holy Seed out of the stump of Israel in the fullness of time. And at the end of all things he will return.
Isaiah saw the glory of Jesus and spoke of Him. Do you see the Lord this morning? Do you see the King high and exalted?
Are you redeemed by His grace?
Then say with Isaiah, Here I am Lord, send me. I’ll go, even if it’s hard. Send me. Let’s pray.