Isaiah 6 - The Holiness of God

Introduction:

The one key theme in this chapter that jumps out at us from beginning to end is the holiness of God.

To say that God is holy is to say that God is completely separate from everything that is unclean, impure and sinful

and it is to say that God in his very being is morally pure in every way.

as one theologian puts it ‘God is not only personally free from any moral wickedness or evil. He is unable to tolerate its presence. He is as it were allergic to sin and evil.’

and it is safe to say that this is one of the main teachings of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, God is holy.

It’s the reason satan fell like lightning from heaven, it’s the reason Adam and eve were banished from the garden and outside of Christ the human race is cut off from God.

It’s the reason Moses had to take off his sandals because the ground was holy because God was there,

it’s the reason that if anything touched the mountain when God was there it had to be shot with an arrow,

it’s the reason the law was given and animal sacrifices were introduced,

it’s the reason aarons sons were struck dead because they offered up strange fire,

it’s the reason uzzah died for steadying the ark, the reason why Ananias and saphira died when they lied to the Holy Spirit

and ultimately it is why Jesus, God the Son, had to die upon the cross so that anyone at all could ever be reconciled to God.

And it’s the reason for everything which happens in our chapter this morning.

The reality is unless we grasp something of the holiness of God, we will never know who He truly is nor what he is like, nor how sinful sin is, nor will we truly understand the need for Jesus’ death

nor why there is a hell

we will not view God as we ought but instead we will view him inadequately, we will worship him inadequately and we will speak of him inadequately.

May we not be the ones an influential speaker was referring to when he said ‘The failure of modern evangelicalism is the failure to understand the holiness of God.’

And so our chapter this morning begins with the words ‘In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up’.

Israel had just lost their king and yet God gives Isaiah a vision of who the real king is and this king is not like a human king who is sinful but this King is Holy.

and if there is one thing we learn from this chapter it is that the living God is a holy God.

and so there are four ways that God conveys this to us in this chapter.

these are the activity of the angels, the trembling of Isaiah, the need for sins atonement and the prophecy of judgement.

So angels, Isaiah, atonement and judgement.

The activity of the angels.

The first thing we see then is the activity of the angels.

Isaiah has this immense vision of God sitting on the throne which may well be the pre-incarnate Jesus which is possibly confirmed by John 12:41

where John says that Isaiah said these things when he saw Jesus’ glory and the things that Isaiah says which John refers to are the words found in our chapter where God tells Isaiah to prophecy to Israel.

However even apart from that Jesus is God the Son and therefore all that is true of God’s character is true of Jesus’ character.

So just as the Father is Holy so is the Son and of course so is the Holy Spirit which goes without saying as he has holy in his name.

So Isaiah sees God seated on a throne and the train of his robe filled the temple which is a symbol of God’s glory and majesty.

in verse 2 we are then introduced to these creatures called serpahim which means the burning ones and they are flying around above him.

They are angelic beings, they are sinless and free from impurity and yet immediately we are introduced to something of the holiness of God

as we are told that they didn’t even dare to look upon God but they covered their eyes and their feet with four of their wings and flew with the 2 of the six wings that remained.

now why would they cover their eyes and their feet?

well I think it is to show something of their unworthiness and nothingness in the presence of a God who is immeasurably holy.

we are then left without a doubt as to the character of God, as we read that they cried to one another and said ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’

Now what is fascinating here, is that in the Hebrew they often repeated stuff for emphasis and to show that what is being repeated is of the highest quality if you like.

So for example in 2 Kings 25:15 our English translations just use the word gold but in the Hebrew it is gold gold as if to say pure gold.

And so here we have what is called a superlative, the repetition is to highlight that God is holy in the highest degree.

He is not just holy, nor is he holy holy but he is holy, holy, holy.

it is expressing totality, God is completely and utterly holy.

There is none like him, everything compared to him is unholy and impure. Even the seraphs daren’t look upon him.

and it is this attribute or quality of God that makes him so fearful, as one has pointed out, we don’t fear God because he is almighty and we are not, but we are to fear God because he is holy and we are not.

He is pure and nothing impure can be tolerated by him.

he is holy and cannot stand the presence of sin and evil but it is incomprehensibly repulsive to him.

but Isaiah’s vision of the angels doesn’t stop there as he then records in verse 4 that the after the angels say this all of the sudden the door posts and the thresholds shake.

inanimate objects begin to quack and tremble before God and the whole temple is filled with smoke.

and the picture this vision paints for us is one that says this God is a holy God.

this is normally where you would get an illustration but there is nothing that can truly illustrate the holiness of God without doing it injustice.

numerous times when I was writing this sermon, I just stopped and thought I don’t even have to words to convey how holy God is

I can’t even begin to imagine it myself how then can I express it in words.

and surely Tozer is correct when he writes ‘God’s holiness is not simply the best we know infinitely bettered. we know nothing like the divine holiness. It stands apart, unique, unapproachable, incomprehensible and unattainable.’

and I truly believe that if as the people of God we were to get a glimpse of just how holy God is, it would change the way we think about God, the way we live and the way we worship.

irreverence and blasphemy would not seem such a light thing to us and we would be even more amazed that this God would save us at all.

and how do i know we would be changed forever?

I know because of what happens next in the passage.

The Trembling of Isaiah

Not only do we see something of the holiness of God in the activity of the angels but we also see it in the trembling of Isaiah.

here was a prophet of God, no doubt a righteous man and quite possibly one of the most righteous people alive at the time, if not the righteous.

and yet his reaction was one we would expect from the worst of people and yet the reality is, it was not just because of the degree of his sin though a sinner he was,

but it was because he caught a glimpse of how holy God is.

immediately after he sees God, he cries out in verse 5, ‘Woe is me’ showing that he is in utter despair as he realises how sinful he is before a holy a God

now he tells us why he is in despair, he says for i am lost, or some translations say ruined or undone and the reason is is because he is a man of unclean lips and he lives among a people of unclean lips.

in other words he is a sinner as is every person who is born into this world apart from Christ.

and yet his eyes have seen the king, the LORD Almighty. as it says at the end of verse 5.

He a sinner has laid eyes upon this immearusably holy God in this vision and now he is sure he is about to die, how can he not face God’s wrath and destruction.

Habbakuk when praying to God says ‘Your eyes are too pure to look on evil; you cannot tolerate wrongdoing.’

and Isaiah a sinner has just seen the Lord.

the book of Job is even stronger, when Eliphaz says ‘If God places no trust in his holy ones, if even the heavens are not pure in his eyes, how much less mortals, who are vile and corrupt, who drink up evil like water!’

and surely Isaiah realised this the day he saw Lord high and lifted up and he saw the reverence of the seraphs who could not even look upon God but only cry out holy, holy, holy.

All Isaiah could do was tremble before the LORD as he was certain of his immediate destruction.

this is the common experience of those who have experiences of God’s immediate presence on this side of eternity.

Manoah and his wife after being visited by the Angel of the LORD fell on their faces and said ‘we shall surely die, for we have seen God.’

When the apostle John saw the glorified Christ at the beginning of the book of revelation we read that he fell at his feet as dead.

sinners cannot stand in the presence of the Holy one.

as Calvin put it ‘what seems

Application:

and I wonder does this fit into our view of God.

When we think of God and speak to God and speak of God, do we see him as Isaiah does in this vision or do we see him as a jokey grandfather figure who we hang out with for an hour on the weekend.

I believe that in order to know God as we ought to and to come to Jesus in the first place then we need to know who we truly are and in order to know who we are we need to know who God is

Therefore we need to have something of the realisation that Isaiah had that day, a realisation that God is holy and before him we cannot stand

and when we realise this we will realise how sinful we actually are.

As Calvin put it we need to realise that ‘what in us seems perfection itself, corresponds ill to the purity of God.’

and this is what we need to grasp.

if you are not a Christian this morning then you need to realise that you are in grave danger because one day you will stand before this Holy God in your sin and there will be no hope and no rescue.

and yet amazingly Isaiah did not die did he, he should have been like the guards of king Nebuchadnezzar who perished from the heat of the fire because they drew too close to it in the book of Daniel ch 3

and yet he was like the Hebrew young men who survived the flames.

and the reason why Isaiah lived to see another day is because of what we read of next.

The need for sins atonement

where we see the need for sins atonement, this is both the reason why Isaiah survived and a third reason as to how we know that God is holy.

sin needs to be atoned for.

to atone means to cover, so sin needs to be covered, needs to be taken away before we can come before God without fear of judgement.

and this is just what we learn in the next few verses. After Isaiah cries out in despair , that he is lost, we read in verse 6 that one of the seraphim flys over to him with a burning coal off of the altar

and touched his mouth with it and said ‘your guilt is taken away, your sin is atoned for’.

Straight away we see that God is so holy that sin cannot simply be brushed under the carpet, nor can sin be out weighed by good deeds but it needs to covered, it needs to be taken away, it needs to atoned for.

so lets think about what this passage is telling us.

The coal was brought from off the altar and the altar was where they sacrificed animals to cover their sin because the Bible says that without the shedding of blood there is no remission or removal of sin.

which is why in the Old Testament we read that the high priest would enter the holy of holies which is a place in the Old Testament Jewish temple where God’s presence was specially manifested

and he would enter only once a year with the blood of a sacrificed bull to atone for his sin

and then once his sin was atoned for he then sacrificed a goat and took the blood of the goat into the holy of holies to atone for the people’s sin.

the high priest would wear bells so they knew he was still alive and hadn’t been struck dead because he had desecrated the holy holies again highlighting the holiness of God.

but do you know why he took blood in to this most holy place where God’s presence dwelt.

It was to sprinkle the blood on something called the mercy seat and inside the mercy seat was the 10 commandments of God.

This is a vivid picture of the fact that the law had been broken which is what sin is the breaking of God’s laws and therefore blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat to atone for that sin.

but this is where it really gets amazing and God’s holiness is seen in a much greater sense, even to an infinite degree.

the coal in Isaiah’s vision cannot take away sin, neither can the blood of goats and bulls as we read in hebrews 10:4 where it says ‘For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins’.

but what these things served to do was to point to the ultimate sacrifice which is the only thing that could take away sins and that is the sacrifice of Jesus upon the cross in the place of sinners.

Jesus’ death is the only thing that can atone for our sin

and this is where we truly see the holiness of God because God is so holy that sin takes on an infinite degree in its severity and therefore it took God,

God the Son, who is Jesus, to come down and take on flesh and die upon the cross himself to save us from our sin.

God is so holy that nothing but the blood of Jesus can atone for our sin and bring us back to God.

which is why Jesus is the only way to be saved and if we haven’t done so already then we need to come to him and call upon him to save us from our sin and reconcile us to God.

J.C Ryle is helpful when in his book on holiness he writes ‘No proof of the fulness of sin, after all, is so overwhelming and unanswerable as the cross and passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the whole doctrine of His substitution and atonement. Terribly black must that guilt be for which nothing but the blood of the Son of God could make satisfaction. Heavy must that weight of human sin be which made Jesus groan and sweat drops of blood in agony at Gethsemane, and cry at Golgotha, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”’

and the reason sin is so sinful that it took Jesus to atone for it, is because the God against whom we have sinned is an immeasurably holy God.

The Prophecy of Judgement

So we have seen the angels, Isaiah and atonement and the final thing we see in the passage which highlights the holiness of God is the prophecy of judgement found in verses 9-13.

After Isaiah experiences the coal touching his lips and the angel says that his sin is atoned for, he then over hears God saying ‘Whom shall I send and who will go for us?’

to which Isaiah says ‘Here I am send me’

showing that once we have been reconciled to God a natural response is service, we should want to serve God and give our all for him what ever that may be in our particular contexts

because God has done so much for us in giving his Son to atone for our sin.

and so once Isaiah says send me, God then tells him what to say.

And what Isaiah is sent to prophecy is judgement

and the reason why judgement is on the cards is because God is holy.

As J.I packer helpfully highlights, God’s justice is an expression of his holiness.

And so because God is holy he is just and because he is just he must do what is right all of the time and a part of that is judging sin and evil.

and the judgement mentioned in these verses are foreshadow of God’s ultimate judgement of sinners in hell, which has to be because God is so Holy.

So God tells Isaiah to tell the people in verse 9 that they are to keep hearing and not understanding and seeing and not perceiving.

this is a sign that they have been given over to their sin, God has called them to repentance and they have rejected it and so now they are at they point of no return.

Isaiah then enquires how long is this to be for? in verse 11

and God responds by saying “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste, and the Lord removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land. And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled.” The holy seed is its stump.”

The judgement of God was coming upon the people because of their sins against him.

and now if we’re being honest this sounds overly severe and harsh to our modern ears doesn't it.

How could God do that to human beings who deep down are good people?

and the reason this is so is because we have lost the sense of the holiness of God and so we have lost the sense that we are sinners through and through and worthy of nothing but the judgement of God.

the reason why as a nation we don’t like the mention of sin, judgement and hell, the reason we don’t like the mention of Jesus being the only to be saved is because we have the lost the sense of the holiness of God.

and I believe as I mentioned at the beginning that when as the church we truly begin to grasp the holiness of God we will worship God differently, speak of him differently and ultimately we will live differently.

finally then this leads us to think about two major implications that follow on from the holiness of God, one for the Christian and the other for the non-Christian.

firstly then for the Christian, amazingly God’s word already applies this truth of God’s holiness to his people.

Now if a thrice holy God tells us what we are to do in the light of his holiness, I think its important that we take it seriously.

and here it is

Le 11:45 “For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.””

so God is telling his people that because he is holy (separate from sin), they are to be holy and separate themselves from sin.

and this same command is repeated again and again.

Le 19:2 ““Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.”

and again in Le 20:26

Leviticus 20:26 ESV

You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.

and now if you’re thinking ah well you see their all old testament scriptures from the law of Moses that doesn’t apply to Christians then you’d be wring because this same principle is repeated in the New Testament again and again.

because God is holy we are to be holy.

1 Pet 1:15-16 says “but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.””

Jesus says the same thing using slightly different words on the sermon on the mount

and 1 John 3:3 says the same thing too but using different words when it says “And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”

sin in the life of a Christian is not a light thing and so we will be seeking to kill it and be rid of it because to whom we belong is a Holy God.

the Christian life is one long pursuit of holiness which will only be complete when we get to glory and are made sinless when we see Jesus.

this means it’s not ok to get drunk, or to lie on our tax forms or to lie at all for that matter, its not ok to watch pornography.

because God is holy we too are to be holy.

And the second implication is for that of the non-Christian

before long you will stand before this holy God naked and in your sin and everlasting punishment will be result.

but there is hope and there is mercy and that hope and mercy is found in the death and resurrection of Jesus who can take away our sin bring us to God.

If you turn to him, no longer will you be under the wrath of God but he will be your father and you shall be his child,

he will no longer see you in your sin but he will see you as one whose sin has been taken away and who has the righteousness of Jesus.

In the year that king uzziah died I saw the Lord, sitting upon a throne high and lifted up…above him stood the seraphim…and one called to another and said ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory’

may we pursue this Holy God and as we do so pursue holiness.

lets pray.