Fear and Trembling with R. C. Sproul, “Holy, Holy, Holy,” 2

Rome, the Roman Forum, and the Contrast Between Empire and the Church

Last summer I had the opportunity to visit Rome, the eternal city, to visit all the historic sites and the thing that stood out to me most dramatically was the mixture of the monuments. On the one hand you had all of the historical monuments to the secular power of the Roman Empire.

And then on the other hand you had all of those monuments that recorded for us the initial days of the Christian church. And it was like an exercise in contrast where we see an intersection, no, not just an intersection, a collision between the secular forces of this world and the things of God.

And I think the most dramatic moment for me in my visit to Rome was in looking at the Roman Forum, the ruins of the Roman Forum where the Senate sat and met to decide the policies of the Roman Empire.

And they had all of these busts remaining from the famous Caesars, from Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus, Nero, Flavian, Diocletian, Titus, and all the rest of them. And then right across the street there was this little known area that you had to go down below ground into what was originally a cistern hewn out of the rock, a place that held water for the city.

And I went into that place, that hole in the ground, right across the street from the Forum. And I noticed that all of the tourists were busy looking at the Forum, and nobody was crowding around this place where I wanted to visit.

But in that hole in the ground, in that cistern, was the place where the Apostle Paul was held prisoner while he was awaiting his execution from Nero. And I thought, I'm standing in the place here where Paul was in chains and where Paul, who doesn't have a monument to him here in the Forum, represented something that far outlasted the power of imperial Rome.

And I remembered that the city of Rome, according to legend and according to the tradition of the Romans, began centuries earlier than the first century with the story of Romulus and Remus. And four years before, that village was founded, according to Roman historians.

Isaiah’s Vision in the Year King Uzziah Died

The prophet Isaiah in Israel had an experience that would change his life forever and would change history forever, as he predicted during his ministry, the coming of the Christ who would upset the Roman Empire.

And the record for that we find in the book of Isaiah in the sixth chapter, where he tells us what happened on that occasion. We read, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of His robe filled the temple.

Now, he notes that this experience that he had took place when a particular king in the year that that king died. His name was Uzziah, and maybe you've never even heard of King Uzziah. You've heard of David, you've heard of Saul, and heard some of the other kings, maybe Hezekiah.

But Uzziah reigned for over fifty years. Imagine that, having the same king when you go to school, the same king is on the throne when you graduate from high school, the same king is there when you get married, the same king is there when you have your children, the same king is there when your daughter gets married.

Fifty years, same king. When he died, it was a time of trauma for the people of Israel. And Isaiah said, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. Now, there's something significant here that we could easily miss.

And when he says, I saw the Lord, the word Lord is spelled like this in the text that I'm reading from, capital L, little o, little r, little d. And then in the very next verse, he talks about seeing the Lord, and there it's spelled capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D.

Now, why is that? You see the same word typed out differently in the text. Well, whenever you see that in the Bible, what the translator is trying to tell you is that even though the same English word is being used, two different Hebrew words are behind the text that are being translated by the word Lord.

And when you see the word Lord in capital letters, capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, that usually indicates that the Hebrew word that is in the text there is the word Yahweh, which is the sacred name of God.

It's not His title. It's His name. Do you remember when Moses met God in the wilderness there, and God spoke to him out of the burning bush, and Moses said to God, you know, who are you? What's your name?

And God answered him by saying, I am who I am, Yahweh, I am. And He said, this will be My memorial name for all generations. Now, it's that name, Yahweh, that's protected by the law of God, by the Ten Commandments, where one of the commandments specifies what thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

If you were asked to write a constitution for an emerging nation, and you could only include ten laws in that constitution, would you include a prohibition against the misuse or the irreverent use of the name of God?

And yet when God created a nation, His nation, and gave His law to His people, He had the normal laws against killing and against stealing and that sort of thing, but included in the top ten laws was this law, thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

The Lord’s Prayer and Reverence for the Name of God

In the New Testament, the disciples come to Jesus, and they say, Lord, teach us how to.

Pray.

Do you remember that? And Jesus gives the Lord's Prayer. I'm going to ask you here, what is the first petition of the Lord's Prayer? What is the very first thing Jesus told His disciples to pray for? Well, let's think about the Lord's Prayer.

How does it go?

Our Father, who art in heaven. Now that's the address. That's how you start the prayer, by naming God who He is and so on. This is the one to whom we're praying. Our Father, who art in heaven, the first petition, hallowed be thy name.

What does that mean? Jesus is saying when you pray, the first thing you should pray for is that the name of my Father be treated with reverence, that it be regarded as holy, because indeed holy is His name.

That's the capital L, capital O, capital R, capital D, Yahweh, the sacred name, that before we even mention the name of God, we should pause and only speak of it with reverence. Now, I know that's not the way it works in our culture.

You can turn on your television, you can turn your radio, go to the movies, and there are certain things that are banned on the radio, certain language things that you can hear in the movies, but you can't hear it on the radio, but it's still okay on the radio to use the word God in a flippant, cavalier, casual way, because we don't have a sense in our culture that the name of God is holy.

You ought to examine your own practice, because nothing, nothing reveals more clearly what your heart's attitude is towards God than how you use His name. There's no way that you can be a person who has been grasped by the character of God, the holiness of God, and turn around and use His name in a blasphemous way.

You can't do it. Well, the other name is really not a name. It's a title, capital L, little o, little r, little d, and normally when you see that title in the English language, what lies behind it in the Hebrew text is some form of the Hebrew word Adon, Adonai.

Now the Old Testament Jews had a whole list of titles that they used for God. God was the king. He was this. He was that. And yet the favorite title that was reserved for God in the Old Testament was this title Adonai.

And what it means is the one who is absolutely sovereign, the one who rules all things. It's even a higher title than the title king. And you find these words joined together at various points in the Old Testament, particularly in the Psalms, Psalm 8 for example, where the psalmist says, Oh Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy name in all the earth.

And it goes really, if you look at it in the Hebrew, it's oh Yahweh, our Adonai, oh God, our sovereign one, how majestic is Your name in all of the earth. Now the irony here is in Israel the king has died.

The Seraphim, the Glory of God, and Human Creatureliness

And humanly speaking, it was Uzziah who was the sovereign in Israel, but he's dead. And now Isaiah gets to look beyond the veil and gets a vision into the inner chamber of heaven itself, and he doesn't see Uzziah.

What does he see? He sees Adonai, high and exalted, lifted up there in his heavenly throne. And we read in the text that he says,. And the train of his robe filled the temple, that his garments were so magnificent that they didn't just furrow down over the edge of the throne and ended there, but they went back and filled the whole sanctuary.

And then we read in the text that above it stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings. With two he covered his face, with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. Now Isaiah gives us a graphic description of these angelic beings whose specific task is to minister in the presence of God in heaven.

And he describes them in somewhat bizarre terms, that these heavenly creatures have six wings, and these wings have specific functions. You know that when God makes creatures, He designs them according to the equipment that they need for their environment.

For example, when He makes birds, He gives them wings, He gives them feathers and so on so that they can fly through the air.

We don't have wings.

We don't have feathers. We're not birds. When He makes fish, He gives them scales and gills and all that kind of thing and fins because they swim in the water. That's where they live. Well, when God makes angels to be in His immediate presence, He designs and constructs them with everything they need for their environment.

So He gives them six wings. They don't need six wings to fly. What do they need six wings for?

What does He say?

With two He covered His face. It's an incredible thing to me that even the angels of God who are in the immediate presence of God need special appendages to cover their face from the brightness of the glory of God.

Do you remember Moses when Moses went up in the mountain and had the opportunity to talk to God as it were face to face, but that's just a manner of speaking. He wasn't able really to see God's face, and he asked God for the big one.

You know, Moses had been there at the Exodus, and he'd been there at the Red Sea and all.

Of that.

He'd seen God do all these mighty things. Now he's alone with God up in the mountain, and he said, okay, God, nobody's around.

Let me see Your glory.

Let me see it.

And what did God say? Hey, Moses, I'll tell you what, I'll come over here, and I'll carve a little niche, a hollow place in the rock, and I'll put you in that rock and cover you, and then I'll walk past, and I'll let you have a momentary brief glance at my backward parts, but my face shall not be seen.

Don't you know, Moses, that nobody can look at my face and live? You can enjoy my presence, but you can't see me. And so God did exactly what He said, and He came by, and for a second Moses got a backward glance of the back of God's glory.

What happened to Moses' face? Moses' face began to shine. His countenance began to glow so intensely that when he came down from the mountain, you know, the people were saying, cover your face, because he had been in the presence.

Of the glory of God.

One of the most incredible things you can ever do when you study the Scripture is begin in the Old Testament, go through the New Testament, and notice every time the Bible speaks about the glory of God being manifested visibly, like the night in which Christ was born, and the glory of God shone round about, and the shepherds were, because they were beholding a sound and light show such as no one in their generation had ever seen.

When God manifests the light of His glory, it's overwhelming, and even the angels can't look directly into the face of God. They have to cover their eyes. And with two, we are told, two of the wings, they cover their feet.

Why is that? You remember again Moses when he was out in the Midianite wilderness, and God came to him in the burning bush, and He first spoke to Moses what He said. He said, Moses, Moses, put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the ground whereon you are standing is holy ground.

Take your shoes off.

Why?

It's the big deal.

What makes it holy ground? Certainly not. Moses' presence makes it holy ground. What makes it holy is God has intersected the planet at that point. God is meeting Moses right then, and He says, take your shoes off.

Why?

Well, look at the significance, the symbolic significance of the feet of human beings in the Bible. What does the Bible tell us in terms of our origins? We are of the earth, earthy. We come from the dust.

We have feet of clay, and it's our feet by which we, as it were, are attached to the world, to this earth, so that the feet in the symbolism of biblical literature become a sign of creatureliness, and even the angels, as exalted as they are in their status, are.

Still creatures.

And when they are in the immediate presence of God, they have to cover their creatureliness. They have to cover their feet. They have to cover their face, and with two, they fly. But when we look at this text, the most important thing we find in it is not a lesson in the anatomy of angels or seraphim.

It's not how they're constructed that I want you to really pay attention to in terms of what's going on here in this text. It's their message. It's what the angels are saying. And we are saying, listen to how Isaiah describes it.

He said, and one cried to another and said, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory. So that the angels now in the presence of God are singing in antiphonal response back and forth to one another, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole world is filled with His glory. There it is again. But again, this is one of those things that we can read in the English translation a thousand times and miss the point because there's a literary device going on here that we don't want to miss.

When I write in English and I get to a place on the page where I want to emphasize the importance of something, I have all different kind of little techniques I can use to draw attention to the importance of a particular statement.

I can underline it. I can put it in italics, right, put little quotes around it, bracket it, bold face the letters, put a dozen exclamation points.

Don't do that.

Only use exclamation points for exclamations, okay? These are the little devices that we use to signal to the reader, hey, this is important.

Don't miss this.

Well, the Jews had all those little tricks too, but they had another one. If they wanted to communicate that something was important, they simply repeated it. How about in the New Testament when Jesus is teaching to His disciples, and sometimes you'll hear Him say, truly, what, tell me, does He just say truly I say to you, or truly, truly, says it twice, truly, truly, or the old translation, verily, verily.

In the text, it's amen, amen, from which we get the word amen. The way we say amen is that after the prayer is over, we say amen, or if we like what the preacher says, we may say amen, but Jesus says amen before He gives His sermon.

He says it before.

He says amen, amen.

That is, this is true. This is the truth. Now listen up. Truly, truly, says it twice. Paul writes to the Galatians, and he said, oh foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you because they're going after another gospel, and he says to them, what, if anyone preaches any other gospel to you than that which you have received, let him be accursed.

Let him be anathema, anathema.

Anathema.

And then what's he say? Again I say to you, if anybody gives any other gospel than that which you have received, let him be damned. He repeats it. There's an Old Testament scholar in England, Alec Mateer, wrote a commentary on Isaiah.

He tells the story of a text in the Old Testament where this strange pit is found, where some translators translate it as an asphalt pit, another one as a bitumen pit, another one as a big pit, another one as a great pit, and they say, why all these different translations?

And what Mateer points out is that what you have in the Hebrew is just the Hebrew word for pit repeated, but it wouldn't make sense in English to translate it that people came to this pit pit. What in the world is a pit pit?

Well, in Hebrew terms, see, to the Jew, there are pits and then there are pit pits. It's one thing to fall in a pit. You're in trouble if you fall in a pit, but if you fall in a pit pit, you're in deep, deep weeds because a pit pit is the piteous pit that you can ever imagine.

But that's how the Jew would describe something by emphasizing it, repeats it. You see, the angels don't say here that God is holy, and they're not satisfied to say that God is holy, holy, but their message is that He is holy, holy.

This is the only time in all of the Bible that an attribute of God is elevated to the third degree, elevated to the superlative level. The Bible doesn't say that God is love, love, love, or justice, justice, justice, or mercy, mercy, mercy, but that He is holy, holy, holy.

That's where the emphasis is, and what happens at this message? We read in verse 4, the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of Him who cried out and the house was filled with smoke. These inanimate elements of the building, the doors, the posts, shake at the presence of God in His holiness, and on Isaiah, screams.

In the Old Testament, when God would pronounce His judgment on people, He would use a formula called an oracle, and it was the oracle of doom, and they used the word woe, woe unto you Damascus, woe unto you Israel, whatever, but here when Isaiah sees the unveiled majesty of God, he pronounces a curse on himself.

Woe is me.

I'm ruined.

I'm coming apart at the seams because I'm a man of unclean lips. I've got a dirty mouth, and I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

Why does He do this?

Well, here's the point, that Isaiah never, ever, ever knew who Isaiah was until he found out who God was, and we don't really know who we are until we find out who God is, and when we do find out who God is, we see the glaring difference between His holiness and our corruption.

That's what the message of Scripture is all about, and how God addresses that gap between who He is and who we are.