Sense of the Holy — A.W. Tozer

Isaiah’s Vision of the Holy God

Above it stood the sheriff in. Each one had six wings. With twain he covered his face, with twain he covered his teeth, and with twain he did fly. One cried unto another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory. And the throats of the door are moved at the voice of him that cried in the house of terrorist smoke. Then said I, Woe is me, for I am undone, a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

For mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts. The seraphim's underneath, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar, and said, He has taken away ample packages in the entire Bible. Something about this is what I can only call a sense of the Holy.

The Holy Cannot Be Fully Expressed

There's something here that is awesome and yet profound. It cannot be understood nor explained. It can only be felt. This is what I could say to you or to anyone who can. In verses 9 and 10 they seem to be described.

Understand not, see and be but perceive not. Make the heart of his people happy, make their ears have wings of their eyes, let them see with their eyes and hear with their ears. But I trust that you will be able to follow along with me and we'll feel this together.

Isaiah is trying to express something here. He has sent it to express it. He is under this handicap that what he saw is inexpressible. What he is trying to utter is ineffable, that is, it cannot be uttered.

Further by the fact that what he saw is different from anything in a classification all by itself, anything on earth. So Isaiah had known that they described this, that it is impossible to conceive God.

That hurts some people's feelings. They want to think that they are on very summy terms with God. But the fact is you can't even conceive God. Because to conceive God, that is, to get God inside your head, to reach up with your brain and lay hold of the concept of deity, would mean that you are equal to God.

You can't get a larger thing in a smaller one. You can't put a gallon in a quart jar. That which contains a thing has to be equal to that which it contains. To grasp God would have to be equal to God.

If it was equal to God, there would be two Gods. The mind that could grasp God and the God that could grasp. And we'd be looking for the God who cannot be grasped. And we'd have to keep on until we find the God who cannot be contained and cannot be expressed.

It's a very clumsy thing. We find sometimes we cannot express what we wish. We only can exclaim. But here God is revealing himself. And everything here is greater than anything that Isaiah saw. What he saw is greater than his ability to express it.

As much greater as God is greater than the human mind. Isaiah presents his ascetic goal of the holy. A goal that must have been over the camp of Israel as they wandered. I saw a vision of God. I saw also the Lord.

God’s Sovereignty and the Meaning of Holy

Upon a throne. That is, he was invested with selfish sovereign. Nowadays, we've seen some of the people. And if the people don't like him, they can take his hand off. As they did a lot of times in the daily history, in the English history.

They called him a sovereign and cut his head off. He wasn't very sovereign, really. But the God Isaiah saw was sitting upon a throne. And his sovereignty was self-bestowed. He didn't get it from the electorate.

He was the sovereign God sitting upon the throne. The God and father who are above the throne. Their word is seraphim. Now, it is a beautiful thought here that the word seraphim means, of course, a fiery burner.

Something that burns. Seraphim are seen, only seraphim. They're seen only when they are seen. God said, I think that I need to try to analyze a little bit this time in the Bible. And these creatures, round and round, they're burners.

They're delights. They're attributing to the Lord's host a certain quality. This is more than an adjective. It's an ecstatic description of the glory of God. They said holy. There's much more, but I'll mention these briefly.

Condescension. Faultless perfection. Now, my friends, you'll hear this if I stay around for a few more days. You'll hear it often said by me. Our approach from one direction or another. It is that our God is too small.

And the God we worship in modern evangelical circles is not the awful God of our fathers, great almighty hand, Lee Haribin. When Isaiah saw God, and he got immediately a feeling of absolute sustainment.

Repentance Before the Holiness of God

I cannot understand how anybody can defend himself once he has thought about God or has had a little bit of a vision of the holiness of God. Repentance, my friends, is not repentance for what you do. Real repentance is repentance for what you are.

A man does a wrong act and asks God to forgive him. That's a kind of repentance, but that's not the ultimate and final repentance. The final repentance is not that for what we've done, but for what we did in prayer in the 51st Psalm.

A confession of what he was rather than what he did, though he admitted what he did. You'll find in Isaiah here, in this sixth chapter, this awful, devastating, heart-rending repentance that came upon the man Isaiah, came without his having mentioned one thing that he did.

He talked about what he was. He said, I am a man of understanding lips. I am, not I did, but I am. The repentance that repents for what we are is a repentance that really baffled the understanding and stunned the mind of the man.

And he stood in speechless humility in the presence of a mystery that was inexpressible. You'll never tell a joke about God or listen to a joke being told about God once you have seen it. You'll never joke about any scriptures or about anything holy.

Now, I have a sense of humor. You can't run away with me, get me in trouble in anything that I joke about. I have no hesitation in joking about preachers because I think they're some of the funniest things God ever put on us.

Some of them are, you know. And I have no hesitation in joking about song directors either. I have no hesitation in joking about weird singers and what those things are. I think a lot of our church stuff that we put on has been a face-to-face joke.

But when it comes to God, my mouth is shut. When it comes to God, it isn't because the mystery or the great God that I there saw is not the object nor the subject of jokeness which I've already mentioned about this that he saw.

The Fearful Majesty of God’s Presence

God is like nothing. God is like nothing there is. God is like nothing you know. He's something else, remote and unknown. And we stand abased and overwhelmed by a sense of our own nothingness in the presence of that which is above all is God.

And then there was something fearful about it. Fearful. Something portentous and dreadful and terrifying. It says our God is a consuming fire. It says it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Shall dwell, shall dwell. You imagine that's hell. No, no, no. That is not hell. That is God and the presence of God. And a pure heart. And hath not lifted up his soul of valour and has sworn distinctly that he is the power of the land, that he is the power of the tree, the king and his beauty.

The eternal burning. But there's an everlasting fire in heaven too. It is the presence of the one who is a consuming fire. You know, in Ezekiel, first chapter, there are creatures that come out of a fire.

Four-faced saints in his temple. They come out of the fire. He saw what was there and saw what is. What Isaiah had here was not an illusion he had. He did not imagine that he saw. He saw what we all might see.

Were not golden and are not hardened. These impressions. There was a poet who said, The angels keep angry faces that miss the many splendours. Wisconsin and Browning said that the whole earth is aglow with God and every bush is afire with God.

We don't know that God is in the bush. That God is there. What a fearful thing to live in a world that's crammed with God. What an awful thing. We don't feel the motorboats and space ships. We don't know we're in the presence of the awful God that made heaven and earth.

Welcome to the majesty of God. How dreadful. How dreadful. The majesty. Please beget our kind and glory of God. They never have seen it one time. My brother, when God opens your eyes and makes you see what Isaiah saw here of his own erectedness, you'll come a little nearer to seeing something of God's glory.

Isaiah’s Confession and the Exposure of Pride

Now, how did this affect Isaiah? Isaiah said, I am undone. I think there couldn't have been a more perfectly fitting word. I am undone. Here was what another man called self-depreciation to the point of total disvaluation.

The trouble with us here is to see that we do not devaluate ourselves. We insist upon passing at par. We're perfectly willing to say all men are sinners, but when it comes to us, we're a certain part of our being, and so I don't think I'm as bad as the next person.

I don't believe in the average prayer. That's why I don't attend too many prayer meetings. I pray a lot with myself. You get to prayer meetings, and people recite their catechism to God. Oh, God, we're filthy rags, you know.

From a prayer meeting, and his wife told him he was a filthy rag. He divorces. People don't believe these things when they lie to God because they haven't seen the vision you see. Then somebody comes along preaching hellfire and tries to scare us into repentance.

I believe in hell and hellfire and I preach it, but I don't believe a man will ever repent soundly because he's afraid. If he repents because he's afraid or go to hell, if he could argue him into believing there was no hell, he'd cancel out his repentance right away and say, excuse me, God, as you were.

I didn't mean it. See, I want the likeness of God. That's what brings repentance. It was not when somebody threatened Paul of Tarsus with hell that he repented. It was when a light shined upon him right here in the noonday sun that he fell down blind and crawled on his hands and feet and had to be held down to the city.

So Isaiah said, I am undone. He was devaluated. You know what devaluation is? It's reducing a value. The dollar, when I was a boy, was worth about 100 cents. It's worth about 49 now they tell me. It's been devaluated.

It's come down. It isn't worth as much. That's why you pay nearly twice, and sometimes more than twice as much for things as you used to because your dollar isn't worth as much. And when we go before God and imagine that we're worth 100 cents, we stop around, and we even can do our religious work, you know.

We can be promoters and founders and all sorts of fellows, get our names in the paper and our pictures and be celebrated, you know. But we haven't been devaluated. I remember one time Delta Lake, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned the name of the place, but it was Delta Lake.

New York State, and I was an evangelist one year. And there was a young evangelist there, and he was dressed to kill. He had stepped right out of the magazine. But, you know, press your pants and don't sit down, and then you'll get a wrinkle in them.

And he was strutting around there. Then one night the Holy Ghost laid hold of him down at the altar. And there before the altar he forgot all about those tricky pressed pants. And that night he got it.

And down he went, forgot about that stake on his hair. And when he was finished, he looked a mess on the outside, but he had glory on the inside. Valuated. He thought too much of himself. You know pride is a birthday present from the devil.

You get it as soon as you're born. If God doesn't kill it in you, you can't fight with your kids. Right when you've lost your teeth and can't even keep the store ones, you're threatening to have a good death.

Wrinkled voice. Doubtful of grandchildren. Take pride out of a man, cools off in the grave, but it'll never cool off. The vision of God, my brethren, we argued into believing that we're no good. His little world of man was this Isaiah that he said he was undone.

Was he a thief or an idolater, a liar, a murderer, a drunkard? No. He was a young poet, a cousin to the king, a genius in his own right, no doubt a fine Jew for nothing is ever known in tradition or in the Bible against Isaiah.

He was a good man, but now he has changed. God is all for whiteness. God is ineffable whiteness. The best man in the world. The best man calling on saints. Every creature in crime, conscious and painless, of the mysterium tremendum.

Cleansing the Unclean Lips

But the trouble is we don't have Isaiah or where the precious blood and the fire of the hope of the individual. If the door shut to hope and to heaven, percent or ninety-five percent of the converts made in the sum of our campaigns, you are told they go back again because they came under the, under the magnetic attraction of spiritual converts.

But we didn't get them through to where they fall to lonesomeness. I beg you to repent, for you will repent in the presence of the awful gods anymore. The man of God, the Isaiah, the man of something unclean, the altar.

Don't think of that poetically. Let's not draw pictures of that and try to make poetry. There's neither poetry nor art. There's awful and surgery. To the man who said, I have unclean lips. And God said there's only a remedy, one remedy for unclean lips.

With a cold, so hot that he couldn't handle it. He knew it would come. To take it from off the armoring was to the prophet. Can you imagine how there was a puff of white smoke in his skin? And the curl of smoke smelled to the looking of iniquity.

To the man who said, I have unclean lips. There's neither poetry nor art. There's awful and surgery. To the man who said, I have unclean lips. And God said there's only a remedy, one remedy for unclean lips.

With a cold, so hot that he couldn't handle it. He knew it would come. And the curl of smoke smelled to the looking of iniquity. But it is this burning in all the early days of the Alliance, Meeting God was tremendous experience.

Cleansing Beyond Theological Formulas

We fix it up so it's not hard anymore. Our professors in the schools helped us on that. They present four different ways to get cleansed and you take your choice whether you want it going wrong with one view, another view, a third view, a fourth view.

But the man who gets cleansed isn't thinking about theology at all. A fellow that can hold theology in his head and get down at the altar of God, trying to read him out what the Greek of Isaiah 6 -9 means, or the Hebrew, will never get anywhere.

God will let him have doctrine, and perhaps he will simply sit down in the altar of God. ...right then and there, right then and there. The blood of Jesus Christ was shed in the fire of God. ...southern fire cure, and so do I.

The blood of the Lamb and the fire of the winds, it'll make clean. ...wrong people, don't let them do it. ...the popular way, don't let them do it. We insist upon going to... ...anyone placed within thy thirteenth sight, it shrinks not, but with calm delight.

Living Before the Burning Presence

...can live and look on thee. ...around thy throne may bear the burning bliss you have never, never known. ...be ineffable appear, and on mine may get... ...truth of the royal... ...that lie in the...