Isaiah 6, The High, Heavy, Holy God

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Isaiah 6 The High, Heavy, Holy God

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Isaiah, chapter six, beginning the entire chapter from verse one to the end here, the word of the Lord. In the year that King Uzziah died,
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I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up and the train of his robe filled the temple above him, stood the seraphim each had six wings with two.
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He covered his face and with two, he covered his feet and with two, he flew and one called to another and said,
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Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory and the foundations of the threshold shook at the voice of him who called and the house was filled with smoke.
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And I said, woe is me, for I am lost, for I'm a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips for the for my eyes have seen the king, the
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Lord of hosts. Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar, and he touched my mouth and said,
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Behold, this has touched your lips. Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.
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And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Then I said,
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Here I am, send me. And he said, Go and say to this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand.
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Keep on seeing, but do not perceive. Make the heart of this people dull and their ears heavy and blind their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand where their hearts and turn and be healed.
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Then I said, How long, O Lord? And he said, Until cities lie waste without inhabitant and houses without people and the land is a desolate waste and the
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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 terrible, a temperate, terrible or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled.
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The holy seed is its stump. If the Lord had his blessings, the reading of his holy word.
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Well, what kind of God do you see? You have a vision of God in your mind, at least your beliefs, your imagination, just your assumptions of what he's what of who he is, what he's like, what is he like?
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What's your God like that you think? I think the God of most people's imagination is a God who is who is for them.
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God's job, they kind of think, is to take care of us. Our our problems, then we think occur when we don't let
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God take care of us, when we override his will, when we veto him with our choices.
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And we can do that. We all know, we all know because, you know, as it's expressed in that great theological masterpiece of about a dozen years ago,
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Bruce Almighty starring Morgan Freeman, that above all we know God can't mess with free will.
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Right, that's just what we what we know about the God. We we assume many people do anyway, sociologists have described the real faith of many
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Americans, especially the youth in our day, as what they call moralistic, therapeutic deism. It's moralistic because God wants you to be nice, as the world defines, as we can just kind of define niceness.
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It's therapeutic. We just make you feel good to help you recover because it's about making you feel better.
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And it's deism because while God exists and God created the world, he's not closely involved with it.
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He's mostly uninvolved, kind of like a absentee landlord. Now, sure, you admit like if you have a landlord, you rent a place, you admit the landlord owns the place where you live, you admit that, but you don't want him constantly hanging around.
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You want him distant. You want him on and you don't want him dropping by uninvited.
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You don't want him just because he has the key. You don't want him coming into your apartment or house just anytime he wants.
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You want him to leave you alone most of the time. Let's be frank. Let's be serious. And that's the way some people about God.
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But it's like a landlord, though. You do want him around sometimes. Maybe if the water heater breaks down, you want to be able to call him for him to take care of it.
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I mean, what else do you pay your your tithes? I mean, I mean, your rent for. Right. We heard this view of God expressed just this last week when a prominent megachurch pastor in Texas said about that, you know, that horrible church massacre there that he said, quote, it was not an act of God.
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What he means to say is that it was out of God's control. It's just one of those tragic, just random events that apparently
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God couldn't do anything about. That's just what's implied. He's out of his control.
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And surely he knew it was happening, but he didn't stop it. Now, ironically, this pastors, the pastor, his church is called the potter's house.
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That's ironic because the analogy of God to a potter in the Bible is meant to show that God shapes all things like a potter shapes a pot.
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Now, of course, what most people think about that now is God being a potter is that God can shape your life if you let him, you know, you jump on that potter's wheel and you say, go ahead,
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God, do what you want. But we also kind of think we just assume because that's what we know.
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Bruce Almighty said so, that we can always drop, we can always jump off the potter's wheel and shape ourselves if we'd rather do that.
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Believers in that kind of God then might say to us, well, then what do you say about that shooting, that horrible shooting in the church in Texas?
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Well, we say it's horrible. There are a lot of things in the world. It's just horrible. But then we say, you know, we say
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God is in control, that he is sovereign. How do you explain that? He's the potter, right? Just what you say.
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How do those two things fit together? We don't always know. We're not
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God. We don't have all the answers. We learn the lesson.
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Some people, you know, we don't even think the Bible gives us everything we need to know, but it doesn't tell us everything.
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Period. It doesn't tell us everything there is. In fact, one thing, one of the things it does tell us, the book of Job, sometimes horrible things happen.
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You believe God's in control. He's God almighty. You don't accuse him, you put your hands over your mouth, appalled at the horrible things and awed at God almighty.
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Well, still, the opinion today is that if if God doesn't exist for us, if that's not what he's, if he's not there for us, if he's not there to make us feel better, if he's not there to help us out, if he's not like a landlord that we can call, hey, you know, the water heater broke down.
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Then what good is he? Why have him? The actor Brad Pitt said that he forsook
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Christianity because, quote, I didn't understand the idea of a God who said, you have to acknowledge me.
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You have to say that I'm the best and then I'll give you eternal happiness. And if you don't, then you won't get it. It seemed to me to be about ego.
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I can't see God operating from ego. So it made no sense. Says that great theologian
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Brad Pitt, of course, it makes no sense. Only if you assume.
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That God, the eternal creator of the entire universe. Must be about helping me.
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So who is it exactly that has the problem with ego? J .C.
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Ryle, famous preacher, pastor, and theologians wrote, beware of manufacturing a
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God who is all mercy, but not just all love, but not holy. Has a heaven for everybody, but a hell for none will make no distinction between the good and the bad in eternity.
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Such a God is an idol of your own. He is not the God of the
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Bible. In this passage, we see the true God.
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We see a God who is high, who is heavy and who is holy.
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First, he is, he is high, like a king is high and the year
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King Uzziah died. That says the date is Uzziah was a King who reigned for 52 years.
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That's my entire lifetime. The year that he died then would be a memorable year. And in that year,
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Isaiah sees another King. He is seated, the Lord is like a
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King on a throne. Now, some people think they can invite Jesus into their life. Even I've even seen diagrams of this.
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You can invite Jesus into your heart and he will be there. Even if you, your ego sits on the throne, that doesn't happen.
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You know, he's the Lord. There's only one place he's going to sit and that's on the throne. He is high and lifted up.
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He is above the prophet. He's above us and he's over us. So in no way is the
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Lord under us and subject to our manipulation. He's not on call, you know, not legally obligated.
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Like, you know, a landlord, we pay the rent. You have to come and take care of the place. It's not like that yet. You have to not,
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Lord, I've done, I've paid my tithe. You have to render your services for me. It doesn't work like that. In no way do we have power over him to get him to do what we want him to do.
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We can't take him for granted. We can't replace him with technology or hard work or manipulative techniques.
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He is exalted. The theological term for that is that he is transcendent.
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It is above and beyond us is beyond our grasp and our control.
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That's why we can't conveniently kind of fit him into some kind of program of our making.
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Or we can't say that if you follow these three easy steps, God is just bound to show up and he has to do what you want him to do, you know, that we can just make him save people as the organ is softly playing.
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And if you repeat the prayer, well, it'll happen. No, he's over us.
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I notice here his robe, it says, fills, fills the temple.
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That is, he is exclusive. He just crowds out everything else. There wasn't room for idols in that temple when
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God was really there. The expansiveness, the overflowing sufficiency of God's presence doesn't allow for any rival, allow for anything else.
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He fills the place, the place of worship. He fills it completely. And now we know in our day now we know that the true place for worship must be our hearts and our church, not the building, but the people.
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So there isn't any room for anything else in our hearts or our church to worship when
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God is truly being worshiped, when he's really there, his robe just kind of crowds out all the other things that sometimes people want to.
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Want worship to include or want the church to to be involved in the celebrations of people, celebrations of patriotism.
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I think football games are a fine time to salute the flag and sing the national anthem. The church is not that time.
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Mobilizing for politics is a place for that. It's conventions for that. It's not the church, though. Whatever is about us, whatever is about our ego, we often try to fit these things in and to into his temple, into the church.
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And when we do that, we show we're not really seeing the Lord. And we think he doesn't fill the whole place.
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We think he can we can fit other things, we can make room, he can make he makes room for anything.
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He doesn't make room. Instead, we need to open our eyes and look, look up because that's where he is and see he is highly exalted.
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He fills the temple in a way that all our programs and personalities and events never could because he fills his temple.
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He's sufficient, he's self -sufficient. Now, there's this pernicious idea just makes me cringe any time
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I hear any Christian say it going on, Christian people say that, you know, they want to they want to sound sophisticated.
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Why did God create people? Well, you know, and they'll say, well, God was, you know, he was lonely.
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He wanted some fellowship. He wanted someone else to hang out with, you know, out there in the past, no one with him.
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And he decided to make us to fill in that gap that he had. You know, it's like you want a wife or a husband.
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He wanted us because to fill in his needs. I just hate that.
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You hear any preacher say that? Oh, I think you need to think some more. I think the motivation for that often really is to to make us feel guilty for not spending enough time with God, maybe not going to church.
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You know, God's lonely out there. How can you let him be by himself? You ungrateful people like he's kind of like a neglected kid, you know, like you're a bad parent for letting your kid be at home watching
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TV. You're a bad person for letting God be by himself on Sunday morning. Isaiah knew better than that because he saw the
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Lord and the Lord he saw was surrounded and sufficient.
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He was surrounded with seraphim. And the word seraphim there, you want to know, you know what the
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Hebrew word for seraphim is. Actually, yes, you do know what the Hebrew word for seraphim is. It's seraphim.
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That's that's the Hebrew word. They didn't translate it. They transliterated it. It literally means burning ones.
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He's not surrounded with cold ones. He's already surrounded with burning ones.
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That's what it means for him to be the lord of host host means that multitudes is the lord of billions, trillions of other beings.
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It means there are multitudes of beings around him at his service, doing his will. So he's not lonely already to begin with.
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And even if he wasn't surrounded by these burning angels, he'd still be sufficient because God himself is a perfect community.
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He's the community of the Trinity, of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. This father loves the son and both send the spirit.
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And even if God were the only intelligent being in all the universe, if there were no seraphim, no other host, he would not be lonely because he has a perfect fellowship within himself.
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He doesn't need anyone outside of himself to complete himself. We do. He doesn't.
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And that means for us, then there's there's nothing we can do, you know, sort of sort of get leverage on God.
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God, if you don't do what I want, I'm going to I'm going to drop out of church. I'll show you you'll be lonely on Sunday morning without my, you know,
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I don't need you. There's nothing we could give to God that he needs. There's nothing with it we can withhold from God that could compel him to act.
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You know, we have no leverage on him. Notice that the seraphim are burning are flaming ones in verse two.
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They have six wings with two to they flew to the cover, their feet. I'm not quite sure what the feet thing means, but the main thing here, they covered their face.
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As though the Lord is like the sun, you know, we heard at the time of the eclipse in August, don't look directly at the sun, they'll burn your eyes as the
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Lord is like that is too powerful to look directly at later in Isaiah. He will describe very same
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Isaiah after 53. He will describe the servant of the Lord, the one who bears our griefs and carries our sorrows, even when horrible things happen.
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Why the horrible things happen? Well, he bears them. The one who was wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities, that one he describes also as one from whom men hide their faces.
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Here, the fiery ones, the covering their feet and their faces, they dare not look into his glory and Isaiah 53 people dare not look at him because he's despised and stricken and smitten and afflicted.
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Are they looking at the same one? So God is high and he is sufficient.
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The Lord is also heavy. Notice that refrain that the burning ones are calling back and forth to one another in verse three, holy, holy, holy, the
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Lord of hosts. The whole earth. Is full of his glory now in English, glory is sort of this ambiguous word we don't really know is great, but we don't really exactly how we can't we don't picture anything in our minds about what it means.
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It's it's it's whatever. It's just ambiguous. It's an idea.
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It may sound, but in Hebrew, it's very different and it may sound it may sound strange to say in English, but the literal translation of that word glory is is heavy.
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So they're literally saying here, the whole earth is full of this of this heaviness. He's weighty, he's not someone we can treat lightly that we can keep putting off like an unimportant person, you know, get a call.
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No, I don't know, ignore that. It's not important. It's trivial. The Lord's not like that.
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He has gravitas, a true vision of him will weigh on your heart when you see him high and lifted up in all his earth filling glory.
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The weight of that site will crush your pride.
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Think about the way that means for our for our worship, how overwhelmed we should be by the weight of his presence, the heaviness of his word that he's revealed himself not only in in nature, but most clearly in scripture.
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Sometimes some evangelical Christians were criticized for treating God so trivially. I've heard of churches that get out of a beach ball and they bounce it around during what's supposed to be worship.
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It's just fun and games. And and although we I don't care about how people dress,
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I don't think that's important or even the style of music, whether the hymns are new or old. I think that's all an important.
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But that doesn't mean just because we can dress informally that we treat it trivially. You understand, we must be impressed by his glory so that all the when he because when we see him, then all the trivialities, all the distractions, they're squeezed out.
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You know, like when you put put a heavy weight on top of a. Toothpaste tube, all the toothpaste is squeezed out.
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Here, if when the Lord, when you when you see him, that's squeezes out all the trivialities out of your heart, the empty things that people make idols out of that keep us from seeing the
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Lord, maybe the obsession with sports, the using of church for politics, the way we make worship out, you know, recognizing so and so it's this day from next week, it'll be somebody else's day.
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And all that is crushed by the by the weight of who he is.
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First, it was the temple. Notice that member first Isaiah sees that the temple is is filled with his robe.
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There wasn't room for anything else to worship now with the seraphim. What they're saying is the whole earth, not just the temple, but the whole world is full of his glory.
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In other words, the weightiness, the heaviness of God leaves its impression over all of creation, his his his impressions, his fingerprints like like, you know, something heavy puts impressions on a carpet when it's left up.
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He's much heavier than that. The the impact of his presence is everywhere throughout all of creation.
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Like a canyon, a canyon shows its glory. You ever seen the Grand Canyon? You're looking at something sculpted, but by the weight of the
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Lord himself. Maybe something like a rose that shows us his glory, maybe an eagle, an animal shows us the variety, the beauty of his creativity, those all bear the stamp of his work, the impression of of his weight, of his glory, like someone leaving a stamp that I was here.
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This is what God is saying. But in everything, all over the creation, everything we see,
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I am here. And that means that when people look, as they often do today, they look at a canyon or they and all they can see is the work of erosion.
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That was just, you know, a river carving out a canyon over so many thousands of years.
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That's all they can see. I'm not going to debate the science. I don't care, but that's all they can't they can't see who was behind the forces of nature, who was ruling over them, who has been weighing on them, who has been using them for his purposes.
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Maybe they look through a microscope, maybe they look through a telescope, but they can't see really anything if they don't see the glory, that the heaviness of his imprint that fills the smallest atom to the largest galaxy.
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He is high and heavy. He's also holy and holy means to be to be distinct, to be separate, to be set apart and to be pure.
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And here God is not just holy. They could have said at once, holy is the
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Lord God of hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory, but he is thrice holy. Now, certainly we can see a foreshadowing of the
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Trinity here, each person of the Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is holy. But the three repetitions of holy is also a way of of emphasizing how perfectly holy the
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Lord is. And the Hebrew language, they often use repetition as a way to express a superlative, to say that something is very or extremely something.
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At one point, for example, the Hebrew literally reads that that's gold, gold.
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In English, that's translated. We translate it as pure gold or refined gold. But in Hebrew, it's like it's it's gold, gold.
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It's the gold of the gold. But those repetitions are just repeated twice.
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And here, Isaiah six, for the only time in the Bible, equality is raised to the power of three.
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He is holy, cubed, perfectly and infinitely holy, absolutely pure.
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He is so holy that even these burning ones, the seraphim, these unfallen beings, you know themselves, we assume sinless, even they cannot bear to to look directly at God.
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The view of God is majestic and in a way terrifying. There's smoke, there's there's quaking here, just as there was at Mount Sinai when the whole nation trembled and they dare not approach the mountain, and then they told
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Moses, you know, Lord Moses, you go talk to the Lord where he'll kill us if if this if we get close to him here, the calling back and forth of holy, holy, holy is so thunderous.
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The foundations shake of this stone built temple, the stones themselves are shaking, and the effect is immediately fear and trembling in Isaiah himself.
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The vision of God does not produce kind of a casual familiarity with the Lord. You know, it's not as though Isaiah says, whoa, wow,
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Lord, you let's hang out. Me and my buddy God, we're going to hang out. Rather, it shakes him, produces terror, says, whoa, is me, he says, whoa, not wow.
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The Lord is not just an impressive sight. He is a humbling, crushing, awe filling vision.
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The closer we get to God, the more we are impressed with the immense weight of who he is, the more we know how desperately dependent we are on his sheer mercy because he could just crush us if he chose to.
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When we see the purity, his purity, then we know how ruined the one translation of the word he uses here that were ruined before him.
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We have nothing but a ruin, a wreck of a life to show this high, heavy, holy
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God. And so we say, whoa, is me. We realize we're unclean in speech and in heart from which the speech comes and we realize.
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So are we all live in a midst of a people of unclean lips, we're all so.
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Filthy compared to this, this Lord. Now, there are some people out there, there's still some that's probably less than it used to be, who don't come to church because they feel too sinful.
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More likely today, there's so many people think that they don't they don't feel sinful at all and they don't mind coming to church, maybe they don't think they need to because they're already right.
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But there are still a few who think they're too sinful to come to church and worship God. And they're right.
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They're right that they're too sinful to worship God, that that's exactly what Isaiah saw when he saw the
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Lord. And if any of us don't see that, if we don't sense our sinfulness, that we are dreadfully unclean, that we are ruined, that we stand before this exalted, all powerful, absolutely pure king.
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And we don't stand a chance. By contrast, if we've forgotten that we've forgotten that or maybe we've never really seen it in the first place, then we're in a grave position.
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If you don't sense your sinfulness before a holy God, then you are in a grave position.
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If you cannot sincerely say, woe is me, then woe are you.
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There is no one you know, there's absolutely there's no one who is further away from God than a self -righteous religious person who's just satisfied with himself.
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It talks glibly about God, thinks he knows the Lord has no sense of sinfulness.
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That person is is the furthest away from the true God. You need to open your eyes that you hope that no one here like that you hear with your ears and understand with your heart and turn that the
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Lord might heal you. But there is one problem with the one who will not come to the Lord or to church because of because of fear and guilt.
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Now, the fear is right. We should reverence our king. What Isaiah felt, we should be overwhelmed with awe when we when we really see him.
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And the guilt is. Is or was right, you know, when we are really in the presence of God, we will immediately be aware of how far from God's holiness we've strayed.
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We saw this in Sunday school where Paul had all these religious accomplishments, but he knew when he really saw the
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Lord that they were. What was his work done, their filthiness before this
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Lord, when we see him, if we see him in that childlike faith, though, we will we will know.
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That he has dealt with our sin, that we can we will also see.
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His grace in dealing with our sin. So look what happens here in verses three to seven.
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He's seen how he's seen the Lord and therefore, by contrast, seen his own sin. But then in verses three to seven,
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Isaiah sees the holiness and glory of God. He's terrified how far short he's fallen to that glory.
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He experiences true humility, what Paul calls godly grief, grieving over his sin because he's now he's in the presence of God.
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And Isaiah knows that he cannot praise and serve God as the seraphim do, because in the depths of his being, he is unclean.
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Everyone around him is unclean. He exclaims, woe is me. He confesses that he's lost, that he's ruined. But. I think what comes next, because it's different what we might expect, we might expect some some angel to come to Isaiah and say,
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OK, here's a here's a 12 step plan, Isaiah, on how to get your life right. But he's not told then to do something to save himself.
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He cannot do that. Instead, as he sort of passively seeing this vision, a seraph, a burning one surrounding the
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Lord, one of those takes a coal, a live coal from the altar. Obviously, this is all symbolic of something and applies it to his unclean lips.
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And the angel adds a word to the action. He says your guilt has departed. Your sin has been atoned for.
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Now, first, what did Isaiah do? To get this forgiveness, what was his action?
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What did he add to this? Nothing, absolutely nothing.
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He felt his sinfulness claims, woe is me. He knows he's ruined.
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And then completely outside of his control, outside of his doing.
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His sin is atoned for, he's made right with God, it was all God's work.
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Now, this is a little different than what many people today think. Many people think God will just kind of let sin slide.
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It's a way you can say, oh, shucks, I'll let you buy. No, sin is not just excused. It's not just shrugged off like nothing happened.
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It is dealt with, but it is dealt with in a way that is not by human effort. Isaiah is cleaned purely by the grace of God.
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Fire from the altar burns away the guilt. Now, the altar, it's important that comes from the altar.
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So that's an important detail because the altar was the place where God accepted the sacrifice, the sacrifice that was our substitute.
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It was the place where holiness was appeased, where the sin was paid for. From there.
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Comes Isaiah's salvation. From there comes your salvation. Now, we need to see this, too, we should not only see
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God's holiness, our sinfulness, we need to open our eyes completely. We need to see that, though God is holy and just and must deal with sin.
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He has also provided an altar where sin was dealt with.
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Through the blood of Christ, he has provided a way he takes something from that altar, applies it to Isaiah and says to him, your guilt has departed.
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Your sin has been passed and it's done. Atone for atone means made at one.
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You are reconciled to God now, Isaiah, because of what is done at that altar.
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And then Isaiah now forgiven, cleansed, made at one with the Lord, reconciled with a good relationship with the
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Lord. Now he hears the Lord ask. Whom shall I send and who will go for us?
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Isaiah raises his hand, you know, me, me, me. Here I am. Send me.
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Forgiven sinners. With a vision of the high, heavy, holy God are quick to want to tell others about the
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Lord. Now, right here, many modern day Christians wish the past is ended.
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This is it kind of. White out the rest are going to go into chapter seven. One preacher cleverly outlines this chapter.
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I love this outline. Whoa, low, go. Very good.
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But we expect the going to be going successfully to tell others about the atonement, you know, go to success, go to make converts and get crowds.
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And it's sort of like it's like the Great Commission. And those last five verses are a commission or a holy commission.
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But here again, we see is here is not a holy excuse me.
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Here is a holy God. Here's not a moralistic, therapeutic, deistic God who's really nice.
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Kind of like Morgan Freeman is really nice and wishes we'd be nice to who isn't so egotistical to keep his own first commandment.
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No, the first commandment to worship and serve him alone. I love the Lord your God with all your heart.
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Not so egotistical. He keeps that himself, is he? But here is a continuation of the of the vision.
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It's a continuation of the vision of of the true God. And we need to open our eyes and see it in these last five verses.
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If we are to really see the Lord in him, we see a God who is self -sufficient and so satisfied, rightly in himself, so holy that he doesn't need to win people over.
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And we need to realize that, you know, he doesn't need us. He doesn't need to make any converts. He may do so because he is love.
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He he will redeem some. But he doesn't need to.
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He is even willing to send prophets and preachers. Knowing that the effect of their ministry will be to harden some people's hearts.
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To keep them from repenting so far, so far from a from a desperate
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God, you know, lonely God is looking for some of us to hang out with, trying any gimmick to get people to come to my temple.
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You know, come on to the temple. We got contemporary music now and you can play basketball or whatever to get him to worship him.
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He tells Isaiah in verse 10, make the heart of this people dull. And their ears heavy.
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And blind their eyes. God's telling Isaiah, this is what you're going to do. They're going to be less responsive to God because of you than they were before.
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And that's what the Lord's the Lord's command to this prophet go. And make sure they don't repent.
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That's a far cry, isn't it? From a desperate God, just kind of needing people to hang out with.
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Here we see a God who calls us to serve. Not necessarily for success.
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Anyone can sacrifice and serve for success. You know, athletes will strive and work out and sweat and lift weights and all that for the success of a gold medal at the
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Olympics or winning the championship. Students study late into the night for the success of good grades and hopefully a good career later on.
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So, you know, serving sacrificing for success is just really no big deal.
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Everyone willing to almost everyone's willing to do that. But we serve not for the joy of succeeding. The success may be of a megachurch with multiple campuses.
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We really got to open our Danville campus soon or the rewards we get for winning people over, you know, get a bigger salary, get bigger congregation.
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But for the joy of serving such an awesome God, that's the reason for the glory of God. The Lord did not send
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Isaiah to save people. Well, at least not all of them. And in fact, on the contrary, he tells
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Isaiah in those last five verses that he is sending him to destroy. By. At least some of the people.
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My back, actually, most of the people in those last five verses in them, that last five verses, so many people wish we could just skip.
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Really, you could you can go on YouTube and look up Isaiah six and look how many fat preachers end at verse eight.
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A lot of sermons and stuff on Isaiah six popular passage. Many of them in diversity. Many people wish you could skip the day or the
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Lord tells Isaiah that his judgment will continue until destruction is is seemingly complete.
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Those who were too self -righteous to say, woe is me. He says it will be completely devoured.
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They will be destroyed. Even if only then he says, if only a tenth of the people are left, there'll be a wave of destruction.
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If only one out of 10 is left. The Lord will come back and finish them off, too. Like a man who cuts down a tree, compares it to this is the
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Lord's destruction, his judgment coming. So as if you cut down a tree, you've you've you've killed it mostly.
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But then you burn the stump just to make sure that thing doesn't come back alive. Now, when that day, that day of judgment, that day of doom, that's what will happen.
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A thorough. A thorough destruction on the day of doom.
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But then suddenly we remember. It's a day of delight to. The holy seed, which is that notice that the last the last phrase of that last verse.
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The holy seed becomes a branch, as we saw earlier a few chapters ago, will be beautiful and glorious on that day of judgment, that day of delight.
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Here, the branch, the one who was sacrificed on the heavenly altar for our sins. He is the vine that produces the branches that are the remnant of the full holy seed, what the
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New Testament calls the elect, the church. They'll sprout. God will graciously save some.
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Isaiah is told that the effect of his ministry will be that most in his lifetime will be hardened and destroyed.
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And yet, Isaiah, you know, he didn't want to back out. No, I don't like that terms of that deal, or I wanted to go and be popular.
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Isaiah did not put himself forward as God's messenger because he got a promise of a great career in religion.
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He didn't get that promise. He stepped forward and said, here I am. Send me.
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Because he saw the Lord. And that's exactly what we need. And if you're tired of serving in the church, maybe helping with Jim Junior or with Jim working, doing this or that, you think, what do
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I have to show for it? Not going to get paid for it. And the crowds aren't exactly, you know, we're not packing this place quite yet.
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If you're tired of that, your main need isn't for me or anyone else to buck you up, to tell you, you know, success is just around the corner, that we'll have overflowing worship services soon and then we'll soon we'll be opening our
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Danville campus soon, just a few months. Encouragement is great. Now, we all need it.
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We all like to see sometimes fruit, but that's not our main need. Our main need is that is that we see the
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Lord when we really see him high and lifted up. We'll long to serve him.
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We can't be stopped from serving him. We'll just spontaneously put ourselves forward.
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You know, here I am. Send me commission for glory. Maybe not for success.
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That's the effect of seeing that God is high and heavy and holy.
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Who is this God? Who is the one from whom the seraphim hide their faces?
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Is he the same one in Isaiah 53 from whom men hide their faces?
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Well, John, the apostle John and writes in John, chapter 12, verse 41, that Isaiah said these things, particularly in those last five verses.
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He said those things. By the way, this people won't like to skip those last five verses. These last five verses are repeated again in the
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New Testament, in John, chapter 12. And there, John says that people
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Isaiah said these things about the people not believing when they hear that God has blinded their eyes, harden their heart so that they would not be healed.
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Isaiah said that, John says, not just about the people of his day, about Isaiah's day, who were heading for destruction at the hands of the
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Babylonians, because that's happened. Understand the prophecy here about being destroyed. And I'm also wiped out. Literally happened.
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But but John says he didn't just say it for the people of his day. But he said it.
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Because he saw the Lord, the Lord. The one from whom the seraphim hide their faces.
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The servant. Yes, he is the same one. The servant from whom men hide their faces.
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John says Isaiah saw Jesus's glory and was speaking about him.
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Isaiah here. Says I saw the Lord, he saw
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Jesus. John says so. Isaiah saw that people today don't believe.
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Don't believe. For some, they don't believe the message of reconciliation. They don't believe that their sins are atoned for, because that message often.
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Hardens and blinds them instead of softening their hearts and opening their eyes.
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It still sometimes does that. This is still. In effect, this is still going on.
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And yet we still say. First to the Lord, here we are. Send us, you know, send us to those those guys at gym who will be coming here in a few hours playing basketball, send us to them.
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We make clear the word to them. Send us to the children around us. Send us to our neighbors. Send us to our own children. Send. Here we are.
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Send us to the people. God making his appeal to us. Be reconciled to God.
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What kind of God do you see? You see a distant landlord. You know, it's good to know you can call him for help.
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As long as you've been paying your rent. Do you see a nice teddy bear there to massage your feelings, make you feel better, comfort you?
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Or do you see the servant of the Lord? The one from whom men hide their faces because he's born all the horrible things that people do.
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You see the Lord high and lifted up from whom Seraphim hide their faces because of his infinite holiness.
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The one whose robe fills the temple and whose glory fills the earth. The one who said.
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That when he is high and lifted up on a cross. Will draw all kinds of people to himself.
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Is that the God you see? If so, if not, see him now.
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And be overwhelmed with a vision of who this God really is.
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See him and say, whoa, is me.
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Then here. Your guilt is taken away. And your sin atoned for.