Isaiah 6, The High, Heavy, Holy God

Isaiah Sees the Lord High, Heavy, and Holy

Isaiah, chapter six, being the entire chapter from verse one to the end here, the word of the Lord. In the year that King Uzziah died, 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, he covered his face and with two, he covered his feet and with two, he flew. And one called to another and said, 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.

And I said, woe is me, for I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. But for my eyes, I've seen the king, the 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, Behold, this has touched your lips.

Your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for. And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Then I said, Here I am. Send me. And he said, Go and say to this people, keep on hearing, but do not understand.

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 with their hearts and turn and be healed.

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 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 terrible, terrible or an oak whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump. If the Lord had his blessings, the reading of his holy word, 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, 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. 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 God take care of us, when we override his will, when we veto him with our choices.

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, Bruce Almighty starring Morgan Freeman, that above all we know God can't mess with free will.

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 Americans, especially of 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. It's therapeutic. We just make you feel good to help you recover because it's about making you feel better.

And it's deism because while God exists and God created the world, he's not closely involved with it. 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. You want him distant. You want him on and you don't want him dropping by uninvited. You don't want him just because he has the key. You don't want him coming into your apartment or house just any time he wants.

You want him. 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. But it's like a landlord, though. You do want him around sometimes.

Maybe if the water heater breaks down, you want him to be able you want to be able to call him. And so for him to take care of it. 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 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.

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 God couldn't do anything about. That's just what's implied. He's out of his control.

And, you know, surely he knew it was happening, but he didn't stop it. Now, ironically, he this pastors, the pastor, his church is called the Potter's House. 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.

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, God, do what you want.

But we also kind of think we just assume because that's what we know. 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.

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? We say it's horrible. There are a lot of things in the world that are just horrible.

But then we say, you know, we say you say God is in control, that he is sovereign. How do you explain that? He's the potter, right? Just what you say. How do those two things fit together? We don't always know.

We're not God. We don't have all the answers. We learn the lesson. 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. 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. 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 odd at God Almighty. Well, still, the opinion today is that if if God doesn't exist for us, if he if he's 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.

Then what good is he? Why have him? The actor Brad Pitt said that he forsook Christianity because, quote, I didn't understand the idea of a God who said you have to acknowledge me. 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. I can't see God operating from ego. So it made no sense. Says that great theologian Brad Pitt. Of course, it makes no sense. Only if you assume that God, the eternal creator of the entire universe.

Must be about helping me. So who is it exactly that has the problem with ego? J .C. Ryle, famous preacher, pastor and theologians wrote, beware of manufacturing a 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.

Such a God is an idol of your own. He is not the God of the Bible. In this passage, we see the true God. We see a God who is high, who is heavy and who is holy. First, he is he is high like a king is high.

The Transcendent King Enthroned Above Us

And the year King Uzziah died. That says the date is Uzziah was a king who reigned for 52 years. That's my entire lifetime. The year that he died then would be a memorable year. And in that year, Isaiah sees another king.

He is seated. The Lord is like a king on a throne. Now, some people think they can invite Jesus into their life. Even I've even seen diagrams of this. 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. 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. He is above the prophet.

He's above us. He is over us. So in no way is the Lord under us subject to our manipulation. He's not on call, you know, not legally obligated like a landlord. We pay the rent. You have to come and take care of the place.

It's not like that. Yes, you have to. Not 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.

We can't take him for granted. We can't replace him with technology or hard work or manipulative techniques. He is exalted. The theological term for that is that he is transcendent. It is above and beyond us.

He's beyond our grasp and our control. That's why we can't conveniently kind of fit him into some kind of program of our making. 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.

And if you repeat the prayer while it'll happen. No, he's over. Us. I notice here his robe. It says fills, fills the temple. That is, he is exclusive. He just crowds out everything else. There wasn't room for idols in that temple when God was really there.

The expansiveness, the overflowing sufficiency of God's presence doesn't allow for any rival. Doesn't allow for anything else. 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. So there isn't any room for anything else in our hearts or our church to worship. When 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 want worship to include or want the church to be involved in celebrations of people, celebrations of patriotism.

I think football games are a fine time to salute the flag and sing the national anthem. The church is not that time mobilizing for politics. There's 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. And when we do that, we show we're not really seeing the Lord. We think he doesn't fill the whole place. We think he can we can fit other things.

We can make room. He can make he makes room for anything. 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. He fills the temple in a way that all our programs and personalities and events never could because he fills his temple.

He's sufficient. He's self-sufficient. You know, there's this pernicious idea. This makes me cringe. Anytime I hear any Christian say it going on, Christian people say that, you know, they want to they want to sound sophisticated.

Why did God create people? Well, you know, and they'll say, well, God was, you know, he was lonely. He wanted some fellowship. He wanted somebody else to hang out with, you know, out there in the past.

No one with him. 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. He wanted us because to fill in his needs. I just hate that. I hear any preacher say that, 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. 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 TV. You're a bad person for letting God be by himself on Sunday morning.

Isaiah knew better than that because he saw the Lord and the Lord he saw was surrounded and sufficient. He was surrounded with seraphim and the word seraphim there. You want to know, you know what the Hebrew word for seraphim is?

Actually, yes, you do know what the Hebrew word for seraphim is. It's seraphim. That's the Hebrew word. They didn't translate it. They transliterated it. It literally means burning ones. He's not surrounded with cold ones.

He's already surrounded with burning ones. That's what it means for him to be the lord of host host means multitudes. He's the lord of billions, trillions of other beings. It means there are multitudes of beings around him at his service, doing his will.

So he's not lonely already to begin with. And even if he wasn't surrounded by these burning angels, he'd still be sufficient because God himself is a perfect community. 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. 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.

He doesn't need anyone outside of himself to complete himself. We do. He doesn't. And that means for us, then there's nothing we can do, you know, sort of sort of get leverage on God. 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, 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.

You know, we have no leverage on him. Notice that the seraphim burning are flaming ones in verse two. They have six wings with two, two, they flew to the cover of their feet. I'm not quite sure what the feet thing means, but the main thing here, they covered their face 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 Lord is like that. He's too powerful to look directly at later in Isaiah. He will describe very same 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. 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. Here, the fiery ones, the covering their feet and their faces, they dare not look into his glory in Isaiah 53. People dare not look at him because he's despised and stricken and smitten and afflicted.

Are they looking at the same one? So God is high and he is sufficient. 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 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. It's great, but we don't really exactly have we can't we don't picture anything in our minds about what it means.

It's it's it's whatever. It's just ambiguous. It's it's an idea. 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.

So they're literally saying here, the whole earth is full of this of his heaviness. He's weighty. He's not someone we can treat lightly that we can keep putting off like an unimportant person. You didn't get a call.

No, I don't. I'll ignore that. It's not important. It's trivial. The Lord's not like that. 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.

The weight of that site will crush your pride. 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.

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.

It's just fun and games. And and although we I don't care about how people dress, 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.

But that doesn't mean just because we can dress informally that we trade 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.

You know, like when you put put a heavy weight on top of a toothpaste tube, all the toothpaste is squeezed out. Here, when the Lord, when you see him, that squeezes out all the trivialities out of your heart, the empty things that people make idols out of that keep us from seeing the 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. And all that is crushed by the by the weight of who he is. First, it was the temple. Notice that. Remember, first, Isaiah sees that the temple is is filled with his robe.

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. In other words, the weightiness, that 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.

He's much heavier than that. The the impact of his presence is everywhere throughout all of creation. 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 Lord himself.

Maybe something light like a rose that shows his his glory. Maybe an eagle, an animal shows us the variety, the beauty of his creativity. It was all bare, the stamp of his work, the impression of of his weight, of his glory, like someone leaving a stamp that I was here.

He's this is what God is saying. But and everything all over the creation, everything we see, 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.

That was just, you know, a river carving out a canyon over so many thousands of years. 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.

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.

The Holy God Who Exposes Sin and Provides Atonement

He is high and heavy. He's also holy. Holy means to be to be distinct, to be separate, to be set apart and to be pure. And here God is not just holy. They could have said it once. Holy is the 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 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 emphasizing how perfectly holy the Lord is.

And the Hebrew language, they often use repetition as a way to express a superlative, you know, say that something is very or extremely something. At one point, for example, the Hebrew literally reads that that's gold, gold.

In English, that's translated. We translated it as pure gold or refined gold. But in Hebrew, it's like it's it's gold, gold. It's the gold of the gold. But those repetitions are just repeated twice. And here, Isaiah six, for the only time in the Bible, equality is raised to the power of three.

He is holy, cubed perfectly and infinitely holy, absolutely pure. 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.

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 Moses, you know, Lord Moses, you go talk to the Lord. We're 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. The foundations shake of this stone built temple, the stones themselves are shaking and the effect is immediately fear and trembling in Isaiah himself.

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, 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. The Lord is not just an impressive sight. He is a humbling, crushing, awe filling vision. 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.

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. We have nothing but a ruin, a wreck of a life to show this high, heavy, holy 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. So are we all live in the midst of a people of unclean lips, we're all so. 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. More likely today, there's so many people think they don't they don't feel sensible at all and they don't mind coming to church.

Maybe they don't think they need to because they're already right. But there are still a few who think they're too sinful to come to church and worship God. And they're right. They're right that they're too sinful to worship God.

That's exactly what Isaiah saw when he saw the 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.

And, you know, we don't stand a chance. By contrast, if we've forgotten that we've forgotten that or maybe we never really seen it in the first place, then we're in a grave position. If you don't sense your sinfulness before a holy God, then you are in a grave position.

If you cannot sincerely say, woe is me, then woe are you. 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, who talks glibly about God, thinks he knows the Lord, has no sense of sinfulness.

That person is is the furthest away from the true God. You need to open your eyes. That's you hope that no one here like that you hear with your ears and understand with your heart and turn that the 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. 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.

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. We saw this in Sunday school where Paul had all these religious accomplishments, but he knew when he really saw the Lord that they were.

What was his work done? There was a filthiness before this Lord. When we see him, if we see him in that childlike faith, though, we will we will know. That he has dealt with our sin, that we can we will also see.

His grace in dealing with our sin. So look what happens here in verses three to seven. He's seen the Lord and therefore, by contrast, seen his own sin. But then in verses three to seven, Isaiah sees the holiness and glory of God.

He's terrified how far short he's fallen to that glory. He experiences true humility, what Paul calls godly grief, grieving over his sin because he's now he's in the presence of God. Isaiah knows that he cannot praise and serve God as the seraphim do, because in the depths of his being, he is unclean.

Everyone around him is unclean. He exclaims, woe is me. He confesses that he's lost, that he's ruined. But think what comes next, because it's different what we might expect. We might expect some some angel to come to Isaiah and say, OK, here's a here's a 12 step plan, Isaiah, on how to get your life right.

Right. But he's not told then to do something to save himself. He cannot do that. Instead, as he sort of passively seeing this vision, a seraph, a burning one surrounding the 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. And the angel adds a word to the action. He says, your guilt has departed, your sin has been atoned for. Now, first, what did Isaiah do to get this forgiveness?

What was his action? What did he add to this? Nothing, absolutely nothing. He felt his sinfulness claims, woe is me. He knows he's ruined. And then, you know, completely outside of his control, outside of his doing his sin is atoned for.

He's made right with God. It was all God's work. Now, this is a little different than what many people today think. Many people think God will just kind of let the sin slide. It's a wink and say, oh, shucks, I'll let you buy.

No, sin is not just excused. It's not just shrugged off like nothing happened. 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.

Fire from the altar burns away the guilt. Now, the altar, it's important it comes from the altar. That's an important detail because the altar was the place where God accepted the sacrifice, the sacrifice that was our substitute.

It was the place where holiness was appeased, where the sin was paid for. From there comes Isaiah's salvation. From there comes your salvation. Now, we need to see this, too. We should not only see 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, he has also provided an altar where sin was dealt with 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. Your sin has been, past tense, it's done, atoned for. Atoned means made at one. You are reconciled to God now, Isaiah, because of what is done at that altar.

And then Isaiah, now forgiven, cleansed, made at one with the Lord, reconciled. We're in a good relationship with the Lord now. He hears the Lord ask, whom shall I send and who will go for us? Isaiah raises his hand, you know, me, me, me.

Here I am, send me. Forgiven sinners with a vision of the high, heavy, holy God are quick to want to tell others about the Lord. Now, right here, many modern day Christians wish the past is ended. This is it, kind of white out the rest.

I'm going to go on to chapter seven. One preacher cleverly outlines this chapter. I love this outline. Woe, lo, go. Very good. 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. Yes, sort of like it's like the Great Commission. And those last five verses are a commission or a holy commission. But here again, we see is here is not a holy excuse me.

Here is a holy God. There's not a moralistic, therapeutic, deistic God who's really nice, 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.

No, the first commandment to worship and serve him alone, to love the Lord your God with all your heart. He's not so egotistical. He keeps that himself, is he? But here is a continuation of the of the vision.

It's a continuation of the vision of the true God. And we need to open our eyes and see it in these last five verses. 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.

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. He will redeem some. But he doesn't need to. He is even willing to send prophets and preachers, knowing that the effect of their ministry will be to harden some people's hearts, to keep them from repenting.

So far, so far from a from a desperate 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. 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.

He tells Isaiah in verse 10, make the heart of this people dull and their ears heavy 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.

And that's what the Lord's the Lord's command to this prophet, go and make sure they don't repent. That's a far cry, isn't it? From a desperate God, just kind of needing people to hang out with. Here we see a God who calls us to serve, not necessarily for success.

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 Olympics or winning the championship.

Students study late into the night for the success of good grades and hopefully a good career later on. So, you know, serving, sacrificing for success is just really no big deal. 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. We're willing to open our Danville campus soon, or the rewards we get for winning people over, you know, get a bigger salary, get a bigger congregation, but for the joy of serving such an awesome God.

That's the reason for the glory of God. The Lord did not send Isaiah to save people. Well, at least not all of them. And in fact, on the contrary, he tells Isaiah in those last five verses that he is sending him to destroy at least some of the people.

In fact, actually, most of the people. Those last five verses in them, that last five verses, so many people wish we could just skip. Really, you can go on YouTube and look up Isaiah 6 and look how many preachers end at verse 8.

A lot of sermons and stuff on Isaiah 6. Popular passage. Many of them end at verse 8. Many people wish we could skip, but there the Lord tells Isaiah that his judgment will continue until destruction is seemingly complete.

Those who were too self-righteous to say, woe is me. He says it will be completely devoured. 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.

If only one out of ten is left, the Lord will come back and finish them off too. Like a man who cuts down a tree, he compares it to, this is the Lord's destruction, his judgment coming. So as if you've cut down a tree, you've killed it mostly, but then you burn the stump just to make sure that thing won't, doesn't come back alive.

Now, when that day, that day of judgment, that day of doom, that's what will happen. The thorough, a thorough destruction on the day of doom. But then suddenly we remember it's a day of delight too. The holy seed mentions that notice that the last, the last phrase of that last verse, the holy seed, it 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 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 new Testament calls the elect, the church, they'll sprout.

God will graciously save some. Isaiah is told that the effect of his ministry will be that most in his lifetime will be hardened and destroyed. And yet Isaiah, you know, he didn't want to back out. No, I don't like that terms of that deal.

I wanted to go and be popular. Isaiah did not put himself forward as God's messenger because he got a promise of a great career in religion. You know, he didn't get that promise. He stepped forward and said, here I am.

Send me 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 Jr. or with Jim, working, doing this or that, you think, what do 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. If you're tired of that, your main need isn't for me or anyone to, you know, else to buck you up, to tell you, you know, success is just around the corner.