A Man Who Saw God on the Throne — A.W. Tozer

God Works in and Through People

I think that I am responsible for the motto God uses, yet I should like to explain that when I use the words, man got understood that God never uses anybody. God works in men and through them, but he never uses them.

A company uses a salesman, sends him out on his own. He always works in. It is God that worketh in us through will and action. Yet not I but Christ worked in me, Paul said. So actually what we're saying is the man can work through.

Isaiah’s Vision of God on the Throne

Last, yesterday it was, I defined that man as the man who met God in the bush. Today I am to speak, and this is also by request, of the man who saw God on the throne. And I'm in a bit of mental difficulty, not serious, just a little block about tomorrow.

I'm not certain what I'll preach about tomorrow. Probably, possibly at any rate, the man who met God above the heavens. Now let me read this very familiar passage. In the year that king died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.

Above it stood the seraphims. Each one had six wings. With train he covered his face, with train he covered his feet, and with train he did fly. He cried unto another and said, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, woe is me, for I am unclean, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.

For mine eyes have seen the king. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off, and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken, and purged.

Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Send me. And he said, Go, tell this people. Now, the man Isaiah here is trying to express that which we must inexpressible.

He's trying to utter that which cannot be uttered, which is said by the theologians to be the inexpressible. And in trying to express what he sees, he's limited by at least three factors. One is that what he saw was wholly other than, and altogether different from, ever seen before.

You know that in our singing, praying, worshiping, preaching, thinking, to draw a sharp line between that which is God and all that which is not. And Isaiah had been familiar with that which was not God, all that God had created and made.

But up to here, he had never been introduced into the presence of the uncreated. And the contrast between that which is God and that which is not God, the uncreated, was such that language staggered under the effort to express it.

Knowing God Beyond the Intellect

It's impossible, as you know, to conceive God. I said something yesterday. I think I said neo-orthodox. I meant to say neo-evangelical, in which I peed a little bit, complained a little bit about people trying to grasp God with your intellect.

Can't be done. We ought to wake up to the fact that if I could grasp God with my intellect, I would be equal to God. Never will be, never can be equal, and therefore I never can grasp God with my intellect.

And yet this man was trying to do it, to set forth what he saw, and the words were clumsy and inadequate. Words are always so. They're clumsy, inadequate to express that with which we are familiar. How much less, then, can they express that which is divine?

And God here was referring to the man. You see, there's a difference between God revealing himself and man discovering. Man bore by his intellect through to God. He couldn't do it in a million years. Not all the pooled brains of the world could do it.

Man in one second time revealed himself to the spirit of the man. And so the man knows God, but he knows God experientially, not... So God revealed himself here, and everything that is written here was true and is true.

He says it's greater than what is written by as much as God is greater than the human mind. Now the man of God said, I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, and I wish that I could make this vision to be at least dimly seen by those of the world, that God sits upon a throne.

God’s Sovereignty from the Throne

Here he is upon a throne. We've gotten away from it now. It's an evidence of anthropomorphism. I never was afraid of big words. Sticks and stones can never hurt you. So let them call us what they will.

I still believe that God sits upon a throne with self-bestowed sovereignty. I believe in the sovereignty of God. I believe that God sits upon a throne determining all events. That's why I can sleep at night.

If I thought the events of the world were in the hands of Khrushchev, I couldn't. And if I thought the events of the world were in the hands even of such good men as Eisenhower, I couldn't sleep, because then he's not wise enough to know what to do.

God sits on his throne, and he determines all events according to the purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began, deciding all destinies and disposing of all chastes. Now we see here some creatures about which I know very little.

They're seraphims. Seraphims, as you like. They're the high exalted ones, the fiery burners. And they're only seen once in the scripture, but I note with a good deal of satisfaction. Our theme, they are seen close to the throne and burning with rapturous love for the Godhead.

Then there was the smoke that filled the temple, and then there was the antiphonal chant, Holy, Holy, Holy, Almighty. I have often wondered why the dear old rabbis and the saints and hymnists of olden times to the knowledge of the Trinity just from hearing the seraphim chant, Holy, Holy, Holy.

The Trinity and the Holiness of God

Now I believe in the term we say this, and when you go out from here, if you ever might by accident happen to mention me, remember that I told you that I'm a Trinitarian. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.

And I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the forgotten of him before all ages, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not created. And I believe in the Lord and giver of life, who with the Father and Son together is worshiped and glorified.

The older I get and the more I pray the Bible, the more I believe in the Trinity. Here were the seraphim chanting to the Trinity 800 years before Mary the baby wailed in Bethlehem's manger, and the second person of the Trinity came to earth to dwell among us.

Now were the words, Holy, Holy, Holy. And from here on I want to do something that no man ever ought to attempt to do. So I shall make of it, and that is talk a little bit about the Holy, the word Holy here, what the word Holy means.

Now it is Lord of hosts here, and it is more than an adjective saying that God is a Holy God, it's more than that. Static description of glory to the triune God. And I'm not sure that I know what this means at all, but I will give you four words which I think may come close to it, to a definition.

After I have given you this, and have talked around here, as preachers do, missing the point most of the time, why, do what you can with it. Always remember that you can feel your way through to God with your heart.

After your mind has given up and quit, because God lies out yonder, infinitely transcendent, all of these creatures. And the old Germans used to say the heart is always the best theologian. No more with your heart.

Now don't force me to explain what I mean by the heart. I don't know what I mean by the heart. I have a heart, and I know you have a heart, and I know David had a heart, and he talked about it a lot. And I know that all the churches, even the preachers' hearts have hearts.

And we all have hearts. Well, with our heart we may know that at least this much is purity. It's good to know there's something left in to think about absolutely pure. You have to discount the world. A good man is always a good man, but.

And a good woman is always a good woman, except. Saint Abraham, David, all the rest, they had their weaknesses and flaws, and James Stewart, the old saint, said something that Elijah was a man of like passion.

That sounds a little bit like a sort of excuse. Elijah was a man of like passion, but it's a comforting thing to know that he was a good man and owned of God, hence in which we've described used by God, and yet he was not a perfect man.

That's why I feel more comfortable with Joseph than I will with Joseph and, say, Paul, because they were good men. Nothing is written against them. The other fellows had things wrong with them. If I find a man that's too good, I'm uncomfortable.

I admit I don't find too many. But if I find men too good, it gives you an uncomfortable feeling. But there is one who is absolutely good, who is absolutely holy, whose moral purity, whose cleanness, who is impeccable, who is faultless, who is perfection itself.

That is God. And it gives us the feeling of absolute profaneness in the presence of God. Now, one thing that's wrong with us is that we don't repent enough. Down in the city of Worsham, one of the prelates there said, this was passed on to me, he said it to a Christian brother, a partisan brother, that he found, and this is not meant to reflect, this was said by this Roman Catholic prelate, he said, he believed that when a man repented, he ought to stick.

Repentance for What We Are

He said, I believe that when anybody repents, they ought to repent and make it stick. But he said, instead of that, they come and confess and go back. And he said, I believe in John the Baptist's repentance.

I was glad to hear that coming from there because I believe in John the Baptist's repentance. I read it in my Bible. I believe in it. And I'm glad some others believe in it. The reason we don't have more repentance is that we repent for what we do instead of for what we are.

Always remember that the repentance for what you do may go deep, but what you are goes deeper. And it was the sharp contrast between what God was and what Isaiah was, the absolute honest of the deity and the spotted speckled impurities of Isaiah's nature that brought absolute profaneness to this man of God.

And then there's mystery. And always that baffles me and stuns the mind. And we come before God in speechless humility in the presence of the inexpressible. I feel that we should always leave room for mystery in our Christian faith.

When we do not, we are jellicle rationalists and we can explain everything. Just ask us any question and we're quick on the trigger. We can answer the question. I don't believe that we can. I think there's mystery running throughout all the kingdom of God, just as there's mystery running throughout all the kingdom of nature.

The most honest scientist will tell you that he knows practically nothing. And the Christian who has ever seen God on his throne with the eyes of his heart has stopped being an oracle. He won't anymore pretend to know and he won't also want to condemn another man who might take a little different position from his.

Catholicity and Christian Unity

You know what? I'm a Catholic. Now, I'm not a Roman Catholic, though I respect them for their religion, but I'm a Catholic. That is, I'm a universal Christian. I love all... What the word means, you know, universal.

And I love all of the Lord's people. I just thought as we sat here singing, holy, holy, holy. Here's a ream, leading a congregation of many denominations in singing an Anglican hymn in an undenialed chapel.

Now, that's what I like, brother. Exactly. Because that makes you a Christian missionary alliance. But we got to make room. The mystery that is God. The mystery that can't be so fluent. When I hear a man pray too fluently, I know he isn't seeing anything.

Because his ability to express himself in prayer, unless it should be by a sudden passion outpouring of the Holy Ghost upon him, would enable... But just average, when we're praying too fluently, we're not seeing much.

God’s Transcendence and the Loss of Holy Awe

Well, then there was strangeness. Something said, like nothing we know, remote and unknown. What we've tried to do in our terrible day is to trim ties and to get control of God and think him down where we can use him as we want.

And we've even made him somebody up there who likes us. One woman said, crawling around among the pubs, that is the saloons in New York nightclubs, and she sat down and began to talk to people. Somebody talked about God and she said, by the way, do you know God?

And he said, no, he didn't think he did. Well, she said, you ought to know God as the living God. And every time, ever since I've heard that, I've had a pain inside of my heart that human beings, people brought up in a Christian society, so-called, could refer to the ineffably holy triune God and all.

Another man said, God was a good fellow. And all these people claim to be Christians. My brother, there's something that's different, it's beyond, it's above us, it's transcendent. We can't get through.

We have to throw our hearts open and say, God, shine my understanding for I'll never find the otherwise. And when we've seen God on the throne, we've had the fourth thing, the faithfulness. Something portentous and dreadful and terrifying here.

You know, there's a passage in the book of Isaiah written later on where it says, ask the question, who among us shall dwell with eternal fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burning? Preach on hell and ask which one in the congregation is going to go to hell.

Well, you couldn't miss it any further, you know, if you try. The fact is, it answers its own question. Who shall dwell with the everlasting burning? It says, he that hath clean hands and hath lifted up his soul to vanity nor sworn deceitfully, he shall see the king in his beauty in the land that is far off.

The everlasting fire, the eternal burning, our God is a consuming fire and it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. And in the book of this chapter, you'll remember that Ezekiel by the river Tebar despondent and down, dejected, God opened heavens and God then saw the open heaven and then coming out of the fire he saw four-faced creatures out of the fire.

We Christians should be men and women out of the fire. Now we should be perfectly normal, perfectly sound, perfectly sane. We should create a sense of humor. We should be perfectly down to earth and practical as James.

But on the other hand, we should have the top side of our soul open. We should have the top side, the windows above open to the mystery that is God. And the Christian should be a walking mystery, a walking miracle.

The Christian never should be the kind of man that can be explained. You've all read William James. He tried to explain it there for a great many years in my earlier life. I read psychology constantly and I got acquainted with all of it.

Even some that I couldn't understand. And when they're all right along, they talk about your head. But about Christianity, they all begin to flounder because they're trying to explain in psychological terms that which is not psychological.

And the Christian should have upon him an element that is beyond psychological beyond the laws up into the spiritual laws. Drummond wrote his great book Natural Laws in the Spiritual World and showed how natural laws could be projected and seen to be the laws that govern the kingdom of God.

He made a pretty good job of it defending his thesis, I think, and I've gotten some help from that. We'll find, I think, if we read our Bible and pray, that there is that in the kingdom of God which is potentially fearful, which is dreadful to a point where we cannot be so flippant about it.

God’s Holy Hatred of Sin

Now, God is holy. He is holy. He is actively hostile to sin. He must be. And God can only burn on and burn on and burn forever. Never let any spiritual experience or any interpretation of scripture, never let anybody sin your hatred for sin.

Even if you fall flat into it, hate it with holy hatred and get out of it Sin that brought the downfall of the race. It was sin that brought the Savior to die on a Roman cross. It is sin that has filled every jail and every insane asylum.

It is sin that has made every murder and every divorce and every crime that has been committed since the world began. Sin it all is. And in the presence of this awful holy God, sin can never be anything but a heinous, heinous, heinous,.

Seeing God Rather Than Imagining Him

And he believed in fairies, you know. And you'd go in, you'd see him sitting there to somebody, and they'd say, who are you talking to? Well, him, he'd say, a fairy. Talking to a fairy on his knee. Well, and there was no fairy there.

Now, it's one thing to imagine something is there. It's another thing to have the ability to see what is there. And that's what Isaiah saw. He saw God. He saw God. Phileas saw God. And you know that if we Had our eyes open we'd see God.

God is everywhere God keep their wanted places Turned but a stone and start a wing. It's you it's your Alienated faces that miss the many splendors. It is it is our faces that have been turned away from God.

But now Isaiah sees this God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And Isaiah cried, I am undone. Here was what somebody called self depreciation to the form of total dis-value. You know what I'm afraid of now.

Isaiah’s Undoing Before the Holy God

You won't mind my saying this will you? Because it wouldn't do any good. Because you know, I'll get out of here tomorrow. But saying that I'm afraid that you're going to try to go out and and Convert the meats and methods.

I'm afraid unconsciously that you're going out saying I can do it. No, my brother, you can't do it. And there are notions of learning in the world. If you could go through them all and learn everything that can be learned and read and written.

There still isn't enough knowledge in the world To enable you to do the job. The Holy Ghost is sending you out to do. Use your instruments. He'll use your skills and your gifts. I believe in that all right.

He'll prove them. But he'll never you never can do it by yourself. You've got to be undone. The man God uses is the none. The man who sees God sitting upon a throne and the result is he's undone. Here was an astonished man.

And his whole world suddenly dissolved into a vast eternal whiteness and he was against it red and black and He said my eyes have seen the king. What kind of a man was Isaiah? Anyhow, was he a murderer a liar a drunkard?

No, it wasn't any of those things. He was a fine young cultured fellow cousin to the king poet in his own, right? Why I there was a man he could have been elected to any mission board. He could have been elected in a church.

He was a good man this Isaiah. And I wish I by nature but in half as good but After all man over against the internal whiteness. What is the purest morality over against the holiness of the unspeakably?

Holy God sighs there when he cried out I am undone. He was meaning There that he was experiencing the undone as set over against the holiness of the Creator and What we hear in these words I am undone is the pain Crown cleanness.

It's the pain cry. That's why I don't like the kind of Evangelism that gets Peter's. I believe that there ought to be a pain cry. I think that there ought to be a birth from within. I feel that there should be the terror of Seeing ourselves in violent contrast to the holy holy holy God.

And unless we do a deep our repentance will ever go and if our repentance doesn't go deep our Christian experience will not go deep. But here was the man who was crying out what he had done for he didn't mention Single sin.

David named a sinner to he didn't name one for it was that was terrifying him here. It was what he was himself what he was. He was a human being and as a fallen human being as such he knew That he would never dare into the presence of this awesome God.

So he cried out done now my friends. It isn't a question today whether we have Isaiah's uncleanness or not. But it's a question of whether we have his away. He was unclean and thank God became aware of it.

But the world today is unclean but unaware of it but uncleanness with us terrible Consequences and that's what's wrong with the world and that's what's wrong with a church. That's what's wrong with Protestantism.

We are on without being aware. Uncleanness without awareness makes us very bold and very self-assured and Gives us a mission of our own holiness and creates false assurance and keeps the door shut to hope.

But when we see God on the throne in the eyes of our hearts and By means of the of the of the theology that our Bible gives us we mount By faith and by inward illumination to behold a little of how holy God is.

Depravity and the Need for Grace

After that, they'll never be privatey. I've never I've always believed in depravity and And Calvin didn't invent that and people think that he didn't. David talked about that long before Calvin was ever heard of and The first baby that was born the first one.

He was born depraved a lot and the work of the Holy Ghost is to make us know that we're depraved. But you say of course, they're depraved harlots and publicans, but you know friends that isn't our problem.

Our problem is the depravity in the circle of the just among the Saints on those Who claim to be great souls and whose pictures get in the papers and who have things named after them? I've often wondered of those churches the Jones Memorial and the Smith Memorial.

I wonder if the people who named the church knew what that old boy had in his heart whether they'd have done it. You know, it's just a thought. It's it's not a serious part of the sermon. But it's just a side thought that if we knew if we knew that lies in the human breath.

Purification by Fire and the Call to Service

Well when he cried out I'm undone God said to the seraph go and the seraph on then put the coal on these lips. Now that's a very poetic thing. If I were an artist, I hope my artist friend chases in the audience.

I don't know. He said he was artist and if I were an artist, I would Paint a picture. I think of this. I would never paint a picture of God or Christ, but maybe of this. Do you know poetic and too artistic the way we've got it figured out?

Did you ever stop to think that a live coal meant a burning and a burning coal? Applied to a human lip you think there's anything poetic about that anything. You're right. Did it what didn't know that that was painful?

Imagine that live coal touching that lip and a scream of pain and a pop going up. Afterwards burning flesh was smelled throughout all the buildings. This man had to be had to be purified down salvation army says blood and fire and I'm for it.

Purification by blood and fire in this case. It was fire. And this man was purified is symbolic of all his nature were purified by fire. Now said God thine iniquity is taken away, but it's called a sense of restored moral innocency.

Isaiah knew he was bad. But now he had a sense of moral in it's all the wonder of the grace of God. That we can know how bad we are at the same time after we have gone through this humiliating experience this Devastating experience after we've gone through it in the coal of fires touched our lips passed our deep iniquity and acknowledged.

How bad we are not our sins committed, but our sin Uncommitted and the grace touches us then we have that sense of restored moral innocency. The forgiving love of God can reach so we can serve him then God said he hadn't said it before there was no use to say it before.

But as soon as Isaiah had consent then God said who shall I send and who will go for us? Then said Isaiah here am I send me there was the man goes the man whose iniquity was taken away. Let's never take anything for granted brothers and sisters never take granted.

The Preacher’s Confession and Dependence on God

Do you know the one that I pray the most for in my my pastor work? Do you know the most trouble? Do you know the one that is worst of all? Just myself, and I'm not saying it to be humble. That's that's real and true.

Trouble with myself then with any I've preached all my lifetime to people that are better than I am. Preached to people that I'm sure ever had a past equal to mine and that I am sure no God many of them just as well or better.

After this place of purity that Isaiah did then God says I'll I'll use you and so he sent out Isaiah. Finished, but I want to close, you know, they say that you're supposed to close with a hymn. I never do or rarely do but I thought I'd morning.

A Closing Meditation on Eternal Light

I'd be orthodox first. Change a Man wrote a hymn. Nobody ever sings it. No, we don't see seeing the other ones and. A man wrote this and when he wrote it, he must have been on these knees. This was never composed in a step plastic top desk and telephone and the dictating machine.

No man could write this like that. You know, he didn't use a ballpoint pen. He probably used a quill and sweated and hung through. I'll read it and close. Eternal light eternal light how pure the soul must be.

When placed within thy searching sight it shrinks not but with come live and look on thee. The spirits that surround thy throne may bear the burning bliss. But that is surely theirs alone since her known a fallen world like this yet.

How shall I whose? Native sphere is dark him. Before the ineffable appear and on my naked spirit bear that uncreated being there to rise to that sublime abode. And offering in the sacrifice the Holy Spirit's energies.

These these prepare us for the sight of holiness above. The sons of ignorance and night may dwell with the eternal light through the eternal love. Wonderful. May God's vision of himself that will Disvalue us to the point of valuation from there.

He can raise us up and send us out and say go.