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Biblical Mission |
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ISAIAH 6 is a fascinating passage. It reveals God in all his majestic splendour. Doesn’t it speak to us all? And what we hear is a call to mission. You know Isaiah’s prophecies. You’ve seen his passion for the people to get it right. You have seen how he pinpoints what is wrong and doesn’t let it go until he has declared God’s full counsel. Yet Isaiah 6 breaks into the stream. It shows God in all his glory revealing himself to Isaiah. It adds a radically new element to Isaiah’s mission. There are many great lessons in this passage. Let’s focus on a few. The critical thing is Isaiah’s encounter with God. Through it comes that calling from God. Finally, we reflect a response to God. All three make for effective in ministry.
Why does Isaiah’s encounter with God come six chapters into the prophecy? Doesn’t calling have come before ministry? Scholars say, “Perhaps this chapter was torn out, and recopied in the wrong place.” Or they say,“Perhaps there was never any real order in Isaiah. Perhaps it was just a lot of brief prophecies all jumbled together by a later editor.” I am no Biblical scholar. I can’t say. They could be right. We know that editors worked on many Old Testament books. The important thing is the Bible we have now, not it might once have been. God has preserved it in this form, and that is all we need to know. That means that Isaiah as we have it says that a person can minister without a clear encounter with God. I knew a pastor who, I’m sure, wasn’t born again. The members of his church told me, “He doesn’t have a clue.” Yet once he gave a most encouraging and uplifting devotion to a group of leaders. Somehow the Spirit of God got through even if he didn’t know it. I read a testimony of a pastor who was a leading evangelist in his denomination for over twenty years, and led many to Christ, but, one day, he met Jesus himself, and he said, “I was born again on the spot.” What a change that made in his ministry! Do you minister because it is the role you were trained in it? It makes all the difference when Jesus comes into the situation. And Jesus came into the life of that young professional prophet, Isaiah. John writes, JOHN 12:39 For this reason they could not believe, because, as Isaiah says elsewhere: Isaiah saw Jesus exalted in the place of God in the very midst of the Temple. Isaiah says, 1 ...I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.” 4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. What a vision of splendour and majesty! The Lord is on a throne. Thrones symbolise rulership and authority. The highest seat always goes to the person with authority, to mark the ruler out from other people. When the ruler speaks, he is seen. Everyone knows who is in charge. The throne indicates decision–making power. It isn’t a spear or a club. The Queen has a sceptre, which is a kind of ceremonial club. It’s proof that she has the right to hit you if you are naughty. It’s coercive power. It says she can lead the people in battle. But this vision of the Lord is one of settled authority. This is Jesus, the unchallenged ruler and judge. His train fills the temple. Again, it is a sign of the ruling Messiah. You don’t wear a train into battle. After the battle, after you shower and trim your beard, you put on finery to show everyone that you are the conquering hero. Then there are the seraphim. The seraphim are more proof of the power and authority of Jesus. Seraphim is the plural of saraph. And that’s a Hebrew word for snake. The snake in the Garden of Eden is nagash; the snakes which bit the Israelites in the desert were seraphim. Of course Isaiah didn’t literally see snakes flying around the throne. After all, snakes don’t have feet and six pairs of wings. But those snakes in the desert were enormously powerful. They killed Israelites. They changed the people’s hearts. The conventional way of drawing these snakes,was zig-zagging like lightning. It is as though Isaiah says, “Around Jesus and around his throne is power over life and death: the most powerful forces of nature. All power rests in him. He rules the universe.” And, just in case you think that these powers are independent of the Lord, Isaiah sees them covering themselves in the presence of the Lord. They cover their faces, because they can’t look at him and live. They cover their feet, because, to an Israelite, the feet symbolise the seat of strength and power. They dare not show their own power in the presence of the King of kings. And, to confirm Isaiah’s vision, they shout out so loudly that the doorposts and even the thresholds shake at the noise: “Holy, Holy Holy is the Lord of heaven’s armies.” That’s literally what they say. This is a phenomenally powerful experience for Isaiah. I attended a wedding once, at a Baptist Church not far away, and I remarked afterwards, “It was very nice, but they are afraid of God!” Everything was so carefully worded to avoid offence, to keep emotion out, to keep it all “nice’. If we are ever to get anywhere, we have to let God be God. We have to see the Lord, High and lifted up. We need to sing praises at the top of our voices! Some of our Calvinist friends are consumed with the need to proclaim the sovereignty of God, but it can seem that all they want is a doctrine of God’s sovereignty. We don’t need a doctrine, we need an experience, a revelation. We need to see the Lord, High and lifted up. That is the beginning of everything.
Before Isaiah heard the voice, he saw himself as he truly was. We read: ISA 6:5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.” We react in many different ways. Some people are overcome with joy. Some people want to think it all through, some are overwhelmed with a sense of sinfulness or of powerlessness. I think Isaiah felt a mixture of many things when he saw the Lord. Do you might remember your own encounter with Jesus? It is probably different for every one of us. At High School our scripture teacher, Rev. Dickie Barton, challenged us to respond to Jesus and not just recognise that he is there. It was almost a shock, “an eye–opener”. Suddenly I realised that somehow, in Christ, God had declared his love; that it was now inescapable. No one is outside it. God’s love is there, it is fixed. You can ignore it, you can reject it, but you can never make it disappear. The ultimate price is paid. We can enter in or remain outside, but there is no place where it no longer applies. Years later, at a Ministers’ Retreat, I had what I would call a vision. It was a turbulent time in my life, and a vision of Jesus in the midst of turbulence came. It was a vision which confronted me with my sinfulness and revealed once again how complete and absolute God’s forgiveness and redemption is through Jesus. Whatever your experience is, didn’t Jesus command us to remember? Didn’t he say, Rev 2: 5 Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. Remembering is the beginning of recovery. But, for Isaiah, this was a first meeting, and he was so aware of his sinfulness that he thought he would die. “Woe to me! I am ruined! That is a cry of death. Isaiah uses words a man might use as he faces execution, or if he were stricken with a sudden illness from which there was no recovery. We will never truly come to God’s new life without passing through death. M Scott Peck talks about how a community is formed, when people pass through a period of chaos leading to brokenness and a willingness to put their own will behind themselves in favour of the interests of the group. Thomas S Kühn talks about how scientific revolutions occur. He explains that people don’t just hear a new idea, realise it is true, and accept it. People fight against new ideas until they can hold out no longer. Then their resistance is broken, and they submit to the new paradigm, to the new way of thinking. The old time revivalists talked of how they would come to a church where the congregation was essentially dead. After a bit of preaching, there would be an outbreak of anger, the devil would rage against the preacher and his message. Then repentance came, and tears and broken–heartedness before the Lord. Isaiah faces his own Calvary. He sees himself in the light of the glorified Christ, and he feels he is dying. As Paul says, ROM 6:5 If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. 6 For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin — 7 because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. Without a death like Jesus’, there is no resurrection; and, without resurrection there is no ministry of life to the dead. It is at that point of death that purification comes. The angel flies down with a purifying fire, a hot coal from the censer. Isaiah is cleansed. He is ready for God’s use. Then Isaiah hears the voice from the throne: ISA 6:8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” When God gets our attention, then he can call for our response.
When we see God as he is, revealed in Jesus, we see the need to respond to him. One of our biggest human mistakes is to react rather than to respond. There has been quite a bit of uproar in Sydney lately about those posters saying we should pray for Osama bin Laden, because Jesus loves him, too. People are reacting. They don’t like Osama, so they react against anything which might be good for him. We are supposed to hate our enemies — according to the world. How could anyone pray for their enemies? God wants responses, not reactions. When we hear his voice, we think about what he asks, and we choose to respond. Most marriage problems are caused by people reacting to each other rather than responding. Most spiritual problems have the same cause. Isaiah hears God’s call and he responds: Here am I: send me! That is the kind of response Jesus seeks. Here am I, Lord: if you want someone to speak for you, send me. I have often told about my sense of calling into ministry. I had no idea that God might have something like that in mind. When he said, “Full time ministry,” it was far from a pleasing idea. Lots of snakes and spiders, no girls — that was what I thought it would mean. I was sure it was about foreign missions. My reaction was to run; my response was to agree. No one wants to go into ministry. If it is at all genuine, it will be a call to do something that scares us and something that the devil will tell you is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you. That is when a decision to obey will mean something to you, and please God. Listen to what the Lord said to Isaiah: ISA 6:9 He said, “Go and tell this people: 11 Then I said, “For how long, O Lord?” This is no happy–clappy message. This is God getting down to business with rebellious people. And that will be true for everyone who wants to obey,
We have to get into serious ministry this year. We have met to face some of our difficulties. We have seen that we have to do some things differently. But we will never get anywhere until we have a true encounter with God and become willing to respond regardless of the price to ourselves. I can’t create an encounter with God, only Jesus himself can. But we can make it more likely or less likely that it will happen. I urge us to set times aside to wait for the gift promised to us, to watch for the Lord in his temple, to make decisions about our responses. God will do something wonderful when we see, hear and respond. Let’s do it! AMEN. |
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© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.) |
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