Sinclair Ferguson reflects on Isaiah’s vision of God’s holiness and majesty. Ferguson emphasizes the transformative impact of encountering God’s glory, leading to a profound sense of personal sinfulness, cleansing, and a renewed commitment to God’s mission. He encourages believers to seek a deeper understanding of God’s holiness and respond with humility and dedication.
The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.
Let me say to you first of all how much of a joy and privilege I count it to be able to share in this service of worship and ministry of God’s word together with you this evening. The truth of the matter is that these extra meetings after the lectures in the afternoons are the real reason why I accepted the invitation in the first place to give the lectures.
The lectures always, in my own estimation, come a very second-rate place to the opportunity to have fellowship in the ministry of God’s word and in the preaching of the gospel. And I am to seek to do that this evening by drawing your attention to this passage that we have read together from the prophecy of Isaiah, chapter 6, under the heading, the vision of God.
And I want to draw your attention to this passage not only for its own sake but also because as we shall see it is one of the profoundest biblical illustrations of a standing principle in the Christian life and indeed in all spiritual service. And that is that our Christian service and our spiritual worship is always determined primarily by our knowledge of God. And it is our knowledge of God in some or all of its facets that makes the most abiding impression on the character and style of our Christian living.
Not only is that so in general terms, but it is also so in this particular sense: very often in scripture and in Christianity, Christian experience, it is the particular way in which God makes Himself known to particular individuals that shapes and fashions the burden and the fruitfulness of their service. You can trace that principle in different characters in Scripture.
It’s very obviously true, for example, of the Apostle Paul, that you can trace almost every fundamental element in his teaching back to the revelation of Jesus Christ to him on the Damascus Road, and what he learned of the grace of God, first of all in the face of Stephen, and then in the shining face of Jesus Christ as he was on his way to Damascus.
And almost every special contribution of the Apostle Paul in the teaching of the New Testament can in one way or another be traced back to the burden of the revelation that God there gave him. The same is equally true of the Apostle Peter. You can trace the contribution that God gave to him and gave through him in terms of the ways in which Christ revealed Himself to him and dealt with him.
And so you find, as the grace of God is manifested in the kaleidoscope of the Christian church, that it is what He shows of Himself particularly to us that so often shapes our own lives and our ministries and our service of one another. And there is no one of whom this is more obviously true in either Old or New Testaments than the prophet Isaiah. He is the one whose ministry
burden is to bring to the people of God the name of God and the knowledge of God as the Holy One of Israel.
And it is, of course, because the Lord has this function for Isaiah’s ministry that he reveals himself in this special way, manifests this particular attribute to Isaiah, not only because Isaiah personally and particularly needs to feel upon his soul the weight of the holiness of God, but also because this is going to be God’s chosen instrument in his own time and indeed in every age through whom he will contribute to the church of God, the knowledge of God in his holiness, the vision of God in his majesty, the display of God in his grace, that that ministry may similarly bear fruit in our lives too.
And that we coming to have our share in the burden of the Lord through the prophet Isaiah may similarly be bowed down in worship and adoration and self-yielding to him. And that something of the fruitfulness of Isaiah’s ministry may also be manifested in the kind of ministries that we exercise to one another and that we exercise in the needy community in which God has placed us. For that reason, it’s especially significant that Isaiah reminds us as he begins the story of this great vision, that this vision took place in his life in very distinct ways.
circumstances. He details two of the elements of those circumstances. The first is the year in which it took place, and the second is the place in which he met with God. And both of them, interestingly, are of great significance for him. The year in which the experience took place, he says, in the opening verse of the chapter, was the one in which King Uzziah died. And that, of course, had very special significance for the whole of the people, but apparently particularly for the prophet Isaiah.
Uzziah, you remember, was that king whom God had so signally raised up in his teenage years and given a long life of unusual fruitfulness as God’s anointed servant. One who had been raised up to bring the divine covenant benedictions upon God’s people so that they became fruitful and glorious under his reign. But the one of whom the chronicler also says that when he became strong and great, he also became weak and poor because of the sin of his pride.
You remember how the narrative in 2 Chronicles 26 goes on to relate how, exalting himself above his God-given station, he chose to offer his own worship to God instead of waiting upon the ministry that God had ordained for the people. And when discovered by the priests, his inner anger and rebellion against them and God’s Word
that apparently had been festering over the months and perhaps the years, broke out. God marked him with a sign of judgment. Leprosy broke out on his skin.
The courageous priests hurried him out of the temple of God and he dwelt apart to the end of his days in a leper’s house, separated from the fellowship of God’s people, separated from the ministry that God had given to them, separated from the office to which God had called him, and separated from the destiny to which he so obviously had been heading as one of God’s chosen servants for blessing.
One who had been mightily used and yet had proven to have these feet of clay, had fallen as a broken, excommunicated man, not only to his own sorrow, but also to the sorrow of all the godly in Israel who had looked to him as Isaiah presumably had and prayed for him as a young man, as Isaiah undoubtedly did, and seen in him the great model of the man and the servant of God, as Isaiah undoubtedly did.
And therefore, it is all the more significant that he says in these opening words, “It was the year that the earthly king died, that my eyes were opened and I saw thee, king, the Lord of glory.” As though God, in His inestimable providences, had seized hold of me, of a situation in which everything seemed to be working for evil. And in this young man’s life, had changed the dark night of his own disappointments into the bright day of the revelation of the vision of his own glory.
That is why it is probably of significance also that Isaiah says to us that the place in which he seems to have had this experience was the very temple of God from which King Uzziah had been formerly thrust out. And one can almost imagine the prophet going to the temple, still bearing upon his spirit the heavy burden of recent events, perhaps even passing by the leper’s house in which Uzziah had lived until the closing days of his life.
And going into the temple, his mind imprinted with the memory of the tragedy that had taken place, perhaps even visualizing King Uzziah coming on that last great desperate act of rebellion against God.
And as he found himself in the precincts of the temple, God seemed to tear down the curtain of space and time and manifest himself in his ineffable glory to this young prophet in order that he might raise him up from the dust into which he had fallen and show him such a sight of his own glory that even though he was to face worse in his ministry than he had ever experienced, he would have a hold of such a God in his sovereign power and majesty as would enable him to stand firm and sure and gracious in a time of unparalleled national darkness and future judgment.
And it is in that context that Isaiah begins to unravel something of the mystery of the vision that he received of the King in his infinite splendor. And there are, as you would notice in our reading, at least three elements to the vision of God that he received. The first and the most obvious one is that this was a vision of God’s holiness. The second that accompanied it was that it was also a vision of God’s solemn judgment. And the third most marvelously was that it was also, thankfully, a vision of God’s infinite grace.
And I want us to look at these things together and to feel something of what Isaiah knew in his own soul, finally, of what it meant to have the vision of this God of Scripture and to respond to him in a way that transformed his life so marvelously. It was, first of all, a vision of God in his holiness. And it was so in a very special way. We are accustomed to understanding something of what the holiness of God means.
Holiness in God means that he is different from us and other than us in his separate from sin. And in the Old Testament, the very idea of holiness takes on almost a measurable quality. God distant from man. Man distant from God in his sinfulness. God other than man in his sinfulness. But the striking thing about this manifestation of God to the prophet Isaiah is that God almost seems to break through the mental categories of Isaiah’s thinking about his holiness.
To inform and invade his thinking with a vision that stretches beyond all the categories he had presumably ever used, perhaps even in his own preaching. You know there is great discussion and always has been among biblical students and scholars as to precisely when this experience took place in Isaiah’s life.
It seems to me there is very little doubt that wherever it took place, it took place in the life of a man who had already some consciousness of God’s holiness and had already spoken to other in some sort of prophetic fashion to men and women about the implications of the holiness of God for the sinfulness of the people.
But what happens to Isaiah here in this vision is that he begins to become conscious that all his speech about the holiness of God thus far almost pales into insignificance by this profound encounter with the holiness of God. And what God does, as you would see in this passage, is virtually to put on an audio-visual display of His holiness, so that the whole of Isaiah’s being, not just his intellectual formulation of the Old Testament doctrine of God’s holiness, but the whole of Isaiah’s being is overwhelmed by this manifestation of God’s holiness.
And you see how the Lord does it. He does it in a sense spatially. As Isaiah comes into the temple, he sees the Lord high and lifted up. And one has this sense that he is seeing God with eyes that are shrinking in his own sight. He sees something of the height of God’s holiness, of the sheer exaltedness of God’s holiness. He begins to experience something of what the psalmists mean when they speak about God being enthroned upon the praises of His people.
Being so powerfully present among them that they feel they are being crushed down from an enormous height by their sense of the holy presence of God. And this is presented to him in spatial terms as he, as it were, has to strain his sinful eyes to catch a glimmer of the sheer exaltedness of God in his ineffable being. And then God impresses him in another way, not only spatially and visually, but one might almost say geologically as well. He has such a sense of God’s holiness that he says that the very thresholds began to shake.
He began to have some sense that if the holy God were present upon the earth, then all within should not only keep silent, but the whole universe should tremble in his presence. So utterly unworthy was it even to exist before this Holy One of Israel. And he feels the very foundations beginning to totter and to shudder, as though he were in the midst of an earthquake, and the ground underneath him were shifting and shaking. And in the presence of this God of infinite majesty, there was no safe ground on which a man could stand.
Not only so, but do you notice that God reveals himself, if one may put it this way, even sensationally. That is, to Isaiah’s senses, he begins so to feel on his being the presence of the holiness of God that he is almost on the point of crying out in a sense of suffocation. The building, he says, fills with smoke, as though even his eyes and his ears, his nose and his very lips are being affected by the suffocating power of the holiness of God upon a sinful man.
And so God reveals himself also to Isaiah psychologically. Do you notice how he puts it here in verse 1? He was high and exalted, and the train of his road filled the temple. Do you see the picture that he’s conveying? That’s the picture of a man who not only feels that he is in the midst of a spiritual earthquake and his senses are being assaulted by the majestic presence of Jehovah, but one who has begun to feel that Jehovah is pursuing him and the train of his robe is beginning to fill and flood this entire temple area so that Isaiah is caused like some prophetic church mouse to shrink away into the darkest corner to find some breathing space from which he can escape from the Lord of hosts even although he is one of his children.
He finds the experience of meeting with God in this way so incredibly overpowering. And then he hears the song of the seraphs, a song that creates a melody he has never heard before upon the earth. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is the fullness of his glory. And you see what he now senses in the song that breaks through the smoke and the darkness and the shattering of the temple. He hears this unparalleled praise of Jehovah.
You know how it’s true in Scripture throughout both Testaments that instead of having the ability to underline something with a red pen and say this is really important or put it in italics, the Scriptures invariably put something, if it’s really significant, in the form of a repetition. Amen, amen, I say to you. uses Jesus when He wants to underline the importance of what He is saying. But do you see what these seraphim do? They not only underline what God is revealing of Himself, they underline what God reveals of Himself twofold.
Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. Holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. Almost as though their experience is to speak forth the praises of God in His holiness and to be so overwhelmed by the significance of the words they have used that it is drawn out of them all over again in another wave of awe and wonder. Holy, and then again, holy is the Lord of Hosts. And then He notices through the smoke what they do. They have six wings each, and with two they cover their feet, and two they cover their face.
1 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. 2 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. 3 And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isaiah 6:1-3, ESV)
And with thirty-three percent of their energy they fly in the service of Jehovah. But with all their other energy they veil their faces from His infinite majesty and humble themselves down before Him. Do you see what Isaiah is seeing?
He is seeing what is almost unlawful to utter, that these seraphic creatures of God, who burn day and night in glorious holiness in His presence, even they express the inestimable gulf between their created holiness and His utterly uncreated holiness by bowing their own holiness down before Him, as though their holiness itself were sin by comparison with the majesty and perfection of His uncreated, underived holiness. He is in a service of worship and praise to the holiness of Jehovah, the like of which He has never experienced in His life before.
God has given Him a taste of something, the revelation of His holiness that will be with Him to His dying day. And it makes an impact on Him, you see, and it does so in this way. He begins to understand through this vision of God’s holiness that if God reveals Himself to His people in holiness, then God must necessarily also reveal Himself to His people in judgment. That’s the significance, ultimately, of seeing the Lord high and lifted up, as Isaiah says, sitting on a throne.
For this is not only the throne from which Jehovah reigns, it is the throne from which Jehovah issues His judgments upon a sinful people. That’s one of the reasons why the temple fills with smoke. That’s one of the reasons why the very place totters at its foundations with this divine earthquake, because the smoke of God’s presence and the earthquake of His
His power are in the Old Testament symbols of His visitation for the judgment of His people. Do you remember how this is recorded by the psalmist when he speaks about God coming in Psalm 18?
Then he says the earth shook and trembled, the foundations of the hills quaked and were shaken. Because He was angry, smoke went from His nostrils and devouring fire from His mouth, coals were kindled by it. He bowed the heavens and came down with darkness under His feet. And this is what Isaiah begins to realize is happening. His visitation of God in His ineffable holiness is inevitably also a visitation of God in His inextricable judgment. And it’s striking to notice what happens as God comes in this context to judge His people for their sin.
What is perhaps most significant of all is this, that it is in the temple that the manifestation of the judgment of God begins to make itself known. The men and women outside of the temple on this day regard it as yet another day in their lives. But for Isaiah, it is the day in which judgment must begin at the very house of God. It is, as it were, a foretaste of that judgment that will burst forth out of the house of God and descend upon the people who have professed God’s name, but have not possessed.
God’s grace. It is full of significance, not only in Isaiah’s age, but in every age, that the judgment of God must break forth from the house of God and the family of God, that it must be tested, as it were, among the people of God in order that they may be cleansed to be a holy people and a royal group of worshipers. And what was it that Isaiah was to discover? It is so plain in the whole of his prophecy what he discovered.
He discovered in this sense of the holy judgment of God how utterly routine had been his own worship and the worship of the people. I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. And you remember how he speaks in the opening chapter of his prophecy of the way in which the worship of God’s name in God’s house had been accommodated to the lifestyle of the worldly and the ungodly.
And he sees in this vision of God, God breaking in and teaching him that what the people had thought were beautiful and good services, as they said, were purely matters of convenience and routine.
And I suppose that sense of judgment was most of all impressed upon him because he had attended a service of worship that
day, which bore almost no resemblance to all the other services of worship which he had attended in this temple, where the Psalms that had been sung had been sung by holy seraphim, where the melodies of praise had been uttered without reservation to the God and Lord of these heavenly creatures, where there was a true self-humbling and not a mock self-humbling, where there was a true covering of the face before the majestic holiness of the one who sat upon the throne, and not merely the covering of the face of routine mannerisms.
For the very first time in his life, he had really been at a service of worship.
And he could not but feel that this was, as it were, but an indication to him that the judgment of God was bound to break forth upon the people who professed his name, for the hollowness and the emptiness of the worship they had brought to him, using his name as the Holy One of Israel, but knowing nothing of the seraphic awe and humiliating bowing down before him in his glory, because they were simply overwhelmed by the sense of his presence.
He expresses this out, as I say, in detail in his prophecy, the way in which they had trampled upon God’s courts, the way in which they came offering their sacrifices with hands that were full of sin that had never been forgiven, because it had never been confessed and repented of. And as he bowed himself down with these seraphim before the presence of the Lord, Isaiah knew that judgment would surely come.
The remarkable thing is the way in which he learned that that judgment would come, for he discovered that God is never more godlike than in his judgment. Remember how the apostle Paul discovers this principle in Romans 1, when he speaks about men who make no profession of godliness, who turn away from godliness and devote themselves to sinfulness. And Paul says that while these men and women say, “Where is this judgment of God of which you have spoken?”
Here we are, devoting ourselves to everything that you say He hates and despises, and we see no bolt from the blue judging us. Paul says, “Don’t you see, you foolish men and women, that it is the very fact that God has given you over to the things to which you have devoted yourself that is the means of His judgment?”
And similarly, Isaiah sees, as God speaks to him and gives him His commission, that when God comes in judgment upon those of us who profess His name and know His word, it is through the very means of His judgment of the things that he professes that God judges the man who handles them lightly. And these people boast in their ancient time of the fact that they have God’s Word and that they hear God’s voice and that he still speaks through the reading and the hearing of the law.
We are alone, they say, the people who of the Word of the living God. But since they hearken not to it, says the Lord, through that very Word they hear, I will harden their hearts and bring my judgments to bear upon them.
What an awesome thing that is to dawn upon our souls that our very trivializing of the hearing of the Word of God, not outwardly, which none of us here would surely do, but that trivializing of the heart that is softened in our mind by the thought that we still have the Word of God is really the most terrible and terrifying truth about us, that we still have it, but it hardens rather than softens.
It confirms us in our trivializing rather than raising it out of us and bringing us in contrite submission to the great and glorious God of Scripture. Oh, to hear the seraphs sing their praises. Oh, to taste something of the worship of the Lord and service of God that made one feel almost crushed in His presence in order that we might be raised up truly to praise Him. A vision of holiness, a vision of judgment, and thankfully also a vision of unspeakable grace that was going to be true, apparently historically, for the nation.
As God began to speak to Isaiah of the judgments that would fall and of which He would speak, He inevitably cried out, O Lord, how long? Is there no mercy yet in God?
God points him to the way in which, in the midst of His judgment, He will reserve the seed of His salvation and gives to Isaiah this glimpse of the remnant people of God, among whom the truth of true worship will be preserved, and from whom the Son of David will come, and by whom men and women will be restored to Him in His grace and glory. But the chief, of course, the chief of these blessings of the grace of God and the pardon of God come earlier on in the chapter to Isaiah himself.
As he cries out to God, God visits him and pardons him and cleanses him, sends him out into this great ministry which he is to exercise for God’s glory. But you see, the question is, for us, what did this involve for Isaiah? And the answer he gives is this. If we are to know something of God in his glory like this, says Isaiah, as he shares his own experience, it means in the face of God’s holiness and judgment and grace, being brought to a new sense of personal devastation.
Oh, he cried out in verse five, I am undone. I am stunned. I am, as Luther translated it, I feel as if I have begun to be dissolved in the very presence of God. And the whole scene he sets before us is a scene of a sense of personal disintegration. As though in the presence of the eternal integrity of God, Isaiah has begun to sense that he is a man made up of a whole series of contradictory bits and pieces that don’t really fit together in a lasting way before this God.
And he feels himself to be someone artificially put together, who is sensing a disintegration in the very foundations of his being before the ineffable holiness of God. As though God were stripping him down before His majesty and rendering him unable to stand, as a preamble to his divine reintegration and spiritual usefulness. It was also an experience of spiritual undeception. Why does he feel undone in verse 5? Because he says, “I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.”
5 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; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5, ESV)
You see, his eyes have been opened to the fact that for all the worship that has been offered, little or no true heart worship has been offered. And God has not come down like this among his people, because they are a people of unclean lips. But the really important thing is that he has brought himself to confess, I myself am a man of unclean lips.
Can you imagine Isaiah going out of the temple and passing into some friend, sitting down before his friend, his body still shaking and his face still white, and saying to his friend, “Brother, I am a man of unclean lips. I have seen today in the worship of God’s house that I am a man whose lips are filthy.” you know what you and I would have said if we had been Isaiah’s friend.
We would have said in our worldly wise way, “Sit down, brother, and we’ll make you a cup of tea. you’re needing some time to just take this in, and perhaps you should have a break from your ministry. you’ve been overdoing it, and things have got out of proportion for you.”
When you see the real glory of Isaiah’s experience, it was that he had discovered the secret truth about himself, which, when discovered, would be one of the great keys to his spiritual usefulness. And that was so twisted, perverse was his own heart that it was in the very areas of the gifts that God had given to him that his sinfulness was most manifest.
If you or I had spoken to Isaiah we would have taken him and said, dear brother it is true that you dwell among a people of unclean lips, but you mustn’t speak like this about yourself. you’re the one man whose lips we’ve learned to trust. Oh no, says Isaiah, I’ve discovered that whatever is true of other men, I am the one man whose lips are false.
That’s why it’s so significant that when Isaiah is brought to this amazing experience of gracious restoration in verses 6 and 7, the live coal which is taken with the tongs from the altar is placed upon his mouth. Can you imagine the sensation of excruciating agony and pain that he is speaking of as he receives the divine forgiveness for the sinfulness that has been embedded in the very instrument God has chosen to use in him for his glory?
And only because that sin has been confessed and most graciously forgiven and purged does he become a man whose very words will be like arrows into the hearts of men. And bring blessing to the people of God until the end of the ages. I am a man of unclean lips. Have we ever really had a sense of that in our worship and our service?
Has it ever dawned upon us as we have sung his praises and lifted up our voices in prayer, that it is our very acts of righteousness that I can speak of and sing of in praise? My great and glorious God. And then, of course, he says, not only was his discovery of God in his holiness, judgment, and grace an experience of personal devastation, extraordinary self-illumination, and gracious restoration, it was an experience in which he was brought to a universal submission.
I heard the voice of the Lord say, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And all he says is two words, “I’m here,” and “me.” No reservation, no qualification, no delay, all-hearted, unreserved. Yielding. Yielding, yielding, yielding, yielding to this God, the vision of whom he has so gloriously experienced. Here, my brothers and sisters, are we in the face of this passage of whom our Lord Jesus Christ has sent. Isaiah said this because he saw my glory. My glory. For in the last analysis, the vision of God.
For Isaiah, the vision of God for us is the vision of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, the holy one. Jesus Christ the church. Jesus Christ, the gracious savior, of whom Sarah saved. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord. Lord of Hosts, to whom we are afresh invited to yield without reservation or delay, before whom we learn to confess, Lord Jesus Christ. We are people of unclean lips. We need the purging of the altar of Calvary. We need the assurance of this sense of your holy presence.
We need to hear you saying afresh to us, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”
6 Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” 8 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.” (Isaiah 6:6-8, ESV)
We need to learn to say, “Here am I; send me.” Let us pray.
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