Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Old Testament studies from Isaiah 6.
“In the year that king Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 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. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke. ‘Woe is 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.’ Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, ‘See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.’ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’ He said, ‘Go and tell this people: “Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.” Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.’ Then I said, ‘For how long, O Lord?’ And he answered: ‘Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken. And though a tenth remains in the land, it shall again be laid waste. But as the terebinth and oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.’ ”
This is the Word of the Lord.
Now this is, in measure, another narrative passage. Yet, it is a narrative quite unlike the other two we have looked at in that it is a visionary experience and it is imbedded within the prophetic structure of Isaiah, unlike, for example, Jeremiah, which is imbedded with the cycle of the Joseph narrative or the like, or unlike 2 Samuel 7, which is part of a much longer narrative of 1 and 2 Samuel.
In some ways this is quite different. Yet, because there is a narrative structure to it, one has to look for plot line and development. It is not quite the same as looking at a psalm, for example, or looking at Proverbs, or the like. One has to see plot line and development.
This is a passage, nevertheless, which is tied on literary grounds to the surrounding context in remarkable ways. Much of its power comes from seeing those sorts of connections. It is also a passage with a lot of internal literary connections. That is, one thing in the passage anticipates another thing in the passage, or one particular expression shows up again and again in the passage or the like.
For instance, it is not an accident that Uzziah is called King Uzziah in the first verse. Then when he dies Isaiah says, “Now mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” That is not an accidental designation for God. It is part of what must be understood to catch the flow of the passage.
Moreover, this is also a passage in which we may be tempted to read down to verse 8 and quit. We get lots of missionary enthusiasm going. “Whom shall I send?” “Send me!” Heroic stuff, this, like when British missionaries were going out to Africa between 1880 and 1910, one third of whom died automatically in central Africa, many of them bringing their own biers with them.
Wonderful stuff, isn’t it? “Whom shall I send?” “Send me!” Yet, I am persuaded that if you read verse 8 in the light of this whole chapter that is just not the tone of the send me at all. Besides, what are you being called to? You’re being called to make everybody thick, basically, and blind, and dumb. How is that to be understood, let alone preached?
In the last place, this chapter has several explicit links to the New Testament. One is the Trisagion, the thrice holy passage, “Holy, holy, holy.” It is one of the very, very few explicit biblical quotations in the book of Revelation. The book of Revelation is the sort of book where there is scarcely a verse that does not allude to the Old Testament but actually has very, very few quotations. This is one of them in chapter 4.
Moreover, the “make the heart of this people thick” bit crops up several times in the New Testament. Not only in connection with the parables of Matthew 13 and parallels but also in John 10 in an astonishingly moving passage that is deeply christological in its interpretation and one or two other places.
Even the depiction of the angels, here called seraphs, with two wings covering their feet, two wings their faces, two wings flying and so on, is picked up in the book of Revelation in a typically apocalyptic merging of two visions. The four living creatures around the throne in Revelation 4 who then emerge again and again and again in the book are called cherubim. They actually have characteristics both of the cherubim in Ezekiel’s throne room vision in chapter 1 and of the seraphim, here. That’s typical of apocalyptic literature. It merges its symbols and biblical references.
There is plenty of material here for making many, many kinds of links with the New Testament as well, which forces you, then, to make some choices about what you will emphasize. You cannot possibly say all of that in one sermon. You either have a choice of preaching four sermons through here or something like that and going really quite slowly, making sure that people pick up on all of the connections or going quite quickly and emphasizing certain connections and maybe just alluding to two or three others on the way by.
Personally, in most context, I would much prefer the latter. You can pick up some of the allusions later when you’re dealing with some of those New Testament passages and you’re casting back. There is more than one way to skin a cat.
In any case, the tackling of it in one is more likely to pick up the powerful drama in the account itself in which you start with a prophet whose experience of God is then so tremendously deepened that his entire stance toward the nation, toward God, and toward himself is massively changed. He volunteers for service and is given the job of making sure that nobody understands. There is drama all over the place here with many sorts of application.
How this fits into the last two lines, which offer the only significant hope in the entire chapter, ties in to your reading of the whole book, especially the first 12 chapters and the very structure of Isaiah. You are now into some structural questions in Isaiah as to how this chapter fits and how this hardness of heart is to be resolved.
Well, I don’t have time to unpack those kinds of things, but those are, it seems to me, the various dimensions that have to be borne in mind when one deals with this. Let me suggest a few points and a possible outline. This is merely one possible outline. This is not meant to constrain anybody’s efforts in this regard.
It is a useful outline, just because it covers just about everything you want to say and leaves you some room for flexibility, and is yet alliterative enough to be memorable. This is only slightly adapted from what many people have used over the years. This one is not original with me. A holy God, verses 1–4, a humbled servant, verses 5–7, and a hard message, verses 8 to the end. Now that gives you a lot of control in a memorable form with a lot of flexibility.
There are many, many ways one could begin this passage, but it helps in some fashion to begin with a device and approach that sets you up for what Isaiah experiences in this vision. For instance (this is only one of quite a few that could be used), very often it is when we come to an end of ourselves, when we’re in mortal danger, when we’ve just been diagnosed with cancer, when we’ve just come through horrid emotional pain, or when we get old and we are now bereaved and have no one left that we begin to think with eternity’s values in view.
We begin to recognize the transience of everything the world affords, the utter lack of security in mere things, in mere politicians, in mere programs, in mere ecclesiastical structures. So many things that seemed so important now seem unimportant when you discover that your colon cancer leaves you three months to live. It changes everything.
You lose your two children in a car accident, and the whole future looks bleak. You remember that in the English language there is a word for a man who loses his wife; that is a widower. A wife who loses her husband is a widow. For children who lose their parents, they’re orphans. There is no word in the English language for parents who lose their children.
You don’t look at anything the same again. Pain, disappointment, fear, danger serve either to make us bitter or to make us better. That old song is not much more than doggerel, but it still says the truth. “He washed my eyes with tears that I might see.” That is exactly what Isaiah experiences.
Chapter 6 stands at a crucial place in the book. Chapters 1 to 5 find the denunciation of Jerusalem and Judea by the prophet. It is important to recognize that Isaiah 6 is placed where it is in the book. It is not right at the beginning. You could have imagined that this would be the opening chapter, Isaiah’s intrinsic call to the ministry, but it is here because it is supposed to be here.
Isaiah has been in the ministry for some time, thank you very much. What has he done? Chapter 2:6, “You have abandoned your people, the house of Jacob. They are full of superstitions from the East.” Sounds like where Western religion is going today with an infatuation with superstitions from the East. “They practice divination like the Philistines.” We are all back at astrology, aren’t we?
“They clasp hands with the pagans. Their land is full of silver and gold; there is no end to their treasures.” The economy is going quite nicely, thank you. “Their land is full of horses. There is no end to their …” BMWs and Lexuses. “Their land is full of idols; they bow down to the work of their hands.” They’re materialists to what their fingers have made. “So man will be brought low and mankind humbled do not forgive them.” Here is biting denunciation because of the national sins.
Again, 3:1, “See now, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, is about to take from Jerusalem and Judah both supply and support.” That is, the physical supply. “Supplies of food, supplies of water, and support, the hero and warrior, the judge and prophet, the soothsayer and elder, the captain of fifty men of rank.” No, no, no. Now boys will be their officials. That is, our rulers will become stupid people, incompetent little children without principle. Not a statesmen amongst them. That becomes part of the Lord’s judgment on nations as well.
Chapter 5, almost as if he’s not getting their attention any other way, he takes out his guitar and sings a ballad. “I will sing for the one I love a song about his vineyard.” You can imagine people listening to the prophet playing his sitar or guitar or whatever it is, his harp. He’s drawing a crowd, just because music often does draw a crowd, especially if there is a story to it, as there is here.
“My loved one had a vineyard …” and away he goes. Do you see? It is very attractive. Now, people are joining in. “A fertile hillside. He dug it and cleared it of stones, planted it with the choicest vines. He built a watchtower …” and anybody who is listening now is going to find out what happens. There is a drama unfolding.
“He looked for a crop of good grapes. It yielded only …” stinkers, the term is. It is bad fruit. That is it. “Now you dwellers in Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more could have been done for my vineyard than I have done for it? When I looked for good grapes, why did they yield only bad? Now I will tell you what I am going to do to my vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be destroyed; I will break down its wall, and it will be trampled. I will make it a wasteland, neither pruned nor cultivated,” and so on and so on.
In case anybody hasn’t got it yet, the coda, “The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah the garden of his delight. He looked for justice, but saw bloodshed; for righteousness, but heard cries of distress.” Then there is the series of woes. “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left.” This is a bruising sort of capitalism that squeezes out little people.
“Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late at night till they are inflamed with wine.” They are a nation of drunkards. Undisciplined people, “They have their harps and lyres at their banquets, their tambourines and flutes, but they have no regard for the deeds of the Lord, no respect for the work of his hands.” Sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it?
Verse 18, “Woe to those draw sin along with cords of deceit, and wickedness as with cart ropes, and with searing condescension say, ‘Let God hurry, let him hasten his work so we may see. Let it approach, let the plan of the Holy One of Israel come so that we may know it.’ ” It’s like those sneering with the Lord’s second coming in 2 Peter, isn’t it?
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.” It sounds like they’re postmodernists. “Who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” Everything gets turned on its head. Call it tolerance, and you can put up with anything. “Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.” It is the sneering condescension of intellectual and moral arrogance. “Woe to those who are heroes of drinking wine and champions of mixing drinks.”
It used to be in our films that all our heroes smoked. That has now gone out of good taste, so almost no hero in a contemporary film smokes unless it is meant to be a hero cast 30, 40, or 50 years ago. But they all drink. The really sophisticated ones know the names of all the boozes. You know, “What would you like?” “[Something or other] on the rocks.” On the other hand, they have no real passion for justice. While they’re having their margarita with a twist they, “… acquit the guilty for a bribe and deny justice to the innocent.”
The nation is in a bad way. The one real hope of the nation, however, at the time, was King Uzziah. If you read the corresponding accounts in Scripture, he is a man of remarkable administrative gift. Initially a good man … an able administrator, a military leader. Judah prospered under his reign. Yet, when you read the account of his last days in 2 Chronicles 26:1–15, he has a sad downfall. He dies in ignominy and shame.
The one capable administrator, the one man of principle has not only died; he has died in shame. He has died in odium. So Israel is wicked, oppressive Assyria was pushing ever closer (read chapter 7), and the only able leader dies in odium. “And in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord.”
For it is sometimes when all our human hopes and comforts for reformation and renewal are stripped away that we begin to see we have no recourse, none. In this encounter, now, here, if I were preaching, I would describe the scene in dramatic terms and explain it. I would spend quite a lot of time on what holy means. “Holy, holy, holy.” I’ll come back to that for just a moment at the end.
Then, when you come to verse 5 you must see that the “Woe to me,” is tied with a whole series of woes. Woe upon this person. Woe upon that person. Woe upon this party. Woe upon that party. Now, for the first time it is, “Woe to me. 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.”
You see, now, he has not only seen his own guilt; he has seen, in a sense, all guilt with reference to the Lord. Everything he has described up to now has been primarily cast in social terms. That is, “adding house to house” so that the little people are squeezed out, getting drunk, and acquitting the guilty for a bribe are all-important issues. I mean, Isaiah continues to have a real moral conscience.
In this regard, Isaiah, in the Old Testament, is the major prophet most like Amos. It is important. Yet, at the end of the day, when he sees the Lord, he sees that the essential odium and disfiguration of sin is with respect to him. What makes sin, sin is its profanation of God, and only God can cleanse you.
Here it is done in the symbol-laden imagery of the vision by a live coal from the altar. If there is a coal it can’t be the altar of incense. It is the altar outside where peace offerings were offered, the daily offerings, the morning and evening sacrifices, the sacrifice of Yom Kippur, the sacrifice of the Passover. A live coal is taken from this one where the peace offerings and the sin offerings have all been offered up to God.
If they’ve all been offered up to God then the coal that has consumed them is now put on his lips from which all of his own sin has sprung forth. “I am a man of unclean lips.” Now this has touched your lips. It is easy to see how that can make all kinds of connections to the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate lamb and the ultimate altar, with many connections to Hebrews and elsewhere.
Out of this, then, the challenge comes. You’ve had the Holy God, now the humbled servant, verses 5–7, now the hard message. The challenge comes, “Who shall I send?” I don’t think, in the context, Isaiah is to be pictured saying, “Okay, I am ready now. Send me! Here I am. I am a volunteer.” It is almost as if, humbled as he has been, he is saying, “Excuse me. Look at me. Will I do? Please? Could you send me? Hmm?” In the context that makes far, far, far more sense.
God commissions him. What he commissions him to do in this prophetic, poetic oracle is to say, in effect, “Be ever hearing, but never understanding. Be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people callused; make their ears dull. Close their eyes otherwise they might see,” and so on.
What do you do with this and how do you preach it? Clearly, God is depicted as commissioning Isaiah to a ministry that will actually prevent repentance so that total judgment will occur. That is what the passage says. He will so minister in his commission that people will not repent. They will just become hardened. The irony and the tragedy is that precisely in the hearing, because of the hearing, people will be condemned. Instead of hearing leading to life, this hearing leads to death.
To use the language of 2 Timothy 3:7, “Always hearing but never able to acknowledge the truth.” It is important to remember how often this theme shows up in Scripture. Do you remember what it said about the Lord Jesus in John 8? He says to the people around him, “Because I tell you the truth, you do not believe.” That is not a concessive, “Although I tell you the truth you do not believe.” That would be bad enough, but “Because I tell you the truth you do not believe.”
That is what is going on here. It is precisely the truth that is guaranteeing their unbelief. The truth is the cause of their unbelief. In other words, they are so blind, so hard, so willfully determined to go in another direction that it is the truth, itself, which is guaranteeing their blindness. That is what the text says. That is what brings Jesus to the cross. That is what guarantees, here, the people won’t hear; they’ll just become callused.
Preach the truth, and you’ll make the eyes of these people blind, their ears deaf, their hearts callused. It is exactly in line with 2 Thessalonians 1. “God himself sends them a strong delusion so that they will believe the lie.” It is a part of judgment. When Isaiah first hears this, he thinks, “Oh, I bet I can do that for a while, and how long is it going to be before revival breaks out? Five years, maybe? Ten? Thirty, perhaps?” What God says is, “It is until the cities lie ruined, without inhabitant,” verse 11.
In other words, judgment has now been affirmed. It is going to happen. This is still 140 years ahead of the events, but judgment is determined by God, himself. So preach on and know that your call to ministry is going to confirm people in their hardness of heart and unbelief until the whole nation is damned and the city is destroyed. For that matter, if there is a 10 percent remainder it will again be laid to waste, verse 13. That was the ministry to which he was called. That is what the text says.
Then this last little bit right at the end, “But as the terebinth and oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.” That is, there will be a small remainder there. The dynastic stump is down. Israel is down. Jerusalem is down. Yet, this gets picked up.
At the end of chapter 10 (if I had time I could show you the structure of how these things work in cycles in the early 12 chapters of Isaiah, nicely set out in Motyer’s commentary), the stump has been mentioned, but now, chapter 11, “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.”
As you get in chapter 11 you see this glorious vision of the eschaton of a new heaven and new earth in which, ultimately, “They will neither harm nor destroy, and all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” So there is hope at the end. There is hope in the form of new life springing from this dead stump as the messianic King finally comes forth, which in Isaianic terms is 700 years ahead. It would not be in his ministry.
Now then, for want of time, I’m not going back to this word holy. Although it is very interesting and one needs to handle it with considerable care. Let me say one or two things about application.
1. It is easy to make a lot of applications on the fly in this one, on the way by, because of so many explicit connections with the New Testament and thus to us.
Thus there is the vision of God in Revelation 4 and 5 which finally depicts God as so searingly transcendent that he is frightening and distant and only Christ is sufficient to bring about all of God’s purposes for redemption and judgment.
He quotes the Trisagion right here, but then this hardening language which takes place in Jesus’ day and brings him to the cross, the ultimate fulfilment of all of this repetitive hardening in Israel that goes in cycles on and on and on with some periods of reprieve. Some minor reform occurs under Josiah, another reform under Hezekiah, another reform under Ezra and Nehemiah, and so on and so on and so on.
At the end of the day, these cycles depict so much hardening until finally Christ comes again. That is the stump out of the land. It is important to catch something of the salvation historic flow of the whole thing. One could do a lot with that.
2. It is also important, it seems to me, even at the level of encouraging Christians and preachers in a relatively dry time not to allow them to think that if they just do their witness or have the right form or pray a lot that it will guarantee revival.
God has his own timings for these things. Sometimes God brings down judgment on a people. Yet, that doesn’t mean God is lost. God still is in this business of calling out all of his people. Christ still builds his church.
It may be some time ahead before we see the reformation for which we long. Meanwhile, we may be called to ministry of faithfulness in dry times. That is not a bad thing to learn. If our only measure of faithfulness is immediate fruitfulness then we will be very frustrated if, in fact, we are called to dry times. My father ministered in French Canada most of his life. He didn’t know the language to begin with, but he had a tremendous burden for French Canada.
Therefore, after seminary training in Toronto, when he moved to Montreal, Mont Royal, the French part, he took an English church, because he didn’t know any French, with the understanding that over the next four or five years he would learn the language on the side and then would abandon the English church and plant churches in French Canada, which is what he did.
There had been an evangelical witness in what was called the Grande Ligne Mission with about 75 churches up and down the Saint Lawrence Valley, but it got lost in liberalism and died out. There were some political reasons and so on. There weren’t more than four or five churches, and they were half-baked and half-liberal at the time. There was really no evangelical witness.
There were really two men who started in the province first. One was William Frey from Switzerland. The other was my dad, back in the 1930s. Through all those subsequent years, decade after decade, a church would go two steps forward and one step back. A big church was 40 people. None of them was self-sustaining. They were all either Brethren or Baptist. That was the only thing that was there.
They were all sustained by English Canada dollars. Just nothing was happening. Baptist ministers alone spent eight years in jail between 1950 and 1952. We kids were beaten up from time to time as maudits Protestants, damned Protestants. They were tough, brutal years.
Then came the turnaround that I mentioned this morning that began in 1972, which lasted for about eight years and saw our churches grow from about 35 in number to 500. By that time, my father was in his early 60s. The whole thing really was in the hands of other people, a new generation that came along and were strategists and capable. Ministry worked through the CÈgeps, which are, in the French system, junior colleges between secondary school and university.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds converted, and ultimately thousands. As the years went by then mom had Alzheimer’s, and he spent 10 years of his life nursing her. At the age of 78, by which time my mother had died, he started preaching again. An old man by this time, he scarcely realized that in his own circles he was viewed as the grand old man of Quebec.
On Mondays, in the basement of our home, he used to run what he called La Pastorale, in which all the French-speaking pastors in the region would come in on Monday for three hours in the afternoon and talk about what was going on in their lives, work through some Scripture, hashed things through, and get counsel. There were so many of them who were such young Christians with not much training.
But I have his journals. Dad died feeling himself, basically, a major failure. Proud of what had happened to his children, but, of course, none of that had happened under his watch. Supposing dad had died at 61? He wouldn’t have even seen what he did see, from a distance as it were. Would that have meant his life was a disaster?
We live in such a success-orientated society and culture that we are twisted beyond measure into the world’s shallow mold. Some of us will be called to minister in lean times. I don’t know what God is going to with it. It might be mighty reformation, but some of us will be called to measure in lean times where it is precisely the articulation of the truth that will guarantee deafness. That is what Jesus says. “Because I tell you the truth, you will not believe.”
So what is Jesus to do? Tell them lies? This, you see, according to John 12 is precisely fulfilled in Jesus’ own life and ministry. Very often, in many cultures, in many times, it is the truth that guarantees opposition. Then, in the Lord’s mercy, at other times articulating the same truth brings conversion, reformation, and revival. Which it brings in, finally, is not in our hands. So don’t pretend that it is. Just get on with it. “Whom will I send?” The broken man who has seen God. “Send me.”
