Brokenness

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory.

and here immediately we think of those words in Revelation describing John’s vision of the worship of heaven

Day and night they (the seraphs) never stopped saying, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God

Almighty, who was and is and is to come.

Isaiah is seeing God and the heavenly worship. He is seeing things given to very few to see. He sees the holiness of God. We generally associate the word ’holy’ either with a very moral quality of life (we call someone a ’holy Joe’, or we say someone is ’holier than thou’ if they’re trying to make themselves out to be better than the crowd. There’s that moral aspect of holiness. There’s a holiness which we associate with church worship, but when we speak about God’s holiness we use a rather different aspect- we concentrate on God’s uniqueness, his glory, his sovereignty, upon the fact that he is high and lifted up. Holiness has very much to do with God who is the very essence of moral goodness and moral purity- really with his difference Words of Faber’s hymn come to mind

How wonderful, how beautiful

the sight ot Thee must be.

Thine endless wisdom, boundless power

and awful purity

There is that orge theos- that awe and dread of the holy. We speak of theses things; we would perhaps better stand in awe and fear and trembling.

Consider Isaiah’s response, his feeling. He tells us:

The door posts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

Isaiah experienced God’s holiness and his glory. Verse 3 says that the whole earth is full of his glory. When we come into the realm of holiness, the realm of glory we are speaking of things that language can’t properly express. There is that about God which defies our language, defies description. We so often try to fit God into a box. As J B Phillips put it in his classic half a century ago ’Your God is too small’. We try to shrink God down into human proportions, and that is one failure of modern Christianity. We try to contain him into human categories, we try to be too familiar with him. Yes, God through Jesus calls us ’friends’ but he is still Creator, the Sovereign One and the Holy One and the Glorious One. As we shrink God down, so too we shrink the Gospel.

In Ezekiel’s vision where he sees God’s glory he says he can’t really describe it. At the end of Ezekiel chapter 1 we have this:

This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of God.

Ezekiel can’t describe God’s glory. He can’t even describe its ’likeness’. He can only describe how the likeness of God’s glory appeared to be. Such was it that when he saw it he fell down on his face. Today we claim to experience God when we fall down on our backs and go to sleep!

When Isaiah experiences God’s glory he cries out Woe to me. I am ruined. 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. Isaiah, the man who in chapter 5 had been calling our one ’woe’ after another on the people, one cries out ’Woe to me’. Isaiah sees that, in the face of God’s glory, in the face of God’s holiness he is on the same level as the people he has been denouncing. He is as them. But he has been granted a vision of the Lord.