Joseph Patty – Associate Director of Student Ministries, High School, Curriculum, and Student Leadership

Isaiah 6
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, 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 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.” 

Then one of the seraphim 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.”

Reflection:
Humans like to put God in a box. It’s our nature. We want something we can comprehend, control, bend, or manipulate. Isaiah’s vision of God quite literally removes that possibility. He finds himself in the temple. The temple was a manmade box where humanity was intended to meet with God but had morphed into a place where we tried to contain God. However, in the vision, the temple barely holds the train of his robe. God is so much bigger, and these creatures that bend our imaginations surround God saying nothing but “holy” on repeat. We don’t have many words in our language that approach the word holy. The closest we get is sacred, pure, or simply other. God is so different in nature from our broken state that when Isaiah encounters God, all he can say is “I am ruined. I am unclean. My people are unclean.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure how many people I talk to on a daily basis really believe that they would be “ruined” at the sight of God. We have a tendency to soften God’s features and put God in our own sweet, metaphorical boxes. We doctor up proverbs like “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” to mean a healthy respect, and we use phrases like “his ways are higher than our ways” as cute anecdotes. Have we stopped to consider the gravity of the one we worship? It’s like the sun. We know that the sun is a source of life-giving energy for our planet, and it is good. However, ask any astronaut, and they will tell you the newfound “respect” they have once they see the sun unmitigated by earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field. Maybe I should pray that the Lord would ruin me—undo me—by giving me a picture of true unmitigated holiness.

The beautiful part of this passage that we cannot miss, though, is the burning coal. It holds the essence of God’s holiness, and when it touches Isaiah’s lips, it burns. It burns, and it purifies. It makes holy. Here’s the thing we discover about God’s holiness in this passage. It’s not something that gets contaminated, but rather it’s something that alters the state of whatever it touches. Therefore, as we pray to be ruined, recognizing the depth of our depravity, we also pray to be touched by God’s holiness. There is pain as it searches the hidden crevices of our soul, but that pain of God’s holiness juxtaposed against our sin yields healing and new life. We then become living coals that can march straight into the darkness, touch it, and produce new life. 

Closing Prayer:
Holy God, undo me. Let me see you for who you really are without the filters that make me comfortable. Touch me and transform me. Fill me with your Holy Spirit. Let me be holy as You are holy. Then let me live unafraid because I fear the one who loves me with a holy love. Amen.