[Music] as we continue our study of the holiness of God we remember that we have been looking closely at the circumstances that surrounded the call of the prophet Isaiah to his ministry and we have seen the historical background with the tragic life of King Uzziah we have seen the response of the Heavenly Creatures the Seraphim to the dazzling glory of the holiness of God we've considered the statement that the whole earth is full of his glory and even looked at the various responses that people have towards this glory how for the most part we go
through life and miss it even though it's staring us in the face but what is important for our consideration now is the response of Isaiah himself to that experience of looking into the inner chamber of heaven and seeing the glorious display of the holiness of God let's look back at the text and see Isaiah's response we read in verse 4 of Isaiah 6 that the posts of the door were shaken by the voice of him who cried out and that the house was filled with smoke then we read these comments from Isaiah and so I
said woe is me for I am undone because I 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 now just as I mentioned earlier when we saw the threefold repetition of the song of the Seraphim celebrating the holiness of God by which they sang holy holy holy and I explained that there was an unusual literary technique involved in their common to the Jewish people so in this phrase that is uttered by Isaiah woe is me for I
am undone we also find something intensely Jewish that we could read over many many times and miss its significance a prophet in the Old Testament was someone singled out by God anointed by God's Spirit and commissioned to announce the Word of God to the people he was a conduit of supernatural revelation he was endowed and authorized to speak the pronouncements of God and those pronouncements that were funneled and channeled through the prophets were basically of two kinds or two sorts they were either positive pronouncements or negative pronouncements they were good news or they were bad
news we see for example in the New Testament in the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus gives his famous lists of Beatitudes he uses a formula that was common to prophets in Israel and the form of the formula was the use of what was called an Oracle in the Beatitudes when Jesus says blessed are the poor blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled and so on those who mourn they shall be comforted blessed are the peacemakers they shall be called the children of God he is using that Jewish
formula because an Oracle of prosperity an Oracle that communicated good news was prefaced by the word blessed now to be blessed to the Jew was to be brought close to the presence of God I hate it when modern translators translate that word blessed into our word happy because our word happy has become cheapened by a superficial use of it now we say happiness is a warm puppy well there's a far cry from the thrill that we get from a nice snuggly warm dog than from the condition that the Bible speaks of being blessed or to
be blessed well this idea of blessedness may be seen in the Old Testament benediction where the Hebrew benediction goes like this may the Lord bless you and keep you may the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you may the Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace do you see the parallel symmetry there that blessedness is communicated in the concrete image of the face of God to be blessed is to live coram Deo to live before the face of God to live in the
immediate presence of God where the Lord makes his face shine upon you where the Lord lifts up the light of his countenance upon you if you've ever seen the film Ben Hur there is a magic moment in that film when Ben Hur is in Chains and he has been reduced to the status of slavery and he's with a group of slaves and is being treated with the humiliation and he is dragged over to the side of a well and he cannot even get off his knees he's parched he's weakened he's bruised and battered and defeated
and he's in the dust in Chains and he said he's he's so thirsty and suddenly all that you see on the screen is the passing of a human shadow and you hear a voice and ben-hur turns his face and looks up at whoever it is who's standing there and whoever it is who is standing there Stoops over and gives to ben-hur a cup of cold water but there is an immediate dramatic transformation in the countenance of ben-hur as he looks into the face of whoever it is who's giving him this cold water and we never
seen the person but there's no doubt who it is that Ben Hur has just met the Christ and by looking into the face of Jesus the radiance of the countenance of the slave is changed and in that second Ben her experiences blessedness may the Lord bless you and keep you may the Lord make his his face to shine upon you may he lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you peace that's the Oracle of good news that's the Oracle of blessedness but the opposite concept in the Old Testament - blessedness is
the idea of the curse another word that has been trivialized in our culture we think of curses today is something that that voodoo witch doctors put on little replica dolls and so on but in Israel the curse was the supreme expression of the wrath and judgment of God you remember in the book of Deuteronomy when God set his before the people and said that if you keep the terms of this covenant then blessed shall you be in the city blessed shall you be in the country blessed shall you be when you get up blessed shall
you be when you go down blessed are you in the living room blessed are you in the bedroom blessed are you all over the place then then in stark contrast to this God says however if you break my law if you refuse to obey my will then cursed will you be in the country curse said will you be in the city Kirstin will be your crops cursing will be your family curse and will you be when you sit down Kirsten where you be when you stand up and we see this ominous idea of the curse
well the curse to the Jew is the exact opposite the antithesis of blessedness and it reaches its worst and most painful moment with the image of God turning his back rather than lifting up the light of his countenance to the curse it he dispatches them into the uttermost darkness rather than causing his face to shine upon the Damned he removes his face from them altogether I've had serious discussions with people about the biblical concept of Hell and people say to me RC do you believe that hell is the absence of God and and I say
yes and they breathe a sigh of relief like always that all it is I said can you anything worse than the absolute absence of God in terms of his benevolence said you people say war is hell or pain as hell or disease as hell or business failure is hell you are using hyperbole because if you could find the person on this planet today who is in the most grievous state of pain and suffering and torment of any person in this world still that person is not totally and absolutely bereft of the gracious presence of God
there is no corner on this planet where at least sunlight from the face of God shines but for the Jew in his imagery he thinks of the worst of all possible things the absolute nightmare of humanity is to be in a situation where blessing is totally absent and only curse abides only forsaken Ness is there that is the bad news that is the pronouncement of doom I mentioned that only once in scripture is an attribute of God elevated to the third degree where the huh leanness of God is declared Holly Holly Holly but there is
a passage in the New Testament in the book of the revelation where the judgment of God is described in graphic imagery where the Angels fly across the darkened sky and they give their Oracle of doom against this planet in which the this wicked creature cries out with the same intensity of the Seraphim whoa whoa Wow and a couple God's wrath is poured out upon the world now the word that announces that judgment comes in the form of the Oracle it is the Oracle of wool when the Word of God pronounces doom and judgment the Prophet
uses that term whoa even as Amos did to the nation's into the cities woe unto you Damascus for three transgressions and for woe unto you Israel for three transgressions and for just as Jesus uses that oracular formula in his radical denunciation of the Pharisees and the scribes who were supposed to be the leaders of godliness the ministers of grace who became the most fierce opponents of the Son of God he said unto them woe unto you scribes and Pharisees you hypocrites you go over land and sea to make one convert and after you make him
you make him twice the child of Hell than you are yourselves again and again Jesus just delivers the prophetic Oracle of doom to those men woe unto you scribes and Pharisees but if we ask the question what is the first prophecy of Isaiah what is the first Oracle ever uttered by this magnificent prophet of the Old Testament the first pronouncement of the prophet Isaiah is not against Damascus not against Israel not against Judah not against the scribes not against the Pharisees his first prophetic oracle is delivered against himself for when he sees the unveiled glory
and holiness of God he cries out woe is me I had cursed I am worthy of being cast out into the utter darkness woe is me he cries for I and undone I intentionally used the the older version here because modern translations say woe is me for I am ruined nobody speaks about being undone anymore what does that mean but I like his selection of words for you see beloved what Isaiah is experiencing in this moment of encounter with the holiness of God is the process of what we call psychological disintegration we say that a
person who is virtuous is a person whose whole he is complete in the vernacular he has his act together that is to say the various components of his life are integrated and he is therefore a person of integrity well if we would have had a popular poll in Israel and we would have gone about the city in the countryside and say who is the man of greatest integrity among you certainly the chief candidate in the 8th century BC would have been Isaiah the pillar of the community the paragon of virtue this man who was already
distinguished for his apparent righteousness has one encounter with the Living God and he comes apart at the scene is it any wonder that people avoid coming too close to a holy God as I've said before what happened in that instant was that for the first time in his life Isiah really understood who God was and the immediate reaction and consequence of that what that the first time in his life Isaiah knew who I say it was we avoid contact with the hully because we know that we are unholy but we try to repress that evaluation
we don't want to hear that we're unholy we want people to tell us how great we are and how righteous we are and how virtuous we are one of the most dangerous things for me or for any Minister is to speak about the holiness of God because as soon as we do we have people rush off to us afterwards to say Oh Reverend you must be such a holy man because only a holy person would love these things say wait a minute if I'm obsessed and preoccupied with the holiness of God it's not because I'm
holy it's because I'm not holy and I know it and I know that my only possible hope rests with a holy God who is prepared to forgive me there's no other way I can possibly stand and I can't kid myself and all jokes were finished for Isaiah one glimpse at the unveiled holiness of God and he disintegrated woe is me for I am undone for I am a man of unclean lips I have a dirty mouth my mouth reveals my character the things I say are not pure I lie I blaspheme I curse and I
realize in this incident as not only is my mouth dirty but this is a common thing it's contagious I live in the midst of a people of unclean lips lips are because our hearts are unclean and they said for mine eyes have seen the king see once he saw that once he saw the truth about the character of God he couldn't lie to himself anymore he realized that he was filthy in comparison the purpose of this for Isiah and for you was not to destroy his self-esteem to let him understand the only possible hope for
any esteem comes from the one who has it perfectly and purely and who accepts us through the cross we'll talk next time about God's response to Isaiah's brokenness you
