Holy, Holy, Holy

Isaiah 6 (with John 12:37–41)

Before this session, read Isaiah 6 in full, slowly, and more than once. Read John 12:37–41 alongside it. As you read, watch the movement from the prophet’s “I am destroyed” to the coal that touches his lips, and notice exactly where the cleansing comes from.

Woe to me! I am destroyed, for my lips are contaminated by sin, and I live among people whose lips are contaminated by sin. My eyes have seen the king, the LORD of Heaven’s Armies.

Isaiah 6:5

The Year the King Died

Every vision in Scripture comes fixed to a moment, and this one is fixed to a death. In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord seated on a high, elevated throne. The hem of his robe filled the temple (6:1). Uzziah had reigned over Judah for fifty-two years, longer than most men of that day would live, and for most of them he had reigned well. He was a king you could lean on. And then he was gone, struck at the last with leprosy for reaching his hand toward an office that was not his, dying cut off in a separate house, shut out of the temple he had presumed upon. The throne of Judah was suddenly empty, and a nation that had leaned on one man for half a century felt the ground move under it.

There is a quiet irony in the king whose death dates the vision. Uzziah had ended his long reign by forcing his way into the temple to burn incense, to seize for himself a holy office the Lord had never given him, and the leprosy broke out on his forehead even as he stood there with the censer in his hand, raging at the priests who tried to stop him. He had reached for holiness on his own terms, and been struck for it. And now, in the very year that presumptuous man dies, the Lord draws back the veil and shows His prophet what real holiness is; and the prophet does not seize it; he falls. The contrast is the whole difference between religion and faith. The one storms the holy place to grab what it wants; the other is carried into the holy place, undone, and given what it could never have taken.

It is in that year, the year the dependable thing died, that Isaiah is shown another throne. Not empty. Occupied. High, elevated, with a robe whose hem alone filled the whole temple. The timing is the first sermon of the chapter, and it preaches before a word is spoken: when the king you trusted is carried out, there is a King who is not carried out, whose reign did not begin when Uzziah’s began and did not end when Uzziah’s ended. The earthly throne empties so that the eyes of a grieving people can be lifted to the throne that never does.

We should notice, too, where this chapter sits. This is the account of Isaiah’s call, the moment the Lord lays hold of him and sends him out, and yet it does not stand at the front of the book. Five chapters of indictment and woe come first, and only then, in chapter 6, do we learn how the prophet was commissioned. The arrangement is deliberate. Isaiah does not open his book with himself; he opens it with the people’s sin and the Lord’s case against them, and then, once we have heard the charge, he takes us back into the throne room to show us the holiness the charge was measured against. We are meeting his call here, near the start of our own study, for that same reason: everything in this book is measured against the holiness seen in this room.

Whose Glory Isaiah Saw

And now the question that governs the whole vision: who is it that Isaiah sees upon the throne? The prophet says he saw the Lord on His throne, and centuries later the apostle John, writing of the men who looked on the Lord Jesus and would not believe, reaches back to this very chapter and tells us plainly: Isaiah said these things because he saw Christ’s glory, and spoke about him (John 12:41). John is not being fanciful; he is telling us, by the Spirit, the identity of the figure on the throne. The One on the high, elevated throne, before whom the burning ones hide their faces, is the Son.

This is what we meant in our first session when we said that Christ is not merely predicted in this book but present in it. Isaiah did not foresee a Messiah who would one day come to exist; Isaiah saw Him, enthroned, and the seeing nearly killed him. Some seven hundred years before Bethlehem, the prophet stood in the presence of the One who would be laid in a manger and lifted on a cross. When the Lord Jesus would later say that Abraham was overjoyed to see my day, and that before Abraham came into existence, I am (John 8:56, 58), He was telling the same truth from the other side: He was there. He is the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, whose majestic splendor fills the entire earth.

Hold those words, high, elevated, because Isaiah will use them again. In the Hebrew the same pair of words returns when the Servant appears: He will be elevated, lifted high, and greatly exalted (52:13). It is the same lifting up. And the Lord Jesus Himself would take the phrase and fasten it to His cross: Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up (John 3:14); And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself (John 12:32). There is the great mystery of this book laid bare already on its sixth page. The One lifted up on the throne in glory is the One who will be lifted up on a cross in shame; and it is the same lifting up, the same Lord, the same glory. Luther taught the church to look for God exactly there, hidden in the suffering, and to find the throne in the cross. Isaiah saw the throne first. But it was the same Lord.

This changes how we read every page that follows. The holiness that is about to undo the prophet is the holiness of the One who will be wounded because of our rebellious deeds. And the hand that reaches to cleanse him belongs, in the end, to the same Lord whose own body will become the sacrifice that the cleansing comes from. We are not reading about a distant and abstract deity. We are reading about the Lord Jesus, before His incarnation, upon His throne, and already, in the logic of this chapter, moving to rescue a man who cannot rescue himself.

There is a great pastoral mercy hidden in this identification, and it is worth pausing over. Left to ourselves, we are forever tempted to picture God as one of two things: a bare and crushing majesty too terrible to approach, or a vague and agreeable kindness too soft to take seriously. Isaiah 6 will let us keep neither. The God upon the throne is genuinely terrifying; the prophet is not exaggerating when he says he is destroyed. And yet that same God, John tells us, is the Lord Jesus, who took our flesh and was lifted up on a cross to draw us in. We do not meet the naked majesty of God and live; we meet Him where He has appointed Himself to be met: at the altar, in the coal, in the flesh of His Son. Luther warned the church over and over against trying to climb up to the hidden God in His unveiled holiness; that road ends at I am destroyed and nowhere else. The God who saves is the God who comes down, the One Isaiah saw upon the throne, and whom we have seen upon the cross.

Holy, Holy, Holy

Around the throne stand the seraphs (the word means the burning ones), and even they, sinless creatures of fire, do not stare. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and they used the remaining two to fly (6:2). We might say that four of their six wings are given to reverence and only two to service, as though worship outweighed even their errands. They cover their faces because they cannot look upon such holiness, and cover their feet in creaturely modesty before the Holy One. If the burning ones must veil themselves, what shall a man with sin-stained lips do?

And they cry, not a hymn they have composed but a truth they cannot stop telling, one to another: Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Heaven’s Armies! His majestic splendor fills the entire earth! (6:3). The word is qadosh: set apart, wholly other, blazing in purity. Hebrew intensifies a word by repeating it, and a threefold repetition like this one is almost without parallel in Scripture. Holy, holy, holy is holiness raised past all degree, a holiness beyond any we could imagine or survive. The church has not been wrong, either, to hear in that threefold cry a hint of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, one Lord, though the seraphs’ first concern is simply the sheer measure of it. And this splendor is not shut up in the temple. It fills the entire earth. There is nowhere a sinner might run to be out from under it.

It is precisely this, the holiness of God, that the modern imagination has the least room for. We are at ease with a God of love, and rightly so; but we have very nearly lost the God of Holy, holy, holy, the God whose mere presence sends sinless seraphs to hide their faces and reduces the best man in the land to rubble. Yet without that holiness, nothing else in the chapter will hold together. The coal is no mercy if the sin on the lips was not deadly. The cross is no rescue if the holiness it answers was not real. To recover the gospel of Isaiah, we have first to recover the God of Isaiah: not a kindly presence who agrees to overlook our sinful lips, but the thrice-holy Lord who cannot overlook them, and who therefore does something far greater than overlook. He cleanses them, at the cost of an altar.

We do not have to strain to imagine our way into this scene as though it were far off, because the church sings it. In every celebration of the Lord’s Supper, just before we come to the table, the congregation lifts the seraphs’ own cry in the Sanctus: Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth; heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. That old word Sabaoth is the very Hebrew word the NET renders Heaven’s Armies: the LORD of the armies of heaven, before whom the seraphs stand. When we sing the Sanctus we are not quoting Isaiah from a polite distance; we are joining the burning ones around the throne, adding our own sinful voices to theirs. And we sing it, every time, on our way to the altar, which is precisely where this chapter is about to send the prophet. Keep that in mind as the smoke fills the room and the man comes apart.

Woe to Me

For that is what the holiness does. It does not inspire Isaiah. It does not flatter him or fill him with a warm sense of his own untapped potential. It undoes him. Woe to me! I am destroyed, for my lips are contaminated by sin, and I live among people whose lips are contaminated by sin. My eyes have seen the king, the LORD of Heaven’s Armies (6:5). The word rendered destroyed carries the sense of being silenced, cut off, brought to ruin, of coming apart at the seams. This is not a man feeling mildly convicted and resolving to do better. This is a man who is certain, in that moment, that he is finished.

And mark who it is that comes apart. Not the worst man in Judah, but one of the best. Isaiah is the prophet, a man whose lips were as clean as any in the land, the very man God is about to send. If anyone could have stood in that room on his own account, it was he. And he is the one crying out that he is destroyed. This is the thing the law does, and the thing we must learn to expect from it all through Isaiah: the law does not merely scold the obviously wicked into tidying themselves up. Set next to true holiness, it undoes the holiest man in the room. Our Confessions put it in four words, lex semper accusat, the law always accuses (Ap IV.38); and it accuses not chiefly by tallying this sin and that, but by setting us beside God and letting the contrast do its terrible and necessary work.

Notice, too, exactly what Isaiah confesses. He does not say, I have made a few mistakes. He names what he is (my lips are contaminated by sin) and he names where he stands (I live among people whose lips are contaminated by sin). The law presses on both at once: it makes the matter inescapably personal (my lips) and it refuses to let him hide in the crowd, because the crowd is contaminated too. And the lips are not named at random. They are the prophet’s own instrument, the cleanest tool he owns, the thing he does for God, and even that is filthy. The law has a way of finding the very thing we were proudest of and showing us the dirt on it.

This is the proper and necessary work of the law, and it is no cruelty. The world’s comfort (you are basically a good person; you are doing your best) would be a lie in that throne room, and a lie is no comfort to a dying man. A man who has seen the King cannot be soothed by being told he is fine; he knows that he is not. The mercy of the law is that it tells the truth and brings us to the end of ourselves, to the place where I am destroyed is the only honest word left in the mouth. And only there, with every excuse silenced, is a man finally in a position to be helped. The law empties the hands so that the gospel can fill them.

It is worth asking why this scene feels so foreign to much of modern churchgoing. We have grown used to a religion that begins with affirmation and never passes through the throne room, that tells the newcomer he is welcome, valued, enough, and never once that he is undone. But a gospel handed to people who have never heard the law is not heard as gospel at all. It is heard as a compliment, or as friendly advice, or as one more program of self-improvement with religious trim. The coal means nothing to lips that were never confessed as sinful. This is not a summons to manufacture a feeling of misery on command; Isaiah did not work himself into his Woe to me; it was wrung out of him by the sight of the King. It is a summons to let the holiness of God be holy, to read the law as the killing word it actually is, and so to stand at last where the absolution can be heard as the life-giving word that it is.

The Coal from the Altar

And the gospel does fill them; but watch closely how, because the how is the whole doctrine. Isaiah, undone, does not repair himself. He does not resolve to scrub his lips clean, to do better, to make himself presentable to the holiness that has just exposed him. He could not if he tried; he is finished, and he knows it. He can only confess. And while he is still confessing, the remedy comes to him, from outside, from a place his own hands never reached. But then one of the seraphs flew toward me. In his hand was a hot coal he had taken from the altar with tongs (6:6).

From the altar. That is the hinge of the chapter. The altar is the place of sacrifice, where blood is shed and atonement is made, and it is from there, and nowhere else, that the cleansing fire is taken. The same holiness that a moment before threatened to consume the prophet now comes to him as a healing coal, but only because it comes by way of the altar. The fire that would have burned him as a sinner becomes the fire that purges him, because a sacrifice now stands between. We are looking, in figure, straight at the cross. The holiness of God is not waved aside so that Isaiah may be forgiven; it is satisfied at the altar, and just so it can heal instead of kill.

And see where the seraph lays it. He touched my mouth with it (6:7), the very lips Isaiah had just confessed as contaminated by sin. Grace does not deal with us in vague generalities; it comes to the exact place of the shame and touches it there. The sinful lips get the coal. The thing we are most ashamed of is the thing the gospel addresses by name. And then the word, for it is the word that does the work: Look, this coal has touched your lips. Your evil is removed; your sin is forgiven. That is an absolution. The seraph does not say, now try to feel forgiven, or here are some steps toward cleaner lips. He pronounces a verdict over a ruined man (your evil is removed), and it is so because the word says it is so.

This is the gospel in its purest shape, and it is worth naming what makes it gospel. It comes from outside the sinner, extra nos, our fathers said, outside us: from the altar, not from Isaiah’s resolve. It is brought to him; he receives it; he contributes nothing but the sinful lips that needed it. Our Confessions teach that repentance has two parts: the contrition the law works (I am destroyed) and the faith that lays hold of the absolution (your sin is forgiven) (AC XII.3–5). Walther spent a lifetime teaching pastors to keep those two from blurring into each other: let the law do its crushing work fully, and then let the gospel be sheer, unconditional gift, with not a particle of law smuggled back into it. Isaiah 6 is that whole lesson in a single scene. The coal is not a reward for confessing well. It is a gift laid on the lips of a man who had nothing left to bring but his ruin.

And lest we think the coal was only for a prophet long ago, consider where its word still sounds. The same absolution the seraph spoke over Isaiah, your sin is forgiven, is the word the church has never stopped speaking: in the pastor’s I forgive you all your sins, in the absolution that opens the Divine Service, in the word laid upon us at the rail. We Lutherans have insisted, against every attempt to make forgiveness a private transaction between a man and his own heart, that God means to give it to us out loud, from outside us, through a called voice and through tangible means (water, word, the bread and the cup), exactly as He gave it to Isaiah through a seraph and a coal. The means are humble every time: a man’s voice, a little water, a morsel of bread. But the word does what it says, because it is God’s word and not ours. Isaiah’s coal is every Christian’s absolution.

Here I Am, Send Me

Only now, only after the coal, does the prophet hear a commission. I heard the voice of the Lord say, “Whom will I send? Who will go on our behalf?” I answered, “Here I am, send me!” (6:8). The order is everything, and it is the order of the whole Christian life. First the man is undone; then he is cleansed; then, and only then, is he sent. Isaiah does not volunteer his way into God’s good favor. He is forgiven first, and the forgiven man is the one God puts to work.

This guards us against a mistake the heart loves to make: the notion that we earn our standing with God by our usefulness to Him, that if we will only make ourselves available enough, busy enough, sent enough, then God will be pleased at last to accept us. Isaiah 6 turns that exactly around. The sending is not the cause of the cleansing; it is its fruit. A man whose evil has been removed has something to say; he has, in fact, just received the very word he will now be sent to speak. The gospel does not leave the forgiven idle, but neither does it make their labor the price of their pardon. The coal comes first. Here I am comes after.

We may notice, in passing, the small plural in the Lord’s question, Who will go on our behalf?, the same plural that spoke at creation, Let us make humankind (Genesis 1:26). The church has long heard the Triune God in it, and we need not be shy of that; the One on the throne is the Son, and He does not send alone. But the weight of the verse falls on what a cleansed man does with his pardon: he offers himself, not in order to be saved, for he is already cleansed, but because he is.

Listen, but Do Not Understand

What he is sent to say, however, is among the hardest words in the book. Go and tell these people: “Listen continually, but don’t understand. Look continually, but don’t perceive.” Make the hearts of these people calloused; make their ears deaf and their eyes blind. (6:9–10). Isaiah is commissioned to preach to a people who will hear and not understand, and his very preaching will harden them further. This is a sober and difficult thing, and we must handle it the way Scripture itself does: without flinching, and without distorting it.

First, what it does not mean. It does not mean that God takes pleasure in the ruin of sinners, or that He decrees some to unbelief before they have lifted a finger. The same God who speaks here declares through His prophets and apostles that He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11) and desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4), and our Confessions refuse to make Him the cause of anyone’s unbelief or damnation (FC Ep XI; SD XI). The hardening is the work of the word upon hearts already set against it: the word that softens the penitent is the very same word that hardens the one who will not have it, as the same sun that melts the wax bakes the clay. The fault is in the clay, never in the sun.

And it is no accident that our anchor text carries us straight here. When John quoted this passage (He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart), he was explaining why so many who saw the Lord Jesus with their own eyes would not believe in Him, and it is right there that he adds, Isaiah said these things because he saw Christ’s glory (John 12:39–41). The glory Isaiah saw in the throne room and the hardening he was sent to announce belong to the same Lord. The Lord Jesus would preach to crowds who heard and did not understand; He would speak in parables that opened Him to some and veiled Him from others; and the prophet who saw His glory was sent on ahead to walk that same hard road. To preach Christ is not always to be received. Isaiah is told as much at his commissioning, and told to go anyway.

I replied, “How long, Lord?” (6:11). It is the cry of every faithful preacher who watches the word glance off hardened hearts: how long must this go on? And the answer is not a gentle one: until cities are in ruins and unpopulated and houses are uninhabited and the land is ruined and devastated, until the judgment has run its full course. Here the law is allowed to finish its sentence. But the chapter does not end on the desolation.

There is comfort buried here for anyone who teaches or speaks the word and sees little come of it: the Sunday school teacher with a thinning class, the parent whose grown child will not listen, the preacher who has said the same true thing for years to the same hard faces. Isaiah was the greatest preacher Judah ever had, and he was told at the very outset that his faithfulness would not be measured by his results, because the results were never finally in his hands. He was responsible to go and tell; he was not responsible to soften hearts, which is God’s work and not the messenger’s. That is a hard word, and also a freeing one. It lifts from the faithful messenger a weight he was never built to carry, and lets him keep speaking the word for the word’s own sake, leaving the harvest, as he must, to the Lord of the harvest.

A Stump in the Land

For there is one word more, and it is a seed of gospel buried in the rubble. And though a tenth remain in it, it will be burned again, like a terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump (Isaiah 6:13, ESV). (Here we quote the ESV, which keeps the Hebrew’s holy seed and stump before the reader; the NET renders the verse differently, and the difference would hide the promise this paragraph rightly draws from it.) When the great tree of Judah has been felled and only a stump is left, there is life in the stump. A holy seed remains. The judgment is real and very nearly total (a tenth, and even that burned over again), but it is not the last word. Something holy survives the fire.

Isaiah will return to that stump. In a few chapters he will promise that a shoot will grow out of Jesse’s root stock, a bud will sprout from his roots (11:1): a living shoot from a cut-down tree, the King who comes precisely on the far side of the felling. The holy seed of chapter 6 and the shoot of chapter 11 are the same hope: that beyond the judgment the Lord keeps a remnant alive, and that out of that remnant comes the One in whom the whole promise is gathered up. The Lord Jesus is the holy seed the axe could not kill. We will follow that shoot when we come to it.

This is a word the church in every lean age needs to hear, and our own not least. The Lord has never promised that His people would be a majority, or that the tree would always stand in full leaf. He has promised something better and stranger: that even when the tree is cut down to a stump, the life is in the stump; that He keeps a remnant; that the holy seed is never finally lost. We are not charged to preserve the tree by our own cleverness. We are told that the One who is Himself the holy seed has already come, already died, already risen, and cannot be felled a second time, and that all who are hidden in Him share His indestructible life. The stump left in the land, we might even say, points in the end to an empty tomb.

So the vision that began with a dead king ends with a living seed, and between them runs the whole gospel: the holiness that undoes us, the altar that cleanses us, the word that sends us, and the promise that judgment will not have the last word, because a holy seed remains. This is what Isaiah saw in the year that Uzziah died. And it was the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Gathering the Threads

Stand back and see what this one chapter has done. It has shown us the throne that does not empty when earthly thrones do, and told us, by the apostle’s own word, that the One upon it is the Lord Jesus, the same who would be lifted up on a cross as surely as He was lifted up in glory. It has set the thrice-holy God before us and let His holiness do to one of the best men in Judah exactly what the law is meant to do: undo him, silence him, bring him to I am destroyed. And then it has answered that woe not with advice but with a hot coal from the altar, laid on the very lips he had confessed as sinful, with a word of absolution that did what it said.

This is the law and the gospel of the whole book pressed into a single vision, and it is why we began here. Every comfort Isaiah will yet speak (Comfort, comfort my people; the child born to us; the Servant wounded because of our rebellious deeds) rests upon the holiness seen in this room and the altar that answers it. When the church sings Holy, holy, holy on her way to the Supper, she is Isaiah in the throne room: a sinner among sinners, her lips and her people’s lips contaminated by sin, coming to the altar where, like the coal, the very body and blood of the Lord Jesus is laid upon her lips with the same ancient word, your sin is forgiven. That is where this chapter has been taking us all along.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. John tells us that when Isaiah saw the Lord on a high, elevated throne, he saw Christ’s glory, and spoke about him (John 12:41). How does it change this vision to know that the One enthroned is the same One who would be lifted up on a cross (John 3:14; 12:32)?

2. One of the holiest men in Judah, brought into God’s presence, does not feel affirmed; he cries Woe to me! I am destroyed (6:5). What does this teach about the real work of God’s law? Why is the world’s comfort (you are a good person) no comfort at all in that throne room?

3. Isaiah does not cleanse himself; a seraph brings a coal from the altar and touches it to the very lips he had confessed as contaminated by sin (6:6–7). Where does the cleansing come from, and where does it not come from? Why does it matter that the coal is taken from the altar, the place of sacrifice?

4. Only after his evil is removed does Isaiah hear Whom will I send? and answer Here I am, send me! (6:7–8). What does the order (cleansed first, sent second) teach about how God puts sinners to work, and what mistake does it guard us against?

5. When the church sings Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth in the Communion liturgy, she joins the seraphs of this chapter, on her way to the altar where Christ’s body and blood touch her lips. How does Isaiah 6 deepen what we are doing when we sing the Sanctus?

6. Isaiah is sent to a people who will listen continually, but don’t understand (6:9–10), words John applies to those who would not believe the Lord Jesus (John 12:39–41), and yet the chapter ends with a holy seed, a stump left in the land (6:13). How does the gospel hide even inside this hardest of commissions?

Looking Ahead

Having stood in the throne room and learned what holiness does to a sinner, and what the altar does for him, we step back now to the front of the book, to the opening chapter we passed on our way in. If chapter 6 is the throne room, chapter 1 is the courtroom. There the same holy Lord convenes a court, calls heaven and earth as His witnesses, and lays out His case against a people who have turned from Him: I raised children, I brought them up, but they have rebelled against me! (1:2). It is the law again, now in the form of an indictment against a whole nation; and yet the courtroom, too, will hold out a startling offer of cleansing: Though your sins have stained you like the color red, you can become white like snow (1:18). The coal from the altar, it turns out, is offered to more than one prophet.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 1 in full. As you read, listen for the courtroom: who is summoned, what the charge is, and what the Lord says He thinks of religious activity offered up by unclean hands. And do not miss the offer in verse 18.

Closing Prayer

Holy, holy, holy LORD of Heaven’s Armies, the whole earth is full of Your splendor; and our lips are contaminated by sin, and we live among people whose lips are contaminated by sin. When we are honest before You, we have no word but the prophet’s word: we are destroyed. We thank You that You did not leave us in that woe, but reached to us from the altar, from the once-for-all sacrifice of Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and laid His cleansing upon the very place of our shame, declaring over us: your evil is removed; your sin is forgiven.

Teach us, Father, to receive that word from outside ourselves, and not to labor for what You give as a gift; to hear the law as law until every excuse is silenced, and the gospel as gospel until our hearts are at rest. Lay the good news upon our lips, and then send us, as forgiven sinners, to speak of the One whose glory the prophet saw. We ask it through that same Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, who with You and the Holy Spirit reigns, one holy God, now and forever. Amen.