Finding the Glory

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! We live in an age of self-esteem. The world wants people to feel better, to feel better about themselves. So reading Isaiah chapter 6 and his self-proclamation of woe by Isaiah can come as a shock.

Woe is me! So why did he say that when he encountered God? That's what we'll be considering today on Renewing Your Mind. Not only do we need to know who God is, because as R.C. Sproul would say, there has been an eclipse of God, we need to know who we are too and who we are by nature.

What the Bible says about man is radically opposed to the views of our day. Here's Dr. Sproul as he takes a deep dive into the woe is me of Isaiah 6. 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 am 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 there 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. Blessed are those who mourn, they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the peacemakers, they shall be called the children of God. And that was the Jewish formula because an oracle of prosperity, an oracle that communicated good news was prefaced by the word blessed. 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 quorum 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's 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 abject 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's so thirsty and suddenly all that you see on the screen is the passing of a human shadow. 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 see it, 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-Hur experiences blessedness. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make 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 to blessedness is the idea of the curse.

It's another word that has been trivialized in our culture. We think of curses today as something 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. Remember in the book of Deuteronomy when God set his law 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 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. Cursed will you be in the city. Cursed will be your crops. Cursed will be your family. Cursed will you be when you sit down. Cursed will 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 cursed, 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, R.C., do you believe that hell is the absence of God? And I say, yes. And they breathe a sigh of relief.

Like, oh, is that all it is? I said, can you imagine anything worse than the absolute absence of God in terms of his benevolence? So you people say war is hell, or pain is hell, or disease is 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 forsakenness 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 holiness of God is declared holy, holy, holy. 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 this winged creature cries out with the same intensity of the seraphim, whoa, whoa, whoa. And the cup of 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 woe. When the Word of God pronounces doom and judgment, the prophet uses that term woe, even as Amos did to the nations and to the cities, woe unto you Damascus for three transgressions and four. Woe unto you Israel for three transgressions and four. 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. And again and again Jesus 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 am cursed. I am worthy of being cast out into the utter darkness. Woe is me, he cries, for I am undone. I intentionally used 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 who is 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 and the countryside and say, who is the man of greatest integrity among you?

Certainly the chief candidate in the 8th century B.C. 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 sea. 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, Isaiah really understood who God was, and the immediate reaction and consequence of that was that the first time in his life Isaiah knew who Isaiah was. We avoid contact with the holy 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 to us afterwards and say, oh, reverend, you must be such a holy man because only a holy person would love these things. They 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 instance that 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. Our lips are unclean because our hearts are unclean. And he said, for mine eyes have seen the King. And 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 Isaiah and for you was not to destroy his self-esteem, but 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. Let me ask you to use your imagination today. How would you respond if you had that vision? If you could step across the veil and look unimpeded at the absolute dazzling purity of God?

What would that do to you? Sometimes I hear Christian people speak of God as if he were a buddy in the sense of a peer. I've heard people say, I've said to them, what would you do if Christ came in the room right now? And they would say to me, oh, I would go over and take him in the hand and say, let's go, Lord, let's stand together. I said, then you don't know who he is. If he came in the room, if you had any sense, you would be on the floor, on your face, at his feet, crying out in awe before his glory, and you would be terrified in your bones at the sight of him.

That's not the description of Jesus that we hear today, even in some churches, which is why we continually need to have our minds renewed according to what God's word says and not by what we would like it to say. You're listening to the Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul from his classic series, The Holiness of God. Today is the final day to request lifetime streaming access to the extended edition of this series, it's 15 messages, and the hardcover 25th anniversary edition of The Holiness of God. Both resources can be yours for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or by calling us at 800 435 4343. This book is an easy way to introduce someone to Ligonier and R.C. Sproul, extending the reach of this ministry. So who might you give a copy of this book to?

Request yours at renewingyourmind.org before midnight, as this offer ends today. This week we considered the majesty and holiness of God. Next week R.C. Sproul will consider the beauty of the arts. That's Monday here on Renewing Your Mind. .