Isaiah's Vision of the Holy God

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord. The timing matters. Uzziah had reigned for fifty-two years. He was a good king. He had brought stability and prosperity to Judah. And now he was dead. The nation was destabilised. Isaiah was grieving. And it is precisely in that moment of earthly loss and uncertainty that heaven opens. When the thrones of earth are vacated, we are invited to see that the throne of heaven is not. The Lord is seated. High and exalted. His robe fills the temple. Above him are the seraphim — fiery, magnificent angelic beings — and they are crying out to one another: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. Three times holy. Holiness in Hebrew thought is the otherness of God. It is the quality of God that sets him entirely apart from everything created. He is not a bigger version of us. He is not a more powerful human being. He is categorically other. And when Isaiah encounters this — when the ground shakes and the smoke fills the temple — his first response is not joy. It is undoing. Woe to me, he cries. I am ruined. I am a man of unclean lips. True worship always does this. It does not first make us feel good about ourselves. It shows us what we are in the light of what God is. But here is the grace: the seraphim brings a coal from the altar. Your guilt is taken away. Your sin atoned for. And only then comes the commission. Then he heard the voice of the Lord: Whom shall I send? And Isaiah, clean, forgiven, remade — says: Here am I. Send me.