A Sermon on Isaiah 6:1-7
This transcript of A Sermon on Isaiah 6:1-7 has been lightly edited for readability.
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If you have your Bibles with you today, I ask that you would take them and turn with me to Isaiah, Chapter six. This is Isaiah’s call to the role of profit as he recounts for us in words very similar to what John gave us in Revelation, Chapter four, he recounts for us his call to the role as profit. And so as he begins his very long ministry, he served under several kings in the southern kingdom of Judah.
He is called to the ministry by God. In Isaiah, Chapter Six, beginning in verse one, we hear these words.
“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne high and exalted and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, 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 doorpost and the threshold 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 seraphs 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.”
Let’s pray. Oh, Lord, as we gather on this Sunday, we pray that your light would pour over the pages and shine upon these words that were written by Isaiah so many years ago. We pray that they would dance with the newness in our hearts and our minds and we pray that we would be radiant and reflecting your word in our living and serving one another. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
INTRODUCTION
When you proclaim and profess with us each week through the Apostles Creed and you start out by saying, “I believe in God,” What God do you believe in? One author has said that God created us in his image on in Genesis one and two. And ever since Genesis three, we have been trying to recreate him in our own image.
It matters what you mean when you say, I believe in God and the creed starts here so that you and I can spend time meditating on what exactly we mean when we say, I believe in God. Today we’re going to take some time to look at what the creed tells us about God to expand upon it a little bit and to hopefully come to a better understanding of what we mean when we say, I believe in God.
We’ll do this first by considering the question, which God and how do we find out about him? Then we will look into what it means when the creed says that God is our father.
And lastly, we will consider what it means when it says that he is father almighty. And this is an important consideration, because what we believe about God does and should shape how we live and how we worship. A biblically informed view of God will change how you view the world and your life.
I BELIEVE IN GOD…
So first, the creed says, I believe in God. The author of the book of Hebrews in chapter 11, that great hall of faith says within Hebrews 11, chapter six says, “without faith, it is impossible to please God because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” If we are going to find the reward and the joy in the presence of God, we must believe in him and we must believe in him as he reveals himself.
When the Christian is asked, which God do you believe in? Our answer in short form is, “I believe in the God revealed to us in the scriptures, in the 66 books of the Old and New Testament.” R.C. Sproul says that the God that we believe in is not some formless entity that is empty of meaning or identity. We believe in a very specific God who has revealed himself both generally in creation and also specifically in his word.
We are not a theist. Theists are someone who believe that there is a God that created and wound everything up like a watch and then set it on the shelf to let it run until everything wound down and went off to take care of other business. We believe in a God who has content and he reveals that content to us in his world and in his word, we learn two things about him.
Number one, he has a name and number two, he acts in creation. In Exodus chapter three, Moses is standing before God. He has been given his commission and he says, Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you and they ask me, what is his name? Then what shall I tell them? God said to Moses, I am who I am.”
Or if you’ll notice in your footnote in your footnote there, it could also be translated. I will be what or who I will be.
“This is what you are to say to the Israelites. I am has sent me to you.”
God reveals to Moses his name. He is a specific God who is knowable because he has revealed himself to us. We see in Exodus 34 that he expounds upon this name to be more than just I am or I will be.
He expounds to tell us that I am is the God who has both compassion on sinners, but also will not allow the guilty to go unpunished, unpunished. Regardless of how difficult it may be to understand that word, I am or I will be. We need to understand that the God that we profess has a name, he is knowable and he is specific.
But he is also a God who acts in creation. Now, next week, we’ll see specifically how he acted in that one act of creation as we look at “who created the heavens and the earth,” the next phrase in the creed. But he has also acted to call and to rescue a people for himself, which is the entire center section.
Speaking of the second person of the trinity in the creed, he called to himself the Old Testament Israel, and he maintains the church as well as the continuation of the people of God. He acted by sending the second person of the trinity, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, into this world to take on flesh, to dwell among us, to be righteous on our behalf and to take the penalty for our sins so that salvation might be secured. He continues to act through the Holy Spirit to apply that work of salvation to the life of the believer, to illuminate the word so that they might understand more of who God is, what he expects, and continues to change them and lead them to holiness.
You and I profess belief in a God who exists, a God who has a name and a God who has and is and will continue to work and act in this world, in the lives of his children. R.C. Sproul, to look at him once again, says that when it comes to knowledge about the God that we profess belief in, he says there is a famine within the church of knowledge of God.
Do you desire to know this God you profess belief in? Do you desire to learn more about him through ongoing lifelong study, not just so that you may fill your minds with facts, but so that you can learn to love and to trust and to rest in him more and more?
As you read through the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, take note of how God reveals himself in those passages. Does he show himself to be creator or judge, savior or sustainer? How does he show his steadfast love in the passages that you read, or how does he show himself to be a promise keeping God? We believe in God, learn more about him in light of that call to learn more about him.
…GOD THE FATHER…
The creed goes on to say that he is God the father. And as we look at God, the father, and as we look at God, the father almighty, we’re going to see two aspects of God’s existence, his immanence and his transcendence. God, the father, reminds us that God is an immanent God.
What do I mean when I say that God has immanence? That word is rooted in the name, another name that he has given in Isaiah 7:14 in Matthew 1:23, where we are told that God will be called Immanuel. Matthew 1:23 tells us what Immanuel means. It literally means God with us.
And so we speak when we speak of the immanence of God, we are talking about the truth that he is close. His presence is near to every aspect of his creation. And in a special way, he draws near to his people.
Part of this infinite presence, part of his immanence is his fatherhood. What do we mean when we say that God is a father? The New Testament speaks of God’s fatherhood in two ways.
First, in Acts 17:26-28, Paul is talking to the Athenian philosophers and he says that we are all the offspring of God because he created us.
There is a sense in which every human being that has been created, God is their father. Jesus goes so far as to say in Matthew 5:45 that both the just and the unjust are cared for like a father by God. The sun shines upon both the righteous and the unrighteous. The rain falls on both the just and the unjust.
So in a very broad sense, God is the father of humanity.
But Romans 8:14 reveals to us what we mean when we say God, the father, we believe in God, the father.
Paul says, beginning in verse 14, “…because those who are led by the spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you receive the spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, Abba, father, the spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now, if we are God’s children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.”
While God broadly is the father of all creation, he enters into a very special fatherly relationship with those who put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. God’s general love or common grace does not save.
But when faith comes to a person, they are taken from the status of traitor, of sinner, of rebel against God, and they are made the sons and daughters of the most high God. They are brought into this father child relationship. That is a special relationship that is given to us by God.
When the Holy Spirit comes to regenerate you and give you faith, you are brought into that special relationship of a father who showers love and grace upon you and you become his beloved child. Every now and then, as I hang out with friends, I have opportunity to meet their children and I love their children, but not like I love my own children. God loves all of humanity, but he doesn’t love all of humanity in the same way that he loves those whom he has called to be his children.
Many times we do struggle with this idea that God is a father, because if we’re honest, we none of us have a perfect father and some fathers are far less perfect than others. But we get the equation backwards.
Rather than looking at our earthly father and saying, that’s who God is like. We should look to see how God reveals himself as a father in his word, talks about the love that he showers upon his children. And we take comfort in that regardless of how good or bad our earthly father is or was. And men, as we seek to be fathers, we should look to the example of the love that God showers upon us and we should strive to be fathers in the image of God.
God is the father of those who truly believe and rest in the salvation offered in Jesus Christ. This should affect how we pray. In Sunday school, it was mentioned today that we start out that prayer when the disciples asked Jesus, teach us how to pray.
What was the first thing he told them to pray? “Our father, which art in heaven.” We can safely, peacefully approach the throne because God is our father. And the fatherhood of God points us to the truth of God’s immanence, the God with us part of his nature. But the creed doesn’t stop there.
“…ALMIGHTY…”
The creed goes on to say, God, the father almighty. And this reminds us that while God is an immanent God, he is also a transcendent God.
Where we read in Revelation, where we read in Isaiah, where it says, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty, It literally means Lord God almighty literally means Lord of hosts or I am who I am of the armies of heaven. When we talk about God’s might and we say that God is almighty, we are talking about his sovereignty, his power, his holiness, his rule over creation and all of those attributes. Everything about him that reminds us that he is God and we are not.
And the passage from Isaiah that we read earlier, Isaiah is called into the throne room of God. And the first thing he notices, the first thing he records is that God is seated upon a throne that is not on the same level as you and I. It is high and lifted up to remind him that God reigns above the heavens and the earth.
He says that the train of God’s robe is filled the temple; the bigger or the longer the train of a king was, the more power and majesty and glory that that king had. And the entire temple was filled, not just the holy of holies, the entire temple was filled with God’s majesty and glory and holiness.
These angelic beings who are terrifying in their own right because of their own glory and their own perfection have to hide their eyes and their feet so that they do not diminish the might and the glory of God. And they fly around saying day in and day night, holy, holier, holiest is the Lord Almighty.
He is so holy the earth is full of his glory. Everything shakes within the temple as they proclaim the might and the holiness and the glory of God.
And how does Isaiah respond to this? Does he just saunter into the room and say, “Hey, what’s up?” Absolutely not. Confronted with the glory, the might, the majesty, the transcendence of God, he falls to his face and he says, “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.”
This is significant what he says here when he says that he has unclean lips. This is a man called by God to speak the inspired words of the holy, holy, holy God. The holiest thing about Isaiah is the lips that he uses to proclaim God’s word to the Israelites. And what is it that he says makes him unworthy of being in God’s presence? Those very lips that proclaim the word of God, he deserves to be undone.
He says, “I am judged unclean in the face of the holy God, and I deserve not only to be ruined, as it says in the English here, but to be undone, to be disintegrated. For I do not deserve to be here.”
But thanks be to God, that’s not where God left Isaiah. One of the angels in this beautiful picture of the gospel, one of the angels flies to the altar, takes a coal from that altar, touches it to Isaiah’s lips and says, you are cleansed, you are redeemed. The author of Hebrews reminds us multiple times that Jesus was a sacrifice. Jesus was the altar from which redemption and cleansing comes.
And so our hope, as you and I stand before the transcendent, holy, almighty God, our hope is the work of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, as he has secured our redemption, as he has secured our cleansing so that whatever uncleanness we bring into God’s presence, whatever outright sin and rebellion we bring into God’s presence is cleansed from us.
Covered with the glorious righteousness of Christ, so that God might say, “Come, my beloved child,” this should approach how you and I worship both in this room and in every moment of our life.
I cringe every time I hear somebody pray to daddy God. I get what they’re saying. I understand they’re trying to highlight the immanence and the fatherhood of God. But it has a tendency to totally dismiss his transcendence, his holiness, his might.
That is the God we worship. We don’t come here saying, Lord, I’m here. I hope you’re happy with me, but I’m going to make your day by showing up.
No, we enter this place. Falling metaphorically, literally, if we have to falling upon our face and saying, I do not deserve to live life in your presence, except by the work of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Brothers and sisters, I tell you, for myself and for you, if you and I truly understood and cared about the transcendence of God, we would tremble. We would tremble at his majesty, we would tremble at his holiness, and we would tremble at the depth of grace offered to us through Jesus.
CONCLUSION
So what God do you believe in? Do you believe in some God who set things in motion and then left, not caring how his creation makes on? Do you believe in a God that conforms to your definition of what it means to be God? You might even believe in a small misinterpreted part of the God revealed in the Bible.
Or do you profess belief in the God of the Bible, even if it terrifies you and you don’t truly understand him?
Professing God the Father Almighty should change two areas of your life. First, your security. It is the transcendent God that draws close to us in his immanence. When he calls us, the holy, eternal, infinite, unchangeable, glorious, majestic, mighty God is the one who secures your status with him. Nothing you can do can change that.
If you have placed your hope and your faith in the work of Jesus for your salvation, you are eternally secure in the hands of the transcendent God. He will never take you back to DHHR and say, “I can’t handle her, I’m giving her back.”
You are forever secure in his hands. And secondly, it is the transcendent God that calls you to draw near to him as he is also the eminent God. We read, Paul said, we call him Abba Father. And while, yes, Abba is somewhat less formal than father, it is still more formal than daddy. And we stand in the presence of the holy God.
The holy, holy, holy God. And we must not forget, whether it’s in this time of worship or as we walk throughout our daily lives, that every moment, every day is lived in the presence of that holy and transcendent God. And he demands our worship.
Brothers and sisters, do you believe in God, the father almighty?
Let’s pray. To the great God above, may we not take you flippantly. May we not take you for granted. May we be reminded that you are holy, holy, holy Lord God almighty. But we also know the comfort that you draw near to us through your son and through your spirit so that way we may be known as the children of God and so that we may respectfully and peacefully call you father.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
As we leave this place, God does give us blessings.
Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.
He who testifies to these things says, yes, I am coming soon.
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
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