The Year the Throne Emptied

Four words out of this chapter have been printed on more mission banners than the rest of the book put together. Here am I, send me. They lift out clean, as if verse eight were a sign-up line.

Read whole, they sit somewhere else. They come after a funeral, after a curse the prophet pronounces on himself, and after something done to his mouth he never asked for. And the job has no success in it.

1. The vision is dated to a death

Isaiah does not open with the throne. He opens with a calendar.

In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple.

Isaiah 6:1

Uzziah had reigned fifty-two years. For anyone under seventy he was simply what a king was.

Chronicles tells the part Isaiah leaves out. Uzziah grew strong, then proud, and walked into the sanctuary with a censer to burn the incense himself. Leprosy broke out on his forehead while the priests were still arguing with him.

And King Uzziah was a leper to the day of his death, and being a leper lived in a separate house, for he was excluded from the house of the LORD.

2 Chronicles 26:21

Hold those together. A king forced his way into that building and spent his last years shut out of it. The year he dies, a man walks into the same building and finds it occupied — filled, hem to ceiling, by a King nobody crowned and nobody can depose. Judah's throne is empty. The throne is not.

On the last page of the canon the song has not changed:

Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.

Revelation 4:8

Was and is and is to come — three tenses, the thing a fifty-two-year reign only imitates.

Isaiah refuses to tidy it, though:

Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, Saviour.

Isaiah 45:15

He says that of the God who is at that moment saving. The throne is occupied and ordinarily invisible. Isaiah got one look, then spent a lifetime among people who had seen nothing.

2. The seventh woe was his own

Look at what the creatures nearest the throne do with their wings.

Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew.

Isaiah 6:2

The name means the burning ones. Four wings of six go on shielding themselves, two on the work. Creatures that have never sinned still cover their faces in that room.

So Isaiah is not overreacting:

Woe is me. For I am undone; for 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.

Isaiah 6:5

An older rule stands behind that fear:

You cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.

Exodus 33:20

Said to Moses, a friend of God, on a good day. Isaiah is not performing unworthiness; he believes he has triggered something fatal.

Now the part easy to walk past. Isaiah 5 is a string of woes, six of them, aimed outward with real accuracy — woe to those who add house to house until they live alone in the land (Isaiah 5:8), and this:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.

Isaiah 5:20

True, and he was right to say it. Then he sees the throne and the seventh woe leaves his mouth pointed the other way. Not woe to them. Woe is me — and in the same breath, I dwell in the midst of them. He stops standing outside the group he had been diagnosing.

The other man who says this said it to someone who had told him where to fish:

Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.

Luke 5:8

Jesus had preached from Peter's boat that morning and healed in his house before that (Luke 4:38-39). Proximity had not prepared him. One catch of fish puts him in Isaiah's posture, asking the holy thing to leave.

3. The coal came with tongs

Isaiah has said he is undone. He asks for nothing. Something is done anyway.

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.

Isaiah 6:6-7

The tongs are not scene-dressing: a creature made of fire will not carry this barehanded. And it goes where Isaiah pointed — not his record, his lips.

Where it comes from is the point. Those coals have one prior use in the Law:

And he shall take a censer full of coals of fire from the altar before the LORD... and he shall bring it inside the veil.

Leviticus 16:12

Day of Atonement. That altar is where the animal has already been killed and burned. The fire touching Isaiah's mouth has been eating a substitute; cleansing reaches him carrying the heat of a death he did not die.

Which is where Uzziah returns. He too stood in that building with a censer in his hand, and those coals did not cleanse him — the leprosy rose while he held it (2 Chronicles 26:19). One man reached for the fire and was put out of the house. The other made no move and the fire crossed the room to him.

Even so, the altar is not the end of it:

For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Hebrews 10:4

Impossible. So the coal was never the payment, only an announcement of one, seven centuries early. What makes your sin atoned for a true sentence is named later:

You were ransomed... not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.

1 Peter 1:18-19

Only now comes a question: Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Isaiah answers with the four famous words — not volunteering to earn anything, just a man whose mouth was repaired, asked for the use of it.

4. Sent to be ignored

Here is where the banner version stops.

Go, and say to this people: Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.

Isaiah 6:9

The commission is a lifetime of preaching that will not land. Isaiah asks the only question left — How long, O Lord? — and is told: until the cities lie waste. He said send me before he was told where.

Nor is this one bad season. Paul, at the end of Acts, under guard in Rome, reaches for these exact verses to explain the response he is getting (Acts 28:26-27). Same words, same result, eight centuries later.

And Jesus quotes them about his own preaching:

To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables, so that they may indeed see but not perceive.

Mark 4:11-12

That is a hard saying and softening it would be dishonest. The Son of God preached on the same terms Isaiah was given. If speech that changes nobody means failure, then he failed too.

The chapter ends in a burned field with one thing standing:

Like a terebinth or an oak, whose stump remains when it is felled. The holy seed is its stump.

Isaiah 6:13

A stump is what is left when everything visible has been taken. Five chapters on it does something:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

Isaiah 11:1

Cut the tree to the ground and the promise is still under the soil.

Whose glory it was

John, writing about crowds who watched Jesus and did not believe, quotes Isaiah 6 and adds a line that reorganises it:

Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him.

John 12:41

His glory — Christ's. The King whose robe filled the temple is the one John has been writing about for eleven chapters.

Then read what John says nine verses earlier, because the verb is deliberate:

And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.

John 12:32

John adds that he said it to show what kind of death he would die: lifted up means crucified. And Isaiah, who saw the Lord high and lifted up on the throne, uses that pair once more — of a servant marred beyond human likeness:

Behold, my servant shall act wisely; he shall be high and lifted up and shall be exalted.

Isaiah 52:13

Same two words, two altitudes: the throne Isaiah could not look at and live, and a cross outside a city wall where people stood and stared for six hours.

What to do with this

Let the woe come inward once. Isaiah was accurate about his nation and became accurate about himself only at the throne. If every sin you can name today belongs to somebody else — a party, a relative, a church gone wrong — that is not clear sight. It is distance.

Take the coal you did not fetch. Uzziah's fault was not wanting to approach God; it was intending to arrange it himself. The movement here runs one way: the altar comes to the prophet. Ask, and stop trying to be clean enough to ask.

Measure the work differently. If you teach, parent, witness or pray into what looks like a wall, Isaiah, Paul and Jesus all worked those terms. The tree is felled in this chapter; the holy seed is the stump, and the shoot out of it is the same Lord Isaiah saw on the throne — lifted up a second time, in the other direction, to be looked at by people who would live.