10 Aug The concept and the reality of God
ISAIAH 6:1-13:
- 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.
- 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.
- And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”
- And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.
- And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; 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!”
- 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.”
- And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”
- And he said, “Go, and say to this people: ‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’
- Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.”
- Then I said, “How long, O Lord?” And he said:”Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is a desolate waste,
- and the LORD removes people far away, and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.
- 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 comes into the temple, and he sees the Lord, high and lifted up. What he sees is the glory of the Lord. “ ‘… the whole earth is full of his glory.’ At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.”
When Isaiah walked into the temple and saw the Lord high and lifted up and his train filling the temple, Isaiah did not say, “Oh! There really is a God.” He already believed. Of course he believed.
But God was just a concept until this moment. Then God became a reality.
Now what’s the difference between a concept and a reality? It’s all a matter of glory. God as a concept is lighter than you.
When you bring God as a concept into your life, you shape it. It fits in around your existing patterns. It doesn’t move you around.
It doesn’t “quake” you. If you believe in God and it just hasn’t changed you very much, it’s just a concept.
A God-concept can’t really change your beliefs around. It just fits in with your existing beliefs.
But basically, we don’t believe in God in such a way that he comes in and rearranges our beliefs. He fits in with our existing beliefs.
Many people are saying to me, “Well, I can’t believe in this or that part of the Bible because that’s regressive. We can’t believe in that anymore.” In other words, our beliefs come from our cultural moment.
You shape the God-concept; the God-concept doesn’t shape you. You have more glory than the God-concept. The God-concept is lighter.
Plenty of people try to get religious. They go to church. They start to pray. They read the Bible. Why? Because they need help in getting to their goals.
They say, “Oh, I need more inspiration. I need more strength. I’m having trouble reaching my goals.” In other words, you fit God into your agenda. You fit God into your existing belief. God as a concept is lighter than you, but God as a reality is heavier than you.
Here’s an illustration,
Imagine you have some family money. Somebody comes along and says, “I’d like to marry you.” So you get married. Imagine that after the marriage at some point, your spouse comes to realize he or she can’t really get his or her hands on that family money, and they leave you. How do you feel? Violated, used, just a means to an end, an object. You feel like you were not loved for who you were in yourself.
Do you realize almost all of us relate to God like that? How do you think Hefeels?
In other words, “He has this incredible blessing bank account somewhere. I know it’s there, but he never would let me get my hands on it. I was really after blessings, not God. The blessings of God are what I wanted, and when I wasn’t going to get the blessings, I was out of there.” You married God for his money. He was an object.
The Hebrew word glory = Chabot is a word that literally means weight.
When it talks about God’s glory, it’s talking about his weightiness, that compared to anything else, God alone is permanent, God alone is real, and God alone matters.
When the real God comes into your life, when you actually get into the presence of the real God, things give way in your life to His glory. Things you’ve always believed, and believe very deeply, are changed by His Word, because God has more glory than your beliefs. He can change things you think. When the reality of God comes into your life, all that stuff starts to change.
ISAIAH HAVING A PERSONAL ENCOUNTER WITH GOD.
What does it mean to actually encounter God’s reality?
It’s to have a God quake, a self quake, and then that will eventually lead to a world quake.
I. GOD QUAKE
ISAIAH 6:1:
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 6:4:
And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke.
realise
If you drop an object that is heavier than water into water, there’s a flood. It’s basically a water quake. Because the object has more glory than the water, the water quakes.
When the reality of God comes down into your life, it changes everything around.
When the reality of God comes down into Isaiah’s life, everything is rearranged. Everything is reengineered. His view of himself, his view of history … Everything has changed.
DEMONSTRATION TO PUT STONE IN TO A JAR OF WATER
Every single place in the Bible where God’s presence comes down, there’s an earthquake because of the glory of God will shake to that place. God is more glorious than anything.
When he comes down on Mount Sinai in Exodus 19, the mountain trembled violently. When he came down into the upper room in Acts 2 during Pentecost, the room trembled and shook violently because God’s glory is ultimate.
Compared to God, everything else has no weight, and whenever God’s reality comes down, everything is shaken.
There is the difference between God as a concept and God as reality, the difference in believing in God and actually having an experience of God’s glory.
For example,
Jeremiah 1 and Isaiah 6 … they’re very different. Isaiah, was a proud man. He was a young man. He was one of the elites.
Jeremiah was filled with inferiority feelings, always saying, “Oh, I’m just a child. I can’t do anything.”
When God shows up to Jeremiah in Jeremiah 1, he says, “Stop trembling.” When he shows up to Isaiah, he says, “Start trembling.”
But in both cases he showed up. God was a concept until this moment, and when he showed up as a reality, he began to rearrange everything in Isaiah’s life.
Has that happened to you? Is he contradicting you? Is he changing you? Has he completely demolished and reengineered your agenda and the way in which you look at life? Has that happened?
If you’re out of touch with the reality of God, you’re out of touch with reality.
So here’s God, who was a “quaker.” So here’s the God who comes in with this quake.
The question is … How do you know you’ve actually had God move from being a concept to being a reality?
II. SELF QUAKE
You know God has come in as a reality and is no longer just a concept in that there’s a self quake. What is the self quake?
ISAIAH 6:5-8:
- And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; 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!”
- 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.”
- And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.”
From these passages we know that Isaiah had an experience of radical beauty, an experience of radical humility,and an experience of radical purity.
- EXPERIENCING RADICAL BEAUTY
ISAIAH 6:3:
And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!”
He heard the seraphim call out, “Holy, holy, holy!” In Hebrew, often, magnitude is conveyed through the doubling and the repetition of a word the most exquisite. So, very often, magnitude is gotten across by doubling. But nowhere but here in Hebrew, in the Bible, is any quality tripled.
God isn’t just holy, holy. There’s a category beyond categories here. He’s holy, holy, holy.
What is holiness?
The Hebrew word holy is qadowsh means, on the one hand, infinitely unique superlativeness.
To say God’s wisdom is holy wisdom is to say it’s infinitely beyond and better than anyone else’s.
To say God’s love is holy love is to say it’s infinitely and perfectly beyond anyone else’s.
The word holiness also means brilliance and beauty.
The seraphim are not just saying, “Holy, holy, holy.” They are constantly … It says, “At the sound of their voices …” They were calling. It’s a present progressive. They’re constantly singing the praises to one another. In other words, they’re fascinated with his holiness. They love his holiness. They can’t get enough of his holiness. They’re constantly adoring his holiness.
This is THE BEAUTY OF HIS HOLINESS
The seraphim are adoring and serving God not on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis, not because God pays off in terms of power, approval, comfort, control, significance, or security. They are serving Him just because it’s His due, just because of who He is, just because of the beauty of who He is. For the seraphim, His holiness is not useful; it’s beautiful.
The power of God is something you could get excited about selfishly because it’s of benefit to you. “Oh, I have a powerful God.”
The wisdom of God is something you actually can get excited about selfishly because it could be a benefit to you. “Oh, I have a God who’s wise, and he’s going to give me guidance.”
You can even get excited about the mercy of God selfishly because it’s of benefit to you. “Oh, now I’m going to get rid of my ‘guilt-hiddenness.’
”But the holiness of God is of no use at all. God’s holiness is of no benefit to you. It’s nothing but a threat. Anyone who worships God’s holiness and adores God’s holiness is loving Him just for who He is in Himself, because it’s of no help to you”.
His holiness is superlative. His holiness is the fact that you cannot beat God because His power is holy power, omni-power, and you can’t question God because His wisdom is holy wisdom, and you can’t escape God because His presence is holy presence. His holiness is nothing but a threat. How could it be beautiful?
- EXPERIENCING RADICAL HUMILITY
He says in verse 5, “Woe to me!” Woe is a curse. He’s pronouncing a curse on himself. He’s saying, “I don’t deserve to live.” Then he says, “I am ruined. I am undone. I am dismantled. For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.”
You always find being in the presence of human superlativeness traumatic because it crushes your self-image.
For example, you might come to Opera House … You were the best singer in your little town, and you came to Sydney opera house because you’re going to have a career in singing. You go to your auditions, and as you’re listening to the other people in the room auditioning, through the door you hear voices that are inaccessibly better than yours. You’re crushed. You were in denial of your mediocrity. You’re dismantled. “Woe is me,” says the male or female singer.
Now what happened to Isaiah?Jewish tradition says Isaiah was of the royal family. His father was the brother to the king. He was one of the elites. We know about Isaiah from his book is he was a man of artistic, intellectual, and communicative genius. If you, by the way, write a book and 3,000 years later people are sitting around studying it, then you’ll know you’re pretty smart.
It was an oral culture. He was a man of lips. He had a golden tongue, you see. He was able to do communication. In an oral culture, what power that was.
Notice it says, “The year King Uzziah died …” King Uzziah had been in seclusion for years. He had leprosy. Everything was falling apart. The culture was falling apart. Society was falling apart. Things were in bad shape.
Don’t you think a guy like Isaiah, who was probably the most brilliant young man of his generation and of the royal family and one of the elites …? He said, “Boy, I can’t wait. I know what’s wrong with this country, and when I get into power, then I’m really going to be able to make things straight.”
Whenever there are things wrong (and there are always things wrong), you always think “those people over there” are the problem. Young people think, “Oh, it’s those old people who don’t understand how things should be done now.” Managements says its union; union says it’s management. Everybody thinks, “They’re the unclean ones. They’re the ones who are the problem.”
But Isaiah have totally different experienced,
He gets into the presence of the holiness of God, and he realises he’sthe problem. “All of my people are unclean, and I’m just one of them. Even my lips … Even the best part of me is unclean, flawed, wrong, selfish, distorted, twisted.”
Every single place in the Bible where a human being moves from God as a concept to God as a reality, every single place in the Bible where people actually begin to move into the presence of the reality of God, they start to hate themselves.
Job says, “I heard of you with my ear, but I see you now with my eyes, and I repent in dust and ashes.” Isaiah says, “Woe is me! I am undone.”
Peter says, “Depart from me, Lord! I’m a sinful man.” Over and over and over.
Let’s just say there is a God who’s nothing but love. No holiness, no justice, no wrath … nothing but love. Listen. If in the presence of just human superlativeness your self-image comes crashing down around your ears, then even if you got into the presence of a God who was nothing but pure love, you would hate yourself. You would say, “I’m so cruel. I’m so unloving. I thought I loved people, but I never loved anybody.”
Here’s how you know you’ve begun to get into the presence of the real God, that you’ve begun to have God move into reality. You think you’re a sinner. You think you’re lost. You see you’re more capable of cruelty, more capable of evil, more selfish, pettier, more small-minded, and more impatient than you ever thought you were. You know you’re a sinner and you need to be rescued by grace.
Here’s how Isaiah, who was crashed for a few seconds into the lowest self-esteem you’d ever want … Here’s what God did.
The minute he confesses his sin, God begins to explode into his life. The angel flies toward him. When Isaiah sees the angel coming toward him, the angel has the fire of God in his hand.
The minute Isaiah confesses that, here comes the fire of God. Look, this isthe fire of God, because even the angel can’t pick it up with his hand. He has to use tongs. When the fire gets to his mouth … It goes to his lips, the point at which he confessed. It must have stung, but almost immediately, instead of it consuming him, he realised he had been cleaned. Instead, the word was a word of pardon. “… your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”
The very next verse is, “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ ”Do you know what God is saying? One second after Isaiah realised he didn’t deserve to live and he was more wicked and flawed than he ever dared believe, he is now more affirmed and valued and wanted than he ever dared hope. Here’s God saying, “I have a little business going. I’m saving the world, and I need a new partner.”
Then God says, “By the way, this job I want you to do is going to be horrible because all of your life you’re going to be unsuccessful. You’re going to preach and preach and preach and nobody is going to listen to you ever. You’re going to be totally frustrated. You’re going to be absolutely ineffective. No one is going to listen to you. They’re going to persecute you the rest of your life.” What does Isaiah say? “Here am I. Send me!”
Here’s what happened to Isaiah.
His self-image had been deconstructed and reconstructed on the spot. At the same moment, he realised he was more wicked than he dared believe and more loved and affirmed than he ever dared hope through the grace of God.
Everybody who hasn’t experienced the grace of God is earning their self-worth through some kind of performance standard. “If I’m like this, then I feel good about myself. If I do this, if I live like this …”
Do you know what that means? If you’re living up to your standards, you’re bold and confident but you’re not humble; you’re arrogant. If you’re notliving up to your standards, you’re humble and kind of sensitive to other people, but you’re not confident.
In the grace of God, you’re both bold and humble at the same time because you’re more wicked than you ever dared believe and you’re more loved than you ever dared hope. At the same time.
This gives you a new psychological ballast and stability.
Nothing can move you. Nothing, ironically, can shake you. Why? Because when you fail, you remember the affirmation of God, which is there by grace, not performance. When you succeed, you’re not puffed up, because you remember you’re nothing but a sinner saved by grace.
You’re bold and humble at the same time.
That’s why you can take on anything. You can handle anything, theoretically, to the degree that God is a reality in your life. You know how that works. When he starts to slide back into being a concept, you have to go back and make sure he’s a reality. Then you can handle anything.
How could the fire of God be an agent for cleansing?
Do you know that, centuries later, almost the same thing happened? Do you know the temple was shaken? Do you know there was an earthquake because God came down? Do you know the temple was so shaken, the doorposts were so shaken, the threshold was so shaken, that the veil ripped? Do you know when that happened?
Matthew 27:45: “From the sixth hour to the ninth hour, darkness came over all the land. At the ninth hour, Jesus Christ said, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
’ When Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, at that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split.”
Before Jesus died on the cross … Do you remember in the garden he said, “My soul is sorrowful even unto death”? What was he saying? “Woe is me. I am undone. I am ruined. I feel like I’m coming apart.” But no angel showed up and said, “Thy sin is atoned for,” because Jesus was the sacrifice on the altar.
Jesus Christ was shaken by the judgment of God … Jesus Christ is the Judge of the world who, the first time he came to earth, came not to bringjudgment but to bear judgment. He was shaken to the depths so you and I could be unshakable, so our sin could be atoned for, so we could get the new self-image that comes from the self quake of having the glory of God come down into your life.
If it’s really true we’re accepted completely in him not on the basis of our performance, now the holiness of God is beautiful. You don’t serve God to get things; you already have everything. Then why serve God? Because of the beauty of what he is and what he has done, because you want to know him, because you want to resemble him, because you want to delight him, because you want to be part of this new business of his in saving the world. That leads to the last point.
III. A WORLD QUAKE
If God comes into your life and creates a self quake, you’re sent out to be part of the movement of God that is eventually going to shake heaven and earth because God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth.
To become a cooperative agent, a man or woman in mission, there are at least three things you see here that come as a result of this self quake that make you useful. Instead of using him, you let him use you.
Here are the three things: availability, dependability, and expectancy.
First, availability. “Here am I ….”
Family holiday to Sydney that changed our family’s life forever.
I remember that experienced very clearly and I realised that up to that point, I wanted God to be available to me, obviously, I was sense God’s reality. I began to experience his glory. Was it a vision? No. He stopped being a concept. He started being a reality. I realised no matter what he said, no matter what he did, no matter what he let come into my life, because of who he was I needed to be unconditionally available to him. Have I lived up to that? Absolutely not. But guess what?
When God becomes real, that gets into your heart as an irreducible, unavoidable, inescapable, permanent principle you’ll never be able to escape.
Secondly, dependability.
GOD says, “I have a job for you.” Isaiah says, “Here am I. Send me!” God says, “Wait a minute. I haven’t given you the job description.” Have you ever noticed that?
Then he goes on and says, “I want you to realise these people are going to be so obstinate, you’re going to preach to them for years, and every time, they’re going to say, ‘I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear this.’ ”
God says, “It’s going to get so bad that at one point you’re going to have to say to them what Romans 1 says. Poetic justice. ‘God is going to give you what you want.’ ”
The worst thing God could ever give anybody is what their unregenerate heart really wants. “I don’t want to hear this. I don’t want to hear this.” “You’re going to have to say, at some point, to everybody in Israel, ‘Okay, then you’re not going to be able to hear it. God is going to give you what you want.’ ” It’s that bad.
What this means is Isaiah is dependable. His needs are not as important as God. He doesn’t work his ministry around his needs and whether there’s individual fulfilment. There was no individual fulfilment here at all.
Why don’t we all do that?
Why not take the jobs around a church that get almost no applause, like sitting with the children during an evening service or passing out bulletins? Nobody is going to applaud you for that. Why not get taken out of yourself and what’s fulfilling to you because the glory of God is in your life?
Last of all, expectancy.
Do you know what expectancy is? You say, “This ends very bleakly.” Oh, it doesn’t. Do you realise what it says? There’s a seed in the stump.
God says, “Isaiah, for the very rest of your whole life, it’s going to be just terrible. Spiritually, economically, politically, it’s going to be one disaster after another. You’re never going to see it get any better. In other words, your nation is going to be like a grove of trees cut down. But there’s a seed in the stump. I will bring about a new heavens and a new earth.”
If God is your reality, then you always work, no matter how it looks around you, in the hope and knowledge that eventually everything sad is going to become untrue. So with that availability, with that dependability, and with that expectancy, say to God, “Here am I. Send me.” Give yourself, not just your money, to the vision. Amen
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