Isaiah 6 and It’s Relationship to Isaiah 53

Robert McAfee Brown: “This is the essence of American religion. I like sinning. And God likes forgiving. And the world is well put together.”

This tends to be the American attitude. And the tragedy of this attitude is that it trivializes everything. It’s a complete misrepresentation of what we are, who God is.

Calvin: “The essence of true religion is to know God and to know ourselves.”

Look at the good churches: sermons have become trivial, the songs have become trivial.

The Holiness of God in Isaiah 6

I want to approach Isaiah 6 from a different angle than it is normally approached from.

“In the year that King Uzziah died..”

This phrase gets treated as merely a marking of the date, or as a general principle: the death of a great man is an occasion for reflection, an opportunity to see God.

We will be greatly deepened in our understanding if we think about the reign of King Uzziah in 2 Chronicles 26. He is greatly blessed and as a result is lifted up with pride. He prospered and he forgot God. He became corrupt and faithfulness.

We are given a remarkable and horrifying incident in the life of Uzziah. He surveys the nations and sees that all the other kings were priest-kings, who ministered as priests in the temples in their lands. All power both civil and religious was under the king. Uzziah asked why the holy place should be off limits to him if it was not off limits to the surrounding kings. He wants to follow the example of all the other kings, everyone of whom is described in Scripture as an evil king.

He marches into the sanctuary of God and offers incense on the altar. He WILL BE priest-king. And at the spot and in that moment the Lord strikes him with leprosy. He is rushed out of the Temple by the priests and is exiled, left alone to die.

With this in mind, we go back to Isaiah 6. In the year that Uzziah dies, Isaiah sees the Lord, high and lifted up. The same word “lifted up” used of Uzziah in 2 Chronicles 26 is used of God here. “The train of his robe” has kingly implications. God is King-Priest as contrasted with Uzziah’s prideful attempt to become King-Priest.

The Temple is a concentration place of God’s glory, which is over all the earth. That majesty is so great, the building shakes at the sound of his praise.

The house was filled with smoke. Why? Scripture often speaks of God surrounded by smoke:Psalm 97, Revelation 15:8. It’s a mark of the hiddeness of God, that we can never see God as He is in Himself. It may be a reference to the altar of incense, symbolizing the prayers of God’s people going up. The Holy God comes and hears the glorified prayers of His people. The smoke reminds us that those incense fires are burning, surrounding God not only with the praises of the angels but with the prayers of His people.

With this scene in view, we see how profound was the desecration of the Temple by Uzziah. God is serious about His purity and sinners enter his presence at great cost. We have no proper instincts about worship.

Calvin said of worship: “The more it pleases you, the more suspicious you should be of it.”

The Temple reminds us to be aware of how serious the Lord is about meeting us. Aaron’s sons who offered strange fire on the altar. The Lord is not an indulgent grandfather.

The Sinfulness of Man: “Woe is me”

Isaiah is humbled, overwhelmed with a sense of his unworthiness.

“I am a man of unclean lips.” The lepers would cry: “Unclean!” As Isaiah hears the seraphim praising God, and as he thinks of Uzziah dead from leprosy, Isaiah is saying, “My lips are leperous. I cannot praise God. I cannot enter his presence, because I am a leper.”

Leprosy for Isaiah represents the corruption of God’s people. Increasingly weakened, and deformed, and corrupted. Increasingly shunned by mankind. Stricken by God. This is how Isaiah is analyzing his own sinful condition before the Lord. It’s not just Uzziah who was a leper, but I am a leper.

It isn’t incidental that Scripture records that the leprosy broke out on the forehead of Uzziah. The priest who ministered to God at the altar wore a miter on his head with the words, “Holiness to the Lord.” Uzziah had the evidence of his corruption on his forehead.

There is nothing Isiah tries to do to improve himself. He recognizes his helplessness in his sin, just as a leper is helpless to help himself.

The Seriousness of Salvation

Salvation is God’s action. Lepers can only be helped by a God who comes to them.

Which altar? The altar of burnt offering outside or the altar of incense inside? This is the altar of incense, the place where Isaiah stood in sin is the place where God begins to redeem him. The coal touches his lips to atone for his sin and forgive his guilt. There is forgiveness and atonement only in the action of God, the mercy of God, the deliverance of God.

Isaiah stands with nothing to offer God except his sin.

Normally we think of atonement relative to the altar of burnt offering. But in Numbers 16, with reference to the sin of Korah, it was the altar of incense.

But the fullness of salvation hasn’t come yet. God is yet to do something for his people according to v. 10. “The seed of Holiness” is yet to be planted, which is revealed in Isaiah 53. We need to walk through Isaiah 53 with Uzziah in the back of our minds to understand something more of the Servant that God sends.

Isaiah 52:13 “He shall be high and lifted up,” not Uzziah

Isaiah 52:15: “So shall he sprinkle many nations,” as a Priest-King. This is part of why God said in the OT that his kings could not go into the Temple. Only Messiah would be a priest-king. Uzziah by going into the Temple was declaring himself to be Messiah. God says, “No you are not. You are a sinner.”

Isaiah 52:14 “Many were astonished at you.”
Isaiah 53:2-3 “No beauty, acquainted with sickness.”

Is there a sense in which it could be said that God has stricken his own Son with the same thing he smote Uzziah. Jesus became a leper for lepers? Surely he has borne our sickness. Jesus was not literally afflicted with the disease of leprosy, but just as Uzziah the good king was afflicted with leprosy to show the people the sinfulness of sin, so we must think of Jesus as stricken with leprosy so that we can see the depths of what he bore for our sins.

He who had been seated on the Throne, high and lifted up, with seraph singing “Holy, Holy, Holy,” that One has become so corrupt that we cannot look at him. We turn away, and the seraph cover their eyes. We cannot look upon him because of the horror of the sin that he took upon himself, the “leprosy” of every one of His people.

Isaiah 53 celebrates that Jesus became our substitiute. He took the sinner’s place. He entered in to the place where Uzziah had gone as a leper. 2 Chronicles 26 tells us Uzziah was “cut off.” Isaiah 53 says that Messiah was “cut off” because he had become the sin bearer.

Isaiah 53:4 “stricken” and “smitten” are words used throughout the OT to describe lepers.

This is a picture of what it cost Jesus to save sinners. It was his bleeding and dying that makes possible at last for our healing to be complete.

Now we can call God “Father,” for in a sense, for a time God lost his Father, speaking metaphorically. Do you see the love of the Savior in this? Do you see what it cost? Do you see what it takes for sin to be forgiven?

Isaiah 53:12a Here is our King victorious over sin and death, a picture of the resurrected Christ as King

Isaiah 53:12b Here is our Priest-King, bearing the sins of His people, making intercession for transgressors. He not only died once for all to bear our sins, but he ever lives to make intercession. This is a wonderful promise. His wounds plead for us before the throne of grace. We need to be encouraged in the struggle with sin that he ever lives to intercede for us.