Someone has described God in these words: "God is over all things, under all things, outside all things, within but not enclosed, without but not excluded, above but not raised up, below but not depressed, wholly above presiding, wholly beneath sustained, wholly without embracing and wholly within filling."
Another has exclaimed at the contemplation of God's majesty, "All eloquence is dumb." God is always greater than anything that can be said about Him.
No language is worthy of Him. He is more sublime than all sublimity; loftier than all loftiness; profounder than all profundity; more splendid than all splendor; greater than all majesty; more merciful than all mercy; more just than all justice.
Isaiah recorded the Word of the Lord, "Lift up your eyes on high and behold who has created these things that bringeth out their host by number. He calleth them all by name, by the greatness of his might so that he is strong in power, not one faileth" (Isaiah 40:26). Isaiah, inspired by the Holy Spirit described the stars, the galaxies, the sun, the moons, the spaces above as sheep upon the blue-green pastures of the night and God as the Shepherd.
If we cannot grasp it, at least we can try to imagine the Almighty God whom Isaiah saw moving across the mighty vastness of the spaces between the stars and the galaxies, leading the heavenly flock of shining sheep, calling them all by name and keeping them in place by the greatness of His power.
Isaiah heard the seruphim crying, "Holy, Holy, Holy." Here is the one thing that becomes any of us, that is to cover our face and to kneel in adoring wonder. I shall try to break down this word holy, at least a little, and as I respectfully stand on the shore, point at least to the vast ocean of truth that it contains. The word holy is attributed to the Lord of Hosts, but it is more than an adjective which describes God, more than an attribute of God. It is an ecstatic ascription of glory to the Triune God. Among other things it means moral purity.
The man God uses is a man of vision. The first vision any man must have is the vision of God, not a vision of the field or the need, or the lost. If we see the lost before we see this Holy God, the gospel we take to them will be an inferior kind of gospel. But we must see God first and be overcome with the vision of His moral purity, His absolute moral purity - rightness, cleanness, faultlessness, perfection - which tends to give us a feeling of absolute profaneness.
For any advanced or lofty Christian experience, any satisfying and lasting Christian service, we must become smitten and beaten down, defeated and overcome with a sense of the holiness of God Almighty. Once we have seen the holiness of God, we will never talk about our own holiness. We will seek to be like Him, but be blissfully unconscious as we grow in His likeness. The man who is pre-occupied with his own holiness or the holiness of any creature has never had a satisfying vision of the All Holy God. Our understanding is baffled and we become speechless in the presence of this inexpressible mystery - there is something fearful here and portentous, dreadful and terrifying. "Our God," says the Bible, "is a consuming fire ... It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God ... Who among us shall dwell with eternal burnings and who among us shall dwell with everlasting fire?" Here this does not refer to hell, but to God, our everlasting habitation.
The God whom we serve in this day is a nice, friendly God, somewhat like a very much enlarged movie star that we can get in touch with, or like our old great grandfather projected upward into infinity (if indeed we allow ourselves in this shallow age to think of infinity). I believe that we will have a holier, a deeper kind of Christianity if we experience a vision of God, if we behold God as He is in His majesty. Before you go out into any kind of Christian service, take time to seek the face of God.
God is actively hostile to evil. You and I excuse sin and shrug it off by giving it nice names borrowed from psychiatry and quack psychology. But God says that sin is sin. God is still infinitely holy. And today we are likely to lose God in this awful hour. Our organizations and our busyness and our promotion of big things may easily cause us to forget that there's only one great Star, that there's only One worthy of our loyalty and devotion: and that is the Triune God.
When this man of God saw this great vision of God, Isaiah experienced self-depreciation to the point of total dis-evaluation. What we need is self-depreciation, although the world says we need self-confidence, self-reliance. Before God we are nothing. Isaiah said, "I am undone." This astonished, awe-struck prophet sank down and his world was filled with a vast and eternal whiteness against which all things looked soiled and every sin looked scarlet. Isaiah's soul became undone, unbuttoned. He fell apart and said, "I'm finished."
Now who was this man - a thief, an idolator, a liar,a murderer, a drunkard? No, the man Isaiah, like Moses, was a member of the royal family - he was a cousin of the king and had been brought up near the court of Uzziah. He was a man of considerable ability. This man Isaiah was also a great poet, one who ranks along with Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe. And yet this man wasn't ready to write. He wasn't ready to put down that marvellous book that the ages have drunk out of like a fountain because he said, "I have seen God, and I'm undone." He had been circumcised the eighth day, according to the Levitical law. He was a good man, he was a religionist. He belonged to something, but that wasn't enough.
I'd like to comfort all of you young people. I could tell you just to believe in Christ and everything will be all right. But I must tell you this, young men and women, you must be undone before God can use you to any degree. You must be undone by a vision of God which is followed by a vision of yourself. If you see yourself before you see God, you will fill your own vision; but if you see God first and then see yourself, the result will be that you will be undone.
Until we reach that place, I don't think we're prepared at all to go out into God's service. This idea that you get converted on Wednesday, give your testimony on Thursday, enter Bible school on Friday, and three years later go out to the field: I think it's all upside down. And I think it is raising a generation of dwarfed Christians. I believe that we ought to tarry until we have met God in the crisis of terror and undoneness, until we fall apart at the seams, until we know that the best we have is only uncleanness. Then perhaps the seraph will fly with a coal from off the altar.
The best of men have all felt their uncleannesss - Abraham, Job, David, Daniel, Peter, Paul. Bishop Ussher (a holy man) used to go down Saturday at noon by the riverside and, using a log for an altar, used to kneel and bewail his personal uncleanness half the afternoon before he would dare enter the pulpit on Sunday morning. That kind of frankness and realism is dear to the heart of God. I believe that our uncleannesss is as real as it was back there but our awareness of that uncleanness is what we lack. We have Isaiah's uncleanness without Isaiah's awareness. And this gives us a certain mistaken conception of ourselves. It creates a false assurance.
I recommend that you pray three prayers: "0h God, show me Thy glory. Oh, God, show me myself. Oh, God, show me the need of the world."
It was after Isaiah had confessed his uncleanness that God said, "This coal has touched thy lips." Listen to me, did you ever stop to think that when a coal so hot that a seruphim had to use tongs to handle it, when a coal so blazing fiery hot as that touched the prophet's lips, do you think that was pleasant? It's never a pleasant experience to have a hot coal burn a fleshly heart. There will be a moment of terror and pain, but it will soon be over and we'll have restored to us what the old writers called "cleanness, a restored moral innocency."
Then we can go out to our service for God with two wonderful thoughts in our mind: that we're no good, and that we're unclean; and yet somehow, wonder of wonders, we're all so clean! We know we're unclean, but at the same time we have received restored moral innocence by the blood of the Lamb and the fire from off the altar.
May God lead us to that place and give us the courage to seek this three-fold vision: God, self and the world - in that order.
link
No comments:
Post a Comment