This is the seventh in a series of postings looking at the meaning of Isaiah 6 for today; it began (here).In the last couple of postings in this series, we've dwelt on Isaiah's grand vision of God "high and lifted up," and now we come to the flip side—the human side. Isaiah's vision of himself and of his nation was as low as his vision of God was grand. It made him feel small and incredibly unworthy—the creature standing before its Creator. In ancient times, people feared the spiritual powers that they worshipped, and getting too close to those powers was literally life-threatening. Isaiah was a man of his times, and seeing God up close and personal drove him to the depths of fear. And being a man of his times, he thought not just about his own personal unworthiness but also about that of his people. If the lips reveal the true nature of the person and the nation, then he and his people were fearfully unclean. How can the impure stand in the presence of the Pure and Holy One? For Isaiah, he couldn't.
What do we do with this Isaiah's fear today? Should we share it? In colonial and post-colonial America, evangelical Christians certainly did. The most faithful of them constantly, sometimes even frantically took their spiritual temper to see if they had been saved or not. They worried that their relatives, friends, and neighbors had not been saved from hellfire. Preachers thundered from pulpits and people trembled at what they heard. In some circles today, the Christian life is still partly lived in a fear of damnation and hope of a salvation in the face of God's judgment and the prospect of life lived eternally in hell.
For others, we are learning what many learned before us, namely that in Jesus the name of the game has changed. The Creator is not an inimical, angry God casting the faithless into eternal torment. God, rather, is the One who shed the trappings of divinity to be one of us and reveal to us the profound love of God for creation and for us. In Christ, we are learning that compassion is far more powerful than fear. We should still fall on our knees in the presence of God but not in fear so much as in a profound love for the One who first loved us. Amen.
