God is Holy! I Am (Not) Doomed
Photo image courtesy Pixabay
“It’s all over! I am doomed, for I am a sinful man. I have filthy lips, and I live among a people with filthy lips. Yet I have seen the King, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.”
– Isaiah 6:5 (NLT)
How can I dare to write to you about holiness? The prophet Isaiah heard the six-winged seraphim praise God’s holiness, saw God in His holiness, and didn’t expect to survive the encounter. When God allowed Isaiah to see Himself as He is, that vision forced Isaiah to see himself as he was: filthy in his own sin and living among people who were filthy in their own sin. “It’s all over! I am doomed!” is a contemporary read of Isaiah’s exclamation. “Woe is me! I am undone!” is the more traditional language.
Undone. Doomed. That’s how our humanness responds to encountering God. God created us in His image, and yet we remain so completely different from God that a face-to-face encounter with Him causes us to recoil in terror. God is greater than any greatness we can imagine, and God’s goodness exceeds anything our human moral codes can describe, or our human bodies can live out.
For Isaiah, living before Jesus was born, this was terrifying. God reassured him with a cleansing and an assignment. God sent a seraph to cleanse Isaiah by placing a burning coal to his “filthy lips.” He then charged Isaiah to tell the nation of Israel that they have brought their destruction on themselves. God also gives a peculiar encouragement: even though Israel will be struck down and left like a tree stump in the wilderness, that stump will sprout. Unholy “Israel’s stump will be a holy seed” that will bear fruit among all the nations. (Isaiah 6:13 NLT)
Through that holy seed, Jesus, we have been welcomed into God’s family as God’s own adopted children. But God also assures us that a day is coming when we will be face-to-face in his presence, and “we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” [CB1] (1 John 3:2, NLT) We will look on His holiness and live. We will, at last, be holy as He is holy.
Until then, we live as holy as our limited understanding and our human frailties allow. We pray for God’s wisdom and guidance. We seek God’s truth in His written Word that teaches us and in the living Word, Jesus, who has cleansed our lips and purified our hearts. We walk by the power of the Holy Spirit, who comforts, guides, and keeps us.
In Christ, you are not doomed. In Him, you will be holy, as God is holy.
God, you sent Jesus to this world so people here could survive seeing you and live with you as part of your household. Remind me every day that you want me to look on your face and live. Give me gratitude for every moment of my life that I am able to look on your face and live.
You cleansed Isaiah’s lips. Cleanse mine as well. Cleanse the thoughts of my heart and show your glory through my words and all of my life.
Questions for Reflection:
1. Why is holiness such a hard thing for us, as believers in Christ, to fully grasp?
2. Take a moment to ask God to help you to better identify with holiness and to make a conscious effort to seek it daily.
[CB1]NOTE: NLT does not capitalize pronouns related to God. I have capitalized elsewhere in the text to avoid confusion in references (is “he” God or Isaiah?)
