This week · Week 29 of 52
The Holiness of God
Before you know what God does, you must know that He is set apart.
Built on Isaiah 6:1-8. The vision that gives the church its clearest single picture of God's holiness: seraphim covering their faces, a threefold cry of 'holy', a threshold shaking, and a prophet undone before he is ever sent.
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Day 1
Holy, Holy, Holy
Loading Isaiah 6:3…
Hebrew has no simple grammatical way to say 'supremely' or 'most', so it repeats a word for emphasis. Scripture repeats holy twice elsewhere, of the temple and of the Sabbath, but only here and in Revelation 4:8 does anything get called holy three times. The seraphim are not being poetic. They are straining language to say something language struggles to hold.
Notice what the vision does to the room before it does anything to Isaiah. The doorposts shake and the house fills with smoke, and only then does Isaiah speak. Holiness is announced first as an objective fact about God, entirely apart from anyone's response to it. Isaiah's undoing in verse 5 is not the cause of God's holiness; it is the effect of having finally seen it clearly.
- Holiness is repeated because language cannot say it strongly enough.
- God's holiness fills the earth whether or not anyone notices.
- Seeing God rightly always exposes something in us first.
Holy God, I have grown too comfortable saying Your name. Let me see You as You are, high and lifted up, so that everything else in my life is measured rightly against You. Amen.