The Holy One Comes Down

Isaiah’s book is full of comfort. It is where we get ‘they will mount up with wings like eagles,’ and ‘a child is born,’ and ‘by His stripes we are healed.’ But before any of that, in chapter 6, Isaiah is given a single overwhelming vision, and it is not gentle. He sees the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, the train of His robe filling the temple, and around Him burning creatures who cannot look at Him – they cover their own faces with their wings. And the only words spoken in the throne room are three: Holy, holy, holy.

The word translated holy, qadosh, does not mean kind or loving first. It means set apart, of another order, unapproachable on common terms. The seraphim are not describing how good God is at being God. They are crying out that He is unlike everything – that there is a gulf between Him and the room. And the doorposts shake at the sound, and the temple fills with smoke, as if the building itself cannot hold what is being said.

Isaiah’s response is the only honest one. He does not feel inspired. He feels ruined. ‘Woe is me, for I am ruined, because I am a man of unclean lips.’ This is the first thing the holiness of God does to a person who actually sees it: it does not flatter him. It shows him, in one second, the distance between what God is and what he is. Before Isaiah can be useful, he has to be undone.

In the buildings where spacecraft are assembled, there are rooms called cleanrooms – sealed chambers where the air is filtered hundreds of times an hour, where a single dust particle can ruin an instrument bound for another planet. You do not walk into one. You are gowned, gloved, masked, and passed through an air shower first, because nothing common is allowed near the thing being made pure. The barrier is not cruelty. It is the only way the holy work survives contact with ordinary hands.

Isaiah is standing in something like that, except the room is the throne of God and the unclean thing is him. He knows it instantly. He does not need a list of his sins read aloud; the holiness in the room is the list. ‘I am a man of unclean lips.’

Then something happens that no cleanroom protocol allows. One of the seraphim flies down with a glowing coal lifted off the altar and presses it to Isaiah’s mouth – the burning thing touches the unclean thing. And instead of destroying him, it cleanses him: ‘your iniquity is removed and your sin is atoned for.’ The barrier did not come down because Isaiah scrubbed himself clean enough to cross it. The fire came to him.

An eighth-century BC prophet in Jerusalem, called in the year King Uzziah died through the throne-room vision of chapters 6. He prophesied across the reigns of several kings of Judah while Assyria swallowed the north. More than any other prophet, he names God ‘the Holy One of Israel’ – and more than any other, he sees that Holy One coming down: as a child born, a Branch from Jesse’s stump, and the Lord who hosts a feast where death itself is swallowed.