Isaiah 6:1-13 In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the LORD sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple.… This is not a story of individual experience only. Isaiah was a typical prophet with special duties, and, consequently, with special qualifications for their right discharge. But in many respects he is also representative of the faithful preacher of the Gospel and worker for Christ. In its inspirations, its aims and motives, its responsibilities and difficulties, the prophet's office was like that of Christ's servant everywhere, and from this record we may gather lessons of universal application. 1. The prophet must be a man whose soul is possessed with God, to whom God is a reality, not an abstraction, a living and present Friend, not a distant and unknown Ruler. There must be visions of God in the glory of His holiness as well as in the tenderness of His condescension, or there will be neither desire nor capacity to testify of Him. It is the pure in heart who thus see God, and even as Isaiah needed that the live coal from the altar should touch his lips and he should be cleansed from all iniquity, so must Christ's messenger know for himself the blessedness of that salvation which he preaches to others. This does not supersede the necessity for intellectual qualifications for the work. Impulse, however pure and noble, cannot fit a man for even the humblest work, much less for the noblest, the most difficult, the most responsible of all. God does lay His hands upon some whom the wisdom of this world would pronounce incompetent for the work. As in the case of Bunyan, the working of His grace in the heart may develop gifts of fancy or of eloquence which might else have lain dormant. 2. Of the special gift of inspiration which Isaiah enjoyed suffice it to say that if that is to be reduced to a "genius for righteousness" which he shared in common with the rest of the Jewish race, the unique character and supreme authority of the Bible are gone. Define inspiration how men will, it must, at all events, imply that God revealed His will to these prophets and seers by whom the Sacred Volume was penned, as He did not to the great poets and writers of the world, or this Book has no distinctive value. 3. The prophet must be a consecrated servant — one who lives not to do his own pleasure, but to glorify God. (J. G. Rogers, B. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. |
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