Isaiah6chapter 6

Isaiah 6:1

In the year that king Uzziah died: The vision is dated with unusual precision to the year that king Uzziah died, a king whose long reign had made Judah prosperous and whose late presumption in burning incense himself had left him a leper to his death, so that the throne Isaiah sees vacant on earth is filled at once in the temple: the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, his train alone filling the whole house. John 12:41 reads this throne directly, these things said Esaias, when he saw his glory, and spake of him, the fourth Gospel's own claim about whose glory the prophet saw, stated here as the claim John makes rather than settled by this commentary. Delitzsch and Barnes both note the vision's placement after five chapters of oracles as the credentials of the voice that has already been speaking, shown last rather than first.

Isaiah 6:2-3

Seraphim appear here and at verse six and nowhere else in Scripture, a class of throne attendants distinct from the cherubim of Ezekiel and Genesis, and the six wings are apportioned with a meaning the older writers draw out: two covering the face because even these burning ones may not gaze directly on the glory, two covering the feet in humility, and two for flight, service and self-veiling held together in one creature. The cry they exchange, Holy, holy, holy, is the Hebrew's own way of marking a superlative by threefold repetition, and the older writers hear in it what later doctrine will call the Trinity, holiness attributed to one Lord under a triple cry, offered as a reading rather than a claim the seraphim themselves intended. The whole earth full of his glory extends the throne room's holiness outward, so that what fills the temple in the vision is stated as already true of the earth outside it.

Isaiah 6:4-5

The temple itself answers the seraphim's cry, the posts of the door shaking at the sound and the house filling with smoke, the same smoke that once filled the wilderness tabernacle when the Lord's glory took possession of it. Isaiah's own response is not wonder but a cry of ruin, Woe is me! for I am undone, a man of unclean lips who dwells among a people of unclean lips, the same organ the seraphim used to sing holiness now confessed as the prophet's point of greatest uncleanness. Barnes reads the confession as proportional to the vision, no one measures his own sin accurately until he has seen what holiness actually looks like.

Isaiah 6:6-7

One of the seraphim answers the confession before Isaiah asks for anything, flying to him with a live coal taken with tongs from the altar, the detail of the tongs noted by the older commentators as proof the coal is too holy even for a seraph's bare hand. The coal touches the very lips just confessed as unclean, and the word spoken over the act names both removal and cleansing in one sentence, thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged, atonement pictured as fire applied at the point of the specific sin named. Gill connects the altar coal to the whole sacrificial system standing behind it, the seraph's action a picture of what every offering on that altar was meant to accomplish.

Isaiah 6:8

Here am I; send me: The commission is offered to the room rather than to Isaiah by name, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us, the plural pronoun the older writers read alongside Genesis's let us make man as another place where God speaks of himself in the plural without further explanation given. Isaiah answers before the terms of the mission are stated, here am I; send me, volunteering into an assignment he does not yet know is one of the hardest given to any prophet. Calvin reads the eagerness itself as the fruit of the coal just applied, a cleansed man runs toward a commission a guilty one would have fled.

Isaiah 6:9-10

The commission itself reverses every expectation a volunteer might have: go and tell this people to hear without understanding and see without perceiving, a hardening the New Testament quotes more than almost any other Old Testament passage, verified at Matt 13:15 for the crowds' parables, John 12:40 for Israel's unbelief at the ministry's end, and Acts 28:27 for the same words closing the book of Acts over the Jewish leaders in Rome. Mark 4:12 and Luke 8:10 carry the same commission in shorter form at the same place in the Gospels, the hardening text standing at the hinge of the parables in three Gospels and at the closing scenes of two more books. The heart made fat and the ears made heavy is judicial blinding rather than accident, the older writers read it, a people who refused to see given over to not seeing so that they might not convert and be healed.

Isaiah 6:11-12

Isaiah's question is not whether the hardening will happen but how long it will last, Lord, how long?, and the answer given is total desolation rather than a fixed term, cities wasted without inhabitant, houses without man, the land utterly desolate. Verse twelve extends the desolation to exile, the Lord removing men far away and leaving a great forsaking in the midst of the land, language that reaches past the Assyrian crisis already near to the Babylonian captivity still a century off. Delitzsch reads the two verses together as the vision's own timetable, a judgment that does not lift within the prophet's lifetime or even within the book's own historical horizon.

Isaiah 6:13

The chapter's last verse refuses to let the desolation be the final word, promising a tenth that shall return and be eaten even after the first devastation, then reaching for a harder image still, a felled tree whose stump still carries life, as a teil tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them, when they cast their leaves. The remnant is named directly in the verse's last clause, so the holy seed shall be the substance thereof, a seed surviving inside the stump the way sap survives a tree stripped bare for winter. Henry and Barnes both read the verse as the hinge into the book's later branch and root images, a stump left standing here that chapter eleven will show putting out new growth.