The Rest of the Commission

Opening tension

Most of us learned Isaiah 6 as a recruiting text.

It has a vision, a confession, a forgiveness, a question from God and a volunteer, and “Here am I. Send me!” has closed a great many missionary appeals.

The chapter has thirteen verses. The line on the banner is verse 8. The job description God gives the volunteer takes up the last five, and it is one of the hardest assignments ever given to a human being: go and speak, and your speaking will leave them deafer than it found them. Isaiah asks the only question a pastor could ask. How long? The answer is a stump.

Where this sits in Isaiah

Jeremiah and Ezekiel open their books with their calls. Isaiah waits until chapter 6, and the placement matters.

Chapters 1 to 5 are an indictment. They open with God complaining that the ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s manger, “but Israel does not know; My people do not understand” (1:3). Hold on to those two verbs, knowing and understanding; they come back in 6:9. Chapter 5 then pronounces a string of woes on the people: in the Hebrew text there are six, at verses 8, 11, 18, 20, 21 and 22. The next time the word appears, the prophet says it about himself: “Woe is me” (6:5). Hebrew uses a slightly different interjection in 6:5 than in chapter 5, so do not press the wordplay into a pun. The movement from them to me is visible either way.

Whether chapter 6 records Isaiah’s first call is a real question. Isaiah 1:1 places his visions in the reign of Uzziah as well as his successors, so he may already have been active. Some read chapter 6 as the inaugural call placed here for theological reasons; others as a later, specific commission. Do not settle it from the pulpit. The sermon does not depend on it.

What the sermon does depend on is what follows. From 6:1 the book speaks in the first person for several chapters, a block often called Isaiah’s memoir. Its first scene after the commission is chapter 7: Isaiah meets King Ahaz with a word from God, and Ahaz will not have it. “If you do not stand firm in your faith, then you will not stand at all” (7:9). The first hearer of the new commission does not hear. The block closes in 8:16 to 18 with the testimony sealed among a handful of disciples, Isaiah waiting for the LORD “who is hiding His face from the house of Jacob”, and saying, “Here am I, and the children the LORD has given me as signs.”

So the book shows the commission working within two chapters. A king refuses, a small circle keeps the word, and the prophet’s “Here am I” comes back with his children beside him.

The year the king died

Isaiah dates the vision by a death. It is worth knowing whose.

Uzziah, called Azariah in 2 Kings, reigned fifty-two years (2 Kings 15:2). Chronicles credits him with victories and building, and says “his fame spread as far as the border of Egypt, for he had become exceedingly powerful” (2 Chronicles 26:8). His death is usually placed around 740 BC, give or take a few years depending on the chronology.

Then Chronicles tells the end. “But when Uzziah became powerful, his arrogance led to his own destruction” (26:16); the Hebrew says, more physically, that his heart was high. He went into the temple to burn incense on the altar of incense, eighty priests went in after him, he raged at them with the censer in his hand, and a skin disease broke out on his forehead in front of the altar. He lived out his life in a separate house, “cut off from the house of the LORD” (26:21), and was buried “in a field of burial that belonged to the kings, for the people said, ‘He was a leper’” (26:23).

Three cautions. Kings says only that “the LORD afflicted the king with leprosy until the day he died” (2 Kings 15:5); the incense story belongs to Chronicles, written centuries later. Isaiah mentions none of it. And the disease is not necessarily leprosy in the modern sense; the Hebrew word covers the conditions set out in Leviticus 13.

Still, the two scenes sit close together in the canon, and the Chronicler invites the comparison by naming “the prophet Isaiah son of Amoz” as the historian of Uzziah’s reign (26:22). In Chronicles a king whose heart is high walks into the heikhal, the main hall of the temple, sure of his right to be there, and is hurried out unclean. In Isaiah a man stands in the heikhal, sees the Lord high and lifted up, says he is unclean, and is cleansed. Ancient readers noticed: the Aramaic paraphrase known as Targum Jonathan renders 6:1 as the year King Uzziah “was smitten with the leprosy.” Present this as the Bible placing two scenes side by side, not as something Isaiah says.

One resonance, labelled as such: Leviticus 13:45 tells the person with the disease to “cover his mouth and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean!’” Isaiah’s first words about himself concern his lips and his uncleanness. No biblical author draws the line.

The wider world. In 745 BC Tiglath-pileser III took the Assyrian throne, and within a few years Assyria was campaigning in the west. Samaria fell in 722. In 701 Sennacherib invaded Judah; his annals claim forty-six of Hezekiah’s walled towns, and the siege of Lachish was carved on the walls of his palace at Nineveh. “Until the cities lie ruined” (6:11) began to come true in Isaiah’s lifetime. Babylon completed the emptying a century later.

A plaque, used with care. The Israel Museum holds an Aramaic stone plaque, dated by its script to around the turn of the era, recording that the bones of Uzziah, king of Judah, were brought there and are not to be opened. Centuries later someone moved his remains and still knew who he was. The plaque does not locate his grave and adds nothing to the account of his disease.

The seraphim, and how much we can say

This is the only passage in the Bible where seraphim appear in God’s presence, and the preacher has to resist filling in what Isaiah leaves out.

What is defensible: the word is formed from the Hebrew verb “to burn”, and “burning ones” is a fair gloss. The same noun names a kind of snake. In Numbers 21:6 the LORD sends “venomous snakes” among the people, and the Hebrew calls them seraph snakes; in 21:8 Moses is told to “make a fiery serpent”, literally to make a seraph. Deuteronomy 8:15 remembers the wilderness “with its venomous snakes”, again seraph snakes. And twice in Isaiah the word describes a “flying serpent” (14:29; 30:6). So Isaiah’s own book uses the word of a winged serpent.

What Isaiah describes is different. His seraphim have faces and feet, at least one has a hand (6:6), they speak, and each has six wings. Some scholars compare them with winged-serpent figures in ancient Near Eastern art, including seals from Judah. That is a possible background and remains a reconstruction. The text never calls them serpents, and it never calls them angels either.

What the text cares about is the wings. Two cover the face, two cover the feet, two are for flying. The creatures closest to the throne spend two thirds of their wings not looking and not being looked at. If the burning ones cover their faces, Isaiah’s terror in verse 5 is simply accurate. And it is one of the burning ones who carries the burning coal to his mouth.

Language notes

All verifiable, none requiring a speculative etymology.

The king and the King. Verse 1 opens with “King Uzziah”. Verse 5 ends with “my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of Hosts.” The same Hebrew word stands in both places. In the year the king died, Isaiah saw the King. That is the text, not a preacher’s flourish.

High and lifted up. The Hebrew pair in verse 1, “high and exalted” in the BSB, is a fixed phrase in Isaiah. In 2:13 it describes “the cedars of Lebanon, lofty and lifted up”, part of everything proud God will bring low so that “the LORD alone will be exalted in that day” (2:11, 17). In 57:15 it names God, “the One who is high and lifted up”, and in 52:13 the Servant, who “will be raised and lifted up and highly exalted.” English versions vary the wording and hide the link. One caution: in 6:1 the grammar allows the phrase to describe the throne rather than the Lord, and the Greek translation takes it that way.

Holy, three times. Hebrew intensifies by repetition, and triple repetition is rare but not unique. What is unique is that it is said of God, and only here and in the echo of Revelation 4:8. Isaiah’s favourite title for God, “the Holy One of Israel”, appears about twenty-five times in the book and only a handful of times in the rest of the Old Testament. Many commentators think this vision shaped it.

“I am ruined.” The verb in 6:5 can mean to be destroyed or to be silenced, and commentators divide. Both fit a man whose confession concerns his lips. You may offer both without choosing.

Removed and atoned for. In verse 7 the second verb, “atoned for”, is the one Leviticus uses for atonement throughout, the verb behind the Day of Atonement. The coal comes from the altar, the place of sacrifice.

The commands. Verses 9 and 10 are imperatives. “Be ever hearing” represents a Hebrew idiom that doubles the verb for emphasis: hear and keep hearing. Then three commands to the prophet: make the heart fat, make the ears heavy, smear the eyes shut. The BSB renders the first “Make the hearts of this people calloused.” Notice the order: heart, ears, eyes; then eyes, ears, heart. The sentence walks in and walks back out, and at its centre is the fear that they might “turn and be healed.”

How the New Testament received it. The Greek translation turned the commands into a description: the heart of this people “has grown callous”, the form quoted in Matthew 13:15 and Acts 28:27. John 12:40 makes it God’s own act: “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts.” Mark 4:12 ends “and be forgiven”, agreeing with the Aramaic Targum (“and repent, and it shall be forgiven them”) against the Hebrew “healed”. The apostles knew the text in more than one form. None of them used any form to soften it.

“This people.” God says “this people” in 6:9 and 10, and again in 8:6 and 8:11 to 12. In 1:3 he had said “my people.” Do not build a doctrine on a demonstrative, but let the congregation hear the distance.

The last verse. Verse 13 is difficult Hebrew. Even a tenth left behind will be burned again, like a terebinth or oak felled to its stump; then the last clause, “so the holy seed will be a stump in the land.” That clause is absent from the Greek translation, and some scholars regard it as a later addition; others defend it. It stands in the Hebrew text our Bibles translate, and it is the only word of hope in the commission. Preach it as the text, without hanging the whole sermon on a clause whose history is debated.

What most readers miss

God never calls Isaiah by name. Abraham, Moses and Samuel each say “Here I am” when God calls their names (Genesis 22:1; Exodus 3:4; 1 Samuel 3:4). Isaiah is not addressed at all. He overhears a question asked in the throne room, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for Us?”, and answers it. The closest parallel in the Old Testament is Micaiah’s vision in 1 Kings 22:19 to 22: the LORD on his throne, the host of heaven around him, a question (“Who will entice Ahab?”) and a volunteer, sent with a message that serves judgment. The plural “Us” is most naturally read against that picture of a heavenly court. Some read it as a plural of majesty, and later Christian readers heard the Trinity in it. Isaiah’s first hearers would have heard a king in council.

Forgiveness comes before the question. Isaiah is not cleansed because he volunteered, and the text does not say he is cleansed in order to be useful. The order is vision, confession, atonement, and only then the question. The man who says “Send me” is a man who has just been told his iniquity is gone.

His son carries the answer around Jerusalem. In 7:3 Isaiah takes his son Shear-jashub to meet Ahaz. The name means “a remnant will return”, and Isaiah explains it himself in 10:21 to 22. The Hebrew verb in the name is the verb of 6:10, “turn and be healed.” What the commission forecloses for “this people” is promised to a remnant, and the prophet walks the promise out to the king by the hand.

The book reverses the sentence. Later chapters take up the same vocabulary and turn it round: “the deaf will hear the words of the scroll, and out of the deep darkness the eyes of the blind will see” (29:18); “the eyes of those who see will no longer be closed, and the ears of those who hear will listen” (32:3); “the eyes of the blind will be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped” (35:5). The hardening of chapter 6 has a horizon, and the book knows it. Isaiah’s question in 6:11 was “How long?”, and the answer began with “until”.

The New Testament returns to it at decisive moments. Jesus quotes it to explain the parables (Matthew 13:14 to 15; Mark 4:12). John quotes it where Jesus’ public ministry ends, just after “He went away and was hidden from them” (John 12:36 to 41). Luke quotes it in the last scene of Acts (28:25 to 28). Whenever the early church had to explain why the gospel met refusal, it reached for these verses.

Why this matters: the verses the missions sermon leaves out

When we stop at verse 8, we send volunteers out expecting a harvest. Isaiah was sent out expecting the opposite, and he was told so on the first day.

That changes what faithfulness means. If the measure of a ministry is response, Isaiah failed. The king would not listen, the people would not turn, and the cities burned. But the chapter defines success before any of that happens: go and tell. He did.

Notice the shape of his reply. He does not ask why. He does not argue, as Moses and Jeremiah did. He asks, “How long, O Lord?” That is the language of lament; it is how Psalm 13 begins. It accepts the assignment and asks for its horizon. God’s answer is honest and terrible: until the cities are empty and the land desolate, and even the tenth that remains is burned again. Then the last clause. There is a stump, and the stump is holy seed.

Anyone who serves people who are not listening, including the parent of a grown child who has walked away, needs the second half of this chapter more than the first. The first tells you who sends you. The second tells you what it may look like, and what God is keeping alive underneath it.

Movements

The passage falls into four, and the turn comes in the middle of the third.

1. A throne in the year of a funeral (6:1–4). Establish the date and let it land. A king whose heart was high has died in isolation, unclean. Then Isaiah sees the King. Read the song of the seraphim slowly, and point out the covered faces. Keep the description where Isaiah keeps it: the robe, the wings, the voice, the shaking, the smoke. Resist architecture.

2. Undone, and touched (6:5–7). The first thing holiness does to Isaiah is silence him. He does not confess the people’s sin first; he says “I am a man of unclean lips” and only then “dwelling among a people of unclean lips.” The coal comes from the altar, and the word of forgiveness is spoken over him before he has done anything.

3. “Here am I,” and what came with it (6:8–10). This is the turn of the sermon. Let the congregation enjoy verse 8 for a moment, because it is glorious. Then keep reading. The volunteer is given a message that will make its hearers harder. Explain the commands honestly; do not rush to rescue God from them. Then show where chapters 1 to 5 have already placed the people: not knowing, not understanding.

4. How long? (6:11–13). The prophet’s question is the congregation’s question. The answer is until. Walk through the emptying slowly, then end the movement on the last clause, and on the picture of a cut oak putting up a shoot. Job knew the image: “there is hope for a tree: If it is cut down, it will sprout again” (Job 14:7).

From study to pulpit

On the seraphim. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “The word seraph comes from the Hebrew for ‘burn’; you could call them the burning ones. Elsewhere the Bible uses the same word for snakes, even a flying snake. But Isaiah describes creatures with faces and feet and hands, and six wings. And with four of those wings they cover their faces and their feet. The creatures closest to God cannot bear to look at him.”

On the hardening command. Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “I am not going to pretend verse 10 says something softer than it does. God tells Isaiah that his preaching will harden people’s hearts. But look at where this comes in the book. For five chapters God has been saying, Israel does not know, my people do not understand. They have heard and heard. What God does here is give them what they have already chosen. And even this has an end, because Isaiah asks how long, and God answers.”

On “How long?” Possible way to explain this to the congregation: “Isaiah does not ask God why. He asks God how long. That is a different prayer. ‘Why’ wants an explanation. ‘How long’ has already agreed to go, and is asking for the horizon. Some of you have been praying ‘why’ for years about someone you love. Isaiah’s prayer may be the more honest one.”

Theological implications

Holiness in this chapter is first God’s otherness, his kingship and his claim on everything: “all the earth is full of His glory.” It is dangerous to sinners. “No one can see Me and live” (Exodus 33:20) stands behind Isaiah’s terror.

The same holiness that endangers him cleanses him. The coal comes from God’s altar, is carried by God’s servant, and is applied at God’s initiative. Isaiah contributes a confession and nothing else.

The hardening is judicial: God gives a people over to the deafness they have practised. Scripture keeps that doctrine hard, and Paul speaks of those who “were hardened” (Romans 11:7). It also keeps it limited: “A hardening in part has come to Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in” (Romans 11:25). Isaiah’s “until” and Paul’s “until” belong together.

And the remnant is God’s work. The chapter does not say the faithful survive because they are faithful. It says the stump is holy seed, and 4:3 had already said that whoever is left in Jerusalem “will be called holy.” Holiness begins the chapter as the thing that threatens the prophet and ends it as the name of what God preserves.

Christological connection

Name the kind of connection you are making. This chapter has one that is explicit, which is unusual, so make the most of it and do not blur it with the weaker ones.

Explicit. “Isaiah said these things because he saw Jesus’ glory and spoke about Him” (John 12:41). The Greek says “his glory”; the BSB supplies “Jesus’” because the context requires it: they “did not believe in Him” (12:37), and many leaders “believed in Him” (12:42). John has just quoted Isaiah 6:10. The glory Isaiah saw on the throne, John says, was the glory of the Son. This is the New Testament’s own reading of the passage, and you may say so without hedging. Read it with John 1:14, “We have seen His glory”, and 1:18, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son… has made Him known.” If anyone asks: most modern editions read “because he saw”, the Byzantine text “when he saw.” Whose glory it was is the same in both.

Explicit, and more uncomfortable. Jesus applies verses 9 and 10 to the reception of his parables, and John to the refusal of his signs. The Lord Isaiah saw enthroned came in the flesh and met the deafness the commission foretold. He is the one on the throne and the one who was not heard.

Canonical. John quotes Isaiah 53:1 in 12:38, just before Isaiah 6:10. The Servant of 52:13 is described with the “lifted up” language of the throne vision, and the Greek of that verse says he will be “lifted up and glorified”, the two verbs John uses of the cross (John 12:23, 32). Several scholars, Richard Bauckham among them, argue that John read Isaiah 6 and 52 to 53 together, so that the glory Isaiah saw is the glory of the crucified one. Present it as a strong reading of John, not as something John states.

Theological. The coal from the altar cleanses a sinner by sacrifice, at God’s initiative, and Christian theology rightly hears the gospel in that pattern. The New Testament never cites 6:7, so preach it as a theological connection.

Canonical image. The stump of 6:13 and the “shoot from the stump of Jesse” in 11:1 share an image, not a word. Paul applies the “Root of Jesse” of 11:10 to Christ (Romans 15:12). No New Testament writer connects 6:13 to Christ.

Not warranted as Isaiah’s meaning. The Trinity in “holy, holy, holy” or in “Us”. The church has sung the seraphim’s song at the Lord’s Table for centuries and heard the Trinity in it. That is a theological reading from the far side of the New Testament, and a beautiful one. It is not what Isaiah understood, and it is not proof.

Contemporary application

Aim at two rooms at once.

For those who serve, and especially those who serve where almost nothing grows: this chapter was written for you. It does not promise results. It promises a God who is holy, a forgiveness that comes before the job, and a stump. If you have preached, taught or prayed for years with little to show, you are not outside Isaiah’s commission. You may be standing in the middle of it.

For the congregation as a whole: we are “this people” before we are anyone else. The hardening in Isaiah 6 happens to religious people who have heard for a long time. Hearing without understanding is a church problem before it is a problem out there. The question for most of us is not whether we have heard. It is whether hearing has become a habit that protects us from turning.

And for anyone who feels disqualified by what has come out of their own mouth: the coal went to the lips. God did not send a man with clean speech. He cleaned the speech of a man who knew it was unclean, and then sent him.

Illustration possibilities

Use the passage’s own images first: the hem of the robe that fills the hall, the covered faces, the coal carried with tongs, the cut oak.

If you go outside the text, keep it verifiable and label an analogy as an analogy. A cut tree putting up green shoots the next spring is something most people have seen, and Job 14:7 is Scripture’s own version. A servant of God whose fruit appeared only after they were gone would serve, if you can name a real, documented one. Do not invent a missionary.

Sermon dynamics

Congregational reading. Print or project verses 1 to 13 and have the congregation read verses 1 to 8 aloud together. Then keep going without comment and read 9 to 13 together as well. Many will expect to stop at “Send me!” Let them feel the moment they realise the reading has not ended.

Intentional silence. After “How long, O Lord?”, stop for ten to fifteen seconds before reading God’s answer. Let the room ask the question with Isaiah.

Congregational question. “Would you still have said ‘Here am I’ if you had heard verses 9 to 13 first?” Ask it, and do not answer it.

Object lesson, used sparingly. A cut stump on the communion table, with a green shoot if you can find one. Name it only at the last clause of verse 13. If it feels contrived in your setting, leave it out.

Closing direction

End with the stump, not the volunteer.

The last thing the chapter shows is a felled tree in an emptied land, and God saying that its life is holy seed. The last thing the memoir shows is Isaiah standing with his children, the testimony sealed among a few disciples, waiting for a God who hides his face, and saying once more, “Here am I” (8:18). The volunteer of 6:8 did not become a failure. He became a man who kept the word through the burning.

Then take the congregation to John 12:41. Isaiah saw his glory. The one on the throne came down, spoke, and was not heard, and was lifted up.

If an appeal fits your setting, the door is the phrase at the centre of verse 10: “turn and be healed.” It is the one thing the hardened do not do, and it is still being offered to anyone in the room who has heard for a long time. Isaiah was sent to people who would not turn. Do not be one of them.

Sources & Further Study

The primary texts and ancient versions checked for this outline are listed under Sources and notes below. For further study:

• John N. Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah: Chapters 1–39, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1986). Careful and theologically rich.
• Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah, Old Testament Library (Westminster John Knox, 2001). On how chapter 6 functions in the book as a whole.
• H. G. M. Williamson, Isaiah 6–12, International Critical Commentary, Isaiah 1–27 vol. 2 (T&T Clark, 2018). The technical commentary, for testing the language notes and verse 13.
• J. Alec Motyer, Isaiah, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (IVP, 1999).
• Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1–39, Anchor Bible 19 (Doubleday, 2000). Useful on the historical setting.
• Sara Japhet, I & II Chronicles, Old Testament Library (Westminster John Knox, 1993). On the Chronicler’s Uzziah.
• Craig A. Evans, To See and Not Perceive: Isaiah 6.9–10 in Early Jewish and Christian Interpretation (JSOT Press, 1989). How verses 9 and 10 were read, softened and applied.
• D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 1991). On John 12:37–41.
• Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel (Eerdmans, 2008). On John reading Isaiah 6 and 52–53 together.