SPROUL: The darkest hour of this planet is foretold to us in the apocalypse of the New
Testament where we are told that in that last hour the bowls of divine wrath will be poured
out upon this planet, and we hear of this heavenly figure flying across the darkened
sky, announcing the final judgment of God with the repetition of one word, saying what?
“Woe, woe, woe!”
You don’t want to be around when that bird starts to sing.
But do you see what happens here in the sixth chapter of Isaiah, that one who is called
of God and set apart, whose words – the very words of God are placed in his mouth
– the first oracle that he pronounces is an oracle of doom upon himself.
“Woe is me!”
As soon as Isaiah sees the unveiled holiness of God, for the first time in Isaiah’s life,
he understands who God is; and the very second that Isaiah understood who God was, for the
first time in his life, he understood who Isaiah was.
And what came out of his mouth was something akin to a primordial scream, where he curses
himself.
“Woe is me, for I am undone!”
I know the more modern translations use “for I am ruined,” but I like this old one – “undone”
– for this reason: If we looked at what’s happening here through the glasses of modern
psychoanalysis, we could describe this experience that Isaiah relates as an experience of psychological
disintegration – that is dis-integration.
We use words to describe a person who is healthy.
We say that that person is whole.
He has everything together, and when we see somebody who is losing it, we say what?
He’s falling apart.
Isn’t it interesting that a synonym that we use for “virtue” in our language is
the word “integrity” – that is that we have everything about our lives meshed
together in a coherent and a consistent way.
Now ladies and gentlemen, here is the man who possesses the most integrity of the Jewish
people, who comes and gets one glimpse of the holiness of God, and he immediately suffers
disintegration.
He comes apart.
That’s what happens to people who catch a glimpse of the character of God because
do you see that we spend our entire lives veiling ourselves from the true character
of God?
Because our natural bent, our natural inclination, beloved, is to hide ourselves from Him because
we know instinctively that as soon as the holy appears, it exposes and reveals anything
and anyone who is not holy by virtue of that standard.