2. " I am undone." — What gave Isaiah this feeling ? (l^-^irefe was the conviction of unworthiness. This man, who of all Israel seemed to be the purest and sweetest, is the
1 P. T. Forsyth.
ISAIAH 103
man that bows the lowest and is most convinced of sin. God's children need to learn that lesson too. He had done good work, but God saw that he could do better, and so convicted him of the comparative unworthiness of his past ministry. Thus it befell that the man by whom God had spoken through five chapters (if we take the prophecies in their order as they stand) was a man who confessed to having unclean lips.
(2) There was the conviction that God was near. The great God had come down from the heavens. The whole earth is full of God, all time, all space ; but now Isaiah felt the presence of the skirts of the Eternal falling upon him.
(3) There was the conviction of sin. Christmas Evans tells us in his diary that one Sunday afternoon he was travelling a very lonely road to attend an appointment in a village the other side of the slope, and he was convicted of a cold heart. He says, " I tethered my horse and went to a sequestered spot, where I walked to and fro in an agony as I reviewed my life. I waited three hours before God, broken with sorrow, until there broke over me a sweet sense of His forgiving love. I received from God a new baptism of the Holy Ghost. As the sun was westering, I went back to the road, found my horse, mounted it and went to my appointment. On the following day I preached with such new power to a vast concourse of people gathered on the hillside, that a revival broke out that day and spread through the whole Principality."
IL
" Because I am a man of unclean lips."
The ethical process by which, in the imagery of the vision, Isaiah's sense of sinfulness came home to him, is finely natural and simple. "^ It was at his lips that the consciousness of his impurity caught him. That, judged by our formulas and stand- ards, might seem a somewhat superficial conviction of sin. We should have expected him to speak of his unclean heart, or the total corruption of his whole nature. But conviction of sin, actual conviction of sin, is very regardless of our theories, and is as diverse in its manifestations as are the characters and records of men. Sin finds out one man in one place, and another in a
104 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
quite different spot, and perhaps the experience is most real when it is least theological. Isaiah felt his defilement in his lips, for suddenly he found himself at heaven's gate, gazing on "the glory of God, and listening to the seraphs' ceaseless song of , adoring praise. Isaiah loved God, and instinctively he prepared to join his voice to the seraphs' chant, but ere the harmony could pass his lips he caught his breath and was dumb. A horrible sense of uncleanlin,ess had seized him. His breath was tainted by his sin. He dare not mingle his polluted praise with the worship of that pure, sinless host of heaven. Oh, the shame and agony of that disability ! for it meant that he has no part or place in that great scene. He is an alien and an intruder. Its beauty and its sweetness are not for him. He belongs to a very different scene and a very different company. He is no inhabitant of heaven, no servant of God ; but a denizen of earth, and a companion of sinners. Down there, amid its squalor, and shame, and uncleanliness, is his dwelling-place, remote from heaven, and holiness, and God. " Woe is me ! because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." With that, the horror of his situation reached its climax. He stands there, on the threshold of heaven in full sight of God and of His holiness, dumb and praiseless, while all heaven rings and reverberates with the worship of its adoring hosts. The awful tremor of that celestial praise passed into Isaiah's frame, and it seemed like the pangs of instant dissolu- tion. He, a creature of God's, stands there in his Maker's presence, alone mute, alone refusing to chant his Creator's glory, a blot and blank in the holy harmony of heaven, a horrible and foul blemish amid the unsullied purity of that celestial scene. It seemed to Isaiah as if all the light, and glory, and holiness of heaven v/ere gathering itself into one fierce lightning fire of vengeance, to overwhelm and crush him out of existence.
IF It appears to me that up to this time profanity of language had been Isaiah's besetting sin. I should think that few will doubt that, when he says " I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips," he means to refer to a prevalence of profanity amongst his companions. Well, is it not the most natural explanation to believe that he had in his previous life given way to that sin, and now that is the sin that burns on his conscience ? I have more