Holy, Holy, Holy: The Holiness of God

In the whole of the Old and New Testaments, only one attribute of God is ever lifted to the third degree. You will not read that God is love, love, love. You will not read that He is mercy, mercy, mercy. There is one attribute, and only one, that the seraphim cry out in three. Holy. Holy. Holy.

And the place they cry it from is not a quiet study. It is the throne room of heaven. The pillars are shaking. The room is filling with smoke. A man who has spent his life as a prophet of the living God falls on his face and says he is undone. He is ruined. Because he has caught a glimpse of the holiness of the Lord.

When was the last time the holiness of God did anything to you? When was the last time it stopped you in your tracks, sobered your speech, drove you to your knees? If our God is the same God Isaiah saw, the right response is not a casual nod. The right response is the dust on your face.

Four moments move through the passage: the vision of holiness, the verdict on sin, the cleansing of the sinner, and the sending of the servant. All of it flows from one truth. The Lord is holy.

The Vision of Holiness (vv. 1–4)

Notice how the chapter opens. “In the year of King Uzziah’s death.” That is not a throwaway timestamp. Uzziah had reigned in Judah for fifty-two years. Half a century of relative stability. He was the only king most people had ever known. And now he is dead. The throne in Jerusalem is empty.

Isaiah looks up. There is another throne, and that throne is not empty. Adonai is still seated. He is still high. He is still lifted up. His robe alone fills the room. The earthly king is gone. The heavenly King has not moved one inch.

Now look at the seraphim. The word means burning ones. These are creatures of fire that stand in the immediate presence of God, and even they cannot stand uncovered. With two wings they cover their face. With two wings they cover their feet. Only two wings are used to fly. Four wings out of six are dedicated to a posture of holy reverence. If the sinless seraphim must shield themselves from the unmediated presence of Yahweh, what business do we have approaching Him casually?

Then comes verse 3. The seraphim are calling back and forth, one side and then the other. “Holy, Holy, Holy, is Yahweh of hosts.” Three times. Hebrew uses repetition for the superlative. To say something twice is to say it is very. To say it three times is to take it to the highest degree the language can reach. The seraphim are not stumbling over a word. They are placing the holiness of God at a height nothing else in the universe touches.

So what is holiness? The word at its root means cut off, separated, set apart. God is utterly other. He is not us with the volume turned up. He is not the best of human attributes scaled to infinity. He is in a category of His own. High, lifted up, and unlike anything else that exists. The whole earth is His, but He is not the earth.

Think about standing on the shore at low tide. Because of the way the continental shelf is here, you can walk out quite a long ways out on the flats and feel like you have a handle on the ocean. You can pick up shells, watch the small fish dart around your feet. The water seems manageable. Then you stand there as the tide turns. It comes in and keeps coming in. By the time you have backed up to the dunes, that shoreline you walked on is gone. Six, seven feet of water now sit where your feet stood. The ocean did not change. Your sense of the ocean changed.

That is what happens to Isaiah in chapter 6. The God on the throne in verse 1 is the same God Isaiah has prophesied for years. But Isaiah has been walking on the flats. Now the tide comes in. And the man who has spoken oracles of the Lord falls on his face.

Is your God big enough to undo you? Or have you walked on the flats so long you have started to believe the ocean is shallow? There is a kind of Christianity in our day that speaks of God as a buddy. A coach. A therapist who validates your choices. That is not the God of Isaiah 6. The God of Isaiah 6 sits on a throne high and lifted up, and makes the doorposts shake. The way we pray reveals who we think we are praying to.

The Verdict on Sin (v. 5)

Look at the words Isaiah uses. “Woe is me.” Isaiah is a prophet. Isaiah has pronounced woe before. Open the first five chapters of this book and you will see him pronouncing woe on the wicked. Six woes Isaiah pronounces on others before chapter 6. In chapter 6, the seventh woe falls on Isaiah himself.

“I am ruined.” The Hebrew word means cut off, undone, destroyed. Isaiah is not saying he feels embarrassed. He is saying he is finished. The same word is used elsewhere of cities being silenced, of people being struck dumb in death. Isaiah has caught a glimpse of holiness, and the only honest thing he can say about himself is that he is dead on his feet.

Notice the specific sin that comes to mind. “I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.” Why lips? Because Isaiah is a prophet. The lips are his instrument. He has stood in the public square and spoken for God. And now, in the presence of the One he has been speaking for, he discovers that his most sanctified body part is filthy. The very tool he uses for ministry is unclean.

This is what holiness does to honest people. It does not make them feel a little behind. It exposes them at their best point. Whatever you think you are good at, holiness will find the dirt in it.

That is who Isaiah is standing in front of. A God whose eyes are too pure to look on evil. And Isaiah is a man whose lips have spoken evil, even if only in the smallest measure compared to the rest of Judah.

You cannot get the gospel right if you do not get sin right. And you will not get sin right until you stand in front of the holiness of God. Light a man up with the holiness of God and his sin comes screaming out from every corner of his life. The man who feels his sin lightly does so because he has looked at God lightly.

Picture a clean white shirt. Hang it in your closet. Look at it under the closet light, and it looks white. Pull it out into the kitchen, and it still looks white. Take it out into the noonday sun in July, and you start to see the small stains. The smudge of coffee. The thin yellow ring under the collar. The shirt has not changed. The light has changed. This is what Isaiah experiences. He has not gotten worse between chapter 5 and chapter 6. He has stepped into a different light. The holiness of God is the noonday sun for the soul.

When was the last time your sin made you say, “Woe is me”? Not, “That was unfortunate.” Not, “I will try to do better.” Woe. Isaiah saw the King and said his lips would be the death of him. Until the holiness of God starts to feel like the noonday sun on your soul, you will keep treating your sin like a closet shirt. White enough. Not so bad.

The Cleansing of the Sinner (vv. 6–7)

Isaiah is on the floor. He has just confessed his ruin. And the response from heaven is not, “Yes, you are correct, you may leave now.” The response from heaven is movement. A seraph flies. He goes to the altar. He picks up a live coal with tongs. He brings it to the prophet.

Pay attention to where the coal comes from. The altar. In the temple, the altar was the place of sacrifice, where blood was shed and atonement was made. The fire on that altar was never the prophet’s fire. It was the fire of God. And from that fire, a coal is lifted, and it is applied to the very part of Isaiah that stood condemned.

The lips that were unclean are touched by fire from the altar. And the seraph speaks. “Your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is atoned for.” Two things happen. The guilt is removed. The sin is covered. Both passive verbs. Isaiah does not lift a finger. He does not reach for the coal. He does not climb to the altar. The fire comes to him. The cleansing is given, not earned.

This is the gospel in shadow. The holiness of God does not destroy the sinner who casts himself before that throne. The holiness of God provides the means by which that sinner is made clean. The same God who made Isaiah cry woe sends a coal from His own altar to take it away.

Imagine a courtroom. The defendant is guilty. He has heard the verdict from his own lips. He has confessed it. The judge takes off his robe, walks down from the bench, picks up the gavel, and strikes himself with the sentence. Then he walks back, sits back down, and pronounces the defendant clean. That is closer to what is happening here than any of us are comfortable admitting. The holiness of God demands that sin be paid for. The holiness of God supplies the payment. The same throne that condemns is the throne that cleanses. There is an altar, and there is a coal from that altar. His name is Jesus Christ.

Has the coal touched your lips? Some have been in church their whole lives and have never had a “Woe is me” moment. They skipped right past verse 5 because lying on the floor was uncomfortable. So they also skipped verse 6. The cleansing comes after the confession. The fire goes to the lips that admit they are unclean. Stop trying to clean yourself up before you come to God. Isaiah did not clean himself up. He confessed. The seraph did the work. If you have been waiting to feel good enough before you come to Christ, you are waiting on the wrong qualification. Come unclean. Come ruined. The altar still has a coal on it.

The Sending of the Servant (v. 8)

Notice the order of the chapter. Vision, then verdict, then cleansing, then call. The Lord does not say, “Whom shall I send,” in verse 1. He says it in verse 8. After the throne. After the woe. After the coal. The man God sends is the man God has first humbled and forgiven.

Notice also the question itself. “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” There is a plural in there. Us. The older commentators, men like Gill and Henry, saw the Trinity peeking through that pronoun, and they were not wrong to. The thrice-holy God, Father, Son, and Spirit, is consulting on the mission. This is not a small errand. Heaven is mobilizing.

Isaiah does not ask for the job description. He does not ask what’s in it for him. He does not ask whether he is qualified. The man whose lips were unclean five verses ago, the man who said he was ruined, stands up and says, “Here am I. Send me.”

The holiness of God, properly seen, properly felt, properly applied, does not freeze a man in place. It moves him. The same holiness that flattened Isaiah in verse 5 launches him in verse 8. A clean man with a coaled lip is a man who has something to say.

That is the same logic as Isaiah 6. The holiness of God is not just a doctrine to admire from a distance. It is a summons. The God who is holy makes His people holy. And His people, made holy, are sent. Not because they are now sinless. They are not. But because they have been touched by the coal, and they have something to declare.

There is a moment in the life of a young man when he stops being a boy and starts being a man. Often it has nothing to do with age. It has to do with a moment when something larger than him hits him hard, and when he gets back up, he gets up different. His small concerns are gone. He has a charge. Isaiah goes through that in chapter 6. The boy who was full of woe stands up a man with a calling. The holiness of God does that. It will not leave you the way it found you.

The holiness of God has implications for what comes out of a believer’s mouth. Isaiah’s lips were the issue, and Isaiah’s lips were the answer. After the coal, his lips became the means God used to send His Word into Judah. There are men who have never heard a faithful word about Jesus Christ in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the waiting room. The God who cleansed His people’s lips did not do it so they could keep them shut.

The call is not just to the public square. There may be a child in the home. A grandchild. A neighbor. A coworker. Someone who needs to hear that there is a coal on the altar of heaven that takes iniquity away. The seraph touched those lips. They are not our own anymore.

The Gospel

If you are reading this and have never been brought to verse 5, you have not yet met the God of the Bible. You may have met a god who shrugs at sin. You may have met a god who hands out participation trophies. But you have not met the God of Isaiah 6.

The holiness that drove Isaiah to the floor will one day drive every soul to the floor. Some will fall in this life, confess their ruin, and be cleansed by the coal. Others will fall on the day of judgment and find no coal coming from the altar. The same holiness that saves the penitent will consume the proud. There is no third option.

The altar Isaiah saw was a shadow. The fire on that altar pointed forward to a day when a Lamb would be laid on a wooden altar outside Jerusalem, and the fire of the wrath of God would burn against Him until the price was paid. Jesus Christ took the coal. He took the burning. He took the iniquity that should have ruined every one of us. And on the third day He came up from the grave with that work finished.

So when you read in Isaiah 6 that the seraph said, “Your iniquity is taken away and your sin is atoned for,” understand what made those words possible. The cross of Jesus Christ. The holiness of God did not get cheaper at Calvary. It got fully satisfied there. And anyone who casts themselves on Christ will hear those very words pronounced over their soul.

Behold, this has touched your lips. Your iniquity is taken away. Your sin is atoned for. Come to Him.