Response and Responsibility
A lot of Christians love Isaiah 6, and this is because they stop reading before the story is over. Let me show you what I mean:
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Then one of the seraphim few to me, having in his hand a burning coal that he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth and said: “Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for.” (vv. 1–7)
Evangelicals love this text. It radiates the exaltation of God. It conveys a thrilling bigness. Then you have verse 8, which is a definite coffee-cup verse: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here am I! Send me.’” We absolutely love Isaiah 6:8. We romanticize it. So when we hear a sermon on missions, and the preacher has moved into leading a “Let’s do something good for the Lord” cheer, we feel the gravitational pull toward Isaiah 6:8: “Here am I! Send me.” It sounds gutsy, masculine. We can hear Braveheart’s guttural yawp in there. “Let’s do it! Let’s take it! Let’s go get ’em!”
We are as zealous about Isaiah 6:8 as we are oblivious of Isaiah 6:9. There is a roadblock waiting for us there: “And he said, ‘Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’” Do you see what is happening here? God says, “Here’s your ministry, Isaiah. Go tell them, ‘Keep on hearing but do not hear.’”
Experientially, we know exactly what this means. We have all at some point said the right words to people who simply are not hearing them. The phrase “It’s like talking to a brick wall” is common for a reason. One of my frustrations living in the Bible Belt is that the gospel and its ancillary truths have been so divorced from actual living that a lot of beautiful theology has become cliché. There is a sentimentalization of the faith that occurs when you sanitize the gospel of Christ crucified or sift it from the substance of the Christian religion. The result is a malleable Jesus, a tame Jesus. The result is, as Michael Spencer says, “a spirituality that has Jesus on the cover but not in the book.” When we dilute or ditch the gospel, we end up with an evangelicalism featuring special appearances by Jesus but the denial of his power (2 Tim. 3:5).
I meet a lot of people swimming neck deep in Christian culture who have been inoculated to Jesus Christ. They have just enough of him not to want all of him. When that happens, what you have are people who have been conformed to a pattern of religious behavior but not transformed by the Holy Spirit of God. This explains why we see a lot of people who know objective spiritual truths but in the end have failed to apply them in such a way that their lives demonstrate real change. They’re hearing, but they’re not hearing.
A really vivid way we see this occur at The Village is in response to what the staff jokingly calls my “State of the Union” addresses, in which I say to the congregation, “Hey, quit coming here. If you’re not serious, if you don’t want to plug in, if you don’t want to do life here, if you don’t want to belong, if you’re an ecclesiological buffet kind of guy, eat somewhere else.” And then people who are doing all of those things will sit there in the crowd and say, “Yeah! Get ’em. It’s about time someone said this.” I’m thinking, “I’m talking to you! You’re who I’m talking to.” It makes me want to pull my hair out. They hear the words coming out of my mouth, but they’re not listening.
God commands Isaiah, “Tell them to keep on seeing, but not to perceive.”
Have you ever come across someone who absolutely knows his life is a mess but cannot put the dots together to see that he’s a part of the issue? If you run into someone with a victim’s mentality, someone who is constantly leaving carnage in her wake, someone who has a new group of friends every twelve to fifteen months, someone who has story after story after story about how this person betrayed him and another person did him wrong, but he has no ability to see or comprehend that he is the common denominator, you’ve run into someone who can see but can’t perceive. Such people know their life is a mess, but they can’t figure out, “Hmm, I seem to be the major malfunction here.” As it relates to spiritual matters, this seems to apply to all mankind.
God continues in Isaiah 6:10:
Make the heart of this people dull,
and their ears heavy,
and blind their eyes;
lest they see with their eyes,
and hear with their ears,
and understand with their hearts,
and turn and be healed.
Now, nobody wants this ministry. Can you imagine this want ad?
