Isaiah 6 - Introduction

Isaiah's Inaugural Vision

It is now universally acknowledged that this chapter records Isaiah's initiation into the office of a prophet. The opinion of many older commentators that it represents a renewal or recovery of the prophetic consciousness after several years of public activity, was based on the erroneous assumption that the order of the book is in the main chronological and that the previous Chapter s contain prophecies from the reign of Uzziah (see also on Isaiah 6:5, below). Everything in the narrative itself suggests that it is an inaugural vision, a record of the experience by which Isaiah was made a prophet. The consciousness of standing in a peculiar relation to God, of personal reconciliation to Him, of being in His council, and bearing a definite commission straight from Himself, dates from the moment when in an ecstasy he "saw the Lord." The vision is undoubtedly an actual experience, not the mere embodiment of an idea; it occurred in the death-year of Uzziah, as the prophet, looking back after some lapse of time, distinctly recalls. Then Isaiah saw God, not indeed with his bodily eyes, but in a prophetic trance, in which the ordinary operations of the mind were suspended and spiritual realities assumed concrete and visible forms. That the publication of the vision belongs to a more advanced stage of the prophet's ministry seems implied by the note of time in Isaiah 6:1, and is probable on other grounds. Its place in the book is best explained by the supposition that it was written as the prologue to a short collection of oracles (7 9:7, see General Introd. p. lxxii) giving a summary of Isaiah's teaching in the early part of the reign of Ahaz. But we have no right to imagine that the prophet, from his subsequent experience, read into his original commission elements which it did not convey to his mind at the time. To suppose that he could not have carried on his work under the depressing conviction (expressed in Isaiah 6:9) that he would only harden the people in unbelief is to mistake the prophet's attitude to his work. If there were any force in the argument, it would prove too much, for it would be necessary to suppose that the chapter was written after Isaiah's life-work was over. But Isaiah, like his predecessors Amos and Hosea and his successors Jeremiah and Ezekiel, spoke the word of God under an inward constraint, and his writings contain no sign that he ever cherished any expectations of success beyond what the vision allows.

The chapter stands unrivalled in the Old Testament both for grandeur of conception and the majestic simplicity of its style. The narrative is in prose: the speeches are rhythmical. There are strictly no divisions, but for convenience of exposition we may distinguish three stages in the process of initiation:

2 Samuel 6:1; 2 Samuel 6:1. The vision of Jehovah in His glory, and the splendours of His court.

ii. Isa 6:5-8. The impression produced by this sight on the mind of the prophet: at first a crushing sense of imperfection and guilt, which is transformed by a symbolic act denoting forgiveness into glad self-surrender to the service of the King.

iii. Isa 6:9-13. His commission to declare the word of God to the people, with an announcement of its twofold effect: (1) to increase the spiritual insensibility of the mass of the nation (Isaiah 6:9), and (2) to lay waste the land by a succession of exterminating judgments, which shall leave only a remnant to form the nucleus of the future people of God (11 13).