The first question that arises is, Who, or what were the seraphim?
They belong to this vision only, and must stand in vital relation to the condition and circumstances of the seer at the time. It is to be noted, further, that the time was that of the greatest crisis in the life of the greatest prophet of the ancient world. It was the time when he was struggling through the portals of spiritual agony into the temple of prophecy. Such visions have no room for superfluous adornment. If ever a picture had a meaning that is worth knowing, it is surely Isaiah’s picture of the seraphim. In the whole vision, as I have said, there is no sign of drapery. It throbs in all its parts with the struggles and revelations and hopes of the prophet’s heart. What, then, was that crisis in the prophet’s life in the light of which the vision will become interpreted? It is pregnantly indicated in the first verse of this chapter--“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted up.” These words indicate the battleground of Isaiah’s soul. Around this King Uzziah, who was now dead, unusual hopes had gathered. In him many deemed that the Saviour of Israel had at length appeared. He feared God, and waxed mighty in his kingdom. On every hand he extended the realm of Judah, and made the foemen of God’s people lick the dust. But when Uzziah waxed mighty, he revealed that he was but flesh. He became arrogant, as though the strength and prowess of his own right hand had accomplished all this, Then, forgetting the fear of the Lord, he presumed to carry the sacred censer into the sanctuary, and to usurp presumptuously the holy functions of God’s anointed priesthood. Then the mighty hand of Jehovah that had upheld him so long struck him, and he fell. And with his fall a thousand hopes were shattered, and a nation’s faith fell headlong to the ground. This was a critical moment for the young Isaiah. Now his faith must either die or be reborn with a new and more glorious birth. Now it shall be seen whether everything falls for him with the fall of the great Uzziah. The vision is the answer. When Uzziah died, the young prophet saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up. The collapse of the Jewish monarch revealed the King Eternal. Now, beyond Uzziah’s shattered throne, the young seer beholds the throne of God towering high in eternal majesty and splendour. The part that the seraphim play in this new consciousness is not far to seek. They are obviously an express contradiction of the attitude of Israel as typified and exemplified in the self-confident and presumptuous king. They represent the attitude which Israel ought to learn in contradiction of the attitude in which it was now found. They represent the prophet’s own new ideal. Henceforth he will strive to make the attitude and the message of the seraphim his own.
So the seraphim have probably no actual existence as celestial beings. They are here the symbol of a human ideal, wrought out of the struggling heart of a prophet. From the moment that his lips are touched with the glowing stone from the altar, Isaiah also becomes one of the seraphim. So the picture of the seraphim still, remains as an ideal, not only for the ministers of the Word of God, but also for me whole Church of Jesus Christ. Let us, therefore, consider their attitude and their message.
I. In relation to THE SIGNIFICATION OF THE SERAPHIM, it seems to me that the name by which the prophet designates them is very significant. These seraphim are simply the “burning” ones. They stand around (not above) the throne, and partake of its burning glory. In this participation in the fires of God the seer sees the starting point of the new way that he is about to mark for himself and the nation of Israel and the peoples of the earth. He, too, will learn to stand in the presence of the glory of God until every fibre of his life is aflame with the same glory. He will learn to be a seraph, one of God a fiery ministers, one or His glorious ones. For such the true prophet must be. “He was a burning and a shining light,” said our Saviour concerning John the Baptist. It is not enough to be rejectors of a higher light; we must become burners, and have a veritable fire of our own. There is a vaunted morality which is only a cold reflection of the life of Christ, in which the glory of the Christ is made nothing more than a chiselled model. The Christian man should be all on fire, yea, on fire to his very fingertips. Such must be our response to the glory of God’s throne. We must receive it into our life until we catch fire, and respond to Heaven with a glory like unto its own. Note, in the next place, the perfect reverence which is here pictured: “Each had six wings. With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet.” Of six wings, four are utilised for the purpose of doing reverence to the majesty of the eternal God. Here lies the central and most emphatic rebuke of the spirit of the Jewish people. Uzziah had no doubt rightly re]presented the prevailing spirit of the people when he dared presumptuously to invade the sacred offices of the temple of the Lord. Prosperity had made them arrogant, and arrogance had made them irreverent. In their own growing splendour they forget to do due homage to the glory of me Lord. The bulking throne of Uzziah had hidden the throne of Jehovah from view. The glory that made the seraphim veil their faces was not felt by the heart of the people. So as Isaiah gazes upon the veiled faces of the seraphim he passes from what is to what ought to be. Reverence is the mark of those that stand in the highest place, and henceforth will take a primary position in the life of Isaiah,. In reverence power begins. The vision of the seraphim with veiled faces and feet is sorely needed again in our day. There are those that make their boast in desecrating the sacred things of life, and in defiling the vessels of God’s temple. Yet you may be assured that all irreverence is essentially impotence. It have its little day of loud presumption, and then the Spirit of the Lord shall blow upon it, and it shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take it away as stubble. The covering of the feet as well as the face is a striking picture. It is difficult to carry the spirit of reverence into the smaller, minuter, and obscurer details of life. There are many that remember to cover the face before God, yet that forget to cover the feet. We are on our guard on great occasions and in great things. In the sanctuary, with its atmosphere of worship, we bend our into reverent homage, but we forget that the cottage and the villa, the workshop and the office, are also holy ground. There we often walk unveiled. And the world sees us uncovered, and thinks there is no God. The Christian Supper of Communion we treat as holy, but the daily meal is reduced to commonplace. The seraphim teach us also self-effacement. The prophet sees the glory that they send forth, and hears the message that they utter in never-ceasing music, but the seraphim themselves are hidden from view, covered from head to foot with their own wings. They sing the message and flash the glory, but they completely efface themselves. Here again the attitude of the Jewish people as manifested in their king is challenged and contradicted. Uzziah, instead of effacing himself before God, had thrust himself ostentatiously forward, as though his own wonderful presence were necessary to bring glory to the land. If he had learnt to efface himself, he might have done great things for God and His people. But he gave glory to himself, and the Lord smote him. Self-effacement is no easy task, but is one of the fundamental lessons that must be learnt by the prophet of the Lord. There is no sight more contemptible on earth than that of a man parading his own marvellous personality when he has the message of the Lord to proclaim. To reverence and self-effacement the seraphim add readiness for service. “With twain he covered his face, with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.” “What a mistake!” says Mr. Modern Shallowbrain. “These seraphim are provided with six wings, yet they waste two pairs of them in reverence, and reserve only one pair for service, if they would only give up that other-world sort of thing which is called worship and reverence, and use all their six wings for service, what an increase of good there would be accomplished on the earth.” So some simpletons talk, and act upon their own shallow creed, and for awhile you see nothing but the dust of their wings, as though they were turning the world upside down. Then they disappear, wings and all, and for all their labour nothing but a cloud of dust remains And even that God’s whirlwind soon sweeps away. With the seraphim is the secret of power. The wings that fly have the strength of ten, because face and feet are veiled by the others. Out of unceasing worship spring forth the currents of power and the energies of service. Four things go together in the life of the seraphim, and they must be found in every good and strong life--participation in God’s burning glory, profound reverence, self-effacement, and readiness for service. To divide them is disaster.
II. The message of the seraphim is important, because it is clearly A MESSAGE FOR ISAIAH’S OWN HEART, the message that is henceforth to be the keynote of his own teaching. The strain is two fold. The first part is, “Holy, holy, holy, Jehovah of hosts.” Some would have us eschew all metaphysical conceptions of God, yet Isaiah must needs begin with one, and a very profound one too. If there is to be any conception of God at all, it must be metaphysical. That the standpoint we adopt should be an ethical one does not in the least lessen its metaphysical character. The problem of the Infinite is essentially a metaphysical one, and the question that remains is simply one of little or much. Shall our conception of God be little or great, clear or obscure, definite or indefinite, true or confused? These are the alternatives. We cannot move a step in the sphere of true religion without some conception of God, and the fuller and richer that conception is, the nobler and stronger will be our religious and ethical life. Isaiah, like every true prophet, begins, not with the service of man, but with the nature of God. The source of all inspiration for him lies in the profound conception that the heart of the Infinite and Eternal is holiness, and such a conception has vast unfoldings. The Old Testament “holy” is a very beautiful term. George Adam Smith appears to say that its primary meaning as applied to God is simply “sublimity.” If he will change that into “moral sublimity,” I agree with him. But if not, I must dissent. I do not believe that the word, whatever its origin, is ever applied to God in the Old Testament except with a moral signification. The “high” place and the “holy” place do not mean precisely the same thing. “Jehovah of hosts” is a mark of sublimity. But the thrice “holy” involves an ethical view of the nature of God. The source of all inspiration for him lies in the profound conception that the heart of the Infinite and Eternal is holiness, and such a conception has vast unfoldings. The Old Testament “holy” is a very beautiful term. George Adam Smith appears to say that its primary meaning as applied to God is simply “sublimity.” If he will change that into “moral sublimity,” I agree with him. But if not, I must dissent. I do not believe that the word, whatever its origin, is ever applied to God in the Old Testament except with a moral signification. The “high” place and the “holy” place do not mean precisely the same thing. “Jehovah of hosts” is a mark of sublimity. But the thrice “holy” involves an ethical view of the nature of God. But there is another implication in “holiness,” which the careful student of the Old Testament cannot fail to observe, namely, that of self-communication. That which seems at first an impassable barrier reveals itself as a yearning heart and stretched out hands. “Be ye holy, for I am holy,” is a golden chain of link within link. Such a conception of God leads to the inspired and inspiring response, “The whole earth is full of His glory.” Or, to put the song of the seraphim more accurately, “The fulness of the whole earth is His glory.” These words mean one of two things, and perhaps they mean both. They mean that everything that is of any value on the earth is a ray from God’s glory. All the fulness of the earth, everything of beauty and of joy, all the products of thought and organisation and energy and life, all the love of human hearts, and all the achievements of the human will, everything, in fine, that is lovely and of good report, belong to Him whose glory fills the heavens, are flaming sparks from the anvil of His brightness. Akin to this, though not identical, is the other signification. The words may mean that the earth can find its fulness only in and through the glory of God. This earth wants filling, for there is now in it many a gaping void; and nothing but the glory of God can fill it. We have now a larger term for the glory of the Lord than Isaiah had, and so can give his words a higher reading. For what is the highest reading of God’s glory? Here it is: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father.” Only in Him can the world receive its power, and The desert places of the earth blossom as the rose. In Him only all fulness dwells. (J. Thomas, M. A.)
The worship of the seraphim
Three times over in Holy Scripture is heaven so opened to us, and the blessed spirits shown to us adoring; in this sixth chapter of Isaiah, in the first of Ezekiel, and in the fourth of the Revelation. In each passage the vision of Godhead occurs as an introduction to the prophecy that follows. It forms the prophet’s warrant and commission for his work. It is his strength and preparation for entering on his ministry. The lesson is of universal application. It is when we have shut ourselves up with God; when we have cast down our sins before His throne; when we have called up the vision of His glory--from such a trance of devotion we go out into the world, indifferent to the opinions of mankind; raised above the temptations of the flesh; with grace and power to control the little tempers that arise, and to hold them in submission to our work.
1. Learn, first, to veil our eyes when we approach the glory of the Lord. We must put off curious thoughts at prayer; we are not come to inquire, but to adore, and must strive to be absorbed in the sense of the Presence. Nay, in our studies, too, of the mysteries of religion, the nature of sin, the necessity of atonement, the punishment of eternity, or the Trinity in unity--here often must we restrain our curiosity, limit our speculations. A rayor two of light is all our capacities can receive; the full naked orb of truth is often more than we can bear.
2. Our weakness will teach us to veil our eyes, and our sins to veil our bodies and our feet.
3. “With twain they did fly.” They exhibit to us the due union of meditative and active piety. Devotion in the temple without labour in the vineyard is not the worship of angels and is not to be the religion of men. While, on the other hand, to engage in the Church’s work without a habit of earnest prayer, is to sink one’s self into a toiling slave and run the danger of becoming a self-conceited religious busybody.
4. The seraphim are our pattern for common praise and prayer. They nave suggested the antiphonal chanting of the Church, voice against voice, alternately.
5. Observe, too, that holiness is the attribute upon which they dwell, not the goodness or the greatness, but the holiness of the Lord whom they adore. There are pseudo-philanthropists who prefer to dwell entirely upon the goodness of the Lord, and would run up all His nature into benevolence. There are natural philosophers, again, who are lost in contemplation of the stupendous forces of nature and the vastness of the universe, and from them alone they draw their conceptions of the greatness of the Godhead. The Architect of all things, the Almighty, the Supreme, these are the names they know Him by and talk mostly of worshipping their Maker. But it is not Great, great, great, nor Good, goes, good which is the angels’ song, but Holy, holy, holy. It is in the character of moral Governor and a Judge that we are to contemplate our God.
6. The earth is full of the glory of the Lord, but the temple shakes at the proclamation of His name. The living temples are penetrated with emotion and with awe before the glory of the Most High and the sense of His presence.
7. The prophet is himself moved and disturbed before the glory of God’s presence, and under the sense of his own unworthiness. Here is the test of a genuine revelation from above. It dazzles not with vanity; it humbles to the dust under the burden of unmeetness for so great a favour from the Lord. Isaiah mentions his own sin first, and then the sin of his people. Let us always accuse ourselves the first.
8. But the sin that is thus deeply felt is thoroughly cured. The light that discovers to us our impurities is a sacred fire as well to burn them out. (C. F.Secretan.)
Who are the Seraphim?
Canon Cheyne’s answer in the “Polychrome Bible” is almost as grotesque as it is uncanny,--“mythical beings, adopted instinctively by Isaiah from the folklore of Judah”! On no other ground, apparently, than a disputed etymology, he sees in them only mythical, treasure guarding, serpent-like spirits, erect, gigantic, connected in some inexplicable way with the snake worship of Egypt! Wiser, more consonant with the facts as related by the seer himself, and in stricter accord with the genius of the Hebrew religion and temple service, is the suggestion of the late Professor Maurice, that they represent, not slimy, treasure-loving, serpentine worldliness, but “those Divine energies and affections of which the zeal, devotion, and sympathy of man are counterparts.” This is the only place in the Bible whore they are mentioned. Their Hebrew name stands for burning radiancy, and in its adjective form may apply to “fiery” serpents, or “glowing” angelic appearances, or kinsmen “burning” dead bodies, or iconoclastic kings who destroy objects of idolatry by “fire.” Though the visual shapes of these heavenly powers were symbolical, they clearly are not merely symbols, but “living intelligent creatures, who perform acts of unceasing worship,” and were actual agencies in conveying the prophetic inspiration to the receptive soul of the prophet. (F. Sessions.)
The service of the seraphim, contemplative and active
That perfect prayer, which our Lord bequeathed to His disciples, sets forth to us angelic service as a model which we shall do well in our services to copy. Not that the services we are called upon to render are the same with those assigned to angels. No, the sphere in which they live is heaven; ours for the present is the earth; and each of these spheres has its distinct and peculiar duties appropriate to the nature and faculties of its occupants.
I. THE TWO-FOLD LIFE OF A SERVANT OF GOD, WHETHER HUMAN OR ANGELIC, IS HERE VERY BEAUTIFULLY EXHIBITED TO US. The seraphim are represented as veiling their faces and feet with their wings while they stand in adoration before the throne of God. But though engaged in ceaselessly adoring the Divine perfections, they lead not a life of barren contemplation. The words “with twain he did fly” intimate to us that they are also engaged in the active execution of those errands with which God has charged them.
1. Consider, first, the devotional branch of the Christian’s life, that branch of it which is withdrawn from the eyes of the world, and opened only to the inspection of Him who seeth in secret. In the exercises of the closet and of the sanctuary are to be found the springs of the Christian’s exertions in his Master’s cause. The Christian’s life, like that of the seraphim, branches out into the two great divisions of contemplative devotion and active exertion. It is the life of Mary, who sat at our Lord’s feet and heard His word, combined with that of Martha, who busied herself in outward ministrations to Him. If even the energies of angels (excelling as they do in power) would be certainly impaired unless they were ever and anon renewed by an adoring gaze on the Divine perfections, how certainly shall ours languish and die if we stir them not up by the diligent and persevering use of all those means of grace which God has put into our hands!
2. The Christian life, although as to its springs and sources hid with Christ in God, yet has an outward manifestation, discernible by the world. Care must be taken not only that the lamp shall be filled with a due supply of off, but also that there shall be a light shining before men. Here is a reproof of what may, without injustice, be termed the monastic principle--a principle which in former ages was deemed correct, and accordingly adopted into the practice of many. It is as if, in the case of animal life, a man should content himself with taking supplies of repose and nourishment, without exhibiting and improving the strength thus gained by the exercise of his limbs.
II. Having thus opened the subject generally, LET US SEEK TO ENTER MORE INTO ITS DETAILS, as the text brings them before us.
1. Let us learn from the seraphim a lesson as to the spirit which should pervade all true devotion.
(1) These bright and glorious beings are without sin, whether original or actual. Still, such is their sense of the infinite distance subsisting between themselves and Him, of whose hand they are the creatures, that they veil their faces and feet before His throne in token of adoring reverence. The first and most essential element of devotion is a feeling of deep awe, flowing from a sense of God’s transcendent excellences, and leading to a profound self-abasement.
(2) But, if there be ground for a sentiment of deep self-abasement even in the approach of unfallen creatures to the throne of God, with what intense feelings of humiliation should the members of Adam’s fallen family draw nigh. God hath not left man without the means of such a moral cleansing, as may make him meet to bear part in those hymns of praise which are offered by creatures who still retain their integrity. But this provision would be, to say the least, most inadequate, if it did not involve sanctifying as well as pardoning grace. And this it does involve.
2. Let us follow the Christian’s steps as he descends from the mount, on which he has held communion with God, once again to grapple with the difficulties and trials of time, and to bear the burden and heat of the day amidst the engagements of the vineyard. “Son, go work today in My vineyard.”
(1) Our own heart is a vineyard into which God hath sent every one of us, to dress it and to keep it,
(2) But surely there is an outward no less than an inward work which God has made binding upon all of us.
(a) His providence has called almost all of us to a definite sphere of duty, and assigned to us a certain position in life. Every such position involves its peculiar responsibilities, its peculiar snares, its peculiar occupations.
(b) But besides the fulfilment of the duties of our station, the Christian has many indirect opportunities offered to him--opportunities which as a Christian he cannot but arrest, and many of which we miss for lack of being on the watch for them--of promoting the cause of God in the world. (Dean Goulburn.)
The vision of God the essence of true worship
I take it that in the veiling of the head and the feet, the source of conception, the source of action, is represented the act of homage in which all true worship begins. I take it that in the outburst of song is represented the result of all the worship. All worship is meant to bring us nearer to God, and God near to us, so that if we worship truly, to us, as to them, there shall be a revelation of God’s nature and God’s truth The object of all worship is not to please God, not even to cave our own souls, though these may be incidents of worship; the object of worship is that, coming into His presence, we may be transformed into His image, as we learn of His ways and work. (Brooke Lambert, M. A.)
Commerce and science acknowledging God
The vision of Isaiah shall yet receive another fulfilment. Commerce and science shall yet bow their heads before the great Power from which they derive their true energy. And when they do, as with twain of their wings the seraphs flew, bowing the while before the Presence, there shall be an advance in knowledge and material prosperity such as the world has never known. Religion, which did stimulate the arts and the sciences to the creation of works which, with all our knowledge, we cannot rival religion, which did permeate action in days of which history tells us, and stirred men to mighty deeds, shall yet again become a mighty power. And when through the world there goes up the chant, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory,” there will be days such as the world has not yet known. (Brooke Lambert, M. A.)
The cry of the seraphim
I. The first thing that strikes us respecting the seraphim is THEIR REDUNDANCE OF WINGS. They each had six, only two of which were used for flying; the others, with which they shrouded their faces and their feet, were, apparently, quite superfluous. Why should they have had them when there was no fit employment for them? Was it not sheer waste to be possessing wings that were merely employed as covering, and never spread for flight? And yet, perhaps, without this shrouding of their faces and their feet they might not have answered so well high Heaven’s purposes, might not have swept abroad with such undivided intentness and such entire abandonment on their Divine errands. We meet sometimes with these seemingly wasted wings in men, in the form of capabilities, knowledges, or skills, for the exercise of which there is no scope or opportunity to their lot. To what end, we ask, have they been acquired? or what a pity, we say, that the men could not be placed in circumstances in which a field would be offered them! And yet, a knowledge or skill gained may not be really wasted, though it be left without due scope and opportunity. The best, the finest use of it does not lie always in what it accomplishes, but often in what has been secretly added to us, or wrought into us, through gaining it; in the contribution which the gaining it has been to our character or moral growth.
II. THE APPARENT CONTRADICTION HERE BETWEEN THE COVERED FACES OF THE SERAPHIM AND THEIR TEMPLE-SHAKING SHOUTS. Feeble, muffled sounds are the most we should have expected to proceed from them. Fancy the posts of the Lord’s house quivering, and the prophet’s heart stirred to its depths beneath the cries of those whose heads were bowed and hid behind their wings! Here, however, is an adumbration of much truth. Great, penetrating, inspiring utterances like the utterances of the seraphim of Isaiah’s vision--are they not always connected with some deep, still inwardness, with some profound withdrawal and retirement of soul? No one speaks with quickening energy, to the rousing of his fellows, who has not dwelt apart, who has not had his moments, his hours, of dumb absorption, with bent brows and folded hands, when thought and feeling have weighed upon him heavily, and held him bound. There is no life of noble activity and influence which does not rest on, and issue from, some inner, hidden life of careful self-discipline and quiet self-communion; which is not fed and sustained from behind with cherishings of faith and contemplation of ideas.
III. THE UNINTENTIONAL, UNPURPOSED EFFECT produced by the seraphim; the much commotion they created without in the least aiming at or meaning it. What were they doing, because of which the vestibule of the temple shook, and the prophet awoke to an overwhelming conviction of his unworthiness? Simply crying one to another, saying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory.” They were conscious of no audience, were making no appeal, but were entirely absorbed in adoring together, in exchanging with each other their Divine thoughts and emotions. Yet see the deep agitations they caused, the deep stir in a human breast. It reminds me of the incidental effects of intense enthusiasm; how, in pursuing its object, in accomplishing triumphantly what it contemplates and desires, it will often overflow upon spectators, disturbing the idle with new dreams of work, rousing the lethargic, reanimating the faint and weary, moving some to attempt as they had not done, or to feel aspirations which they had not felt; how sometimes, one and another standing by, dull and inert, are caught by and swept on with it, and begin, themselves, to glow!
IV. And now, concerning THE ASPECT, THE SALIENT FEATURES OF THESE BURNING ONES who proclaimed the glory of the Lord, and were such moving powers. They were creatures with six wings: “with twain they covered their face, with twain they covered their feel and with twain they did fly”--in which composition of them we may see imaged three things which are always involved in real greatness of character, without which no real nobility is attained. “They covered their face”--it was the expression of humility, the humility of awe and worship, of those who were admiringly conscious of a splendour and majesty, a sublime strength and perfection, in the presence of which they felt their own littleness, their poorness and infirmity. And no lofty excellence is ever reached where there is nothing of this. They only grow fine and do finely who know what it is to kneel in spirit, to have visions before which their heads are bowed. “They covered their feet”--renouncing the use of these, though they had them, because it was theirs to fly. Meaning to be wholly “winged” ministers of the Lord, they wrapt up their feet. And, devotion to some chosen life purpose involves always some resolute self-limiting in relation to things lawful enough, but not expedient, and always impels to it. “With twain they did fly”--swift, so swift, to execute the errands of Jehovah; and faithful velocity, instantaneous and vivid movement in obedience to the voice of the Lord within you, action that drags not, nor halts, that is never reluctant or slow when duty is seen, when conviction speaks, but flashes forth at once in quick and bright response--this is the third of the three essentials to real greatness of character and nobility of life which Isaiah’s seraphim suggest. (S. A. Tipple.)
The six wings
I. THE WINGS THAT COVERED THE FEET. When we see the seraph spreading his wings over the feet, there comes a most useful lesson--the lesson of humility at imperfection. The brightest angels of God are so far beneath God that He charges them with folly.
II. THE WINGS THAT COVERED THE FACE. Another seraphic posture in the text. That means reverence Godward. How many take the name of God in vain, how many trivial things are said about the Almighty! Not willing to have God in the world, they roll up an idea of sentimentality and humanitarianism and impudence and imbecility and call it God. No wings of reverence over the face, no taking off of shoes on holy ground! Who is this God before whom the arrogant and intractable refuse reverence? Earthly power goes from hand to hand, from Henry I to Henry II and Henry III; from Louis I to Louis II and Louis III; but from everlasting to everlasting is God; God the first, God the last, God the only. Oh! what a God to dishonour! The brightest, the mightiest angel takes no familiarity with God. The wings of reverence are lifted. “With twain he covered his face.”
III. THE WINGS OF FLIGHT. The seraph must not always stand still. He must move, and it must be without clumsiness. There must be celerity and beauty, in the movement. A dying Christian not long ago cried out, “Wings, wings, wings!” The air is full of them, coming and going. You have seen how the dull, sluggish chrysalid becomes the bright butterfly, the dull and the stupid and the sluggish turned into the alert and the beautiful. Well, in this world we are in the chrysalid state. Death will unfurl the wings. See that eagle in the mountain nest. It looks so sick, so ragged-feathered, so worn out, and so half asleep. Is that eagle dying? No. The ornithologist will tell you it is the moulting season with that bird. Not dying, but moulting. You see that Christian, sick and worn out, on what is called his deathbed. The world says he is dying. I say it is the moulting season for his soul--the body dropping away, the celestial pinions coming on. (T. De Witt Talmage, D. D.)
The seraphim
The seraphim are not angels; they are rather the expressions of the forces of the universe waiting there beside the throne of God. They are titanic beings, in whom is embodied everything of strength and obedience which anywhere, in any of the worlds of God, is doing His will. Since man is the noblest type of obedient power, these majestic seraphim seem to be human in their shape; but, as if further to express their meaning, there are added to each of them three pairs of wings, whose use and disposition are with particularity described. If the highest attitude of any man’s life is stand waiting for what use God will choose to make of him, then we have a right to seek for something in the fullest life of consecrated manhood--of manhood standing by the throne of God--correspondent to each indication of temper and feeling which Isaiah shows us in the seraphim. How shall man stand, then, in a world where God sits in the centre on His throne? We gather so many of our impressions of humanity from poor stunted human creatures--poor wingless things who strut or grovel in their insignificance--that it will surely be good if we can turn for once and see the noblest image of consecrated power, and say to ourselves, “This is what man is meant to be. This it is in me to be if I can use all my powers and let God’s presence bring out in me all that it really means to be a man.” (Phillips Brooks, D. D.)
The wings of the seraphim
Each of the three pairs of wings has its own suggestion. Let us see how they represent the three qualities which are the conditions of a complete, effective human life.
I. With the first pair of wings, then, it is said that the living creature, standing before God, “COVERED HIS FACE.” There was a glory which it was not his to see. There was a splendour and exuberance of life, a richness of radiance coming from the very central source of all existence which, although to keep close to it and to bathe his being in its abundance was his necessity and joy, he could not search and examine and understand. There was the incomprehensibleness of God! We talk about God’s incomprehensibleness as if it were a sad necessity; as if, if we could understand God through and through, it would be happier and better for us. The intimation of Isaiah’s vision is something different from that. It is the glory of His seraphim that they stand in the presence of a God so great that they can never comprehend Him. No man does anything well who does not feel the unknown surrounding and pressing upon the known, and who is not therefore aware all the time that what he does has deeper sources and more distant issues than he can comprehend. I know, of course, how easily corruptible the faculty of reverence has always proved itself to be. The noblest and finest things are always most capable of corruption. I see the ghosts of all the superstitions rise before me. I see men standing with deliberately blinded eyes, hiding from their inspection things which they ought to examine, living in wilfully chosen delusions which they prefer to the truth. I see all this in history; I see a vast amount of this today; and yet all the more because of this, I am sure that we ought to assert the necessity of reverence and of the sense of mystery, and of the certainty of the unknown to every life. You can know nothing which you do not reverence! You can see nothing before which you do not veil your eyes! But now take one step farther. All of the mystery which surrounds life and pervades life is really one mystery. It is God. Called by His name, taken up into His being, it is filled with graciousness. It is no longer cold and hard; it is all warm and soft and palpitating. It is love. And of this personal mystery of love, of God, it is supremely true that only by reverence, only by the hiding of the eyes, can He be seen. Isaiah says of the seraphim not merely that their eyes were covered, but that they were covered with their wings. Now the wings represent the active powers. It is with them that movement is accomplished, and change achieved, and obedience rendered; so that it seems to me that what the whole image means is this--that it is with the powers of action and obedience that the powers of insight and knowledge are veiled. The being who rightly approaches God, approaches Him with the powers of obedience held forward; and only through them does the sight of God come to the intelligence which lies behind. The mystery and awfulness of God is a conviction reached through serving Him. Behold, what a lofty idea of reverence is here! It is no palsied idleness. The figure which we see is not flung down upon the ground, despairing and dismayed. It stands upon its feet; it is alert and watchful; it is waiting for commandments; it is eager for work; but all the time its work makes it more beautifully, completely, devoutly reverent of Him for whom the work is done.
II. Let us pass on to the second element in Isaiah’s image of a strong and consecrated life. With twain of his wings, he says, each of the seraphim “COVERED HIS FEET.” The covering of the feet represents the covering of the whole body. As the covering of the face means not seeing, the covering of the feet means not being seen. It signifies the hiding of one’s self, the self-effacement which belongs to every effective act and every victorious life. Here is a man entirely carried away by a great enthusiasm. His heart and hands are full of it. What is the result? Is it not true that he entirely forgets himself? Whether he is doing himself credit or discredit, whether men are praising him or blaming him, whether the completion of the work will leave him far up the hill of fame or down in the dark valley of obscurity, he literally never thinks of that,. He is obliterated. Consider your own lives. Have you not had great moments in which you have forgotten yourselves, and do you not recognise in those moments a clearness and simplicity and strength which separates them from all the other moments of your life? The man who forgets himself in his work has but one thing to think of, namely, his work. The man who cannot forget himself has two things to think of--his work and himself. There is the distraction and the waste. Efface yourselves; and the only way to do it is to stand in the presence of God, and be so possessed with Him that there shall be no space or time left for the poor intrusion of your own little personality. Here, as before, it may mean something to us that the feet are not merely covered, but covered with the wings. The meaning is that the thought of one’s self is to be hidden and lost behind the energy and faithfulness and joy of active work. I may determine that I will not be self-conscious, and my very determination is self-consciousness; but I become obedient to God, and try enthusiastically to do His will, and I forget myself entirely before I know it.
III. “WITH TWAIN HE DID FLY.” Here there comes the simpler, and, perhaps, the healthier thought of obedience purely and solely for itself--the absolute joy and privilege of the creature in doing the Creator’s will. There are two extremes of error. In the one, action is disparaged. The man says, “Not what I do but what I am is of significance. It is not action. It is character.” The result is that character itself fades away out of the inactive life. In the other extreme, action is made everything. The glory of mere work is sung in every sort of tune. Just to be busy seems the sufficient accomplishment of life. The result is that work loses its dignity, and the industrious man becomes a clattering machine. (Phillips Brooks, D. D.)
Reverence, an element of power
It is not only a pleasing sentiment, it is a necessary element of power--this reverence which veils its eyes before something which it may not know. What would you give for the physician who believed that he had mastered all the truth concerning our human bodies, and never stood in awe before the mystery of life, the mystery of death? What would you give for the statesman who had no reverence, who made the State a mere machine, and felt the presence in it of no deep principles too profound for him to understand What is more dreadful than irreverent art which paints all that it sees because it sees almost nothing, and yet does not dream that there is more to see; which suggests nothing because it suspects nothing profounder than the flimsy tale it tells, and would fain make us all believe that there is no sacredness in woman, nor nobleness in man, nor secret in nature, nor dignity in life. Irreverence everywhere is blindness and not sight. It is the stare which is bold because it believes in its heart that there is nothing which its insolent intelligence may not fathom, and so which finds only what it looks for, and makes the world as shallow as it ignorantly dreams the world to be. (Phillips Brooks, D. D.)
Reverence should be universal
To make the sentiment of reverence universal would be the truest way to keep it healthy and pure. It must not seem to be the strange prerogative of saints or cranks; it must not seem to be the sign of exceptional weakness or exceptional strength; it must be the element in which all lives go on, and which has its own ministry for each. The child must have it, feeling his little actions touch the infinite as his feet upon the beach delight in the waves out of the boundless sea that strike them. The mechanic must have it, feeling how his commonest tools are ministers of elemental forces, and raise currents in the air that run out instantly beyond his ken. The scientist needs it as he deals with the palpable and material which hangs in the impalpable and spiritual, and cannot be known without the knowledge of the mystery in which it floats. Every true scientist has it; Newton or Tyndal pauses a moment in his description of the intelligible, and some hymn of the unintelligible, some psalm of delight in the unknown, comes bursting from his scientific lips. (Phillips Brooks, D. D.)
A seraph’s wings
This is the only mention in Scripture of the seraphim. I would notice, before I deal with the specific words of my text, the significance of the name. It means “the flaming” or “burning ones,” and so the attendants of the Divine glory in the heavens, whether they be real or imaginary beings, are represented as flashing with splendour, as full of swift energy, like a flame of fire, as glowing with fervid love, as blazing with enthusiasm. That is the type of the highest creatural being that stands closest to God. Cold religion is a contradiction in terms, though, alas! it is a reality in professors.
I. THE WINGS OF REVERENCE. He covered his face, or they covered their faces, lest they should see. As a man brought suddenly into the sunlight, especially if out of a darkened chamber, by an instinctive action shades his eyes with his hand, so these burning creatures, confronted with the still more fervid and fiery light of the Divine nature, fold one pair of their great white pinions over their shining faces, even whilst they cry, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty!” And does not that teach us the incapacity of the highest creature, with the purest vision, to gaze undazzled into the shining light of God? I, for my part, do not believe that any conceivable extension of creatural faculties, or any conceivable hallowing of creatural natures, can make the creature able to gaze upon God. “We shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.” But who is the “Him”? Jesus Christ. And, in my belief, Jesus Christ will, to all eternity be the medium of manifesting God. “No man hath seen God at any time,” nor can see Him. But my text does also suggest to us by contrast the possibility of far feebler sighted and more sinful creatures than these symbolical seraphs coming into a Presence in which God shall be manifest to them; and they will need no veil drawn by themselves across their eyes. God has veiled Himself, that “we, with unveiled faces, beholding His glory, may be changed into the same image.” So the seraph, with his white wings folded before his eyes, may at once stand to us as a parallel and a contrast to what the Christian may expect. We can see Jesus, with no incapacity except such as may be swept away by His grace and our will. There is no need for you to draw anything between your happy eyes and the Face in which we “behold the glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father.” All the tempering that the Divine lustre needed has been done by Him who veils His glory with the veil of Christ’s flesh, and therein does away with the need for any veil that we can draw. But, beyond that, there is another consideration that I should like to suggest, as taught us by the use of this first pair of the six wings, and that is the absolute need for the lowliest reverence in our worship of God. It is strange, but true, I am afraid, that the Christian danger is to lose the sense of the majesty and splendour and separation of God from His creatures. What does that lofty chorus that burst from those immortal lips mean: “Holy, holy, holy!” but the declaration that God is high above and separate from all limitations and imperfections of creatures? We have need to take heed that we do not lose our reverence in our confidence, and that we do not part with godly fear in our filial love.
II. THE WINGS OF HUMILITY. “With twain he covered his feet.” The less comely and inferior parts of that fiery corporeity were veiled lest they should be seen by the Eyes that see all things. The wings made no screen that hid the seraph’s feet from the eye of God, but it was the instinctive lowly sense of unworthiness that folded them across the feet, even though they, too, burned as a furnace. The nearer we get to God the more we shall be aware of our limitations and unworthiness. And it is because that vision of the Lord sitting on “His throne, high and lifted up,” with the thrilling sense of His glory filling the holy temple of the universe, does not burn before us that we can conceit ourselves to have anything worth pluming ourselves upon. Once lift the curtain, once let my love be flooded with the sight of God, and away goes all my self-conceit, and all my fancied superiority above others. Get God into your lives, and you will see that the feet need to be washed, and you will cry, “Lord! not my feet only, but my hands and my head!”
III. THE WINGS FOR SERVICE. “With twain he did fly.” That is the emblem of joyous, buoyant, easy, unhindered motion. It is strongly, sadly contrary to the toilsome limitations of us heavy creatures who have no wings, but can at best run on His service, and often find it hard to walk with patience in the way that is set before us. But service with wings, or service with lame feet, it matters not. Whosoever, beholding God, has found need to hide his face from that Light, even whilst he comes into the Light, and to veil his feet from the all-seeing Eye, will also feel impulses to go forth in His service. For the perfection of worship is neither the consciousness of my own insufficiency, nor the humble recognition of His glory, nor the great voice of praise that thrilled from those immortal lips, but it is the doing of His will in daily life. Some people say the service of man is the service of God. Yes, when it is service of man, done for God’s sake, it is so, and only then. Now, we, as Christians, have a far higher motive for service than the seraphs had. We have been redeemed, and the spirit of the old Psalm should animate all our obedience: “O Lord, truly I am Thy servant.” Why? The next clause tells you. “Thou hast loosed my bonds.”
The seraphs could not say that. The seraphim were winged for service even while they stood above the throne and pealed forth their thunderous praise which shook the temple. May we not discern in that a hint of the blessed blending of two modes of worship which will be perfectly united in heaven, and which we should aim at harmonising even on earth? “His servants serve Him and see His face.” There is possible, even on earth, some foretaste of the perfection of that heavenly state in which no worship of service shall interfere with the worship of contemplation. The seraphs sang “Holy, holy, holy!” but they, and all the hosts of heaven, learn a new song from the experience of earth, and redeemed men are the chorus leaders of the perfected and eternal worship of the heavens. For we read that it is the four-and-twenty elders who begin the song and sing to the Lamb that redeemed them by His blood, and that the living creatures and all the hosts of the angels to that song can but say “Amen!” (A. Maclaren, D. D.)
The use of faculty
Is it not strange, that of those parts of an angel’s figure which seem as if they were made only for action, four out of six are used for an entirely different purpose? It is to teach us, that it is not every power which we have--and which we might think given us for public service, and for the outer life--which is really intended by God for that use. Never think that large faculties are fitted only for large enterprises, and that all your endowments are to be spent on that which is to meet the general eye. Remember that of six wings an angel uses only two to fly with. (J. Vaughan, M. A.)
Why is an angel so very humble?
1. An angel is very great, and therefore he grows humble.
2. An angel is always conversant with the great things of God.
3. An angel knows and is sure that he is loved. (J. Vaughan, M. A.)
