We have here in this wondrous vision the proper inauguration of the great evangelical prophet to his future work.
I. First, he gives the date of the vision. "In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord." What would he say but this: "In the year when the crowned monarch of the earth went down into the dust and darkness of the tomb, and all the pomp and pageantry which had surrounded him for a little while dissolved and disappeared, I saw another king, even the King Immortal, sitting upon His throne, which is forever and ever"? How simply and yet how grandly are earth and heaven here brought together, and the fleeting phantoms of one set over against the abiding realities of the other!
II. What is the first impression which this glorious vision makes upon the prophet? His first cry is not that of exultation and delight, but rather of consternation and dismay. "Woe is me! for I am undone." He who had uttered this cry was one who had kept himself from his iniquity, holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience; and yet in that terrible light he saw and avowed himself as a man undone, saw stains in himself which he had not imagined before, discovered impurities which he had not dreamt of before, saw his own sin and his people's sin, till that mighty cry of anguish was wrung from him. Yet that moment, with all its dreadfulness, was a passage into a true life.
III. Observe the manner in which the guilt of sin is here, as evermore in Holy Scripture, spoken of as taken away by a free act of God, an act of His in which man is passive; in which he has, so to speak, to stand still and see the salvation of the Lord, an act to which he can contribute nothing, save indeed only that divinely awakened hunger of the soul after the benefit which we call faith. It is quite another thing with the powerof sin. In the subduing of the power of sin we must be fellow-workers with God; all the faculties of our renewed nature will need to be strained to the uttermost.
IV. Behold the joyful readiness with which the prophet now offers himself for the service of His God. "Here am I; send me." He stops not to inquire whereunto the Lord would send him, to undertake what painful labour, to drink what cup of suffering, to be baptized with what baptism of blood. Be the task what it may, he is ready for it.
R. C. Trench, Sermons New and Old,p. 98 (see also Sermons Preached in Ireland,p. 166).
References: Isaiah 6:1-3. M. Nicholson, Communion with Heaven,p. 57; R. W. Forrest, Christian World Pulpit,vol. i., p. 492.Isaiah 6:1-4. Homilist,Excelsior series, vol. ii., p. 347.