The Gospel of Isaiah: Ch. 57:15, The Exalted One with the Lowly Ones

The Gospel of Isaiah: Ch. 57:15, The Exalted One with the Lowly Ones. 

WANTED: An imaginative scribe who can write exquisite poetry. A faithful, articulate believer in Yahweh who can switch from one extreme to another at the Lord’s command… from a sublime vision of God’s glory, to a ridiculous demonstration of shameful nakedness; from confronting the people over their sinfulness, to comforting people with hopefulness; from being an outspoken messenger one minute, to a living object lesson the next; from having one foot in the immediate surroundings one minute, to one foot in the future messianic realm the next. Must be adaptable, thick-skinned, and extraordinarily brave. Person who answers, “Here I am. Send me!” will be especially considered. (from The Jerusalem Post, 740 BC).

“For thus says the One who is high and lifted up,

Who inhabits eternity, Whose name is The Holy,

‘I dwell in the high and holy places,

and also with those who are broken, humble, and dejected in spirit.

I dwell with them in order to revive the spirit of the lowly and humble,

and to restore life to the hearts of the contrite, those who are crushed over their sin.” (57:15).

“The Holy” (Hebrew, “kadosh”) = The God in the Bible is the very definition of holy. When we read “the Holy One” in Isaiah, the literal translation is “The Holy,” and the “One” is assumed. Yahweh God, the Lord of the universe, is The Holy. The transcendent Creator is uniquely set apart from evil and sin. He is completely pure and morally perfect. He is the author of Truth, Goodness and beauty, and is so separated from this material world that there are no categories in which to place Him. Comparisons are futile, for God is distinctively set apart in every way, utterly incomparable. God is the Wholly Other, the Everlasting One, worthy to receive one-of-a-kind worship and adoration, honor and reverence, and loving obedience. God is not associated in any way with the taint of sin, not influenced in the least by the evil one. God has perfect freedom from anything that would compromise His character or Essence. Creator God is a personal spirit full of uncreated light. He is high and lofty, above and beyond comprehension and imagination. The Lord God is truly the only Being in the universe who cannot be described adequately. When Isaiah 6:3 is recited in the Jewish daily worship liturgy, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory,” it is customary for the worshippers to stand on their tiptoes and stretch their arms upward three times. This is a graphic picture of believers attempting to rise up and grasp the unreachable holiness of God. In Isaiah we see the most distinctive quality of God, His holiness, exclaimed in triplicate. This three-ness emphasizes the Lord’s unique holiness, of course. To say “Holy” once is true and accurate, but somehow seems insufficient. God is certainly worth more than one Holy. To say it twice is more like it, expressing the truth that God has holiness to spare, He is overflowing in holiness, twice the amount as anything else on earth. But shouting out “Holy” three times? That surpasses weak descriptions like super-holy, really holy, holiness to the extreme. Three Holies from the angels around His throne tells us that our God is beyond the furthest extremes in holiness, that we can’t even imagine how holy God is. Three Holies expresses the truth that God uniquely exists in the very fullness of holiness.

Here is one meager attempt to describe why The Holy is worthy to be worshipped:

(1.)  The Holy is Better than Perfect. His power and wisdom created everything out of nothing. He is utterly complete and doesn’t need anything. He is older than time, and bigger than the universe. Outer space cannot contain Him. “His center is everywhere and His circumference is nowhere.” (Lockyer). He has unlimited righteousness. He is so set apart that we cannot in any way discover Him unless He chooses to reveal Himself. Because God’s essence is purity and goodness, He is the Judge of the world who will apply ultimate justice. He is the standard for what is good vs. evil, and the basis for moral discernment. We can only understand God on His own terms, because human understanding is completely inadequate. Even with our extended knowledge of God through Scripture, we are merely on the outer fringes of His ways. Even considering all we have heard about God, we have only heard the faintest of whispers about Him. (Job 26). The mind of God is boundless, and combines all the knowledge that has ever existed, or that will ever exist, in the history of the world. Therefore, whatever is not on His mind has never existed. The Holy is set apart because of His greatness.

(2.)  The Holy has more Substance than all of Creation. We can describe God’s glory as the weighty splendor of God’s presence. God’s glory outweighs the world, and is so expansive that He fills the universe and then spills over. The entire universe is too small, too confined a space, to contain God’s glorious presence. God has more substance, more girth, more spiritual matter, than our meager reality. In those moments in human history when the presence of the The Holy made an appearance, nature seemed to burst at the seams. God had to somehow split the created world and present Himself. Maybe Isaiah had it right when he cried out to the Lord, “Tear the heavens apart and come down!” (Is. 64:1). Glory sightings in Scripture tend to be quite dramatic. The presence of God’s glory provides a lot of drama. We can get everything from angels and trumpets to fire and earthquakes, from lightning and smoke to hurricanes and thunder, from voices out of clouds to blinding lights to foreign languages. When God’s glory made an appearance on the Cross of all places, graves were opened, bodies were resurrected, the sacred curtain in the Temple was ripped from top to bottom. And when God’s light was snuffed in the death of Christ, the world experienced darkness in the middle of the day. The Holy is set apart because of His weighty glory.

(3.)  The Holy is Passionate about Mercy.  Mercy is the chief attribute of God. “Mercy is the defining explanation of everything that God has revealed of Himself. The root of all of God’s activity in this world, beginning even with the world’s creation, is Mercy.” (Reardon, Christ in the Psalms). Mercy can be described in many ways: Eager love-in-action; steadfast kindness; loyal compassion; live-giving favor; the deep love reserved for someone in an intimate relationship, and offered even if there is no prior relationship. God may seem to be preoccupied with justice, but His is a saving justice, a justice that is based on His love. The Hebrew language has three main words for mercy, all of which are fulfilled in Yahweh God: Chanon, which is mercy in the context of grace, forgiveness and pity; then there is Hesed, which is mercy as lovingkindness, loyalty and covenantal love; finally there is Rachem, a mercy which is related to the word for womb, a sacred place where life is protected and promises to bring new life. In the Hebrew Bible, God is revealed as the One who offers Himself to be a sacred womb, the ultimate safe place for our souls. Psalm 56:15 puts all three mercies into play: “But you, O Lord, are a God merciful (rachem) and gracious (chanon), slow to anger, and abundant in lovingkindness (hesed) and truth.” The Holy is set apart because of His tender mercy.

(4.)  The Holy Glories in His Love. God is rich in what might be called glory-love. When Moses asked Yahweh to reveal His glory, God revealed His heart of mercy. These are two intertwined aspects of God’s identity that help reveal to us His character and His essence. “Then the Lord Yahweh came down in the cloud and stood there with Moses, and proclaimed His Name, Yahweh. And He passed in front of Moses, proclaiming,
The LORD! The LORD! a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in mercy and faithfulness, maintaining lovingkindness to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” (Exodus 34). Moses asked God to reveal His presence, and God gave Him a revelation of who He is at heart… Mercy. Perhaps God’s glorious presence shines brightest when His mercy is more evident. Since Scripture says that all these attributes of love are actually His Name, there is no question that God wants us to weave together an identity which combines His majesty and splendor with His compassion and grace. Evidently, His glory IS His mercy. There was an eternal truth revealed in the wilderness Tabernacle. In the Holy of Holies, God’s glorious presence was placed directly above the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant. “When Moses entered the Tent of Meeting to speak with the Lord Yahweh, he heard the Voice speaking to him from between the two cherubim above the Mercy Seat. And Moses spoke to Him there.” (Numbers 7:89). The Holy is set apart because of His glory-mercy.

(5.)  The Holy is Content to remain Humble. In His other-worldly greatness, God chose to humble Himself in order to care for His human family. God’s character miraculously embraces lowliness as He joins Himself with the humble: “Though the Lord is on high, He looks upon the lowly. Though the Lord is great, He cares for the humble.” (Ps. 138:6). The high and holy God, high and lifted up, makes Himself available to mankind. “Who is like the Lord our God, the One who sits enthroned on high, who stoops down to look on the heavens and the earth?” (Ps. 113:4-6). Imagine that… God is so above and beyond that He has to stoop down to view the galaxies! Since we cannot possibly reach God’s height on our own, The Holy extends Himself to reach us. “For this is what the high and lofty One says, He who lives forever, whose Name is Holy – I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit.” (Is. 57:15). The great God doesn’t just reach down far enough to help the high and mighty ones of this world, but He keeps going lower to reach those of us who recognize our brokenness, our need for Him! In God’s case, and in God’s case only, power will not corrupt, and absolute power will not corrupt absolutely. We need not fear that God would ever abuse His unlimited power and glory and authority. We can absolutely trust God’s power. Confirming this truth of Yahweh’s humility, He went so far as to empty Himself and make Himself nothing (Philippians 2). God volunteered to leave His eternal loft, a volunteer of love. Yahweh submitted Himself to the human experience. Lord in the flesh lowered Himself to become a human fetus dependent on a teenage girl, then a baby needing to be changed and burped, and then going through the developmental stages typical of all human beings. This physical version of the spiritual God lived a short life of humility and compassion and sacred power, and ended with His submission to a torturous death on the Cross. Just how humble can God become? Apparently, there are no limits to God’s lowliness, and that sets The Holy apart.

“Blessed are the sorrowful, for they will be comforted. (Matthew 5:3).

In Other Words. You will sigh with satisfying relief when your heart is broken by the profound pain of loss, shame or sin. You are fortunate! You are not alone! For the deeper your sorrow, the more room there is for God’s healing presence and comforting grace. The wisdom of Jesus is sometimes perplexing. In this Beatitude He is essentially saying “Happy are you when you are sad! Celebrate when you grieve with brokenness!”

Those who mourn, who are sorrowful, are grieving with tears of brokenness:

• a sense of one’s own sinfulness in repentance and confession;
• a painful awareness of the brokenness of the world, the soiled creation, the presence of sin in other people;
• a grieving over someone else’s pain or difficulties;
• lamenting over one’s own loss of something or someone dear.

The Man of Sorrows. Yes, there are many reasons for those tears. Those tears were called the “Second Baptism” in the early church. Those tears can be cleansing and the start of new life. In these tears one finds that the soul is in pain with an open wound. Sometimes the wounds of loss and sin are healed rather quickly. Most often the wound is deeper and only gradually is healed. But there is a promise here. God will bring comfort in the form of His presence. Being the “man of sorrows,” He loves to be gracious to those who grieve. He knows what it means to suffer loss and to grieve over sin.

Let the Healing Begin. When we are in painful circumstances like those mentioned, God promises that we are in a position to welcome the Lord and start the healing process. The deeper the grief, the more profoundly God will reveal Himself in your broken heart. So when you mourn, you are to be envied! You are now in a position to be comforted. As Robert Smith once said, “Tears is a language God understands.” We see clearly from Jesus that God fully identifies with those with a broken heart. The Lord will collect tears of brokenness as liquid prayers that reach to the throne of heaven. “Can we find a friend so faithful, who will all our sorrows share? Jesus knows our every weakness – Take it to the Lord in prayer!” (Joseph Scriven).