6 Words That Will Change Your LifeSample

One of the scariest movie characters from my childhood was the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. She not only tormented poor Dorothy and her timid friends, she scared me witless. Perhaps that’s why her demise is so indelibly imprinted in my brain.  

Just after the Wicked Witch sets the helpless scarecrow on fire, Dorothy grabs a bucket of water and throws it to put out the flames. Unbeknownst to everyone except the witch herself, water is her mortal downfall. She immediately begins her lament, crying, “I’m melting! I’m melting!”  

In seconds, the Wicked Witch is totally undone by simply coming into contact with water.  

This kind of makes me think of Isaiah 6:1-5. Instead of contact with water melting Isaiah away, it’s contact with the holiness of God Almighty that sends him into a meltdown of a different sort. “Woe to me!” he cries, “I am ruined!...my eyes have seen the King,  the Lord Almighty.”  

As an Old Testament prophet of God, Isaiah is highly experienced when it comes to delivering messages of woe. In Isaiah 5, just one chapter before his dramatic, personal vision of God’s holiness, the prophet delivers a whole string of woeful curses on the sinful Hebrew nation. Six times in this single chapter, he pronounces prophetic doom upon the wicked, declaring “Woe to those who…” 

…accumulate more and more possessions  

…make their lives all about drinking and partying  

…pursue wickedness and ignore God 

…call evil good and good evil 

…are clever in their own sight 

…are unjust to the innocent. 

But now in Isaiah 6, when the prophet is actually given a personal vision of God’s holiness, it’s no longer “Woe to those….” It’s “Woe is me!”  

Isaiah was instantly overcome by his own sinfulness and sensed his very being might collapse beneath the weight of his sin’s ugliness in the presence of God’s beautiful holiness.  

Notice that even the seraphim, God’s heavenly creatures, covered their faces and feet, concealing themselves as much as possible from the direct presence of God, as the cried out “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord Almighty.” 

This passage gives us a sobering look at why no human can ever enter into the presence of our holy, pure and perfect God through the power of their own human efforts to be “good enough.” We are all sinful. We have all fallen short and missed the mark of God’s holy perfection. 

The awestruck chant “Holy, holy, holy” appears only one other place in Scripture. In Revelation 4, we find the writer once again describing how God’s heavenly creatures gather around His Throne. 

Quiet your mind, close your eyes, calm your soul, enter His presence and meditate for a few minutes on the holiness of God.