Isaiah 6

The Book of Isaiah opens at its climax, with the Jewish people looking doomed as the Assyrian army encircled Jerusalem. The first five chapters describe how things got to that point: The nation of Judah had turned away from God, and was being punished for its rebellion.

Chapter 6 resets the story to 743 BC, almost 40 years before the Assyrian invasion, when Isaiah has a life-changing spiritual encounter. The book never mentions what he was doing before. It doesn't matter because there is no way he could go back. What Isaiah describes sounds more like an HP Lovecraft novel than the Bible:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying.

- Isaiah 6:1-2 

The seraphim cover their faces to avoid looking at God. One of the themes of the Old Testament is that most creatures can not directly experience the glory of God and survive. We are never actually told what He looks like. The idea of God as an old man with a white beard is something that modern audiences came up with. The Jews saw any depiction of God as leading to idol worship. Isaiah, in keeping with that tradition, doesn’t say anything about what he saw when he looked at the throne. He just talks about the scene around it.

Photo: seriykotik1970

Isaiah doesn’t feel worthy of being there. Being that close to the presence of God drives home how far he falls short of perfection. He knows his sin, and knows that God knows his sin. The only thing he can do is beg for forgiveness. What happens is pretty fascinating from a Christian perspective:

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lip; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

- Isaiah 6:5-7 

Isaiah needs something to cover for his sin so an angel puts a coal on his lips. There’s a clear contrast between what happens to Isaiah in the Old Testament and what happens to the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation. John doesn’t need a heavenly coal to be in the presence of God. He has something better.

But that bit of theology is something I picked up as an adult. I first read Revelation as a teenager, long before I was a Christian. You don’t have to grow up in the church to be curious about it. There’s so much crazy stuff in there that it’s hard to know where to start -- the seven trumpets, the four horsemen, the scorpions with the faces of men. The whole thing seemed insane to me: How could Christians believe any of this? How could any modern person?

Believing in the supernatural was one of my biggest hurdles in becoming a Christian. I was raised in a family that believed in science, not religion. I couldn’t get my head around the idea that there anything more to life than the material world around us. The moment that changed came when I was rolling on ecstasy at an EDM concert. The drug opened my eyes to something new. Anyone who has rolled will know what I am talking about. You feel connected to everyone around you in a way that is hard to describe. You feel an overwhelming sense of love as your inhibitions and even your sense of self washes away.

Photo: gato-gato-gato

I had rolled at EDM concerts before. What was different about this experience was that the mask from V for Vendetta was plastered on a screen that we were dancing in front of. I saw it and I just knew in my bones that something was wrong. I felt it leering and laughing at me.

Your brain normally protects you from stuff like that. That’s how people can go their entire lives without ever experiencing anything supernatural. But taking certain types of drugs lowers your spiritual boundaries. It's like a computer that gets connected to the internet without any anti-virus software. Ecstasy essentially turns off that part of your brain and leaves you open to anything. It’s great when you are in a positive place with positive people around you. But it can go real bad real fast if you are exposed to the wrong thing.

I lived a pretty reckless lifestyle in college and my early 20s. One thing you learn when you take psychedelic drugs is how different the world can look with a different filter on it. The human brain is designed to filter reality. Take the electromagnetic spectrum. Only a small fraction is actually visible to us:

Just because you can’t see X-rays, gamma rays, infrared light, and radio waves doesn’t mean they don’t exist. The question that you have to ask is whether the same thing could apply to the supernatural.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

- Shakespeare 

Take this story from Kira Salak in National Geographic Adventure. She climbs a mountain in Libya that the locals tell her is haunted by demons and evil spirits. Nothing happens to her. A year later, she is in the Amazon jungles, going through an ayahuasca healing ceremony, when it suddenly turns into an exorcism:

And now they appear to be escaping en masse from my throat. I hear myself making otherworldly squealing and hissing sounds. Such high-pitched screeches that surely no human could ever make. All the while there is me, like a kind of witness, watching and listening in horror, feeling utterly helpless to stop it. All I know is that one after another, demonic-looking forms seem to be pulled from my body. I’ve read nothing about this sort of experience happening when taking ayahuasca. And now I see an image of a mountain in Libya—a supposedly haunted mountain that I climbed a year and a half ago, despite strong warnings from locals. A voice tells me that whatever is now leaving my body attached itself to me in that place. 

In the post-Christian West, we are raised to believe that this life is all there is. That there is nothing after death and that spiritual forces are a primitive superstition. Maybe we are wiser and more advanced than the overwhelming majority of societies throughout human history who believed otherwise. Or maybe we aren't. But just because you have never experienced something doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

Most Western people believe in aliens despite there being zero proof of them whatsoever. One of the most famous problems in modern science is Fermi’s Paradox: How could there be no other signs of intelligent life in this impossibly vast universe with billions upon billions of stars?

Here’s one theory that fits the evidence. Maybe this universe was created for us specifically by a higher power. Maybe there is a guiding hand leading history to a specific end point. Maybe that power left evidence in the form of prophecies that predicted the most important event in human history hundreds of years before it happened.

Do you not know?
Have you not heard?
Has it not been told to you from the beginning?
Have you not understood since the earth was founded?
He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.
He stretches out the heavens like a canopy, and spreads them out like a tent to live in.
He brings princes to naught and reduces the rules of this world to nothing.
No sooner are they planted,
No sooner are they sown,
No sooner do they take root in the ground,
Than he blows on them and they wither,
And a whirlwind sweeps them away like chaff.

- Isaiah 40:21-24 

The idea of an all-knowing and all-powerful God is hard to internalize. But it’s the only way that the teachings of Christianity make sense. Jesus tells us not to worry about anything and to love our enemies even as they persecute us. Those are impossible things to do under our own power. It only becomes possible if we really believe in God.

It was the same thing for Isaiah. His life after his encounter with God was hard. He wasn’t preaching the good news. He had to spread the bad news about the coming judgment of God to a people who had walked away from their faith and didn’t want to hear any of it. Isaiah had to face constant rejection and persecution. The only way for him to keep going was to remember that there was more to this life than what he was experiencing in the moment.

God is real. Once you experience that for yourself, nothing else matters.