The Man Who Saw God on the Throne

At a glance

Scripture read in this sermon

In the year that king Uzziah died I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. And the posts of the door moved at the voice of him that cried, and the house was filled with smoke. Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts. Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: and he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged. Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.

Isaiah 6:1–8 KJV

This is the passage Tozer read aloud at the start of the message, and it governs everything that follows in this study companion. Look it up alongside the rest of Isaiah in the UECF.NET NKJV Bible.

UECF.NET summary

Tozer opens by clearing up a piece of theological language he thinks Christians get wrong. We often say that God "uses" a person, the way a company uses a good salesman — as an instrument, picked up and put down. Tozer will not have it. God, he says, works in a man and through a man; He does not merely use him. That distinction matters for everything that follows, because it changes what we expect when God lays hold of somebody: not a tool being deployed, but a person being remade from the inside so that God's own life can move through him.

He had preached, on a previous occasion, about a man who met God at a burning bush — Moses. Now he turns to a different kind of meeting: a man who saw God not in a desert bush but seated on a throne. That man is Isaiah, and the moment is dated with unusual precision for a vision of this kind: "in the year that king Uzziah died." Uzziah had reigned in Judah for over fifty years, a long and in many ways prosperous reign. His death marked the end of an era of the only security Judah had known for a generation. It was into that vacuum — a king gone, a throne on earth suddenly empty — that Isaiah looked up and saw a throne that was never empty at all.

Tozer takes care to say who Isaiah actually was, because the vision did not come to a beggar or an outcast. Isaiah was a man of standing: cultured, literate, a poet by temperament, by tradition a cousin of the royal house. He was not a man crushed by circumstance or obviously guilty of some scandal. That detail matters later in the sermon, when Isaiah's reaction to what he sees turns out to have nothing to do with a particular sin he had committed.

Then comes the vision itself, and Tozer spends real care insisting that we take it seriously as an actual encounter, not a literary device or a dream to be interpreted away. Isaiah saw the Lord sitting on a throne, "high and lifted up," with the train of His robe filling the temple. Above the throne stood the seraphim, calling to one another. Tozer's point here is almost as much about language as about theology: Isaiah, a trained poet with the finest vocabulary of his generation, reaches for words and cannot make them hold what he saw. The prophet is not being vague because he lacks skill; he is being as precise as human language allows about a reality that language was never built to carry. What can be known of the true and uncreated God by the human intellect alone is nothing — Tozer is blunt about this — but what God discloses of Himself to the human spirit arrives immediately and unmistakably. Isaiah did not reason his way to this throne. He saw it.

Key ideas

• God does not merely use a person as an instrument; He works in and through them, changing the person Himself in the process.
• The vision is dated to a real historical hinge — the death of King Uzziah — when an earthly throne stood empty and a heavenly one did not.
• Isaiah was a man of privilege and culture, not an outcast; whatever undoes him in this vision is not explained by his circumstances.
• Human language, even a poet's, cannot fully contain what Isaiah saw. Tozer treats this as evidence of a real, transcendent encounter, not as a flaw in the account.
• Knowledge of God by unaided human reason is, in Tozer's phrase, essentially nothing; the self-revelation of God to the human spirit is another matter altogether — immediate rather than deduced.

Bible references in this chapter

• Isaiah 6:1
• Isaiah 6:2
• Isaiah 6:3
• Exodus 3:1–6 (the burning bush, referenced by Tozer as a contrasting encounter)