Isaiah
Vision, Valley, Verity
Life is not as idle ore,
But iron dug from central gloom,
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And batter’d by the shocks of doom
To shape and use.
It is always well to go back to the foundation truths revealed in God’s word regarding what He expects of the man or woman who wishes to be what He wants. “Called to be saints,”† that is what God expects.
Thank God for the sight of all you have never yet been. The vision is not an ecstasy or a dream, but a perfect understanding of what God wants, it is the Divine light making manifest the calling of God. You may call the vision an emotion or a desire, but it is something that absorbs you. Learn to thank God for making known His demands. You have had the vision, but you are not there yet by any means. You have seen what God wants you to be but what you are not yet. Are you prepared to have this “iron dug from central gloom” battered into “shape and use?” “Battering” conveys the idea of a blacksmith putting good metal into right useful shape. The batterings of God come in commonplace days and commonplace ways, God is using the anvil to bring us into the shape of the vision. The length of time it takes God to do it depends upon us. If we prefer to loll on the mount of transfiguration, to live on the memory of the vision, we are of no use to live with the ordinary stuff of which human life is made up. We have not to live always in ecstasy and conscious contemplation of God, but to live in reliance on what we saw in the vision when we are in the midst of actualities. It is when we are going through the valley to prove whether we will be the “choice” ones, that most of us turn tail; we are not prepared for the blows which must come if we are going to be turned into the shape of the vision. It does not matter with what the vision is connected, there is always something that corresponds to the valley of humiliation. God gives us the vision, then He takes us down to the valley to batter us into its shape, and it is in the valley that we faint and give way, while all the time God is wanting to get us through to the veritable reality.
Abraham
In Genesis 15:1, we read “After these things the word of the Lord came unto Abram in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” After the vision there followed the valley of humiliation, and Abraham went through thirteen years of silence. Genesis 16 is an illustration of the danger of listening to good advice when it is dark instead of waiting for God to send the light. The act of Abraham and Sarah produced a complexity in God’s plan all down the ages. The intervening years brought Abraham through his valley of humiliation. During those years of silence all Abraham’s self-sufficiency was destroyed, every strand of self-reliance was broken; there was no possibility left of relying on common-sense ways, and when Abraham had exhausted all human strength and wisdom, then God appeared to him. “And when Abram was ninety years old and nine, the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty God; walk before Me, and be thou perfect” (Genesis 17:1). No vision this time, but Reality. Abraham, after his humiliation, was in a fit state to stand the reward—God Himself. Abraham became a man more sure of God than of anything else.
The one thing for which we are all being disciplined is to know that God is real. As soon as God becomes real, other people become shadows. Nothing that other saints do or say can ever perturb the one who is built on the real God. “In all the world, my God, there is none but thee, there is none but thee.”
The danger is to try to anticipate the actual fulfilment of the real vision. On the mount of transfiguration we saw clearly a vision of what God wanted, and we transacted business with God spiritually; then immediately afterwards there was nothing but blank darkness. Remember Isaiah’s word—“Who is among you . . . that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon his God.” The temptation is to work up enthusiasm, to kindle a fire of our own and walk in the light of it. God’s “nothings” are His most positive answers. We have to stay on God and wait. Never try to help God to fulfil His word.
Moses
And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens. (Exodus 2:11)
That is an indication of the vision of God’s purpose for Moses, viz., the deliverance of his brethren. It is a great moment in a man’s life when he realises that he has to go a solitary way alone. Moses was “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” a man in a royal setting by the providence of God, and he saw the burden of God’s people, and his whole heart and mind was ablaze with the vision that he was the man to deliver them. He was the man to deliver his people, but not yet, there was something in the road, and God sent him into the wilderness to feed sheep for forty years. Imagine what those years must have meant to Moses, realising on the threshold of his manhood the vision of what he was to do; seeing, as no one else could see, the burdens of his people, and feeling in himself the certainty that he was the one to deliver them; how he would ponder over God’s ways during those forty years.
Then we read that God appeared to Moses and said—“Come now therefore, and I will send thee unto Pharaoh, that thou mayest bring forth my people the children of Israel out of Egypt” (Exodus 3:10). At first, Moses was certain that he was the one to deliver his people; but forty years have passed since he had the vision, and there is a different characteristic in Moses now. It is no longer the big “I am,” but the little “I am.” When God came with a renewal of the call, Moses had the quaver of the little “I am”—“Who am I, that I should go?” The little “I am” always sulks when God says Do. And the Almighty’s reply to Moses is full of stirring indignation—“I AM THAT I AM” hath sent thee. The big “I am” and the little “I am” have to go until there is no “I am” but God, He must dominate. Let the little “I am” be shrivelled up in God’s indignation. Is it not illuminating how God knows where we are, and the kennels we crawl into, no matter how much straw we hide under! He will hunt us up like a lightning flash. No human being knows human beings as God does.
“Behold, there is a place by Me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock” (Exodus 33:21). Moses has come to the Reality of all realities, recognition by God. The place in God’s mind for Moses was by Him on the rock, recognised by God as His true yoke fellow. Nothing can deflect the life that has once been placed by God on the rock. After the forty years of humiliation Moses was in a fit state to receive the recognition of God without being unduly lifted up.
“There is a place by Me. . . .” No man ever gets beside God who has not first been beside himself and knocked out of his wits with worry and anxiety about the mess he has made of things. That is the meaning of conviction of sin, the realisation—“What a fool I have been! how wicked and vile! and I ought to have been this and that!”
Moses’ experience was of the type in which the certainty is brought home that God has been preparing you for something, and you realise that you have the power potentially to do what He wants. You can recall the perfect reality of the vision, the clear understanding of what God said to you then. You say—“I know He said it, I almost saw Him, it was so real. I know God called me to be a missionary—but it was a long time ago, and I suppose I was mistaken, for look at me now, something in an office.” You know you were not mistaken. The call was right, but you were not ready for it. God has to season us, there has to be a time of humiliation before the vision is turned into verity. We have to learn not only how useless we are, but how marvellously mighty God is. “Many are called, but few prove the choice ones.”
Think of the enormous leisure of God! He never is in a hurry. We are in such a frantic hurry. We get down before God and pray, then we get up and say, “It is all done now,” and in the light of the glory of the vision we go forth to do the thing. But it is not real, and God has to take us into the valley and put us through fires and floods to batter us into shape, until we get into the condition in which He can trust us with the reality of His recognition of us.
Isaiah
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. (Isaiah 6:1)
Isaiah’s vision stands for another type of the call of God. In the profound grief of the greatest bereavement of his life, Isaiah saw the Lord, and right on top of the vision came deep and profound dejection on account of his sin and unworthiness. “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.” The effect of the vision of the holiness of the Lord was to bring home to Isaiah that he was a man of unclean lips; there was deep dejection at his utter unfitness to be anything like what he had seen. Then the live coal from off the altar was laid upon his mouth—the cleansing fire was applied where the sin had been concentrated, and in the communion with God resulting from his intense spiritual cleansing, Isaiah overheard God say, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” and from heartbreak and disenchantment to simple humble attachment, he said: “Here am I; send me.” Isaiah was made the Representative of God.
Each one of us has a counterpart somewhere in the experiences of these three men of God. In the case of Abraham, the valley of humiliation lasted thirteen years; Moses, forty years; Isaiah, a few minutes. No two of us are alike, each one stands alone before God. Your valley may be a darkness where you have nothing but your duty to guide you, no voice, no thrill, but just steady, plodding duty; or it may be a deep agonising dejection at the realisation of your unfitness and uncleanness and insufficiency. Let God put you on His wheel and whirl you as He likes, and as sure as God is God and you are you, you will turn out exactly in accordance with the vision He gave you. Don’t lose heart in the process.
If ever we have had the vision—and all of us probably have had, it may have been when we were little children, or when we were very ill, or after a bereavement—we may try as we like to be satisfied on a lower level, but God will not let us. The goads of God are in, and it is hard to kick against them. Ever since we first had the vision, God has been at work getting us through the valley of humiliation, battering us into the shape of the vision, and over and over again we have tried to get out of God’s hands and batter ourselves into our own shape—“Now this is the place I must be in; this is what the vision means.” Keep paying the price. Let God see that you are willing to live up to the vision.