KJV Isaiah 6:5 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.
The seraphs had praised God with pure lips, and this Isaiah could not do. His lips were unclean, and that means that he as a man was unclean. A sinful man, he cannot praise God, and his sinfulness manifests itself at the lips. What Isaiah must do is praise God as the seraphs were doing, but because of his depravity, he could not do this. Those whose natures are sinful cannot praise God as they should. There must first be a cleansing of the heart. The prophet must first of all be made conscious of his own sin and unworthiness before he can praise God as he should.
Isaiah 14:13-14 quotes Lucifer desiring to be like the most high God, a desire which itself disqualifies him from ever holding this status. Geoffrey Grogan explains it this way:
It is a strange paradox that nothing makes a being less like God than the urge to be his equal, for he who was God stepped down from the throne of his glory to display to the wondering eyes of men the humility of God (Phil 2:5-8).
Is it just me, or does this quote from Oswalt sound a lot like David Wells in Above All Earthly Powr’s?
Apart from a diligent search for God’s perspective in every circumstance, we conclude too easily that God is concerned only about spiritual affairs and not about practical matters, a fallacy which leads eventually to the loss of God in all affairs.
KJV Isaiah 6:3 And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.
In their song of praise therefore the seraphim set forth what was the distinguishing characteristic of God, namely, His holiness. Their hearts burst forth in praise of His very essence. Our greatest service to Him also is to be found in praising His name. To praise His name involves more than the mere repetition of the word qadosh (holy). It includes deep meditation upon God and His attributes and the living of a life of humility in accordance with the precepts laid down in His Word. It is, in other words, the life of faith in Jesus Christ, lived for the glory of God.
Wordle is a neat tool for analyzing lengthy portions of text. To get an idea of how useful they are, look at this page that compares the inaugural speeches of all the United States presidents. What’s a wordle? Here’s how they explain it on their site:
Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
There are lots of ways to make wordles. You can paste text into a big box. You can dump your blog feed into it and see what words you overuse (and which words you forgot you said).
Just for fun, I made wordles of each book of the Bible. Each book took only a few seconds using my handy esv-insert command for Ubiquity. All of my wordles are linked here, but be sure to try this out yourself too.
