Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Greetings, dear people.

Once again—there’s not much morning left. I need to get out there and stir up some sawdust before eating any lunch. I had a late breakfast—so may not be seeing lunch for a couple more hours. I actually ate it alone on the creekside deck—just me and the fish. Becki had gone to the doctor for her annual check up. It looks like she’s going to be OK—but she’s not feeling real great right now due to the high contration of alergens in the air at present (hay fever). Thano has gone to a shift at Safeway.

May you and yours be blessed today.

Love, Dad/Ray.

Something important is being shown here. On one hand, we would have to assume that Isaiah was relatively a pretty good guy to begin with, with a HEART AFTER GOD, divinely appointed as a prophet of the LORD, and he followed through with a ministry spanning more than 50 years, under the reigns of 4 different kings. The first of these kings was Uzziah—identified at the beginning of Isaiah’s special divine encounter (6:1). My Bible offers the date of about 740 B.C. That’s the setting for Isaiah receiving this divine and dramatic visitation. But notice that even with his heart-level godly qualities, about which he might even be a little proud, when he is brought into the glorious presence of the LORD and exposed to His absolute Holiness, something profound happens to Isaiah’s view of himself. Suddenly he sees things clearly. He clearly sees now what he has not been seeing clearly. He is made to recognize as never before that all the good deeds he has ever done or could do would never be enough to win God’s acceptance and blessing. He saw clearly that his positive relationship with God was not on the basis of a balancing act of good deeds outweighing bad deeds. Later he would affirm, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6). Let’s make this clear: If this is a true accounting of Isaiah seeing clearly, we should do everything we can to learn the same lesson and incorporate the same clarity into our own seeing. Our natural bent, of course, is to see distorted, deceptive, and dirty (Jeremiah 17:9) while we arrogantly boast of how wonderful we see ourselves—how deserving we are to win God’s favor—how lucky God is to have us on His earth. That notion is just a bunch more B.S.!—bad seeing in this case.

There is also some unavoidable agony attached to this quality of seeing. Do you see what I mean? That right there is the source of this agony—I can’t make you see what I see! And you can’t make others see what you see. And if we see things that are essential to one’s eternal well-being, and that this can only be seen by means of personal revelation and illumination of the Holy Spirit, how can we not agonize when we see so many who can’t see the same? No amount of preaching, argument, reasoning, or good intentions will ever make people see what they don’t see or don’t want to see. Oh—the agony! I suppose the best we can do translate this agony into motivation and pray to the All-Seeing One that He would be free to work within the hearts and minds of others in ways that would encourage them to want to see what God wants them to see. I think that’s basically how it works.

How could anyone not be astounded and dumbfounded while studying the inner workings and physiology of the miraculous gift of seeing?! I exclaim again—MINDLESS DIRT COULD NOT HAVE THOUGHT THIS UP! If that is a valid view, why would we expect spiritual sight to be any less intricate, delicate, and amazing? Why would it be any less a God thing—any less dependent upon the All-Seeing One for seeing clearly?