Week 6: Here I Am, Send Me

Isaiah is still in the temple, still shaking from the coal on his lips, when the Lord speaks for the first time in the vision. Who will I send? Who will go for us? Isaiah answers before he's heard the job, and the job is hard to take. He's to preach to people who will keep listening and never understand, and his plain preaching will harden hearts that had already refused God through five chapters. When he asks how long, God answers with a picture of an empty country: cities in ruins, houses without people, the land driven out by the Lord Himself. Even the tenth that survives goes back into the fire.

Then the last line. Like an oak cut to the ground, Judah will leave a stump, and God calls it the holy seed. The chapter that opened with a dead king closes with a felled tree, and death doesn't get the last word either time. Jesus, John, and Paul all quote Isaiah's commission as they watch the same refusal happen again, and each time the story keeps going.