A Thought For The Week Of April 10, 2017

"In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple." (Isaiah 6:1) This verse is, of course, the beginning of a vision that the prophet Isaiah had of God and heaven. It got me thinking about visions and how we can use or often misuse them. The Bible is full of visions - in both the Old and New Testaments. They have much to reveal to us about ourselves, about God and about eternity - but we have to know how to make use of them and how to interpret them. It's with biblical visions perhaps more than anything else that a hard and fast biblical literalism becomes a problem. You simply can't take a vision and interpret it literally. A vision is a portrayal of spiritual realities in understandable images. But spiritual realities really go beyond our ability to fully understand - so we can't take a vision and make a literal picture of it. This passage, for example (which extends to verse 10) isn't a photograph of heaven. It's more like a piece of abstract art. If we study it carefully we can glean what it's trying to say, but the image isn't an exact representation of what's being revealed. What we get from this vision is an image of a powerful and holy God who exists in a spiritual world beyond our own, who sees our lives and forgives our sins, and who sends us into the world to bear witness - even though many people to whom we bear witness can't understand. That about sums it up. The vision is grand and glorious, because it points us to a spiritual reality we can't fully comprehend. That's why we can't just take it literally. To do that is to pretend that we get it - fully and completely and totally. To do that is arrogant. But if we don't take it literally, we do take it seriously, because it has a message for us. That's the way of dealing with all biblical visions - even, for example, Revelation, which so many people get so hung up on. Like this vision, Revelation is a vision and not a literal reality. But all biblical visions have a message; a truth to reveal to us - if we have the courage and the humility to go beyond the literal and to embrace the symbolism we find.