Isaiah 6- looking for reality

Reading Isaiah is not like any other type of reading I do. At my local library, books are helpfully given stickers to indicate genre, and I can choose 'romance', 'historical fiction', 'travel guide' etc. If I choose to read a story, then however realistic the author makes his characters and settings sound, I am aware all the time that they only exist as a figment of his imagination. When I read a travel guide, I expect that I could visit the places described and they would actually exist. Isaiah messes with my expectations of reality.The text lurches from mythical poetry, through stinging social criticism, to these first verses of chapter 6, which suddenly sound like history. We are given a date in time, the year that King Uzziah dies, which seems to point to the fact that this is going to be a serious, reliable record of events. But in verse 2, Isaiah is describing his vision of God, surrounded by six-winged seraphs. We find this so hard to understand, but who has got it more right- our 21st century world, where we rigorously divide our experiences into real, objective facts; and unreal, subjective experiences- or these people of long ago, who saw no difference in the reality of the death of a king and the appearance of God in all his glory? It could be us God is talking to, when he commands Isaiah to say to the people "Keep listening, but do not comprehend; keep looking, but do not understand." (6: 9) We look and we listen, but the whole time we do not see the obvious truth of who God is, even though it is written large across the world all around us.

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