THE BOOK
ISAIAH’S VISION.
‘The earliest recorded event in his life is his call to prophecy as now found in the sixth Chapter of the Book of Isaiah; this occurred about 742 BC. The vision (probably in the Jerusalem Temple) that made him a prophet is described in a first-person narrative. According to this account he “saw” God and was overwhelmed by his contact with the divine glory and holiness. He became agonizingly aware of God’s need for a messenger to the people of Israel, and, despite his own sense of inadequacy, he offered himself for God’s service: ”Here am I! Send me.” He was thus commissioned to give voice to the divine word. It was no light undertaking: he was to condemn his own people and watch the nation crumble and perish. As he tells it, he was only too aware that, coming with such a message, he would experience bitter opposition, wilful disbelief, and ridicule, to withstand which he would have to be inwardly fortified. All this came to him in the form of a vision and ended as a sudden, firm, and lifelong resolve.’
My Commentary: Insofar as being able to “see” God, Blank correctly tempers that notion by the phrasing of the relevant part-sentence and use of closed commas, saying: ‘According to that account he “saw” God...’ We use the term, ‘correctly tempers that notion’, because a curious distortion surrounding this idea has been part of Christian Church doctrine “forever”! On the one hand --- as we explained previously --- we have two clear Scriptures; from Exodus 33:20, and John 1:8, (Fenton Bible) that respectively state:
He added, “you are not able to see my face, for no man can see me and
live”, --- and:
“No one has yet seen God...”
And on the other, we have a seemingly opposite view that states it is possible to see God because, ostensibly from Christian interpretation, it says so in Revelation 4:2, where John observed:
“...a throne in the heaven, and upon the throne an Occupant”.
As we stated earlier, in standard Church theology, the One Enthroned must therefore have to be God --- by virtue of the fact that He is Enthroned. Yet in front of that throne are 144,000 human spirits who can obviously also see the Throne --- and its Occupant. Now, we cannot have two different and diametrically-opposed ‘singularities’. What is global Christendom’s answer to that ‘seeming quandary’? Of course, there is an answer, and though simple in its Truth, it is stupendous in scope and scale.
Even though we have looked at this aspect in the previous Discourse, we will go much deeper into full and logical detail in the following one, for it has everything to do with Isaiah’s “Calling to Prophecy”. These first three formative Discourses thus set the appropriate parameters for the Key Revelation to further on. Now: What does the Koran say about God’s ‘veiled countenance’?
“Vision comprehends Him not, and He comprehends (all) vision; and He is the Subtile, the Aware.a” (6:103 M.M. Ali).
Ali’s commentary on 103a:
‘The physical vision of man, working as it does only within narrow limits and being able only to see bodies, cannot comprehend the Infinite One. He is the all- pervading Spirit, and can be seen only with the spiritual eye.’ (*)
(*) On the question of: “Can He be seen or can He not”; between Islam and Christianity there sits a ‘difference of sorts’ in the respective interpretations of Koranic Verse and Biblical Scripture. From our standpoint, what Ali has not taken into account is the vast and “Unbridgeable Gulf” between the ‘nucleus’ of Spirit --- our human derivation --- and what we have now learned from The All-Truth about GOD Who resides Above the Divine Realm.
In this stupendous revelation, we are gifted with the vastly elevated knowledge whereby the nonetheless very high Spiritual Realm is virtually cast into shadow when compared with the humanly-incomprehensible Pure Unsubstantiate Essence that is GOD.
[Of course, there cannot be any real comparison, and neither do we attempt that here. We simply use that term to attempt to designate the idea of the concept in some sort of relative context that we low-level humans might perhaps begin to just basically comprehend.]
Since “Unsubstantiate” is The Almighty’s correct but humanly- incomprehensible “Designation” [no words adequate enough here, people] it logically follows that because we do not, and never will, possess anything even approaching ‘divine’ sight, we, as just human beings, will never ever see to that Height and thus He beyond that.
To somehow believe that we can is to attempt to elevate human beings to a plane and station forever beyond our reach, so no degree of understanding thereof is possible. In addition, it must forever remain a blunt and logical fact that we can only have real understanding of ‘things’ up to the level of our origin. We can know about Higher Realms if we are told of their existence by ‘Whomever’ naturally occupies such levels and chooses to communicate that knowledge to us. But we cannot get there in person or, indeed, have any kind of inherent knowledge of “there”, any more than an insect or animal can have any real understanding of us. It really is as He said:
“Human beings can only envision God as the highest of what is human.”
In that context and in simple language, to ‘see’ does not necessarily mean to view with the physical organ of sight. Using the faculty of the imagination, we can ‘see’ in a non-physical way, or ‘to see’ can mean to ‘recognise’, to ‘understand’. In terms of a singularly-powerful spiritual insight or recognition sufficiently strong so as to “change one’s life completely” --- and for the term of that life as in the case of Isaiah --- the word “seeing” really dissolves into something quite irrelevant. The magnitude of that level of “seeing”, simply “overwhelms in absolute and awe-inspiring recognition”, hence Isaiah’s profound ministry for all of his life. Britannica’s Sheldon Blank continues his narrative on Isaiah: