The first twelve words of Isaiah 6:1 are words with which some of us are familiar: "In the year that king Uzziah died I [Isaiah] saw also the LORD." Present in Isaiah's words is a profound contrast - Israel's king was dead, but Israel's God still lives.
How many times have we allowed some event, some loss, to cause us to lose sight of the ever living God? In his commentary on this text (July 13, My Utmost for His Highest), Oswald Chambers writes, "Over and over again God has to remove our friends to put Himself in their place, and that is when we falter, fail, and become discouraged. . . . When the person died who represented for me all that God was, did I give up on everything in life? Did I become ill or disheartened? Or did I do as Isaiah did and see the Lord?" In other words, when something or someone we hold dear was removed from our lives, what was our response?
How we respond during the times when we are walking in our respective valleys is very much dependent on how much of God we know before those times come. For some of us, our most memorable times with God were during some of the most difficult and challenging times of our lives. While we see from our limited perspectives and consider those times to be ones of disappointments and tragedies, it is possible that God, seeing things from His perspective, permits them in our paths so we would see Him. We have to be careful that we do not become so caught up in our circumstances that we fail to see God who stands supreme over our lives.
Chambers continues, "Your priorities must be God first, God second, and God third, until your life is continually face to face with God and no one [or nothing] else is taken into account whatsoever. Your prayer will then be, "In all the world there is no one but You, dear God; there is no one but You."
"In the year king Uzziah died I saw the Lord." Who do you see when life happens?
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