The Seraphim: Part 11: A Touch from God in 1967 Brings a Deeper Insight into the Seraphim Ministry in Isaiah 6 Today
Isaiah 6:6, 7 Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar: And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.
I am able to interpret these verses because of an experience I had in 1967 that I never understood until I started finding it in some of my deep Bible studies. Even at that, I had studied the above verses off and on for a few years and still did not understand them until just a few days ago. It had to be the Lord who gave me the experience in 1967, and it had to be the Holy Spirit who revealed its meaning to me in the context of these verses just a few days ago in 2022. Here is my story:
My husband and I traveled by car from the Cherry Point Marine Air Station in North Carolina to El Paso, Texas where the Marine Corps sent him to an Army school at Fort Bliss for specialized training prior to his being deployed to Viet Nam. Our baby was with us in our VW bug and her portable crib was secured to the top of the car. As we traveled across Texas facing a headwind, there were times when we could not get our car to go any faster than about 45 mph.
Our quarters for this seven week school was a furnished apartment in El Paso far away from our family and friends and all distractions. Perhaps that is why the Lord chose this place for this experience. I remember I was reading the English Classic Novel, Vanity Fair, and I may not even have had a Bible with me. So I wasn’t some spiritual person deeply ensconced in the Word of God, but I was a believer. With all this in mind, here is what happened:
One night I was awakened from my sleep by our baby crying. I entered her room, changed her diaper and just sat there for a while rocking her and loving her. I was enveloped by a deep overwhelming love for her deeper than anything I had ever known, to the point I knew I would die for her. Then I had the thought that I would die for any baby anywhere in the whole world rather than see that baby suffer. After a while I put her back in her crib and went back to bed.
As I lay there next to my sleeping husband, I started to pray. I was thanking God for my wonderful husband and my precious baby when something inexplicable happened.
I felt something like gentle, loving, tingling lightning touch my head and in an instant go down through my whole body. And I felt like a shift in my mind where for an instant my mind had been united with the mind of Christ. I knew that had never happened to me before but it seemed familiar and I didn’t understand why. One thing though that I did understand was that God had touched me. So I just lay there for a while in wonderment at the thought that I had been touched by God.
As I thought about the experience years later, I understood that the love that enveloped me that night was not my human love; it was God’s love. My experience in El Paso all those years ago was actually a prophecy to me of a ministry God had planned for me in the future. And not only for me, but for all his people who choose to go all the way with him into his fullness. First he will envelop us with his love for us, and then out of knowing ourselves deeply loved by God, we will then be enabled to release that love to others. Out of our oneness with Love Himself, we can experience the joy of pure love flowing through us out to others.
So I was studying verses 6 and 7 here in Isaiah 6 a few days ago, a passage I have studied several times before, when I suddenly saw something I had never seen before. I saw that this experience in El Paso was in the passage in front of me. Let me explain and hopefully you will be able to see what I saw:
Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having a live coal in his hand…
I have already established in my previous Isaiah 6 articles that the seraphim are human beings in the fullness of Christ ministering in the end times. These articles have also revealed that their wings are not literal wings used for flying but are symbolic of various aspects of their character and ministries.
In light of all this, we know they do not literally flap their wings and fly in the atmosphere. What we can see however is that they are lifted up spiritually. They spiritually leave the lower realm of their natural, human experience and thinking to a higher, heavenly realm of experience and thinking. In this passage, one of the seraphim has been lifted up by God into such a high spiritual place that his mind has become one with the mind of Christ (flew) and he is no longer earth bound for a period of time for the purpose of ministry.
This then is what I experienced that night when I felt I would willingly die not only for my own baby but for any baby in the whole world. I was spiritually flying in that my mind had been lifted up and become one with the mind of Christ such that my own thoughts were joined with his thoughts. My mind was thinking and feeling the pure love of God with nothing of my carnal nature mixed in. When I went to bed and was lying there praying, the touch of God and the shift of my mind becoming one with the mind of Christ was God’s way of letting me know what had happened as I held my baby. As I held my baby and was filled with pure sacrificial love that was beyond what I had ever known, God had touched me and permitted me to feel the love of God united with my mind briefly so his love could pour out of me towards another person; in this case it was my baby and all the babies in the world.
It is an interesting side note that twenty-five years later I found myself called and ministering to persons who had been satanically ritually abused as babies and who had remained in bondage until God set them free through me in a ministry that could only be accomplished through the laying down of my self-life. And not only that, they had inside them dissociated parts that were still babies waiting to be rescued. In this ministry I ask God to come to the dissociated parts and he does. They experience God’s presence as he ministers directly to them. I am just a vessel filled with the presence of God and his love for these persons.
Having a live coal in his hand.
Of course, this is not a literal live coal in the minister’s hand. If it were a literal live coal in his hand, he would be badly burned. This is a spiritual live coal which symbolizes the divine love of God. According to George Nicholson’s Dictionary of Correspondences: the Key to Biblical Interpretation, “A live coal signifies the divine love from which all purification is derived”. So this divine love of God has a specific purpose. It is to purify this person receiving the ministry so that he/she can come up into the same spiritual realm in which the seraphim/minister dwells.
These ministers are in the fullness of Christ no longer having a sin nature. They have been through a process in relationship with God in which their sin nature was dealt a final death blow. Because the minister is no longer in sin, he is in a realm with God wherein he is able to fly. When he flies, he is not leaving the ground and flying through the air. He is spiritually elevated in Christ such that his mind has become one with the mind of Christ and the Holy Spirit can speak through him to minister to others.
The live coal, signifying the divine love of God, reveals that this seraphim/minister was filled with the love of God and this love was being directed and empowered by the hand of God. (Hand symbolically can mean power, means and direction.) The minister had momentarily come into union with God so that not only his thoughts but also his body (hand) were yielded to the Holy Spirit.
This was possible because the time was right (ends times) and he had been willing to suffer in his own life to the point that his humanity was purged of all sin nature through the giving up of all things for God. This will become clearer as we look more deeply into the meaning of the tongs from off the altar.
Which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar
As we have seen above, the seraphim/minister had a live coal in his hand, meaning he was filled with the love of God in order to minister with the motive of God’s pure love. The live coal had to be taken off the altar using tongs.
Tongs are symbolic of “purifiers and evacuators in the natural principle” (Dictionary of Correspondences). For the minister to have taken tongs means in his own life he had chosen to do as the apostle Paul had described in Philippians three:
But what things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ, And be found in him, not having mine own righteousness, which is of the law, but that which is through the faith of Christ, the righteousness which is of God by faith: That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death; If by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead (Phil 3:7-11).
Those who have suffered all for Christ have the tongs from off the altar. The altar represents their life of worship and sacrifice. They are the only ones who are able to minister in the way described here in Isaiah 6 because their natural tendency to sin as inherited from the fall (the natural principle as seen in the signification of tongs) will have been evacuated. It will be gone. Only in this way will the ministry be purely from God with no human agency interfering. The following verse tells us more about their ministry.
And he laid it upon my mouth, and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.
In order to unpack what this verse means, we need to begin by turning to the New Testament for the understanding of the word “mouth.”
When He had called the multitude to Himself, He said to them, “Hear and understand: Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man; but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man” (Matt 15:10).
But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and they defile a man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man (Matt 15:18-20a).
Out of the pure motive of divine love, the seraphim/minister does two actions seen in the words “laid” as in laid upon the mouth and “touched” as in touched the lips. These two English verbs, laid and touched, are the same Hebrew word, naga which means “to strike or smite.”
As these end-time ministers preach out of the motive of divine love, they will be spiritually smiting all those things in the hearts of their hearers that defile them.
The word “lips” in the Hebrew language is saphah from a root word that means “through the idea of termination.” This indicates that what has defiled this person as seen in “mouth” is going to be terminated “lips.” With lips meaning “speech, language, vain words, prating, etc.” we can see that never again will any evil and defiling things come out of the mouths of those who receive and act upon the ministry of the seraphim/ministers. If it is not in their mouth, then it is not in their heart because it is “out of the heart” that man speaks.
I believe I may have another insight about the words these seraphim/ministers will speak because of a special birthday present Jesus gave me many years ago. It came in the way of a dream. The situation was this:
My husband and I lived in Newark, Ohio and one of our daughters and her family lived in Indiana. Sometimes we would meet at a halfway place in Dayton at a large mall to spend the day together. We had plans to meet in Dayton on my birthday, but it was snowing hard in both states. Our daughter called and said there was no way she could get to Dayton. We confirmed we were in the same situation. As we were saying goodbye she added that she was sleepy and was going back to bed.
Not too long afterward she called and said she had had a dream about me. In the dream I and a few other Christians were in a car traveling somewhere and singing praise songs to the Lord. At one point I began to minister to each person in the car. I told each person of a sin in their life, something I could not have known that could only have been revealed by God. And with the identifying of the sin was added a warning of a specific serious illness that would befall them if they did not deal with their sin.
The warning given in the dream might sound harsh, but if it was delivered from a heart of pure love, it could be the most loving thing this person would ever receive. As Paul encouraged Timothy, “reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.”
It is important to understand that we must never judge any sick person as being evil or of being more sinful than someone who is not ill. Our God works in mysterious ways and sometimes illness is something God uses to do a deep spiritual work in someone’s life. The fact is, however, we only get sick and we only die because we have a sin nature. Until this sin nature is eradicated by the Lord himself in these end times, we are all vulnerable to sickness, aging and all that accompanies that and finally death.
It is easy to see why the Lord hid the message of the seraphim ministry in such a way that it could only be revealed by the Holy Spirit in the end times when the ministry would be initiated by God at a fixed and definite time known only to him. If Christians had known of this before the kairos moment, there would have been a multitude of sin-laden condemnations and accusations coming from carnal believers against innocent fellow believers who were ill. Only God himself knows what is in our heart.
Even now as I write and publish my interpretations of these difficult passages on the Internet, only a few people will read them, and thus they are still hidden away. Only believers with hearts for the deep things of God will read them because most people don’t want to read about biblical types or what words mean in their original languages because they believe what they are being taught is the absolute truth. Instead, we should be like the Bereans who researched what they were being taught to see for themselves whether or not these teachings were true.
I truly believe based on my studies, my own experiences and the dream, that this is the kind of ministry that will be necessary to prepare the church to become the bride of Christ. Up to this point, at least in our experience, prophecy has been loving and edifying. The new ministry to come will be loving in a different sense with a no-nonsense urgency for people to do something about their sin or they will suffer greatly as a result of their failure to obey the commands of God.
In finishing our study of this verse, let’s look at the final portion:
thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.
Until I studied this verse I didn’t know there is a difference between iniquity and sin. I just thought they were the same thing and the Holy Spirit had used parallelism to emphasize the weightiness of sin. However, upon closer scrutiny of the words in their original language and what I found in the teachings of others, I discovered there actually is a slight difference between iniquity and sin and that the two are mentioned together in many passages of Scripture. For example:
Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, And in sin my mother conceived me. (Psa 51:5)
He will remember their iniquity; He will punish their sins. (Hosea 9:9)
You have burdened Me with your sins, You have wearied Me with your iniquities. (Isa 43:24)
This verse in Isaiah 6 states that “iniquity is taken away.” Just exactly what is iniquity? In Bible usage we find this definition: “perversity, depravity, guilt or punishment of iniquity.” According to what I have learned, iniquity is that thing inside of us that motivates us to do the wrong thing. This would be the sin nature we inherited from our ancestors that is in all human beings as a result of the Fall.
I believe the punishment of iniquity is what we inherited from our forefathers because of the punishment put upon us all from Adam’s sin in the garden. This punishment came in the form of having a sin nature (brought forth in iniquity [Psa 51:5]) that causes us all to grow old, weak, sick and die. It causes us to always fall back into some form of sin. “They have turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers” (Jer 11:10).
Sins are our thoughts and actions that spring forth out of our depraved sin nature (iniquity) that continually opposes the things of God.
Looking once again at the last portion of Isaiah 6:7…
thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.
We can see that our sin nature (iniquity) is first taken away, and then sin will be purged. Purged in the Hebrew is kawfar and means “expiated, covered over, pardoned,” and is usually translated as “atonement.” In fact, it is translated “atonement” 71 times in Scripture.
Here we have the completed work of the atonement granted us through the propitiatory work of Jesus on the cross. In these end times we will actually go forward in complete freedom from all the effects of the Fall and will go forth in the image of the Son of God to minister as he did. This is what Jesus meant when he said we would be able to do the works that he did and even greater works because he was going to his Father. Jesus had to die on the cross and rise from the dead in order that the Holy Spirit could come and indwell God’s people. And, glory be to God, there will be nothing left in us to oppose the perfect, powerful functioning of the Holy Spirit within us and through us!
More on the Seraphim to come…
