Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.
All Commentaries on Isaiah 6:5 Go To Isaiah 6
Gregory The Dialogist
AD 604
Purity of heart and simplicity are most precious in the sight of Almighty God, who is fully pure and simple in nature. Set apart from the ways of the world, the servants of God are strangers to its vain talk and thus avoid disturbing and soiling their minds in idle conversation.… We are drawn downward by mingling in continual conversation with people of the world. It is with good reason that Isaiah, after seeing the Lord, the King of hosts, accuses himself of this very fault. In a spirit of repentance he says, “Woe is me, because I have held my peace; because I am a man of unclean lips.” And why are his lips unclean? Because, as he explains immediately, “I dwell in the midst of a people that has unclean lips.” Grieving that his own lips are unclean, he shows us that he contracted this defilement by living among a people that had unclean lips.
To take part in the talk of worldly people without defiling our own heart is all but impossible. If we permit ourselves to discuss their affairs with them, we grow accustomed to a manner of speech unbecoming to us, and we end clinging to it with pleasure and are no longer entirely willing to leave it. We enter upon the conversation reluctantly, as a kind of condescension, but we find ourselves carried along from idle words to harmful ones, from trivial faults to serious guilt, with the result that our lips are more defiled with foolish words, and our prayers further and further removed from God’s hearing.… Why should we be surprised, then, if God is slow to hear our petitions when we on our part are slow to hear God’s command or pay no attention whatever to it?
