Isaiah 6:3

And one cried unto another,.... This denotes the publicness of their ministry, and their harmony and unity in it; they answered to one another, and agreed in what they said; their preaching was not

And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.

One cried unto another; singing in consort the praises of their Lord. Holy, holy, holy: this is repeated thrice, either, 1. To intimate the Trinity of persons united in the Divine essence; or, 2. That he was most eminently and unquestionably holy in his present work of judgment, and in all his ways; such repetitions being very frequent in Scripture, for the greater assurance of the thing, as . The whole earth; not only Canaan, to which the Jews did vainly and arrogantly confine the presence of God, but all the world; which seems to have a respect to the conversion of the Gentiles, which did accompany the plenary and last execution of this judgment here threatened against the Jewish nation, , as is evident by comparing this with ,15 Acts 28:26,27, and other places of the New Testament. Full of his glory; of the effects and demonstrations of his glorious holiness, as well as of his power, and wisdom, and goodness.

Isaiah 6:3 And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, [is] the LORD of hosts: the whole earth [is] full of his glory.Ver. 3. And one cried to another.] Hymnum cantant τρισαγιον, and that, as it may seem, by way of antiphony, as those did. And said, Holy, holy, holy.] Hereby showing their earnestness and insatiability in praising God. The ingemination importeth strong affection. Infinitis vicibus iterant, saith Procopius; the holy angels "have no rest," and yet they have no unrest either, "day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty which was, and is, and is to come." The ancient Rabbis, as R, Simeon Ben Joai, proved the trinity of persons from this text, saith Galatin, appointing their posterity to repeat these words twice a day at least - viz., at the rising and setting of the sun, which also they do to this day, and when they do it they leap three times. The whole earth is full of his glory.] Not the land of Judea only, but the wide world, shall be full of God’ s glory, when the gospel shall be preached to all nations. This was for comfort to our prophet, that although his countrymen were cast off for their contumacy, yet he should not lose the fruit of his labours when once that "great mystery of godliness" was revealed; "God" - whom he had now seen upon the throne, and that purposely for his confirmation - "manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory." Lib. ii. cap. 1.

(3) And one cried unto another.—So in Psalms 29:9, which, as describing a thunderstorm, favours the suggestion that the lightnings were thought of as the symbols of the fiery seraphim, we read, “in his temple doth every one say, Glory.” The threefold repetition, familiar as the Trisagion of the Church’s worship, and reproduced in Revelation 4:8 (where “Lord God Almighty” appears as the equivalent of Jehovah Sabaoth), may represent either the mode of utterance, first antiphonal, and then in full chorus, or the Hebrew idiom of the emphasis of a three-fold iteration, as in Jeremiah 7:4; Jeremiah 22:29. Viewed from the standpoint of a later revelation, devout thinkers have naturally seen in it an allusive reference to the glory of Jehovah as seen alike in the past, the present, and the future, which seems the leading idea in Revelation 4:8, or even a faint foreshadowing of the Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead. Historically we cannot separate it from the name of the Holy One of Israel, which with “the Lord of hosts” was afterwards so prominent in Isaiah’s teaching.

Verse 3. Holy, holy, holy] This hymn performed by the seraphim, divided into two choirs, the one singing responsively to the other, which Gregory Nazian., Carm. 18, very elegantly calls Συμφωνον, αντιφωνον, αγγελωνστασιν, is formed upon the practice of alternate singing, which prevailed in the Jewish Church from the time of Moses, whose ode at the Red Sea was thus performed, (see Exodus 15:20-21,) to that of Ezra, under whom the priests and Levites sung alternately, "O praise JEHOVAH, for he is gracious; For his mercy endureth for ever;" Ezra 3:11. See De Sac. Poes. Hebr. Prael. xix., at the beginning.

3. And one cried unto another] (frequentat. impf.). Cf. Revelation 4:8. Holy, holy, holy is Jehovah of Hosts: That which fills the whole earth is His glory. The word “holy,” thrice repeated as if it struck the chord to which the whole nature of these pure beings vibrated (the ancient church found here an allusion to the mystery of the Trinity) sums up the meaning of the vision in so far as it is a revelation of God. The general notion of holiness is too complex to be analysed here. The root idea appears to be that of distance or separation. As a predicate of deity it expresses first of all the awful contrast between the divine and the human, and then those positive attributes of God which constitute true divinity, and call for the religious emotions of awe, reverence and adoration. What Isaiah here receives, therefore, is a new and overpowering impression of the Supreme Godhead of Jehovah; the whole impact of the vision on his mind is concentrated in the word which he hears from the lips of the seraphim. Although the idea of holiness in the O.T. is never to be identified with that of moral purity, it is clear from Isaiah’s immediate sense of guilt that ethical perfection is included among the attributes which make up the holiness or Godhead of Jehovah (see Robertson Smith, Prophets, pp. 224 ff.). The second line of the Trisagion celebrates the “glory” of Jehovah, His manifestation of Himself in nature,—one of the leading thoughts of the second part of this book (ch. 40 ff.). The seraphim contemplate the universal diffusion of this “glory” (sub specie aeternitatis) as a present fact; elsewhere it is an ideal yet to be realised: Numbers 14:21; Habakkuk 2:14.

And one cried to another - Hebrew ‘This cried to this.’ That is, they cried to each other in alternate responses.

3. Cried unto another — If more than two, then they stood in opposite rows, each side the throne, and responded each singly to his opposite fellow, after the manner of an antiphonal service.