Isaiah 40:5

Isaiah 40:5

Has this revelation of God's glory respect only to the past and to the present? Has it nothing to do with the future? We believe that Jesus Christ was that image of God whom prophets had been desiring to behold. He took flesh, and through His flesh showed forth the fulness of that glory which the previous ages had only seen in scattered glimpses. Is that enough for us? If not, what is it we wish for? Is it something else than the manifestation of Christ? Is Jesus the One that shall come, or do we look for another?

I. If you read the Old Testament, you will perceive that there is a striking uniformity amidst the variety of its records. The misery of the Jewish people in the different ages of their commonwealth is produced by the most different instruments, but the cause of it is always the same. Tyrannyis the cause of their groaning. And as the disease is the same, the remedy is the same. A deliverer is their one infinite necessity. Men appear as their deliverers, but they appear in the name of the Lord. He is the enemy of tyrants. He is the Deliverer.

II. Isaiah saw more clearly than any one that only One who perfectly revealed God who perfectly revealed Him as a Deliverer could be the Person whom Israelites and all nations desired, whom He Himself was teaching them to desire. He saw, indeed, in every event which took place in his own day a partial epiphany a manifestation of God the righteous Judge, of God the Deliverer. But the more he recognised these revelations of the glory of God, the more he craved for One that should be perfect, that should be in the strictest and fullest sense for all flesh.Less than that it was treason against God to expect.

III. Let us have no doubt that, however we may classify men's oppressions as individual or as social, as political or intellectual, as animal or spiritual, God Himself has awakened the cry for freedom. Let us have no doubt that that cry is, when truly understood and interpreted, a cry that God will appear as the Deliverer, that His glory may be revealed. We ought to stir up hope in every human being, hope for present help from God to overcome the sin that most easily besets him; hope that he shall be able to say to the mountains which now stand in his way, "Remove, and be cast into the sea;" hope for the future, that the glory of God the Deliverer shall be fully revealed; and that we, being included in the "all flesh" of which the prophet writes, bearing that nature in and for which Christ died, shall be able to see it and rejoice in it.

F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. i., p. 175.

References: Isaiah 40:5. Homiletic Magazine,vol. viii., p. 327; Spurgeon, Evening by Evening,p. 361.