Isaiah 40:5 “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

We are all on a quest to find and fulfill our destiny. The soul-searching question of Forrest Gump has challenged every thinking human being: “What’s my destiny, Momma?” When Forrest rescued Lt. Dan from certain death on the battlefield, Dan furiously rages, “I had a destiny. I was supposed to die in the field with honor.” Forrest’s mom philosophizes on her deathbed about the subject of one’s destiny: “Life is a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”

In this statement, Forrest’s mom neither plumbed the depths of the hard-core realities of life nor the heights of its consummation. Life for you may or may not be a box of sweet chocolates. However, the scriptural bottom line is this: You can know what you are gonna get!

Our text today summarizes our destiny in one word: glory. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together (v. 5). How can we be so sure that Handel is right in believing that the glory of the Lord referenced here speaks of none other than Jesus Christ?

Isaiah 40:3 claims there will be a voice of a prophet calling out in the wilderness and then the glory will be revealed. Who was that voice? All four gospel writers declare it was John the Baptizer. If John is the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Jesus is Yahweh (the Lord). He’s the same God who revealed Himself to Moses in the burning bush. Please consult the following Scriptures that confirm this (John 1:14, 2:10, 11:40, 12:41; Hebrews 1:3; and 2 Corinthians 4:6).

In John 17:24, Jesus prays for all of those who will believe in Him through the word of the Apostles: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.”

Seeing and experiencing Jesus’ glory is the destiny of all who believe in Him as Lord. One day we will receive our summons by the Lord at our death or at His coming and we will go to be with Christ forever. C.S. Lewis states beautifully the need and the result of this moment in his book “The Weight of Glory”: “Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honor beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.”