For four hundred years the heavens had been silent. No prophetic voice had spoken. The glory of God had departed from His people. It hadn’t always been so. During the golden era of God’s chosen people one prophet after another had proclaimed, “Thus saith the Lord”

Now, here in Luke 3 the silence is shattered. Luke- very careful to record when something happened places it four-square in its historical context-
  In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar..and so on.
This reminds us that our Christian faith is different from all others. It’s not just a set of morals, nor a philosophical system, but God acting in human history.
  And, what happened in that year, that fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius. We're told that the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert. And we’re told that John went into all the country around Jordan preaching. This sets John the Baptist firmly in the line of Old Testament prophets. Yet, John’s message was different; it was unique. We’re told he preached a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness not through animal sacrifices, but through a repentance. This was new; it was revolutionary stuff.
  But in the middle of it John quotes from the prophet Isaiah:
   A voice of one calling in the desert, “Prepare the way for the Lord, make
   straight paths for him....And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all
   mankind will see it together” (Isa 40:3,5)

The revelation of God’s glory had been a major theme of Old Testament prophecy. The glory of God had dwelt with his people. In the desert wanderings after their deliverance from Egypt, God’s glory had been with His people- in the pillar of fire at night and in the pillar of cloud in the daytime. When the people make the golden calf Moses pleads for them and calls out to God: Show me your glory, Lord. God does reveal his glory to Moses but Moses cannot see God’s face and he must hide in a cleft in the rock.
  The revelation of God’s glory was always a shattering experience. Isaiah sees God’s glory in the temple and calls out Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord the Almighty (Isa 6:5). Then the angel touches Isaiah’slips with the burning coal and Isaiah is declared cleansed.

Let’s just stop and ask ourselves what we are to understand by God’s glory? It is the height of God’s excellencies; of his awesomeness, his holiness, his total otherness- such that no man may see God and live. It’s beyond our definition. If you think you’ve got God sized up, then it isn’t God! Ezekiel had a revelation of God’s glory. At the end of his account (found in Ezekiel 1) he can only say:
   This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord (v28)

In the year 586BC the Jews were taken into exile by the Babylonians. This was God’s discipline for their disobedience; their immorality and idolatry. The prophets had warned them but they persisted.  The glory of God is taken from them. Yet they do not forget Jerusalem- the place of God’s dwelling with His people; the place of His temple. The psalmist expresses their agony and torment:
   By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion... How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?
   (Psalm 137:1,4)
God, by His grace and according to His promise returned them to Jerusalem seventy years on. The temple is rebuilt. The glory returns and for a few generations the prophetic voice is heard again. But the heavens become silent and the glory is removed when the temple is desecrated in 165BC.

So onto the scene comes John “a voice of one calling in the desert.
  The glory of God was going to return to His people and the apostle John was able to write The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14)- and, of course, he was one of the privileged group of three to see the veil lifted from the human from of the Lord Jesus Christ.
  Now so far I haven’t mentioned that John the Baptist actually altered the ending of that quotation from Isaiah. In place of the glory of the Lord will be revealed, he said to the people all mankind will see God’s salvation.
  There was that change which was part of the novelty of the Baptist’s message. For ‘glory’, ‘salvation’. Because of God’s glory we need salvation: It is part of God’s glory that He provides salvation. It was because of that need and that provision that John came preaching his message of repentance. It was for this reason that he must needs prepare the Lord’s way.

The revelation of God’s glory was in the Lord Jesus Christ. His salvation is through the Lord Jesus Christ. It was for this reason that when Jesus approached Jerusalem for the last time, approaching his place of destiny, facing his crucifixion which would have seemed shame and ignominy and total failure and undesirable suffering that he could say:
   Now my heart is troubled and what shall I say? “Father, save me from this   hour?” No, it is for this very reason that I came to this hour. “Father, glorify your Name!” (John 12:27-28)

So, the message of John the Baptist is twofold
-repentance, the precondition, a turning from sin
-salvation, a rescuing from that in God’s holiness and glory which would devastate us; the means by which those who trust in the Lord Jesus Christ will have access to the Father’s glory.
  John must have borne in mind that word of Isaiah that all flesh will see God’s glory. I close with words of a hymnwriter.
                     Brothers this Lord Jesus
                        shall return again,
                      with his Father’s glory;
                         with his angel-train.
                      For all wreaths of empire
                          meet upon his brow
                      And our hearts confess him
                           King of glory now!
 
 
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