“Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”—Isaiah 43:18-19 (ESV)This is one of the more startling moments in Scripture. It’s startling because this section of Isaiah is full of appeals and references to “the former things,” to all the things he’s done for them in the past; indeed, immediately before this, God has anchored his promise to bring his people back home in the story of the Exodus, in the reminder that he’s done it before. And then he says, essentially, “But forget about all that.” So what’s the deal?It seems safe to say that God isn’t commanding his people to collective amnesia; nor is this a license, as many Western theologians want to think, to throw out all that stuff that God says about sin (at least the sins we don’t want to believe are wrong) and judgment. Rather, this is hyperbole designed to jolt Israel into opening their eyes and ears and actually hearing him, and seeing what God is doing. God is not only present and active in the past, but also in the present—theirs and ours—and they had no sense of that. They had no concept of what God was doing in their own time, or what he might be calling them to do; they knew all about the Exodus, they’d heard about it a million times before, and they would no doubt have told you they believed God had delivered their ancestors from Egypt. What they didn’t believe was that that had anything to do with their lives and circumstances. They believed God had saved, but not that he would save—and that makes all the difference. It’s not that hard to believe that God has done miracles in the past—but that he’s still in the miracle business now? That’s another matter.And so too often, we as Christians in this country are like those Jews in captivity in Babylon—we have this nice little box labeled “God” full of all sorts of things God did a while ago, and it really doesn’t have a lot to do with how we live our daily lives. We pray, though maybe not that much, and we read our Bibles, at least a little, but when it comes to the issues we face and the choices we have to make, a lot of us are functional atheists—we do things just like the world does. Not only do we not ask God to guide us, a lot of the time, we don’t even take him into account—we base our decisions solely on “practical” considerations, things we can see and touch and quantify. And that’s not how God wants us to live. God wants us to remember, in everything we do, that we are children of the Lord of the Universe, that he loves us, and that he’s working for our good—including in ways we can’t predict, or see coming. He wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. He wants us to hear him saying, “See, I’m doing a new thing—it’s springing up right before your eyes. Don’t you see it? I’m making a road for you through the wilderness, and streams of living water in the wasteland. Can’t you see? Look. Open your eyes. See.”
