¹⁸ ‘Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. ¹⁹ See, I am doing a new thing! (Isaiah 43:18–19)

¹⁸ ‘Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. ¹⁹ See, I am doing a new thing! (Isaiah 43:18–19)

¹⁹ See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland. (Isaiah 43:19–20)

I am the LORD, your Holy One, Israel’s Creator, your King.’ ¹⁹ See, I am doing a new thing! … to give drink to my people, my chosen, ²¹ the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise. (Isaiah 43:15, 19, 21)

God of might and mercy,
you have planted in us the seed of your word
Which creates your new life in us.
Help us by your Holy Spirit
to hear and receive it with joy
and live according to it,
so that we may grow in faith, hope, and love
And bear witness to your new hope and love.
We ask this through your Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.

Kind and generous God,
you have planted and watered
the seed of your word in us.
Create new growth in us that produces a rich harvest
of faith, hope and love in us and through us.
We ask this through your Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns
with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen.

Refrain: ‘Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth.

¹⁵ ‘I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King.’
¹⁶ Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters,

¹⁸ ‘Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old.
‘Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth.

¹⁹ ‘Yes, behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
‘Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth.

²⁰ ‘I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people,

²¹ ‘The people whom I formed for myself, that they might declare my praise.’
‘Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth.

(Isaiah 43:15, 16, 18, 19, 20c, 21)

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit;
as it was in the beginning is now and shall be for ever. Amen.

‘Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth.

Like the layers of an archaeological site, this passage of scripture requires some real digging to understand its context in all of its complexity. However, to get a sense of the context is to unearth the real treasures stored in this small microcosm of God’s beautiful plan for our lives. So, roll up your sleeves for a moment, this is worth the work!

In this section of the book of Isaiah, God warns his people that their sin is leading them to a future of captivity under the Babylonian Empire. He is calling out for them to understand their sin and to change their ways, saying in 42:18, “Hear, you deaf, and look, you blind, that you may see!” But the people of God refuse to listen, and look, and see. So, many years later, God’s people are conquered by the Babylonians.

But, in this prophetic summary we learn of God’s plan for the future rescue of his people from that same bondage after some 70 years. In our verses, God is telling his people not to remember the former rescue that he gave them from Egyptian bondage (see verses 43:16-17). He is going to rescue them in a new way from the slavery they will experience in the future. In a very real way, God’s people were released from physical bondage both in the times of Egyptian and Babylonian captivity.

But that would be too simple to just end there. We learn later in the book of Isaiah that these physical rescues from captivity are but a shadow of the great and final spiritual and holistic rescue that God has in store for his people. God speaks again and again in Isaiah about his coming Servant who will suffer for his people and save them in totality from the bondage of sin and death. The New Testament reveals Jesus as that servant.

But there is one more layer. God is calling out to the modern reader (to you and me) to listen, and look, and see what he is doing in our lives. He is asking us to turn towards him for his loving salvation. He is asking us to give up our selfish ways and pursue his loving rescue plan for our lives. In Isaiah 43:25 God says, “I, even I, am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake and remembers your sins no more.”

What a depth of unspeakable riches are revealed in this treasured truth: God wants to save his people (including us) from our bondage to sin and death.

Jesus is that new and total thing of freeing love. He has saved us from a slavery to self and the death it brings upon us.

God is doing thing in our lives. Often, we do not recognise what he is doing or has been doing for a long time. But then, occasionally, we see something; we see his hand, we hear his voice and we are re-affirmed and encouraged in this calling to follow Jesus’s way truth and life.
How do we ‘see’ what God is doing?

We hear his voice on everything: through his Word already spoken in Scripture when we are alone and when we are with others – people we know, people close, people we don’t know, people far away.

We remember what he has done and yet, we are called here to forget those things and keep an ear and eye on new things God is doing with us.
Yes, we are baptised into his family, and yet that baptised status and privilege is renewed and put to worm for others every day.

We remember that he gave us a holy meal be why which he promises to forgive and make us holy in the power of the Spirit, and yet we take that sustenance into the day and forgive, heal, restore, act in love as we have received Jesus the same.

We remember and then we listen, watch for what the Holy Spirt is at work in others., in circumstances, within our own heart and mind every day.
In this way we “see’; we live in God’s ‘new thing’ – restored and free life in his grace in Jesus day by day until the last day when Isaiah’s vision will be complete – the final layer – all thing new for all time on in the presence of Jesus the King who had gathered his people once and for all in praise and love.

God spoke eloquently through Isaiah. If you have any interest in the Bible at all, Isaiah will reward a close reading. It is “the most theologically significant book in the Old Testament.” “Of all the books in the Old Testament, Isaiah is perhaps the richest.”⁵ “From ancient times Isaiah has been considered the greatest of the Old Testament prophets.” The scholars who know what they are talking about prize Isaiah. What Bach’s first biographer said about his music applies to Isaiah’s prophecy:

[Bach’s music] is not merely agreeable, like other composers’, but transports us to the regions of the ideal. It does not arrest our attention momentarily but grips us the stronger the oftener we listen to it so that, after a thousand hearings, its treasures are still unexhausted and yield fresh beauties to excite our wonder.²

In heaping our idolatries together, we assemble a culture—a brilliant, collaborative quest to prove ourselves. Our modern culture rarely represents itself with religious language. But Ernest Becker, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book *The Denial of Death*, explained how we serve it every day with faithful devotion:

We disguise our struggle by piling up figures in a bank book to reflect privately our sense of heroic worth. Or by having only a little better home in the neighborhood, a bigger car, brighter children. But underneath throbs the ache of cosmic specialness, no matter how we mask it in concerns of smaller scope.

We crave reassurance that our lives are not zeroes. But unless we are resting in God, our uncertainty generates “a blind drivenness that burns people up; in passionate people, a screaming for glory as uncritical and reflexive as the howling of a dog.”³ No idol can truthfully say, “My yoke is easy” (Matthew 11:30).

² Hear, O heavens! Listen, O earth!
For the LORD has spoken … (Isaiah 1:1–2a)

These opening lines are like the first stirring chords of the overture to a great oratorio. They summon us to listen and give us the first indication of the character of the work we are about to hear.

We are told at once of both the human agency and the divine origin of the vision. It is the vision of ‘Isaiah son of Amoz’; he saw it, lived it, and died for it. In this sense it is his vision. It comes to us clothed in a human person, alive with human passion and cast in human language. It is the human aspect of the vision that makes it accessible to us. But at the same time it has a quality that transcends this. The very term ‘vision’, especially in this and similar contexts, stands for divine revelation.³⁰ It is received by a human person, but originates outside him. At the most fundamental level, it is God’s vision and exists only because ‘the LORD has spoken’.⁴

² Raymond C. Ortlund Jr. and R. Kent Hughes, Isaiah: God Saves Sinners, Preaching the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 17–18.
³ Raymond C. Ortlund Jr. and R. Kent Hughes, Isaiah: God Saves Sinners, Preaching the Word (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 20.
⁴ Barry Webb, The Message of Isaiah: On Eagles’ Wings, ed. J. A. Motyer and Derek Tidball, The Bible Speaks Today (England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1996), 25–26.