Scripture: Isaiah 43:16–21 (NRSVUE)
Key Verse: “I am about to do 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 43:19)
Reflection:
Isaiah 43 speaks into the experience of exile, the same national devastation that stands behind Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones. The prophet names God as the one “who makes a way in the sea,” the God of the Exodus who brought down Pharaoh’s chariots. That was Israel’s founding memory, the story they told to prove God was real. Two verses later the same God says, “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old.”
The command is startling. God has just reminded the people of the Exodus, the defining story of their liberation, and now tells them not to dwell on former things. God is not asking them to erase their history. God is challenging them to stop treating the past as the only pattern the future can follow. Isaiah is speaking to a people so fixed on the shape of the last deliverance that they cannot see the next one arriving. God has not gone missing. Their eyes are pointed backward. The new thing will not look like the sea parting. It looks like a road through wilderness and water in a desert, something green and unlikely pushing up through dry ground. God’s faithfulness carries forward. God’s methods do not repeat on command.
Here Christian hope shows its hard edge. We are tempted to define revival as restoration: the pews as full as they were, the family whole in the way it once was, the country returned to a decade we remember fondly. When God’s new thing fails to match the memory, we conclude nothing is happening. Nostalgia becomes a way of refusing the future while sounding faithful. Isaiah calls that refusal blindness. A people can stand in a valley where breath is already moving and miss it, because they are still waiting for the old Temple.
The answer to “Can these bones live?” comes as a direction, and following it costs something. The life God promises grows somewhere ahead of us, in a form we did not request and may not like. Faithfulness means turning to look for it, and then walking toward a place that does not yet resemble home. Some of us will take that walk slowly. Some are still grieving what they have lost. God does not abandon either one.
Writing Prompt: What former thing do you rehearse most often, in your family, your faith, or your church? Write honestly about what you hope God will give back. Then write what it would mean if God’s answer were a new thing you would not have chosen.
Application: Walk or drive through your neighborhood looking for one thing that is new and alive: a new business, a family that just moved in, a community garden, a group gathering somewhere unexpected. Stop, introduce yourself, and ask what would help.
Prayer: God of the new thing, I keep asking you for yesterday. Turn my eyes forward. When your breath moves somewhere I did not expect, let me see it and follow. You know whether these bones can live. Let me be found walking toward your answer. Amen.