Dear friends in Christ at Peace and Grue,
O sing to the Lord a new song. Ps. 96:1
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. Jer. 31:31
A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you. Ezek. 36:26
For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth. Isa. 65:17
I am about to do a new thing. Isa. 43:19
“What’s new?” is the question on everyone’s mind, especially this time of the year. Yet to talk of something “new” requires a contrast with something “old.” Perhaps we should asking, “What’s old?”, what do we make of the old in our excitement with the new. Even the faithful Bible reader is confronted with this dilemma. Suppose you are reading Isaiah and are challenged by the cry: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old, I am about to do a new thing.” (Isa. 43:18-19a) But then just three chapters later comes: “Remember this and consider, recall it to mind, you transgressors, remember the former things of old.” (Isa. 46:8-9a). Well now, what are you suppose to do, remember or not. Amid this season of newness it is important to ask, “who is to remember and why?”
Without remembering the old, the newness of the new cannot be understood. God is doing something wonderfully new, says Isaiah. Oh, says his hearers, what does it look like? “Well,” says the prophet, “remember the Exodus?” How will you marvel over a wet way through the desert unless you have known a dry way out of the sea” The call to remember the old makes clear there is a unity in God and a continuity to God’s work. And that is what these passages are finally about: trust in God and the future in which God is doing radical things now, not just a theory about the nature of history.
The call to remember is another way of saying that “the word of our God will stand forever” (Isa. 40:8), that God’s word “shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose” (Isa. 55:11). These verses on the word of God are crucial to Isaiah’s call to remember. Israel is called to remember them because the “former things of old”, which include all the divine words of judgment and promise, creation and redemption, are still in effect. This is possible because it is the voice of God which calls Israel to remember. God is God after all. God is alive and present in Babylon: “I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like me. (Isa. 46:9).
No matter how marvelous the new, how great the discontinuity in God’s activity, God’s word, once spoken remains -and remains active. That is both a theological truth and an experiential observation. The divine word, says the prophet Isaiah, remains out there, doing its thing in every generation, because it is the divine word. It is like rain and snow watering the earth. There are times of plenty and times of drought. When and where the rains will come is unpredictable. Whether a snow storm will come as good news or disaster is not always clear. The word of God is similar functioning sometimes with providential regularity, sometimes with delay and then incredible surprise, occurring sometimes as gospel and sometimes as law, but always with God’s own power of life and death. Thus we are called to hear and to remember and once it is written to read. For who knows how and where the Spirit will speak through God’s word. Who is called to remember what and why? We are called to remember all that God has ever said and done, in order that faith might live. Not bad from something old. The new will hardly be able to do without it. Blessings to you as you move into 2023.
Blessing to you in this New Year,
Pastor Dan