The theme of Isaiah 43:14-21 is a poem of promise. The Lord is the speaker. These verses picture the liberation of Israel as a new exodus. The people will pass through sea and desert. God will transform the desert. The key to the passage is the miracle and wonder of the restoration of the people to their land. One of the noteworthy accomplishments of the author is the skillful blending of mythological imagery, historical critique and eschatological (end-time) promise. We find all of these themes within the space of a few verses. The event depicted in this passage is, as one scholar has described it, “An Isaian Exodus.”
This text is one of the several oracles of salvation in II Isaiah (along with, for example, 40:1-11; 42:5-9; 43:1-10; 44:1-8). It is the Word of the Lord to the captive Israelites in Babylonia that God guarantees their deliverance. The presence of oracles, promising deliverance and restoration to a captive and broken people, is one of the signs to which scholars have pointed as evidence of a setting and author different from the first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah. Although the element of prophetic judgment is not entirely absent in these chapters (chapters 40-55), the emphasis is placed elsewhere, on deliverance, rescue, release and recovery. Nature imagery abounds throughout the book of Isaiah, as the eighth-century prophet and his exilic and post-exilic successors repeatedly attempt to place Israel’s historical existence and vicissitudes in an ever-larger framework. That framework includes not only such familiar pastoral imagery as shepherd and sheep, but also such relatively hostile and untamed imagery as the jackal and the wild ostrich (a favorite biblical parallel — see also Job 30:29; Isaiah 34:13; Lamentations 4:3; Micah 1:8).
The apogee of this imagery is, of course, the prophet’s famous description of the so-called “peaceable kingdom” (found at 11:6 and echoed at 65:25): “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them” (11:6). This passage foreshadows that vision of a harmonious end time in these words of promise. This passage contains a promise of liberation to a captive people not so that they might live the fiction of an autonomous, self-determining, self-serving existence (a state of being unknown to the biblical writers), but in order that they might live in the service of their liberator, that they “might declare my praise” (v. 21).
The oracle begins with the stereotypical prophetic formula “Thus says the LORD.” In the ancient world, before the widespread use of writing letters, messengers who acted as mouthpieces for their sender carried messages. This is the reason they preserved messages and prophetic oracles such in the first person rather than the third: They understood the role of the messenger to be as incidental as possible, so as not to detract from the importance of the message itself. The prophet continues that the Lord is their redeemer and the Holy One of Israel. For their sake, the Lord will send to Babylon and break down all the bars. The shouting of the Chaldeans will turn to lamentation. Pannenberg, in a discussion of the infinity of God, refers to this passage in saying that incomparability of the Holy One means that the designation “the Holy One of Israel” becomes a guarantee of the hope of redemption by the exiles.[1] The Lord is the Holy One, the Creator of Israel, their King.
Isaiah 43: 16-17 envision the new exodus with re-enactment of the wonders of the first exodus. 16 Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea,[2] a path in the mighty waters, thereby identifying who the Lord is. The reference to providing a way in the sea recalls the exodus from Egypt, the pre-eminent liberating event in Israel’s history and foundational to its self-understanding and its understanding of its covenantal relationship with God. The author frequently draws on historical events in Israel’s past to remind his hearers that the God in whose name he speaks is not without a history of saving acts on Israel’s behalf, and that this history of salvation — Heilsgeschichte in scholarly language — forms the basis of the trust the prophet now urges the people to place in their God. However, the prophet’s use of language does more than simply recall past events. By using such techniques as active participles, he extends the effect of the saving events of the past into both the present and the future, so that he understands the drama of salvation, in which the Lord is the principal actor, to be an on-going reality in which Israel can participate if it chooses. The prophet opens up not only history, but also possibility. To open a way in the sea for landlocked captives, separated from their homeland more by sand than by water, obviously takes the language from mere historical referent to the realm of metaphor and mythology. In the mythology of the ancient Near East, of which Israel’s creation and salvation narratives were a part, the sea was often personified as a monstrous force of chaos and hostility to the will of a supreme, benevolent deity. Creation, in numerous accounts, was not infrequently portrayed as the result of the triumph of a people’s patron deity over the destructive forces of the sea. A vestige of this cosmic struggle remains, in vastly subdued form, in the opening verses of Genesis, where the wind or spirit of God brooded (or, probably better, swooped) over the watery deep at creation’s inception. This mythological imagery is part of the background of Isaiah’s language. II Isaiah continues with exodus imagery in order to identify who the Lord is. The Lord is the one 17 who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick. Israel, even at its military zenith during the reigns of David and Solomon, never mastered the art of chariot warfare, for a variety of reasons. Chief among those reasons was the hilly terrain that comprised much of Israel’s territory and which made the effective use of chariots (and, for the most part, horses) virtually impossible. Horses and chariots, as well as a massive standing army, were luxuries Israel’s neighbors on nearly every side could afford, which Israel discovered repeatedly through numerous invasions by militarily superior nations. These powerful human adversaries, no less than the threatening sea, are also subject to the will of Israel’s delivering God.
The theme of Isaiah 43:18-25 is the promise of the return of the Israelite exiles from their captivity in Babylon by the miraculous activity of their God, a return that both harkens back to the pivotal release in Israel’s history — the exodus from Egypt — and orients the Israelites toward the eschatological future of God’s redeeming work and Israel’s future life. The prophet quotes the Lord as being disgusted with the hearers for their shortcomings in the matter of worship and ritual sacrifice. Nonetheless, the Lord will care for them. The promise is that the Lord is always faithful, even when we fall short, whether in worship, in service, or in our lives. He offers assurance that the Lord will never turn from us, even when we turn from the Lord. If we turn from the Lord the consequences may be severe, not by the Lord’s doing, but by our own.
As the oracle continues, the prophet prods his audience with a word from the Lord. 18 Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. They must also forget past disasters. The instruction is unusual; prophets call is Israel to remember — Yahweh’s deliverance of the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery (Exodus 13:3), the Sabbath and its holiness (Exodus 20:8), Yahweh’s commandments (Numbers 15:40), etc. Often, Israel’s failure to remember those things constitutes its departure from the ways of the Lord. Some Bible passages do encourage us to cherish the old. Jeremiah 6:16 says, “Thus says the Lord: Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies; and walk in it. ...” Other passages urge us to look forward to the new. These concepts of the value of both the old and the new are not mutually exclusive. For example, the Lord God made historic covenant(s) with Israel — the Lord God would be their God, and they would be the people of the Lord God. Israel sometimes fondly remembers and follows the Lord’s covenant(s), but frequently forgets their relationship with the Lord and breaks the covenantal stipulations. Later, in association with repentance, they sometimes seek to renew their ancient covenant with the Lord. For example, the Davidic King Josiah (c. 640-609 B.C.), after hearing from the prophet Huldah, led his people in renewing the Deuteronomic covenant and performing acts of repentance (II Kings 22−23:3). Jeremiah 31:31-34 promises a new covenant, some features of which transcend even the best of the former covenants. The writer of the NT book of Hebrews cites the Jeremiah 31:31-34 passage in 8:8b-11 as part of the writer’s argumentation of 8:6-13. There is an old story about the famous baseball pitcher, Orel Hershiser. In a book, Out of the Blue, Hershiser shares the secret of his success. Throughout his years of playing, he cultivated a peculiar focus as he ascended the pitcher’s mound. He acquired the ability to concentrate on the next pitch, and the next pitch only. He could not afford to worry about bad pitches he had thrown, or bad calls the umpire might have made. No sooner did these things happen, than Hershiser banished them from his mind. The only thing in the world was the next pitch. In a similar way, we do well to give our full attention to each day as it comes. Yesterday is over and done with. We can’t change it, but it surely can change us, if we let it. Imagine what we could all accomplish, if we could direct our energy to one day, and one day alone, without fretting about the past. Now imagine that day is today. 19 I am about to do a new thing. Just as there’s physical inertia, there is also such a thing as spiritual inertia. How easily we grow comfortable and complacent in our spiritual lives, holding tightly to the “same-old, same-old”! The theological term for this is sloth. Sloth is a kind of virus of the soul that keeps us from focusing on that which brings life and meaning. We need to listen to the call that comes from the future, a call that beckons us beyond what we are now and to what we can be. The real reason for the call not to remember lies not with the past, but with the future. Thus, one of the literary themes running through chapters 41-48 of the book of Isaiah is the contrast between “former things” and “new things” or “latter things” (e.g., 41:22; 42:9; 43:9; 46:9 [where, in contrast to this passage, Israel is told to “remember the former things”]; 48:3, 6 [referring to new things]). The prophet is warning his hearers not to romanticize the past, a perennial temptation of all people and groups. Don’t keep obsessively looking back to even the finest of what God has done. Instead, actively anticipate the new thing God is bringing about. This verse finds reflection in II Corinthians 5:17, Romans 8:10, and Revelation 21:4-5. II Isaiah expects the consummation of history. This future event will show that the God of Israel is the God of all peoples. Attention turns away from the past saving deeds of the Lord in the exodus and the conquest to the future of a new and definitive event of salvation and a related universalizing of the understanding of God in monotheism. The prophetic turn toward the eschatological future of world history remains the presupposition of Christian monotheism and its missionary proclamation. What happens is that the prophet here no longer views the self-demonstration of Yahweh by the exodus as the sole and ultimate self-revelation of the Lord. The ultimate acts of the deity of Yahweh are eschatological. Here, we find that Israel is not to remember or regard the past, for God is doing a new thing.[3] II Isaiah speaks of the creative power of the Lord in using the concept of divine creating for the bringing forth of what is historically new, whether the event be good or bad. Even when the author speaks of the Lord creating Jacob or Israel, we are to think of the act of the Lord in historical election. The new things that take place in nature he also regards as creative acts of the Lord.[4]
There will be miracles
After the last war is won.
Science and poetry rule in the new world to come.
Prophets and angels
Gave us the power to see.
What an amazing future there will be.
And in the evening,
After the fire and the light,
One thing is certain: nothing can hold back the night.
Time is relentless,
And as the past disappears,
We’re on the verge of all things new.[5]
It may well be that the Lord is instructing the Jewish people here that a generous approach to the future is in giving our all to the present.[6] The future arises out of the same stuff as the present.[7] If so, the past is the beginning of a beginning. All that is and has been is the twilight of the dawn. Everything the human has every accomplished is only a dream before the awakening of humanity to its fullness.[8] In this case, the prophet re-enacts the passage of Israel through the desert. The prophet presents the oracle in classic Hebrew poetic parallelism, but the richness of the imagery sometimes takes priority over strict parallelism.[9] Thus, now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. Rivers were not, in ancient Israel’s literature, symbols of travel, transportation or movement, probably because Israel has so few navigable rivers (unlike Egypt’s Nile and Mesopotamia’s Tigris and Euphrates). Israel’s most prominent river, the Jordan, is barely more than a shallow stream at points (ranging from two to 10 feet deep) and rarely exceeds more than a hundred feet wide. This diminutive size, as well as its tortuous route from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, made the Jordan unfit for both navigation and irrigation. It did form, however, a natural border, and that became its lasting biblical significance. (Of the 180 references to the Jordan in the Hebrew Bible, well over half occur in the context of its crossing by the Israelites into the Promised Land or its function as a boundary for various tribes.) Therefore, the poet’s use of the word “rivers” loosens its connection to its poetic parallel “way,” and moves the imagery in a different direction, the direction of refreshment. 20 The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people. The poet is echoing the Exodus/wilderness tradition of God providing water in the wilderness by shifting the emphasis from movement (“way”) to providential care, thereby keeping the focus of the oracle on the divine and miraculous rather than on the human. The prophet pointedly elaborates Israel’s status as the chosen people. Modern scholars who have suggested that the concept of “Israel” is to an unknown extent a theological construct of the biblical writers are echoing an idea already expressed by the sixth-century poet of Second Isaiah. God’s people were not of natural generation, but of deliberate divine formation. Israel, as God’s chosen people, simply did not appear; it formed itself out of disparate elements, against the odds, for a divinely ordained purpose, and Israel as God’s chosen people could not simply be identified as coterminous with the historical geopolitical entities that self-identified as Israel, Jacob, Ephraim, Judah, etc. This theological dictum, which runs throughout the Hebrew Bible, was in constant tension with the perennial temptation on Israel’s part to take its chosen status for granted or as deserved. The biblical writers, from the earliest to the latest periods and including the author of our passage, consistently denounced this form of religious smugness. Further, the Lord reminds 21 the people whom I formed (yatsar) for myself so that they might declare my praise. The Lord nourishes the people so that they can declare in their words and deed their praise of the Lord. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that in worship, the true audience is God. Members of the congregation are the performers. Worship leaders are the prompters. Together, members and leaders declare God’s praise. This approach has been a real breakthrough for people who have discovered that true worship has its basis in what they can offer God, not on what they can get from the service. The past is useful only by way of contrast with what the future holds for Israel by virtue of God’s intervention. In II Isaiah, belief in creation becomes an argument for the expectation of a new saving action on the part of the Lord that will demonstrate afresh the divine power over the course of history.[10] Israel’s God will make a way in the desert by which Israel may escape its current oppression. However, immediately, the imagery begins to change, and the familiar becomes novel. Not only will rivers appear in the desert to provide drink for God’s people, but the wild animals — “the jackals and the ostriches” — will become part of the creation that honors God. Israel’s first deliverance, from Egyptian captivity, was a pivotal experience; Israel’s second deliverance, from Babylonian captivity, is an even greater experience. Whereas the former displayed the power of the Lord through the forces of nature — splitting the Red Sea, bringing water from rocks — in this latter deliverance, nature itself, represented by “The wild animals . . . the jackals and the ostriches” will join Israel in the praise for its deliverance.
The theme that all of us have a wilderness period in our lives has been a strong one. If you are going through your wilderness, it will have at least three things in common with all other wilderness experiences. You did not choose it. You would not purposely choose to be there. You are not in control. Your anxiety lets you know how little in control you are. Yet, what is missing, amid the noise or quiet, is the voice of the Lord. That voice tells you it will be all right, that you are not alone, and that even the wilderness has its purpose. If we could that voice, it might not feel quite so much like a wilderness. Yet, the silence defines the wilderness experience. The hardest thing for many persons to believe is that the Lord has anything to do with the wilderness. It can feel as if the Lord has vanished, turning you over to the enemy.[11]Indeed, the Lord makes a strange promise. The Lord does not remove the wilderness. The Lord does not tame the wild animals. The Lord does make a way through the wilderness. The Lord will provide water for rest and nourishment. Yes, even the wild animals will see the new thing and honor the Lord. When you come to the spring, the water pours forth. You will never see all the water, for it remains hidden in the earth. You will always be in the position of beginning to see the water. In an analogous way, fixing your gaze upon the infinite beauty of the Lord, you constantly discover the Lord in a new way. What you discover will always be something new and strange in comparison with what you have previously understood.[12] We need to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again.[13]
It is important to dream big and think small. I certainly do not want to suggest that big is not important. Thus, the important things, like the political and economic order in which we live, remain important. The Lord is at work there as well. Yet, the Lord will make a way through the wilderness and provide something as small as water for the journey. As important as grandiose things truly are, the future is in “small,” not “big.” I simply mean that it may well be that something barely visible today may well shape the future in large ways. A well-known saying is that the Lord is so big that the Lord can be small, even to live in our hearts. The Lord is so big the Lord can be as small as the Lord needs to be. One of the many beautiful elements of this passage is that the Lord reaffirms a commitment to work through small rather than big. Small is significant. The Lord prefers to work through small. The Lord called Abraham. The Lord observed the misery of the descendants of Abraham as slaves in Egypt, so the Lord called one man, Moses. The Lord established a covenant with a small, insignificant Israelite people, through whom the Lord seeks to bring light to the nations. When the Lord became a human being, the Lord made a small entrance through the Jewish girl Mary. Thus, the problem is not that our view of God is too small. Rather, our problem is that our God is not small enough. We sing, “Our God Is an Awesome God,” only because it’s easier to sing than “Our God Is a Smaller-Than-Quantum-Dots God.” When we are beleaguered, bewildered, and befuddled in Babylon, as were the Hebrew children, we, too, receive comfort. Yet, if God were so awesome, then why am I sitting on the banks of the Euphrates and not under the cedars of Lebanon? If my God is an awesome God, then why am I in an oxcart on the way to Baghdad? If my God is an awesome God, then why does my soul seem like a desert?
The Lord seems quite content to use the small and humble to accomplish the work of the Lord in this world. The Lord sends the people of the Lord to influence the world on a micro level, bringing hope to the discouraged, guidance to the lost, comfort to the grieving and assistance to the needy. The mission of the people of the Lord is to welcome strangers, visit prisoners, and bring food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty and clothing to the naked. When we serve others in these simple but significant ways, Jesus promises that we are really serving him (Matthew 25:40). Small is significant in the eyes of God. Small actions are enormously important, especially when we focus them on serving others and seeing Jesus Christ. “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world,” said anthropologist Margaret Mead, “indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
[1]
[2] a participial phrase The Hebrew verb is an active participle of a root meaning, “to give,” prefixed with the definite article — “the giver of a way in the sea.”
[3]
[4]
[5] —Billy Joel, from the song, “Two thousand years,” from the album, The Complete Albums Collection, released November 8, 2011. billyjoel.com. Retrieved September 19, 2018.
[6] Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present. -Albert Camus
[7] The future is made of the same stuff as the present. = Simone Weil
[8] It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. H. G. Wells
[9] for instance, the expected parallel for the A-clause “I will make a way in the wilderness” would be something like “highway in the desert” for the B-clause. However, the poet instead has paralleled “way” with “rivers,” hardly a poetic parallel.
[10]
[11] --Barbara Brown Taylor, "Four stops in the wilderness," a sermon on the temptations of Jesus in Mark 1:9-15.
[12] --Gregory of Nyssa, cited by Elizabeth Newman, Untamed Hospitality (Brazos, 2007), 58.
[13] G. K. Chesterton
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