Isaiah 43:16-21, “I will give water in the wilderness…”
Today’s given text is from Isaiah 43:16-21, about hope, seeing things that God is doing when our eyes do not see that happening yet. The background of our text is that during the seventy years of Babylonian Captivity of Israelites, about midway through the Babylonian Exile, God started to speak through Isaiah about Israelites returning home to Jerusalem from Babylon in chapters 40 to 55. When they had no hope of release from bondage, it was the hope that Isaiah tried to instill in the people of Israel.
Israelites were desolate in the foreign land, in the hands of their conquerors. They longed to be home again. They were far from home, far from free, and far from hope. They had been in exile for long years – displaced and disheartened. By then, some might have adapted to the culture of their oppressor. They were blocked from Judah by an impassable desert. They felt that God had abandoned and forgotten them. They lamented in Isaiah 40:27, “My way is hidden from the Lord.”
This is what life does sometimes. Isn’t it? As we know, a powerful 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar on Friday, March 28th. The media reports that it claimed about 3,100 lives. But, according to my missionary friend in Myanmar, the number was seriously reduced by the Myanmar military regime. He wrote that 80 percent of the buildings and houses collapsed in the location where the earthquake hit. So many people were killed, with thousands more injured.
Most survivors are sleeping outdoors, either to avoid aftershocks or because their homes and apartment buildings have been destroyed. Relief efforts are hampered by destroyed infrastructure—including roads and bridges. In the hardest-hit areas, residents dug through rubble by hand in desperate attempts to find survivors. Daily, around 400 bodies are cremated, with countless people in line to cremate their loved ones due to the limited number of the crematorium.
In Myanmar, a Buddhist nation, about 5 million are already displaced from their homes due to the ongoing civil war. The military regime tries to demolish those ethnic groups that rebel against them and Buddhism. The most hated ethnic group by the military is the Chin state, a Christian tribe. They don’t get any relief aid; instead, they get bombed down. The military regime requested relief aid internationally, yet they strictly forbade foreigners from doing relief work. My missionary friend sent his newsletter saying he could do nothing because he was not allowed to.
My former students, who are teachers and pastors in Myanmar who face this horrible natural disaster on top of the persecution they have been already experiencing, might wonder if God had abandoned and forgotten them.
Our text through Isaiah confronts those discouraged people. It reminds Israelites that God has pulled them through before. God parted waters and stopped chariots to free them from slavery. God made a way where there was no way. Verses 16-17, God “made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters.” He was the one who lured the Egyptians into the middle of the dried-up Red Sea and then let the towering walls of water come crashing down on Pharaoh’s armies. They all died, “extinguished, snuffed out like a wick.” Our start of the text urged those desolate and disheartened people to recall how God had helped them, being their mighty God.
But then, in vs. 18, all of a sudden, it says, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.” What does that mean? Wasn’t the sin of forgetting God’s amazing redemption that led to the Exile? Wasn’t God always telling his people to remember? Then, why does God tell them to forget the things in the past here?
God’s call to forget the past is to say not to be stuck and frozen in the past as if the deliverance of God’s mighty act was only a thing of the past, that their best days were behind them, that God cannot act now, that there was no hope for another Exodus. Seeing no hope, having no faith in God, and thinking that they are as good as dead, shedding tears as they dwell in good old days, God asked them rhetorically, “Is God dead”?
To those of you who are downcast, disheartened, and desolate because you feel like you are facing a dead-end, God asks, “Is God dead”? The God who had previously pulled you through asks you, “Is he dead”? What is your answer? Is God dead? NO! He is not dead; He is alive!!! God wants you to stand up boldly from where you sit in the place of disappointment, desolation, and hopelessness and claim God’s promise that ‘I will be with you always and help you.’ You may be sick worrying about your children, grandchildren, siblings, and parents, not knowing where they are spiritually or physically; God wants you to hold on to your faith in God and have hope.
Our faith in God’s ability to help us in our presently difficult situation is rooted in what God had done for us in the past. If Israelites had faith in God, who helped them at the Red Sea and in the Exodus, hope would arise in their hearts that their painful days in Babylon would come to pass, too. Instead of getting stuck in the past and being frozen, our past experience with God should bolster our faith, hope, and confidence in our future with God. Forget the former things. God is not dead. Come out of your hopelessness, desolation, and disappointment. God is acting on your behalf.
Along the line, God urges Israelites and us to see with faith that God is working and acting on our behalf even when we don’t see that happening. He asks, “Do you not perceive it?” “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” Although our answer is “No, I don’t perceive it. I don’t see the new thing God is doing in my life, in my world,” God wants us to walk by faith, not by sight. God, through Isaiah, challenged discouraged people to hold on to the hope that God lives, moves, acts, intercedes, and even intrudes among us in life, in death, and in life beyond death again and again.
It is important to note that God does not deliver his people because they are good people. Vss. 22 and further down point out that Israelites have burdened God with their sins and wearied Him with their offenses. Even when they prayed and offered sacrifices, their religious activities were half-hearted. They had not been faithful to God. That’s why they were in exile. But God delivered them again, not because they deserved it, but because He is a God of grace who forgives the undeserving.
Vss. 19-20, God will send streams of mercy and rivers of grace into their lives, not because they deserve it, but because God is full of grace and faithful to his covenant. So, praise the Lord, even as we wait for God’s new thing. Because of His mercy and love, God is doing a new thing even though we don’t deserve it and do not see it. We haven’t finished our journey yet. The cross and empty tomb are before us in the liturgical year. God did an astonishing new thing there in the future on Good Friday and Easter, raising the dead to life, but we can’t see it when we are on the journey to the cross with Jesus. Right now, all we feel is pain and suffering, not seeing anything that will happen on Easter. What do we have to do then? We must believe God will deliver us, raising us to life with Christ Jesus. The return of Christ is still before us. God will do a new thing then, redeeming and recreating a whole new world. But we can’t see that yet. Thus, we are called to believe it. We call it “hope.”
Jurgen Moltmann, a theologian of hope, tells a story from the Talmud of a rabbi, considering what questions a Jew would probably have to answer at the Judgment. What would the Universal Judge ask? First, the rabbi thought the obvious things: Were you honest in business? Did you seek wisdom? Did you keep the commandments? And so on. Finally, a question came into his mind, which surprised the rabbi himself. It was the question about the Messiah. The Universal Judge will ask, “Did you hope for my Messiah?” Isn’t the question Christians will be asked? Says Moltmann: “Did you hope for me? Did you keep hoping even when you nearly gave up? Did you endure to the end?”
“Faith, hope, love, and the greatest of these is love.” But Augustine says the greatest of these is hope while we live on earth. Amen!
2025-04-05
