It's Personalናሙና

It can be easy to think of our lives through the lens of where we’ve been and what we’ve done, so much so that we become prisoners to our past. We let the “former things” determine the future. In this verse from Isaiah, God is telling the Jewish people to not let where they were coming from, what they had done, or what had been done to them, determine the course and where they were going. They did not need to stay ensnared in what had happened before.

God does not live in the past, and we shouldn’t either. God can and does use the past, but God is not held hostage by it and we shouldn’t be either. Think about a “former thing” from your past that is having more say in your present living and future imagining than it should. What would it take for you to believe there is something beyond your past experiences? What is keeping you from believing that God isn’t seeing you or your life through the lens of your past and you shouldn’t either?

Being stuck in the past will keep us from experiencing the new things that God intends for us. But here in Isaiah, we learn that God wants to do a new thing for us, in a new way.