Isaiah 43:18-19
“Remember not the former things,
nor consider the things of old.
Behold, I am doing 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.
The difficulty of the past is that it often still lives in the present. We are often confronted with our past each day we walk on this earth. A smell reminds us of an event, or time, or person from the past. A place carries incredible memories ... good and bad. That old home has precious and precarious moments that spark both excitement and anxiety at the same time. In this portion of Isaiah God is speaking to His people and He wants them to know He knows their past but He will make something new from them. In the above passage He tells them (and us) to make sure we live the past in the past. We are not to give the past permission to withhold the joy He is about to give us. We are all "lovers" - we like to hold-on to the past. We like to embrace the memories. There are actually places in God's Word where we are told to hold onto these things. Note Solomon's words in Proverbs:
Proverbs 23:10
Do not move an ancient landmark
or enter the fields of the fatherless,
Proverbs 22:28
Do not move the ancient landmark
that your fathers have set.
God does want us to remember when He does great things for us. He does want us to remember His promises. But, God does not want the things of the past to hinder the glory He wants to reveal to us in the future. He also does not want us to forget that the past has shaped us and formed us. Romans 8:28 is all about how God uses the events of this world (in our past) to bring glory to Him. In fact, in the beginning of this chapter God is reminding them of His redemptive history and bring glory to it. However, God does not want us to live in the past. We can glory in what God has done in the past, but He wants us to realize that Christ is our future. For the believer, God is not in the business of holding the past over our heads. God wants us to realize that this new thing is Christ. In 1 Corinthians 11 we are instructed to observe the Lord's Table and to "do this in remembrance of Me." Remember history for where Christ was the center. Remember what Christ did for us. Remember the past for the glory of God. Do not remember it if you can't see the New thing God is doing through the events of the past and in the framework of Christ. The truth is, Christ is the answer to the issues of the past, the present and the future.
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