“In With The New”

“In With The New”

Text: Isaiah 43:16-21

© March 25, 2007 by C. Edward Bowen

There’s a certain verse in the Old Testament that always puzzled me. It’s in the book of Psalms – Psalm 126, to be specific – where it says: “Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.” And so I always wondered: why would people be weeping, why would people be crying, when it came time to plant their seeds?

Well, recently I found out that it is not completely uncommon even today to find people in the Middle East and in Africa who sob uncontrollably when spring arrives and the time comes to plant the seeds for their crops. And the reason they cry is because in lands where food is scarce and where starvation is a very real possibility, when people take the seeds they have stored up and plant them in the ground, it’s like taking food out of the mouths of their children.

You see, in lands where food is scarce and where starvation is a very real possibility, the people are at times tempted to hold on to what they have – to the seeds that they have – and eat them for food.[1] But they know in their hearts that if they do that, they eliminate their future, because then there wouldn’t be any crops for them to harvest and eat for the coming year. And so as tears drip down from their cheeks, they make the difficult choice of planting those seeds – in essence, saying goodbye to what they have – so that in time God might cause something new to rise up, something even greater than what they had.

Basically that’s the kind of situation that this passage in Isaiah is dealing with. You see, back around 587 B.C., the Babylonians, who lived in the area where Iraq is today, invaded Israel. And the Babylonians defeated the Hebrew people, burned down much of the capital city of Jerusalem, and took away many of the leaders as prisoners to live in exile in Babylon.

But then almost 50 years later, things changed. A new king, named Cyrus, came to the throne and he issued a decree that all the Hebrews should be freed and allowed to return to their own land. And it’s during that period that this passage in Isaiah was written.

And essentially what this passage is saying is: “Long ago, God led our ancestors out of slavery in Egypt. And God did that parting the waters of the sea for us, and by destroying the pharaoh’s army and chariots. Well, guess what? God is about to do that same kind of thing in our day. But instead of freeing us from Egypt, this time God is leading us out of Babylon and is making it possible for us to go home again.”

But right after reminding the people about what God had done for them when God had freed them from slavery in Egypt, in the very next breath Isaiah says, “Forget about that. Don’t remember it anymore. Stop thinking about it. Because God is about to do something new – don’t you see it?” In other words, Isaiah was saying, “God has a future in store for us – a great and glorious future in store for us. But to be open to that new thing that God wants to do in our lives, we need to be willing to let go of the past.”

But letting go of the past is never an easy thing to do. For example, in the Old Testament there is a relatively short little book called Haggai. And Haggai was a prophet who lived during this time when the Hebrew people were returning home, after being freed from Babylon. And it seems that when the people got back to Jerusalem, at first they were thrilled and excited to be there. And one of the very first things they got to work on was rebuilding the temple. But after working on the temple for just a few months, the people could tell that there was no way that that new temple was ever going to be anything like the temple that they used to have, the temple that King Solomon had built, covered with gold and silver and fine cedar wood.

And so as the people looked at the temple they were building, many of the older people who had been around and remembered what the old temple was like started to cry. They cried because they remembered what things were like in the past and they just knew that things were never going to be the same again. But that’s when the prophet Haggai came along and essentially gave them all a kick in the pants and said, “What are you doing, crying like that? Yeah, you’re right – this new temple isn’t going to look like the temple we used to have. But get over it! God is about to do something new in our midst. And even if you don’t believe it, the future that God has in mind for us is going to be even greater than anything that’s happened in the past.”

Every year Fortune magazine puts out a list called the Fortune 500. It’s a listing of the 500 largest companies in the country. But one thing I found rather interesting was a study where they found that of the companies that made it onto that list, 13 years later 1/3 of those companies were out of business – it’s not just that they’re sales went down; 1/3 of those companies ceased to exist.[2]

How could something like that happen? How could you go from having one of the largest and most successful companies in the country one year, and in slightly over a decade be out of business for good? I think it’s mainly because a lot of companies start out doing a good job of thinking about the future and what kinds of products and services people will want, but then when they finally come up with a great idea, they focus so much of their time and energy on that idea and producing more and more of it, that they end up spending less and less time looking at the future and trying to figure out what’s the next new thing they need to be doing. Basically those companies fail because they focus so much on what worked well in the past, that they don’t open their eyes to what they should be led to do in the future.

As you might be aware, for a long time the Swiss were considered to be the world leaders when it came to making watches. Well, some years ago all the Swiss watchmakers got together for their annual convention in Geneva. And one watchmaker introduced a new idea he had come up – a digital watch, a watch that ran on a battery. Well, right away all the other Swiss watchmakers shook their heads and insisted that a watch is only a watch if it has springs and gears inside and a stem that a person turns to wind the watch up. According to those Swiss watchmakers, that’s the way they’ve always made watches, and it was that way of making watches that had made them the world leaders.

Well, guess what? How many of us here today are wearing Swiss-made watches that you have wind each day? My guess is not too many of us, if any. You see, when the Japanese company Seiko and the American company Texas Instruments found out about that Swiss watchmaker’s idea for a new kind of watch, they had the vision to see that that would be the wave of the future, and they ran with it.[3] But the Swiss remained so focused on their glory days in the past, they ended up missing out on the future they could have had.

Today, during our service, we have communion. And when most people think of communion, they think that it has to do with the past – that it’s about reminding us of the great things that God did for us long ago, especially the way that God sent Jesus into the world and how Jesus sat at the table with his disciples and ate and drank before he was arrested and nailed to the cross. And yes, communion is about the past – it is about reminding us of the great things that God did for God’s people long ago.

But communion is not just about the past. Communion is also about the future. It’s about pointing our attention forward to that day when God is going to do something new – to the new heaven and the new earth that God is going to bring about – to that new day when all of God’s people will join together around God’s table in heaven.

What about in your life? As you look back across the years, maybe you can point to certain events and certain times when you know that God was there for you, when God did great things in your life or in the life of someone close to you. And it’s important and valuable to have memories from the past like that.

But as you turn and look toward the future, are you prepared for God to do something new in your life? As you turn and look toward the future, are you open to following God in some way that you’ve never gone before? As you turn and look toward the future, are you ready to go out and do what God wants you to be doing, even if it’s something new and different from what you’ve been familiar with in the past?

The past is important. The past is an important part of who we are. But we can’t let the past, we can’t let what we’re used to, hold us hostage. Instead, we need to have the faith to turn and trust that God is waiting to do even greater things in the future. In your life, can you see what new thing God is wanting to accomplish? Because the God who worked wonders in people’s lives in ages past is just waiting to work wonders in our lives even today.