Symbolic release of 21 doves

Are you so entangled in the past that you miss present opportunities? Usually the advice to let go of the past refers to emotional recovery from a divorce or job loss or other big disappointment. Hanging on to grief or bitterness or resentment over an unpleasant experience certainly holds people back from recovering and getting on with life. Actually, though, holding on to past victories and joys can just as easily prevent us from moving on.

The prophet Isaiah wrote of the exodus, a pivotal time in Israel’s history. Israelites had deliberately and rightly kept that memory alive. It was a key element in their ethnic identity. For those inclined toward faith in God (too small a minority then as now), memory of the exodus helped keep their faith alive, too. Unfortunately, it also kept a false hope alive. They wanted God to come back and do the same all over again. So what was the conclusion to Isaiah’s recall of God’s supernatural intervention against Pharaoh?

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland.”–Isaiah 43:18-19 (NIV). Or to paraphrase, “The exodus? Fuggedaboutit.”

Times change. During the exodus, the children of Israel were weak, oppressed, and helpless. God made a dry path for them through the sea and rescued them. By Isaiah’s time, they also had a glorious and mighty kingdom in their rearview mirror. David’s  kingdom had split into two parts that, in their own ways, turned away from God.

A king of Judah named Ahaz had foolishly called on the power of Assyria instead of the power of God to rescue him from three pesky but insignificant threats. As a result, he inherited an independent kingdom from his father and passed down a weak and dependent vassal state to his godly son Hezekiah.

God destroyed the northern kingdom during Hezekiah’s reign, and Isaiah warned that Judah would face the same fate. The faithful in Judah prayed for God to rescue them from Assyria as he had rescued them from Egypt, but the nation was not an innocent and oppressed multitude any more. They were sinners, oppressors, under God’s judgment. They should have been looking not so much for his power as his grace and forgiveness.

While the people prayed as if they needed a way through the sea, Isaiah spoke of a desert. Under God’s judgment, the nation’s prospects had dried up. There are streams in a desert, but they do not flow constantly. If it rains somewhere, water can rush through these streams and, for a while, slake the thirst of people who find them. Then they dry up again.

Why cling to memories of deliverance from the sea and wait for God to produce a rerun? What could that possibly accomplish?It could only keep people from recognizing their desert surroundings and looking for the blessings God wanted to make available to them in the present.

Yesterday is gone. Maybe it was a hideous yesterday, a nightmare that keeps coming back unbidden until we no longer feel like we’ll ever wake from it. Maybe it was a great yesterday that we would like to repeat. Either way, we don’t and can’t live there any more.

God will not do for me today exactly what he did for me in the past. It would no longer be appropriate. Here is faith: to remember that God took care of me in the past, to trust that he will continue to do so in the future, and to watch to see the new way he plans to take care of me according to who and where I am today. This principle of letting to of the past applies not only to individuals, but especially to nations and the church.

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Bill Morrow.