Isaiah 43:20-21 “I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise.”

In God’s hands, you are the spiritual equivalent of a work of art. When he says that we are people he formed for himself, he speaks of the kind of forming a potter does with his clay. With his own hands he carefully molds and shapes his work until it is just the right shape and will serve just the function he intends.

In one sense, all of the people on earth are the work of God’s creation. But when he speaks of “my people, my chosen,” he is referring to those in whom he is carefully forming and shaping their faith. We are all still works in progress. None of us has fully taken the shape that God wants us to have. But he continues to work with this material to get it to express just the message he wants.

When an artist creates some piece, he is trying to do more than make something look pretty. He wants it to communicate a message. That is also God’s intent with the people he has formed for himself: “that they may proclaim my praise.” When a Hebrew thought of praising God, he was not thinking primarily of emotional outbursts. Praise transcended how God made him feel. His very word for praise suggests that he was going to tell a story. Something very important had happened, and he was going to tell about it.

You have a story to tell, a story that praises God, too. Right now God is forming and molding your faith so that you can tell it. He is molding and changing your behavior, so that your life tells the story of his impact on it. He is molding and changing your Bible knowledge, so that your mouth can tell others the story of God’s grace. He is molding and changing your heart, so that you have the courage to open that mouth and live that life and let the story come pouring out.

The last verse of the old gospel hymn “I Love to Tell the Story” closes this way, “And when in scenes of glory I sing the new, new song, ‘twill be the old, old story that I have loved so long.” The new song of heaven is about the old story: Christ’s love for us. It goes back thousands of years, but for those who have drunk from its waters and experienced its life-changing powers, it remains ever fresh, and ever new. May we always love to tell that story, too.

Isaiah 43:19-20 “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. The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the desert and streams in the wasteland, to give drink to my people, my chosen…”

God’s new thing forms an interesting contrast with the crossing of the Red Sea. At the Red Sea there was too much water, it seemed. The Lord had to make a dry place through the middle of the sea so that his people could cross it to safety. In the new thing God is doing, there is too much dry, trackless desert his people need to cross. That’s why God creates streams of water–so that they can survive their journey and cross the desert to safety.

One might guess Isaiah is referring to his people’s return from captivity in Babylon. Isaiah had predicted this captivity was coming. He even gave the name of the man who would let them go home when it was done: Cyrus, the future king of Persia. When the time finally came, and the people could come home to Jerusalem, they certainly had to cross a very dry, very lonely desert to get there.

That crossing of the Arabian desert may have begun the fulfillment of this prophecy. But we have no record from either the Bible or history of literal streams appearing in that desert on the Jews’ trip home. It’s also hard to think of the return from Babylon as being a more momentous event than the crossing of the Red Sea, whether for its historical or for its spiritual significance.

But there was another time ahead for God’s people when he was making ways in the wilderness and providing drinks in the desert. Remember Isaiah’s words describing John the Baptist? “A voice of one calling: ‘In the desert prepare the way for the Lord; make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God.’” Remember Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well? “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The reason God led his people home from Babylon to Jerusalem was to bring them the Water of Life later in the person of Jesus. Then they could cross the spiritual desert in which they were living to safety with him.

Look at this new thing God has to show you. Do you see how it is blessing you in the present? These wonderful works of God were not done in a vacuum. They were not merely awesome displays of his power far removed from us. We still drink from these streams in the desert. God says that he has given them “to give drink to my people, my chosen.” That includes you and me. Does it occur to you that you have been personally privileged to experience an even greater miracle than the crossing of the Red Sea?

Less than two years after Israel had crossed the Red Sea, the impact of that miracle had worn off for most of them. After the people refused to enter the Promised Land on their first trip to its borders, God complained to Moses, “How long will these people treat me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in me, in spite of all the miraculous signs I have performed among them?”

But you believe in him. You haven’t seen all kinds of astounding changes in the forces of nature. You simply heard the name of Jesus. You heard him inviting you, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

When he promises you that your sins are forgiven, you can’t see that it is so. But when you drink from that promise, your soul is refreshed and your strength is renewed.

Jesus has sent you no postcards of your heavenly home. He has never invited you to come and inspect the foundation or check out the furnishings before you move in. But though you have never seen it, its very mention fills you with longing to go there. Its promise is sometimes all that keeps you going when your life has become uncomfortably hot or dry.

Is that not a miracle? We are a uniquely jaded and skeptical people. By nature the human heart is closed to the spiritual truth about God. But on the force of some promises flowing from the loving life and sacrificial death of Jesus Christ nearly 2000 years ago, God has opened a way through the wilderness into your heart. He has poured the cooling drink of his love into your soul, and you live with the present blessing of believing it is so.

Isaiah 43:16-18 “This is what the Lord says– he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, who drew out the chariots and horses, the army and reinforcements together, and they lay there, never to rise again, extinguished, snuffed out like a wick: ‘Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past.’”

From our perspective in history, it may difficult for us to appreciate how shocking these words of Isaiah were. They allude to the crossing of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army there. In our day God’s people have more or less followed this command, though not intentionally. We might watch The Ten Commandments on TV at Easter. We might study this part of Bible History in a Sunday School class. But we don’t dwell on it anymore. Our church and our faith revolves around Jesus and the events of his life, death, and resurrection.

But when God inspired Isaiah to write this, the Exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea were the most important things God had ever done for his people. This was how Old Testament people came to know the true God and what he is like. His justice, his love, his power, and his deliverance are all wrapped up in these events. How could he say, “forget the former things; do not dwell on the past”?

The Lord wasn’t saying this deliverance no longer held any importance. He was telling his people it would be overshadowed by the new thing he promised to do. That new thing culminated in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. To an outsider, this may seem mistaken. How could Jesus’ simple life of love, telling people the good news about God, overshadow the power of God forging a path through the waters of the Red Sea? How could the criminal death of one man overshadow the destruction of an entire army on the floor of the Red Sea? How could one empty tomb overshadow the deliverance of an entire nation from the most powerful empire on earth at that time? The people of Israel simply had to trust God when he told them the future would hold greater things. We, too, must simply trust God when he tells us that the events of Jesus’ ministry are more significant than all the other wonders God has performed.

We aren’t always inclined to see it that way. God’s people have often found it difficult to keep their eyes focused on the main event, and the main event is Jesus. In an age that wants to dismiss God’s wonder-working power, some Christians react by making miracles the center of attention. In a society that denies God’s right to establish the standards of right and wrong, other Christians want Biblical morality to take the center ring. In a world where life is a struggle, relationships are prickly, and health is teetering on the edge, some want God’s principals for successful living or promises to provide to stand in the spotlight.

All these have their place. But sometimes we get so caught up in the peripherals we forget that the great issue of the day is not evidence for God’s supernatural power, or society’s lack of respect for life, or the success of my own life. The great issue of the day is still what I am going to do with my own sin. The always new thing that overshadows everything else God has said or done is freedom from sin and victory over death in the death and resurrection of his Son.

Luke 23:28-31 “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children. For the time will come when you will say, ‘Blessed are the barren women, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then ‘they will say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us!’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us!’ For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will they do when it is dry?”

It is too easy for our earthly circumstances mask our true spiritual condition. We equate success and prosperity with God’s approval of our lives. If I am healthy and gainfully employed, happily married and respected in my community, then everything must be okay between me and the Almighty. This is why so few are interested in a Jesus who forgives my sin and takes me to heaven. If I have already found heaven on earth, why do I need a heaven to come? If I have already been so blessed, why should I think I have been doing anything wrong? Even we begin to lose our sense of how desperately we need what Jesus wants to give. The grip of our faith begins to loosen. We begin to replace the security of a Savior’s grace and love with worldly comfort.

But if worldly success equals divine security, why did the beggar Lazarus go to heaven and the rich man go to hell in Jesus’ parable? Why did Jesus tell the rich and religious Pharisees that the prostitutes were getting into heaven ahead of them? Why did Jesus tell these women of Jerusalem that they needed to weep for themselves rather than the condemned man stumbling to his death in front of them?

A terrible death was waiting where Jesus was going, it is true. Crucifixion was a cruel, cruel way to die. The deeper hell he would suffer on the cross was hidden from the onlookers who watched him make his way through the streets.

But a new life awaited Jesus just three days away. A place of power at the right hand of God in heaven would follow less than a month and a half after that.

God’s judgment would not be so kind to those who cried at the sight of Jesus, but never put their faith in him. Jesus doesn’t go into graphic detail about the horrors of that judgment, but his description of its effects upon the heart and mind are just as effective.

For Jewish women of that time– who prized children and viewed childlessness as the greatest possible curse–to wish their children never existed suggests a terror beyond description. My own son’s cancer made it unmistakably clear for me how painful it is for parents to see their children suffer. To see your children suffer where there is no kind Savior, no hope, and no escape hurts to think about.

But if no tears of repentance followed their tears of sentimental sympathy, this was the only fate awaiting these women of Jerusalem and the unbelieving generation they would raise. “For if men do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?” Do you get Jesus’ picture? Jesus was the green tree, a tree full of life. He shouldn’t be cut down. He was not fit for the fires of judgment. He was the innocent and holy Son of God, a man of perfect love and unquestionable goodness. If Jesus suffered this kind of treatment now, what could possibly be in store for those so spiritually dry and dead that they were perfect candidates for judgment?

Do you see what Jesus’ words are trying to do? They may sound severe, but they are not the words of a bitter man lashing out in pain and anger. They are not his desire for these people who cry, but do little to help. He is not a man so wrapped up in his own misery that he can’t appreciate the sympathy of others.

These are the words of a Savior who isn’t seeking our tears. He wants to spare us the misery he is about to suffer. The beatings and whippings exhausted him. The cross filled him with dread. But Jesus is always the Good Shepherd seeking straying sheep. It is not vengeful anger, but a breaking heart that moves him to make a final plea: “Repent! Trust in me! Escape the judgment I am going to bear for you on the cross!” If we must shed tears, let them be tears of sorrow for our sins, so that he can replace them with tears of relief in forgiveness and tears of joy in heaven.