How dear to the heart of the Israelites was the remembrance of the nation’s deliverance from Egypt and their journey to the Land of Promise! To those great events the religious teachers of the people continually turned for illustrations and proofs of God’s greatness and power and goodness and love.
From this well used and familiar store of imagery the figurative expressions of the text are derived. Dropping the figures put of sight for a moment, we may say this is a gracious promise of suitable help and supply, even under circumstances most difficult and precarious. It is intended as an encouragement to repentance and to renewed consecration to God. It is the old message that God will give to all who look to Him everything that is requisite for spiritual progress and success. In presence of every untried enterprise; on the threshold of every unknown experience; in the hearing of every Divine call, this promise floats as a banner before the soldier’s eye, and rings as the sound of a trumpet rings upon the soldier’s heart. (T. Stephenson.)
“A new thing”
1. This messenger of God proclaims, and he may be regarded as in this respect representing all God’s messengers of grace to the world, “Look not on the former things”--listen not now, in these moments of penitence and prayer, to those threatening voices which tell of an inexorable law of repetition, of the relentless working out of a foregone conclusion and appointed destiny--old things may pass away, all things may become new. “Behold, I will do a new thing!”
2. This “new thing,” in the instance before us, is compared with the opening of a path in the wilderness, and the supply of rivers of waters in the desert. The pathless wilderness of the future is before us--no foot has trodden it,--it is beset by unknown difficulties and unseen perils; but even their God will make a way, a road upon which His people shall travel in security and with unerring certainty to their appointed destination. And although the heat of the sun may beat fiercely down upon that path, drying up every particle of moisture and consuming all pleasant vegetation, so that it may seem most unlikely that life can be sustained in the journey across such an arid waste, God can and will provide all that is needed; and rivers of water, an abundant and continuous supply, shall be found there. Preparation and guidance! These are the ideas involved in the promise to make a path. Difficulty, peril, privation! These are the thoughts which associate themselves with the desert and the wilderness. (T. Stephenson.)
The new thing
This doing a new thing is the very achievement which many voices of high authority are assuring us, just now, is impossible with God. The power that carries on the universe, they tell us, never does a “new thing.” What seems to us the new is only the old revealing itself in an unexpected way. Continuity is the law that governs all things. It is the language of those whose symbol of deity is an interrogation mark, or the sign for an unknown quantity, or a fetter, as they may happen to prefer. It is a phase of thought by no means modern, although sometimes imagined to be such. It never found more telling expression anywhere than at the lips of one who flourished a thousand years before Christ, more or less, and who put it thus: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new?” I suggest that we take up the ancient challenge. I will mention some of the ways in which Christ may be said to have broken in upon the monotony and uniformity of human life and thought with something new. He brought us--
