Isaiah 65:17: “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; / And the former shall not be remembered or come to mind.”

September 28th, 2024 by Pastor Ed in devotional

Isaiah was looking beyond the millennial or 1000-year earthly reign of Jesus Christ, to the time when God will make a New Jerusalem and a new heaven and earth. The Hebrew word for create here is not asa, meaning to create out of previously existing material; but bara, meaning to create out of nothing. The Apostle Peter writes of the same thing:

But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. (2 Pet. 3:10)

There will be 2 events in Israel’s future kingdom. First there will be a temporal kingdom that will last a 1000 years, and will be ruled by Jesus from ancient Jerusalem. Then, the second stage will begin when God creates a new heaven, a new earth, and a new city of Jerusalem. It will be an eternal kingdom that will never end.

In this chapter, Isaiah used the eternal kingdom as a reference to both the 1000-year reign of Christ as well as the eternal kingdom. By doing so it’s hard to tell that they are 2 separate events. We see them more clearly and separately in Revelation 20 and 21. This is how the Old Testament prophecies referred to the 2 comings of Jesus (being born as a child and His future return to rule the earth), making the 2 comings almost indistinguishable.

When Isaiah says, “the former shall not be remembered or come to mind,” we cannot be sure if this means we will not have a memory of the past, or if the new will be so remarkable that the past will seem like a distant dream. As Paul wrote:

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. (1 Cor. 13:12, NLT)

In the new heaven and earth, we will understand things so perfectly that all will make sense and be right. There is no doubt that the difficult things from our pasts will no longer cause us pain when we finally get to come into the presence of the God who loved us so completely that He came and died for us.

“LORD, come quickly.”