After our first son was born, my wife Miska and I entered a rough stretch in our marriage. We had been extremely close, but now another little person interrupted all that. We loved Wyatt very much, but our relational dynamic had changed forever. Selfishly, I kept insisting that our marriage get back to the way it was before the upheaval. One day, amid a fight, Miska said, “Winn, you are going to have to stop insisting our marriage be what it was. It will be good again, but it will be different.”

Isaiah wrote to the people of Judah prior to their Babylonian exile. He reminded them of how God miraculously rescued them generations earlier during their Egyptian exile. He recounted how God was the one who “opened a way through the waters” and made a “dry path through the sea” (Isaiah 43:16). The Exodus story, Moses going toe-to-toe with Pharaoh, plagues raining down, and the people crossing the Red Sea on dry ground had been their defining marker of God’s power and goodwill toward them.

So, in the face of their prophesied future exile, some of God’s people may have assumed that God intended to send another prophet and another battery of stunning plagues, another miraculous trek across a sea to deliver them. They may have expected God to act in a certain way. Maybe others, when they heard Isaiah’s words, felt cynical. We’ve heard these stories before, for hundreds of years. But nothing is going to change.

Either way, the people had to let go of what they were holding so tightly (either their cynical doubts or their ideas of how God would act). They had to forget what they thought they knew so they could receive the new thing God wanted to do. As novelist L. P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”