Isaiah 43:19
What does Isaiah 43:19 mean?
Behold, I will do a new thing. It springs out now. Don’t you know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.
The short answer
In Isaiah 43:19, God announces something startling to a people in exile: "I will do a new thing." The words are not vague comfort. They come right after God has described the exodus—the path through the sea, the drowned army—and then, astonishingly, told Israel not to remember it. The founding miracle of the nation, the story they told at every festival, is set aside. Something greater is coming, and it is already underway: "It springs out now."
The shock is the point. Israel's identity was built on looking back to the exodus. Now God says the old rescue must give way so a new one can be seen. Instead of a path through water, God will make "a way in the wilderness"—and instead of dry land through the sea, "rivers in the desert." The imagery reverses the first exodus. Where the original miracle was escape through water, this one is water arriving where there is none. Historically, this pointed to God bringing the exiles home from Babylon across the desert, a journey as impossible-seeming as the first escape from Egypt.
Notice the question tucked into the verse: "Don't you know it?" God's new work is not waiting to begin; it is already springing up. The question implies that people can miss it. Grief, nostalgia, and even reverence for what God did before can keep eyes fixed backward. The verse is less a gentle reassurance than a summons: loosen your grip on the past—even the sacred past—so you can perceive what God is doing right now. The new thing is without precedent, which means no old map will chart it. Only openness will.
What scholars say
Why would God tell Israel to forget the exodus—the very miracle that made them a people? William P. Brown argues that the announced new thing is so unprecedented it replaces the old, while Walter Brueggemann traces how the promise expands into imaginative, even cosmic hope meant to shock readers into awe.
“But God is not done. Through the mouth of the prophet, God announces “a new thing” ( ḥădāšâ ), something so unprecedented that it is meant to replace the past, rendering it forgettable. Of all the things that God commands to be forgotten, it is this: the very event of Israel’s birth—birth by divine deliverance! Yet this tremendous event of triumph is to be forgotten. Why? We may never know, but whatever the reason, the old must give way for the new. Through Isaiah, God announces an entirely new exodus, one that calls for a replacement of the past. Isaiah 43:16–20 is a canonical countertestimony to the book of Exodus. For Isaiah, the new renders the old obsolete: it is without precursor.”
“The poet plays upon the imagery from Isaiah 43:18–19: Do not remember the former things [ riʾšōnôt ], or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In that passage, we are led to expect a new exodus of emancipation. But now in our text, the poet goes "cosmic." Here there is no worry about or calculation concerning "science and religion" or how a new world might come into existence. Now we are in the realm of faithful imagination, wherein lyrical utterance invites relinquishment of all that is old in order to begin afresh. The poet intends that we should be shocked into awe and wonder.”
What it means for you
Most of us anchor our sense of God's faithfulness in what God has already done—an answered prayer, a season of blessing, a rescue we still retell. Isaiah 43:19 gently unsettles that habit. It asks whether devotion to the past has become a way of not noticing the present. The verse invites a practical question: where might something new already be springing up in your life that you haven't perceived because you're watching the old door?
Releasing the past doesn't mean it wasn't real or holy. It means trusting that the God who acted then is acting now—often in reversed, unexpected imagery: water where you expected dryness, a road where you saw only wilderness.
Isaiah 43 in context
Isaiah 43 speaks to Judah in Babylonian exile, opening with tender reassurance: "Don't be afraid, for I have redeemed you." God promises to gather the scattered people from every direction and declares them witnesses that there is no other savior. Verses 16–17 deliberately evoke the exodus—the way through the sea, the extinguished army—before verse 18 commands Israel to stop dwelling on former things. Verse 19 then delivers the pivot: a new, unprecedented act of deliverance. The chapter closes by acknowledging Israel's failures while affirming that God blots out their sins for his own sake.