Redemptive Recollection
Redemptive Recollection
Isaiah 65:17
“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.”
If re-creation was God’s ambition from the start, why didn’t He just save Himself a world of trouble and start over as soon as Adam ate the fruit or Cain killed Able or humanity built Babel? And why did He whisper a promise throughout the drama, a proto-evangelion as theologians call it, of a divine mustard seed, cast into the flesh-and-blood of the drama, sown between the crevices of common life? Friend, God doesn’t unwrite all He’s written, and He certainly doesn’t lead us to a heavenly state of forgetfulness. Because to forget our Savior’s Passion is to render the perpetual scars He wears in His hands and feet as meaningless. And to forget the sanctifying journey of faith that culminates in heaven’s rest is to render our eternal reward as meaningless as well.
No, God doesn’t erase His most glorious works of old nor our memories of them. Far better, He transforms our perspective so that when we look back at the past from the hindsight of heaven, what we once thought as ugly and sad and dark we now behold as beautiful and joyful and radiant.