“For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.” (Isaiah 65:17)
Isaiah 65:17 invites us to lift our eyes beyond repair and toward re-creation. God does not merely promise to improve what is broken; He declares that He is creating something altogether new. The language is intentional and echoes Genesis. Just as God once spoke light into darkness, He promises to speak a renewed world into existence, one so transformed that “the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind.”
This verse confronts our instinct to cling to the past. We often imagine redemption as God restoring what we lost: old joys, old stability, old versions of ourselves. But Isaiah tells us that God’s future is not a rewind button. It is a reset of a deeper kind. The pain, injustice, and grief that have shaped our memories will not define our eternity. They will not even haunt it. God’s promise is not amnesia, but healing so complete that sorrow loses its power to dominate our consciousness.
For Isaiah’s original audience, exiles, weary from judgment and displacement, this promise would have sounded almost too good to be true. Their world had collapsed politically, socially, and spiritually. Yet God does not offer them a slightly improved Jerusalem or a safer version of their old life. He offers a new creation in which joy replaces despair and peace eclipses fear. The scope of God’s promise matches the depth of their loss.
For Christians, Isaiah 65:17 points forward to the hope fulfilled in Christ and consummated at His return. The New Testament echoes this promise when Revelation declares,
“Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5).
In Jesus’ resurrection, the new creation has already begun. The future has broken into the present. While we still live amid groaning and decay, we belong to a story that is heading toward renewal, not ruin.
This verse also shapes how we live now. If God’s future is truly new, then our present suffering is not ultimate. Regret does not get the final word. Neither do failures, losses, or unresolved grief. Isaiah 65:17 gives believers courage to endure, knowing that what weighs heaviest on our hearts today will not define our tomorrow.
God’s promise frees us to live with hope rather than nostalgia and with faith rather than fear.
Isaiah’s call to “behold” is a summons to trust. God asks us to fix our attention not on what is fading, but on what He is creating. Even now, He is at work, quietly, powerfully preparing a world where joy is unbroken and sorrow is no more. Until that day, we live as people shaped by the future, confident that the God who makes all things new will finish what He has begun.
