I Will Do a Great Thing for You

The day is 25th April 2020. I have been sitting in isolation at my home wondering why our Creator seems to have forgotten his best piece of work: Mankind. Or worse, why he is punishing us for I know not what vile sin we have committed. That is when I got thinking.

A Prophet Called Isaiah

One of the oft-cited Biblical incantations is a promise that was made to a Jewish prophet named Isaiah.

In Isaiah 43:18 the following is written:

“Do not call to mind the former things;

pay no attention to things of old”.

To the ordinary mind, this is a severe admonition. You are being told to forget everything you have experienced or known in the past and more, if something good or bad happened to you or in your country, ignore it completely. You may want to ask: Just how far back do I go to forget? The answer is simple: EVERYTHING! Without exception.

In modern computer jargon, it is telling you to press the delete button. And, more, to make sure there is no undelete function and you have not backed it up in a cloud file somewhere, in a discreet flash stick or in someone else’s hard disk. This is obviously a tall order for most people for how can you forget everything including important events in your life.

Gender wise, this may be particularly hard for our ladies as they are hard-wired to remember a lot about the past especially the bad memories. But the admonition is quite clear: If you keep remembering all the bad things done to you, how will you be able to forgive yourself or the person you may have hurt or who hurt you? And therein lies the greatest human weakness: The inability to forget and, therefore, limiting your ability to move on.

Like the familiar song by pop singer Skeeter Davis used to go:

“Yesterday is gone and dead

And tomorrow is out of sight...

Let me live, dear Lord,

One day at a time!”

The Promise

For his creator to have given him this kind of challenge, he must have had a great deal of trust in Isaiah. For the simple reason that to ask someone to do this kind of thing is to ex- pect him to do the virtually impossible. Alternatively, there must be a great reward awaiting whoever takes this advice.

In the case of Isaiah, the promise comes in verse 43:19:

“Behold, I am about to do something new; even now, it is coming”.

In case you are interested, the rest of the reward for Isaiah was “making a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” Given the land in which Isaiah was living - Israel - one can appreciate the value of the promise. If you have ever been to Israel, you can appreciate it even more. The country is both a wilderness in much of the north and a desert in the south and west. Even the famous River Jordan disappears into the Dead Sea, the salty lake lying at the lowest point on earth - 430 metres below sea level.

So, for Isaiah to have been promised rivers of clear water in that desert is nothing short of a miracle. And yet that is precisely what he was being promised: a miracle. As I am not a bible scholar, I do not know whether God kept the promise that he made to Isaiah although something tells me that he must have. Otherwise, the story could not have survived this far.

The Corona Context

As I write this, the world is going through one of its most horrendous challenges of all time, i.e., the coronavirus pandemic. As a consequence, many countries are in partial or full lock- down meaning that a lot of normal human contact has stopped. A genuine torture for most of the human race.

As I write this (April 3020), almost 3 million people have contracted the viral disease. The “good” news is that less than 200,000 people have succumbed to the infection, a rate of around 6%. In absolute terms, this may not appear a large number but the tragedy is that the infection is spreading across the entire world unlike in the case of a normal epidemic where it is concentrated in a region or a given country. (Recalling that the population of man in the world is around 8 billion, it means that the infections are a miniscule 0.04% of that population).

Which brings me to the Isaiah connection. There are many people in the world today who believe that this disease means that the end of the human race is near. Even many religious leaders are telling their people to urgently confess their sins because, after this, it will be too late.

Whether they are right or wrong is not the issue since we are all entitled to our opinions and beliefs. The point is that throughout history man has experienced similar calamities and has somehow figured out a way of overcoming them. In certain cases, there is evidence that man has evolved and created within their own bodies mechanisms for overcoming various diseases which they have encountered.

England (1665-66) were dealt with successfully as were more recent scourges like smallpox (1890s), the Spanish flu (1918), Ebola and even HIV. Even diseases with a bacterial origin have been defeated sometimes by accident.

There are, even with this corona virus, people who believe that a solution will soon be found. With all the advances in modern science, it is surely a matter of time before a clever scientist stumbles upon a solution. It is up to the rest of mankind to keep on encouraging them and for governments to increase funding for scientific research and to elevate medical and environmental budgets to a much higher level than they have done in the past.

The Future

There is no doubt that many of the calamities facing us are due to our own greed or carelessness and a failure to realise that nature has a way of hitting back at those who offend it - at times quite viciously as in the case of this virus. We must, therefore, have a completely different way of looking at the world as we go forwards. As the late American psychologist Dr. Wayne Dyer (1940-1975) said once: “If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change”.

So, let it be with this virus for which there is a firm promise from the Creator of the universe:

“I will do a great thing for you”.

In other words, he will provide a solution to the problem in his own good time. My prayer is that we will sincerely look forward to a brighter future believing in that promise.

But, in case you are the religious type, there is a simple admonition by one Jackson Githaiga, the first African head- master of Alliance High School (1977-1981):

“Yes, keep praying to God to move the mountain but, in the meantime, keep on digging”.

Only time will tell.

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