A New Thing: Reflections on Isaiah 43: 19 and John 9
Look again at the cover of this newsletter. A man stands on the edge of a cliff. Behind him, darkness — thick, low clouds, almost black. In front of him, light breaking through in bright, glorious shafts. He is standing exactly where the two meet.
That image is a picture of grace. Not a man earning his way from darkness into light, but light breaking in on him — unearned, entirely God’s doing. Isaiah 43:19 carries that same image. “I am doing a new thing” — God is the subject of that sentence. Not “you will do a new thing” or “you will finally see clearly enough to notice it.” God acts. The only question left for us is whether we perceive it, and even that is gift. Isaiah says elsewhere it is God who opens blind eyes, not we ourselves who learn to see.
As this reflection is being written, we are in John 9 this week and the same grace sits at the centre of that story. Jesus comes across a man blind from birth and does something strange: he bends down, spits into the dust, makes clay, and smears it onto the man’s eyes. Go back to Genesis 2, where God forms the first man from the dust of the ground. Jesus is not repairing this man’s eyes.
He is recreating, the way God has always created — out of nothing the man contributed, nothing he asked for, nothing he did to deserve it. The man didn’t even know who Jesus was yet. Grace came to him before faith did.
That order matters. The man is healed first, and only slowly, across the chapter, does he come to understand Who healed him — from “the man called Jesus,” to “a prophet,” to at last, kneeling, “Lord, I believe!” Faith is not the price for his sight. Faith is what grows in the light he was given for free, out of Grace.
Contrast that with the Pharisees, who spend the whole chapter trying to reason their way to the truth by their own authority, their own categories, their own sight — and end up more blind than the man who started without eyes. It is not a story about who is smart enough or righteous enough to see. It is a story about grace going first, to the one who could not have found it on his own.
So, look at the cover again. The man standing at the border of darkness and light hasn’t stepped into the light by his own strength. It has come to find him. He has come to find him. For Christ is the Light of the world. That is the new thing God is always doing — not waiting for us to perceive our way toward him, but breaking into our darkness first, remaking us before we even know His Name. That is Grace. Pastor (intern)
Wikus Opperman
