People keep telling me God can change anyone. I believe it about other people and I cannot make myself believe it about me.

“Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”

Isaiah speaks to exiles whose national story looked finished, and he tells them to stop staring at the old thing. The new thing is described as already springing up, in a desert, which is precisely where nothing new is expected. This promise was made to people with a long and thoroughly documented record of failure. That was the audience, not an exception to it.

“Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”

Paul is defending his ministry to a church that had doubted him, and this line about new creation lands in the middle of that argument. He is a man who had hunted Christians and now writes to them as a father. Whatever he means by new, he means it about someone whose past was bad enough that others found it hard to believe about him too.