Isaiah 43:19 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

A new thing; such a work as was never yet done in the world, even the redemption of the world by the Messiah. Now; shortly, although it was not to be done till after some hundreds of years. For so the Scripture oft speaketh of things at a great distance of time as if they were now at hand, as Haggai 2:6 James 5:9 Revelation 22:20, and elsewhere; which it doth to correct our impatience, and to make us willing to wait till God's time come; and to assure us that the mercy shall come as soon as ever it is fit for us, and we for it; and to make us sensible of the inconsiderableness of time, and all temporal things, in comparison of God, and of the eternal things; upon which account it is said that a thousand years are in God's sight but as one day, Psalms 90:4. Shall ye not know it? certainly you Jews shall know it by experience, and shall find that I do not deceive you with vain hopes. I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert; I will give you direction and provision in the wilderness, where there is commonly no path, and where all necessaries are wanting; which as it literally speaks of God's conducting them in the way from Babylon to Jerusalem, which lay through a great desert; so it is mystically meant of those spiritual blessings which God in and through Christ will confer upon all his people, not the Jews only, but also the Gentiles, who in prophetical language are oft compared to the wilderness, as Isaiah 35:1, and elsewhere.