Isaiah 42:8,9

I am the Lord.... — The prophet grasps the full meaning of the name revealed in Exodus 3:15. It follows from that meaning that God cannot look with indifference on the transfer to the “graven image” of the worship due to Him. With his vision of Cyrus still present to his thoughts, the prophet again presses the unique point of prediction as distinguishing the religion of Israel from that of the heathen. The “former things” refer probably not to the remote past, but to Isaiah’s earlier prophecies, say the whole Assyrian cycle, on which he now looks back from his new stand-point; or even, as in Isaiah 41:22, to the near future of the conquests of Cyrus as compared with that which was to usher in the restoration of Israel.