This morning we're going to be looking at a book called Lamentations. Before we turn to that this morning, I wanna start with this statement. You know that God has found you when you believe that God is good no matter what happens. You know that God has found you when you believe that God is good no matter what happens. We know we belong to God, in other words, when nothing can shake our confidence in His unchanging, unfailing goodness.
Not when a plane crashes that kills loved ones. Not when positive biopsies shatter dreams, unexpected unemployment that fills thoughts of tomorrow with fear, rebellious children that provoke unimaginable pain and self doubt, battles with self hatred that make every mention of an identity in Christ sound like a mockery, Memories of abuse that haunt every waking moment. Personal failures that shreds the last remnants of hope. Difficult decisions in which one direction or the other involves significant loss either way. Or consuming loneliness that covers your soul like a fog.
You know, God has found you when you believe that God is good no matter what happens. Maintaining our faith in God's goodness in these times, I am sure you will agree is not easy. Where is God? We ask during my suffering. Don't simply tell me pastor that He's here because I can believe that with my mind, but my heart cries out and asks why isn't He doing something?
I don't know why He let my boy play behind my car when I reversed out the driveway. How could a good God allow that? This morning, I'm very aware that I'm preaching to a church with families and individuals that are suffering and people doing it tough. And that's in one way or another. And I want to ask you this morning, do you know that God is good?
Do you really know that God is good? You see the truth is not many people can conclude that God is good by simply looking at life. Not many will be able to conclude that. In fact, philosophers throughout the ages have tried to look at life and have tried to answer that question. Because there's so much pain out there in this world.
And if you're not directly experiencing that pain right now, you are an observer watching other people go through it and it's just as shocking. Belief in the goodness of God and the worship that flows from this confidence depends solely on the work of the Holy Spirit. It is supernatural. When God ushers us and His Spirit ushers us into the presence of ultimate goodness, when our darkest tragedy is pierced by one glimpse of invisible glory, people that have experienced that will tell you that faith is at its most real. The faith that is given by God's Spirit lets us know that we are in good hands no matter what may come.
You know God has found you when you believe that God is good no matter what happens. This morning we're going to be looking at this book called Lamentations. And if you know your English, you know that the word lament means to grieve, to mourn. It was written by the prophet Jeremiah around May. It's a book full of grief and shock at the destruction of Jerusalem, the city that was God's special place.
It was a time of the Babylonian invasion at that time. And the book is about a people crying out to God in the midst of terrible pain and suffering. It's called Lamentations for a reason. An artist by the name of William Wetmore Story carved a sculpture that he called Jerusalem in Her Desolation. And it's on display in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
She is a queen sitting among ruins, slumped slightly to one side. Her elbow hangs across a crumbling wall. Her empty gaze is turned downward, and her mouth has fallen. Her face reveals that she has endured great suffering, A grief too deep for words perhaps, perhaps even for tears. And though she is beautiful and regal, she is despondent and is betrayed.
The queenly city that William Story carved into stone is Jerusalem personified at this time. The Jerusalem that barely survived the tragic events described at the end of the book of Jeremiah. She had already experienced all the indignities and the indecencies of the Babylonian assault. After a long siege, the city fell to Nebuchadnezzar, and Jerusalem's citizens were deported to Babylon. Now, Story's sculpture depicts the grief of that event.
A city, a people numb with grief. The most significant detail is actually a little serpent at her feet on that left side near the wall. A little snake. The serpent points to sin, showing that Jerusalem's desolation had been the result of her disobedience just like the prophets had prophesied. This morning, I want us to focus on Lamentations 3.
So let's have a look at that chapter, and we're going to read just over half of it this morning. Lamentations 3:1-30. Jeremiah writes this in the first person, but it reflects the heartache of the whole people of Israel. Lamentations 3:1, I'm a man who has seen affliction by the rod of His, that's God's wrath. He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light.
Indeed, He has turned His hand against me again and again all day long. God has made my skin and my flesh grow old and has broken my bones. He has besieged me and surrounded me with bitterness and hardship. He has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead. He has walled me in so I cannot escape.
He has weighed me down with chains. Even when I call out or cry for help, He shuts out my prayer. He has barred my way with blocks of stone. He has made my paths crooked. Like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in hiding, He dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help.
He drew His bow and He made me the target of His arrows. He pierced my heart with arrows from His quiver. I became the laughing stock of all my people. They mocked me in song all day long. He has filled me with bitter herbs.
He has sated me with gall. He has broken my teeth with gravel. He has trampled me in the dust. I have been deprived of peace. I have forgotten what prosperity is.
So I say, my splendour is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord. I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed for His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. I say to myself, the Lord is my portion, therefore I will wait for Him. The Lord is good for those to those whose hope is in Him, to the one who seeks Him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young. Let him sit alone in silence for the Lord has laid it on him. Let him bury his face in the dust, there may yet be hope. Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him and let him be filled with disgrace. So far our reading.
This morning I want to point out in this book that is all about grieving and mourning, a loss of identity, a loss of hope, of suffering and pain. I wanna draw us to these few verses, verses 22 to 27 in chapter 3. And I wanna point out three character traits of God that are identified by Jeremiah that cause hope amidst the suffering and the pain. The first thing we notice is in verse 22, and we notice God's love.
We notice God's love. The Hebrew word, chesed, sometimes translated as covenant love or loving kindness in other Bibles, is one of the most important words in the Old Testament. We've spoken about it before, chesed. Don't try to say it too much because you might spit on the person's neck behind you in front of you. But it refers to the love of God that is shown by the promise or the covenant that He initiated with the people of Israel.
The promises He made to His people to love them and to be their God. This chesed, this love, never changes. It is unconditional. It doesn't falter. Why?
Quite simply because God never changes. It is so tied in with His character that never changes, that it is a love that doesn't change. The word carries with it the overtones of obligation, of family commitment, of unconditional attention and concern. And Jeremiah begins, because of the Lord's great chesed, we are not consumed. See Jerusalem had fallen.
She had been pillaged and she had been raped, but she was not consumed. She was not overcome. She had fallen, but she was not trampled into the dust. She was broken and scarred, but not mortally wounded. And Jeremiah sees the covenantal love of God behind this.
Because of Your love, we are not consumed. The second character trait of God that has called for hope amidst and amongst the suffering is God's unfailing compassions. Also, the end of verse 22, for His compassions never fail. Now this is amazing. The word again that talks about compassion that we translate as compassion is actually a term that's related to the womb.
To the womb. It describes the tender, caring love of a mother. Now we know that God is neither male nor female, although we speak of Him as a father and in the masculine. But this is a rare word that talks about a feminine soft love of God that He has for His children. Isn't that amazing?
It occurs in the mouth of God, at the moment where He rescues Israel from Egypt in Exodus. Exodus 33:19 where He says, I will cause all My goodness to pass in front of you and I will proclaim the name Yahweh before you. I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and I will have compassion. This word. I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.
The emphasis of this word is one of concern, of compassion, of mercy, on a mother like love. And if you've had a good mother, you will know what this love is like. It is marked with sympathy, with worry, with concern, with heartache. God is concerned and heartbroken, in other words, at the suffering of His children. His compassionate love, Jeremiah says, never fails.
It is new every morning. Every day, day in, day out, God is concerned. Though He has broken Jerusalem, though He has allowed her to suffer, though He has brought her low, His eyes are never taken off her. His eyes never wander. Like a watchful parent, He achingly desires to see her get back up.
The third character trait mentioned here in verse 23 is God's faithfulness. The word used for faithfulness again is related to our word amen. The word amen means so be it. And it's a word of constancy and of reliability. It was a unique characteristic of Yahweh, the God of Israel, that He was faithful.
It was unique to God. See, all the neighbouring nations around Israel had gods who were fickle, who were nice on the one hand and then could be really bad on the other. And they had to be pleased and they had to be won over by their worshipers. But the Jews understood God to be faithful. And friends, there is no greater hope than knowing that God is totally reliable, that He is faithful.
But here's the kicker. Jeremiah knew that God was faithful because God was faithful in bringing about Jerusalem's destruction. Hundreds of years before when God had rescued Israel from Egypt, He said to them this in Exodus 34. The Lord passed in front of Moses and proclaimed Yahweh. Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God.
He is slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving wrongdoings, rebellion, and sin. But He will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the father's wrongdoings onto the children and the grandchildren to the third and fourth generation, but showing His love to a thousand generations of those who love Him. For Jeremiah, the penny had dropped on God's faithfulness, but it came in a surprising way. God had said, be faithful to Me and I will bless you. Worship Me as your God.
Love Me as your father, and you will receive blessing upon blessing. But if you walk away from Me, I will not protect you. If you turn away from Me, I cannot defend you. A feminine war will come upon you, He said, and you will lose all the good gifts that I have given you. And the irony is this, that Jeremiah sees God's faithfulness and reliability in that He sincerely kept that promise, that He allowed Israel to be disciplined.
But now the hope for Jeremiah was that God had also promised to restore. As faithful as God was in allowing Israel to, Jerusalem to come to that point of destruction, God would also be faithful in redeeming her as He had promised. You see, often in life, people do not realise the faithfulness of God until the bottom has fallen out in their lives. The poet realises here that restoration is on its way, but he also realises that God is faithful even when we are not. You and I are not reliable.
Not even in our most well intentioned promises, our mother like love, our fatherly love makes us bend the rules, doesn't it? Our unconditional love allows our children to get away with things. Even though we don't want to fail, we do. And we disappoint. But God is truly faithful.
And so it says, great is Your faithfulness. Great is Your faithfulness to all Your promises and to all Your warnings. The Lord is about hope. Friends, the Lord is about hope. His character causes hope to stir up.
It is not a maybe or a might be or a most of the time will be, but this hope has the solid confidence and the highest degree of certainty because it is well grounded in the God of all grace, of chesed love, of compassion, and of faithfulness. His love and His mercy to His children are unending. And this is what Jeremiah says in the midst of this lament of this morning, of this greeting. Then we come to verses 25 to 27. In the next three verses, interestingly enough, in the poetry here, they all begin all these sentences begin with the word good in the Hebrew.
Good. So we can see that here. The Lord is good to those who hope whose hope is in Him, the one who seeks Him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young.
Christians and the people of God, when we suffer, it is more than suffering. We also wait. We wait. It's not a passive waiting of stoic endurance, of stiff upper lip. It is an act of resting in the faithfulness and the goodness of God with a hope filled expectation that redemption is coming.
It is not simply enduring. There are times when the only thing a sufferer can do is wait. But in waiting, we find it good because God and His salvation is worth waiting for. His salvation, the promise is, will come. What we must do in the meantime, however, is to surrender to His will and to His timing.
And these verses in which Jeremiah praises God for His faithful mercies and he surrenders to God's timetable for redemption, we see the climax actually of the book of Lamentations. According to Hebrew poetry, the most important truths are contained in the center of the work in Hebrew poetry. It leads up and then it resolves itself. And if you look quickly, we see that there are five chapters here and chapter 3 is right in the center of it. In these verses which form the heart of Jeremiah's lament, the prophet reaches a place of comfort and hope that marks a turning point in his spiritual journey.
Our problems are rooted in the suspicion that God is not good. Our suffering, our angst, our stress is rooted in the suspicion that God is not good or that He is not good enough. So when we think that God looks bad and sin looks good, When we start to rationalise things, when we start to think that, well, I probably deserve a way out of this. That determination to take matters into our own hands can seem very appealing. But there have been many, many faithful believers who have endured horrendous suffering and yet despite that clung to the Lord and waited for His faithfulness to produce salvation.
And friends, some of us may not even see that salvation in this life. That's the reality. But clinging to God in suffering is a resting in the goodness and the completion of everything that He's bringing about in us. It is resting through poverty. It is resting in blindness.
It is resting in ill health, in crop failures, in plane crashes, in deep disappointments. Clinging to God means to face all of life, both good and bad, with a spirit of trust. It is having confidence in God in all our relationships and in all our activities. In the midst of our deepest suffering, we might cry out like the psalmist in Psalm 119, my eyes fail. My eyes fail looking for the salvation of God.
My eyes fail looking for His righteous promise. When God is so invisible and seems so far away, our eyes may fail looking for Him. But this is the great thing. This is the great thing. We have one who we know very well and our eyes have seen Him and His name is Jesus.
When our eyes fail, when they go foggy searching for salvation, when God, the invisible God, we can't sense, We know that we have a God who came to us in the flesh. We have the words of encouragement from Hebrews 12:2, and let's read them. Hebrews 12:2. This is the promise. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
When our eyes fail, searching, longing, desiring to see God save and redeem, when our eyes fail, fix your eyes on Jesus. Because He is both the author, the initiator, the cause of your faith, but He is also the perfecter of that faith. He is faithful. He will keep you perfect in your wavering faith. Keep your eyes on Him.
In our suffering, remember that He also suffered, that He endured the cross, He endured the pain and the shame of that event, but He was not overcome. He was not consumed. He was beaten down. He was pillaged by the consequences of mankind's sin, yet He has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. The position of power, the position of privilege and honour.
Christ's faithfulness and our eyes being fixed on Him, clinging to Jesus Christ as the visible representation of God is our greatest comfort in our suffering. Because Christ understands our suffering, not only because He suffered Himself as a human, but more than that, He is the God of Lamentations 3. He is the God of Lamentations 3, made flesh. He is the God of promise keeping love, of compassionate mercy, of unrelenting, unwavering faithfulness. Fix your eyes, dear church, suffering church, on Jesus.
And you will know that God is good. Let's pray. Thank you Lord. Thank you that we can have You as our comfort. Thank you that we can cling to You as someone clings to a lifeboat.
Someone that clings to a flotsam after their ship has sunk. Lord, let us not be tempted into exchanging gold for dross, precious wheat and grain for chaff and rubbish, for exchanging You, Lord Jesus, for sin, for our own power, for our own wisdom. Father, in our struggles as individuals, as families, Father, where we are as a church in many ways, we cling to You Lord because that is our only hope. And we thank You Lord for the promise that You are the God of love, of family obligation, of unwavering love that will not disappoint. We cling to the truth that You are the God of compassion, of mother like concern that sees us and whose eyes will not depart from us.
And we thank You, Lord, that Your faithfulness is great. Father, that You are constant, that You are reliable even in that You allow suffering and discipline to come upon us. Lord, we don't like that word. We don't like that idea that You are in the process of refining us. But yet, we are also comforted that You are in control of that.
That You are behind it. That You control it. Lord, for those of us struggling and suffering today, I ask that relief will come soon and we can pray that. We do appeal for that. Lord, see us, see our troubles, see our pains, and give us comfort.
Give us endurance and perseverance. But above all, we pray for salvation. Father, lastly, we thank You that You are good. That that is inherently who You are. That You are not bad, that You are not fickle, that You do not change with the seasons, but that You are good.
And that we can expect goodness, and we can ask for goodness in our life. We can ask for blessing. So Father, we give ourselves into Your hands, do with our lives what You see fit, and we wait, Lord, for that salvation. And we wait for Your will to be done. And we wait for Your timing in our life.
And we wait, Lord, patiently for it is good for us to do so. We pray for Your strength through the Holy Spirit. In Jesus' name. Amen.