Great Faithfulness

If my child were to awake in the night afraid, all would not be lost; he would simply come to me for comfort. Even a five-year-old knows that morning is coming. Children don’t know why; they just know that resting on their father makes morning come. They don’t need understanding to make it through the night; they need comfort, rest; then morning will come because it does. Our Father invented the order of day and night. The hard, utilitarian mechanism of the earth’s rotation reflects this sweet sequence of his presence: dark before light. Always.

Jeremiah then gives us a means to the hope when he writes in verse 27 that it is good for a young man to bear the yoke. This is a strange passage indeed. Why is it good to bear the yoke in youth? The answer is that the young have a certain advantage of time. If they can bear the yoke of discipline now, they will be prepared in their later years to deal with whatever comes their way. Here is why: the yoke is not going away. We are not all young, but we are all younger than we are going to be. Embracing God’s discipline now seems to lighten the load later. Why not, as has been said, do immediately what has to be done eventually?

There is a connection with Jeremiah 27:12. In the last days of the reign of Zedekiah, Jeremiah spoke to the king: “I spoke to King Zedekiah of Judah in the same way: ‘Put your necks under the yoke of the king of Babylon, serve him and his people, and live!’” The yoke was a metaphor for surrender. Here is the irony. In order to live, he had to surrender. He had to surrender to the will of a king who hated God and wanted to destroy his people and take his land. Yet what Zedekiah could not see, would not see, is that this surrender was his salvation. This was discipline that was saving him from a worse fate later on. If he would surrender, he would live.

Of course, he did not. He was taken captive. His family was killed in front of him. His eyes were gouged out. Then he was hauled off to Babylon. God had wanted to spare him this suffering through discipline. He was to bear up under the yoke. When he rejected obedience to the Lord, he also rejected the protection of the Lord. All of this happened because he would not bear the yoke in his youth.

Among the greatest pieces of encouragement we could receive during hard times is verses 31-33. This passage is remarkably similar to Psalm 103:8-10. The psalmist said,

The Lord is compassionate and gracious,

slow to anger and abounding in faithful love.

He will not always accuse us

or be angry forever.

He has not dealt with us as our sins deserve

or repaid us according to our iniquities.

Jeremiah’s point is slightly different from the psalmist’s. He is not only drawing attention to God’s character but also dealing with our response. The argument is that since the Lord will not cast off forever, since our suffering is not eternal, why not bear up under the yoke now and learn all that God wants to teach us?

Lamentations 3:34-54

After this pattern of desperation and salvation in the first half of the chapter, the pattern repeats itself from verse 34 to the end of the chapter.

Here we see that the actor in this drama is God, as we saw in chapter 2. God is the agent who is acting against his people (vv. 43-45). It would seem, outside of this context, accusatory, as if Jeremiah is blaming God. However, he deals with that in verses 34-42. The person who is poised to repent should not blame God for acting as God. God is the one who is acting, but his actions reflect a God who is responding to a people he has warned repeatedly.

Judah’s enemies respond by mocking them (v. 46). They seem to feel they are responsible for the defeat of the nation, and their gloating mocks the people and ignores the reality that God is sovereign over all. They just don’t know it.

Jeremiah is a broken man. The weeping prophet is weeping for his people (vv. 49-51). It is possible that Jeremiah is reflecting on his own experience. This was not metaphorical; he really was thrown into a pit (v. 53).

Lamentations 3:55-66

In the pit he calls on the Lord (v. 55). This is again a beautiful verse from a dark place. When preaching on sexual sin, I have borrowed the phrase nothing good grows in the dark to highlight that sins held privately need to be exposed in order to find healing. However, in a sense, the phrase does not apply here. The beauty of brokenness grows in the dark. Darkness does not stymie spiritual growth. The greenhouse of grace does not need the light of day, just the light of God.

These are the songs of lament, but they are also Jeremiah’s journal. Note the change in tone. In the first six verses God was the enemy. God was both the wild animal and the hunter; Jeremiah was the victim and the prey. But look at the contrast! God is now the one who hears him, who comes near, and who champions his cause (vv. 55-58). God is no longer on the offense; God is the defender. This is a good reminder. When God seems a long way off and there seems to be no hope, keep writing in your journal. Jeremiah ends this chapter with a beautiful confession. In the last verse of this journal entry, God is no longer pursuing Jeremiah; he is pursuing Jeremiah’s enemy.

Throughout this chapter Jeremiah is borrowing from several lament psalms. It does not seem logical to picture him as a scholar with books strewn in his office, extracting quotes from here and there. That’s not how he is alluding to the Hebrew songbook. Rather, it reads like a man trying to sleep at night and he can’t. He is trying to find peace, trying to find rest, trying to find hope, trying to find a way to live. His survival skills don’t lead him to quote some proto-Talmud. He does not quote the Torah. He is looking for new mercy, so he carefully selects psalms he has mentally archived for these types of situations—music as portable theology. He is desperate, and there are songs for that. He is desperate, hopeless, lost, and weak, but not alone. He had been needing help but finding none. This is when he reaches for his ancient songbook to meet his new problems. What he needs is the grace of new mercy. Grace comes with a melody.

Music is often the means of grace for new mercy—old songs for new mercies. The principle of pain teaches this. The Psalms help us understand what we are going through; they lead us to the meaning of new mercy. And the mercy we experience helps us understand the Psalms. In a sense the Psalms satisfy our hunger for comfort and make us hungry for knowledge. Both meaning and mercy come through music. In his dark place Jeremiah remembers, and he thinks, I need to sing that one again; or perhaps he thinks, Now I know what that psalm means. Music is both courier and linguist. Music brings grace to us and translates grace for us. And that’s a new mercy available every morning. In this way Jeremiah relates to us. In this way he is our teacher. And in this way he teaches us about a greater life to come.

There was a time when the Son of God was under the wrath of God. There was a time when Jesus felt as if he was the hunted, the prey—like a lamb led to the slaughter (Isa 53:7). Jesus was the lamb. The Father was the one with the knife. This is because the wrath of the Father was pursuing him. He knew no sin, yet he did not even open his mouth.

In this moment of suffering and abandonment, Jesus turned to the Hebrew songbook and, quoting Psalm 22, cried out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matt 27:46). And, as with Jeremiah in Lamentations 3, the direction of God’s power changes. The Suffering Servant of Isaiah is eternally vindicated by God. The same pattern of suffering and song was in the life of our Lord. The same pattern of cosmic balance of light and dark was, in the moment when the world went dark, held up for us as a model of our own lives—when our lives move from light to dark, to light again. And we sing.