Great Faithfulness

Lamentations 3

Main Idea: Great is his faithfulness.

1. Sometimes God Seems to Be the Enemy (3:1-18).
   1. God is the enemy (3:1-6).
   2. God is a warden (3:7-9).
   3. God is a wild animal (3:10-11).
   4. God is a warrior (3:12).
   5. God is a hunter (3:13-14).
2. When God Seems against You, Remember: Great Is His Faithfulness (3:19-33).
3. Sometimes We Are Drowning in Desperation (3:34-54).
   1. What God has done (3:34-45)
   2. The response of the enemy (3:46-47)
   3. Jeremiah’s response (3:48-54)
4. When We Are Drowning in Desperation, Remember: Great Is His Faithfulness (3:55-66).

The brightest lights shine in the darkest nights. Like a desert rose, passages in Lamentations 3 are splendor in the midst of desolation. To appreciate the beauty, you have to see the ugly, the gore, that surrounds the passage. Grace glows in the dark.

Jeremiah is in a cavern without a light, the valley of the shadow of death without a shepherd—no light and no leadership, wholly dark. Lamentations 3 is not tied to a specific moment in this national crisis, yet the whole situation is desperate. The nation is captive. The leaders are gone. The life they knew is a memory and a bitter one at that. And, as discussed in previous chapters, it all could have been avoided. None of this had to happen. They did not have to be captives, they did not have to disobey, they did not have to follow foreign gods, they did not have to prostitute themselves, and they did not have to be unfaithful to God.

The wrath God poured out in chapter 2 as the primary actor in this tragedy was totally and completely avoidable. All sin is à la carte. You don’t have to do it. Like people who had never even heard of God, Judah let the depravity within them and the nations around them control their actions. They followed their heart and broke God’s heart. They chased their dreams of a life free from God’s constraints and found a life free from God’s protection. The collapsed walls of the city lay as a metaphor for the broken rubble of their lives.

In the midst of this moment, Jeremiah has the unenviable job of screaming to the nation that they are headed in the wrong direction. And that’s not the bad part. While the nation is headed down, he has to ride along.

Like a conductor on a runaway locomotive, Jeremiah is called to pull the hand brake to no effect—400,000 pounds of iron, engineering, and inertia against his puny prophetic bicep on a brake. They were out of control, and Jeremiah was along for the ride. Every sin is indeed a choice, but the inertia of disobedience is real. This is why sin is so scary: it’s hard to stop once it begins. Like a mutant alien from a bad sci-fi movie, it reproduces until it destroys.

So, as we read this depressing chapter, we might think Jeremiah is being a little dramatic. You know the type: that guy who is always down, the guy who can’t force himself to be positive. Perhaps he is being too hard on himself and on others. Maybe. But this is not a silly glass-is-half-empty person. What he sees is real. The loss is real, the pain is real, the heartbreak is real, and the devastation is real. Real people lost their lives and their homes and their dreams of a whole covenant relationship with God. This is where God finds them, and this is where God works. God does in fact do maintenance, but what is thrilling is when he does a complete restoration. Sure, he does detailing to people who are already showroom quality. Yet what makes us stand up and notice is the restored rusted-out junker. When the odometer has turned over a few times, parts are missing, and the torn interior reeks of bad decisions, that’s when God’s abilities are more obvious. He is so faithful. He restores.

This is where Jeremiah is: broken. Yet there are cracks in Jeremiah’s darkness from which light will stream in—full on, glorious, bright light. Here we have our hope: bright light, illuminating, warm, and waiting at the end of our darkness.

Structure

Unlike chapter 2, a measure of hope is seen here in the flow of the chapter. A repeated pattern of desperation and salvation is evident. This chapter has an undercurrent of hope. The chapter could be outlined this way:

• God’s Actions and Jeremiah’s Desperation (vv. 1-18)
• Hope (vv. 19-33)
• Drowning in Desperation (vv. 34-54)
• Salvation and Vindication (vv. 55-66)

Sometimes God Seems to Be the Enemy

Lamentations 3:1-18

As in chapter 2, God is the agent who is acting against his people. However, here it is personal. The actions directed toward Jerusalem are felt by Jeremiah. What’s fascinating in this section are the metaphors. They are horrifying.

God Is the Enemy (3:1-6)

God has Jeremiah under the rod of his wrath. The same metaphor is in Psalm 2:9, the great passage on the Messiah and what he will do to his enemies. If Jeremiah is alluding to this psalm, then it is extremely fascinating. The Messiah was the principal figure of hope for the whole nation. The means of God’s hope and national deliverance has turned on him. He is stricken with the rod or scepter of God. This is the famous rod mentioned in Psalm 23:4: “Your rod and your staff—they comfort me.” The staff was for leadership and the rod for protection. The shepherd leads his sheep with his staff, and he beats the wolves with his rod. In Lamentations the God who should be Jeremiah’s shepherd is treating him like a wolf. This is shocking!

God is no longer painting a beautiful picture. This is a twisted abstract painting that makes you stare in confusion. This is God as Picasso. The strangeness of this picture is seen in the twisted metaphors of verses 5-7. Like an enemy God has besieged Jeremiah and trapped him in a way that he cannot escape.

God Is a Warden (3:7-9)

God has walled Jeremiah in, and he can’t get loose. There is no way out of this situation. His chains placed there by his warden are real. They are heavy. He would like to escape, but instead of a path he has a wall. Leadership has surrendered to obstruction. There is no escape.

God Is a Wild Animal (3:10-11)

The fear of wild animals is lost on many in modern times, but a bear or a lion was a real fear in Jeremiah’s day. Largely, people were defenseless. To lions a man without defense is prey. They ravage.

God Is a Warrior (3:12)

Jeremiah feels as if he is a target for God’s wrath.

God Is a Hunter (3:13-14)

This is perhaps the most vivid of all the metaphors. God is a hunter pursuing and stalking his prophet. He drives arrows into his kidneys, and since the prey cannot escape the stalker, he is a public spectacle.

He summarizes his plight in the telling words of verses 16-18. He concludes that the situation is utterly hopeless. There is nothing else he can do.

Some of these metaphors were also literally true. Jeremiah did have his life threatened, and he was a public spectacle. What are we to think of a God like this? The context of the text governs our conclusions, and these first verses fit into a larger context of this chapter. In the verses to follow, Jeremiah balances his desperation with stark beauty.

When God Seems against You, Remember: Great Is His Faithfulness

Lamentations 3:19-33

Now we come to one of the most beautiful passages in all Scripture. Jeremiah remembers that there is something he has previously forgotten: God’s love. The hope that was lost (v. 18) is now recovered by the memory. To say it another way, Jeremiah confesses that all he just wrote was, in a sense, forgetful. It was penned in the lonely mental void of love, like a child sitting on the floor of a mansion weeping over a broken toy. There is more to the story than what was in his prefrontal cortex at that moment. His confession makes us more understanding of his hyperbole found in the first verses of the chapter.

God’s mercies are new every morning, and he is good to those who wait on him. Another way to say this is that God is good to those who wait till morning. Those who do not wait do not see the mercy because new mercies come but not until the morning. “Despair” means awakening in the dark and assuming it’s reality. Dark, for a believer, is pre-reality. Reality is coming. The Friday night before the Sunday. The disorientation before the reorientation. Therefore, if you give up before the sun rises, you miss the light of God’s mercy. It comes in the morning.

I love rising early. The peaceful calm in the morning is, to me, the best time of the day. Everything else can wait. In the morning all that will come is still coming. In the hours before dawn everything is hope and expectation for the very reason that I know the sun will rise. The certainty of the sun makes the dark predawn glorious. And Jeremiah awakes to the thought that he is not in a black hole; he is in a black night that reminds him of the coming light. Those of us groggy in our suffering, waking before God’s light, must not despair. The darkness is the evidence of the light in the same way that every morning is ushered in by light. It’s the rhythm of our Father.

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?

Sometimes We Are Drowning in Desperation

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.

What God Has Done (3:34-45)

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.

The Response of the Enemy (3:46-47)

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’s Response (3:48-54)

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).

When We Are Drowning in Desperation, Remember: Great Is His Faithfulness

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.

Conclusion: Meaning, Mercy, Messiah

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.

Reflect and Discuss

1. What do we do when we feel like God is the enemy?
2. Describe the poetic trajectory of this chapter. How does it move?
3. Discuss a time when you felt like God was thwarting you.
4. What are the poetic metaphors Jeremiah uses for God in verses 1-18?
5. What is the connection between Lamentations 3 and Psalm 103?
6. Jeremiah is broken. How, in light of the beatitudes, can that be a good thing?
7. Did you note a shift in the tone of Jeremiah’s journal? Describe it.
8. How is music both a “courier and a linguist”?
9. How does this passage teach us more about Christ?
10. When did Christ quote a song of lament?