Word of Salvation – October 2026
Finding Hope in the God Who Judges
A sermon by Rev. Ben Fien on Lamentations 3
Bible Reading: Lamentations 3
Third in a Sermon Series: Words When There Are None
The Poetry of Pain
What a prayer. It’s all over the place, isn’t it? Full of pain and then hope and then calling out judgement on their enemies. What is this chapter? Well, it’s what we call a lament.
It’s the poetry of pain. This is why so many people avoid this book in the Bible because it’s difficult to hear. It’s full of painful words. It’s full of difficult things to hear, and they’re there for a good reason. These words of Lamentations, they were penned after the destruction of Jerusalem, and it is hard to describe how terrible that was.
The city was put to siege for eighteen months. People were dying from starvation within, and you can imagine the weakest went first, little ones and the elderly. People, just to survive, actually cannibalised and ate human remains. And when the city was finally broken through, the king’s sons were slaughtered in front of his eyes before his eyes were gouged out by the Babylonians. And then everyone else was taken off as slaves back to a foreign nation while the city was destroyed and burnt.
I cannot imagine what that would be like. It is indescribable. And it’s that kind of pain that we don’t want. We want to avoid it.
Maybe you’re here and you’re here for the third week of the series, and you’re like, I’m sick of church feeling like a funeral. I’m sick of going through this difficult book. But, you know, for some of us, and there’s some dear brothers and sisters here, maybe every day, they wake up. They don’t get to choose to avoid pain. They wake up, and their reality is difficult.
Their reality is full of physical pain and emotional pain. And this is one of the reasons why we want to spend time in this book, because God has put it in the Bible for us to listen to, to hear what He has to say, and to help those dear brothers and sisters among us whose every day is hard. And I said in our first week of this series, one of the other reasons why I want to spend time in a difficult book is because wisdom is found in the house of mourning. That’s what we hear from Ecclesiastes chapter 7. It says, the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
The party house, the house of mirth, is fun to be in, but you don’t find wisdom there. The house of mourning is painful to be in, but you discover wisdom there. You discover perspective on what really matters. You cut through all the superficialities to get to the truth of our existence. We have an opportunity to learn wisdom as we spend time with a mourner in Lamentations.
I love how Robert Browning Hamilton put it in a poem that he wrote, which says:
I walked a mile with pleasure.
She chatted all the way, but left me none the wiser
for all she had to say.
I walked a mile with sorrow.
Not a word, said she, but oh, the things I learned from her
when sorrow walked with me.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning. And that’s exactly what Lamentations is. It’s a book full of mourning, full of prayers we call laments, a formal prayer which sufferers have used for millennia to express their pain and their protests to God. And this book was written, as I said, in the wake of something that was indescribably painful. Hence, the reason this series is called Words When There Are None. Because in the wake of this catastrophe, a prophet, Jeremiah, picks up a pen and writes words for the people when there seems to be none.
Words to express their pain, their distress, and their prayers to God. And today, in week three, we look at lament number three, chapter 3. I said this at the beginning of the series, but the first four chapters, the first four laments are actually alphabetic acrostics. So that means that each verse of the poetry starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So it was originally written in Hebrew.
So if it was in English, the acrostic would look like A B C D. A, Adam was the first man. B, but he rebelled. C, cursed was mankind because of him. D, death became our reality. Something like that. A B C D. That’s an alphabetic acrostic, and that’s what Lamentations is doing. It’s taking the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Sometimes it’s a memory device, but many scholars think that what Jeremiah is doing is taking us through an A to Z of suffering. He’s taking us through the whole alphabet of pain and suffering and helping us to express that to God. But chapter 3 is special. You see, chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5, they all have 22 verses because there are 22 verses in the Hebrew alphabet. But chapter 3 is also an alphabetic acrostic, but it is a triple acrostic.
So each letter of the Hebrew alphabet gets three verses. So the 22 letters becomes 66 verses. Three verses for each letter. During that middle chapter, chapter 3 that we’re in today, it’s the heart of the book. And at the very middle of the middle chapter, verse 33 if you want to be exact, (verses 31 to 33, are the triple triad there) really shows us something that the author wants us to see.
See, this book, though it is full of pain, it has been carefully crafted. And Jeremiah wants us to hear something about God’s heart at the heart of this book. So today, we’re going to learn about why people could hope in a God who judged them so severely. Hence, the sermon today is called: Finding Hope in the God Who Judges. Now if you’re here or maybe you’re online and you’ve joined us because you’re a spiritual seeker, maybe you’re seeking, maybe you’re interested in Jesus and His teachings, we’re so glad that you’re here.
But you might be wondering, how can Christians hope in a God who did this? Jerusalem was God’s city. Correct? And Lamentations is lamenting God’s judgement against the city, and it’s putting its hope in God. How can they hope in a God who did this?
Is this God not worthy of running away from? He seems scary. Aren’t you terrified of Him? Why do Christians hope in God? Why do they find God a comfort when He is able to do something like this?
A Justly Judged City
Well, that’s the very question that we’re going to answer this morning as we open up this chapter together. So let’s get into the text. I’m going to break it down under four headings to help us keep track of the poem. And here’s heading number one: complaining about a God who cannot be anything other than just. This is what Jeremiah does to begin with.
He complains about a God who cannot be anything other than just. But notice how chapter 3 opens. Jeremiah is complaining, but he’s talking as an individual here, not as a ‘we’, but as an ‘I’. And he says: I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of His wrath. He has driven and brought me into darkness.
Verse 4: He has made my flesh and my skin waste away. He has broken my bones. He has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation. He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape.
He has made my chains heavy. Though I call and cry for help, He shuts out my prayer. He has blocked my ways with blocks of stones. He has made my paths crooked. And so on.
Full of pain, complaining not about the cruelty of God, God is not cruel, but about the justice of God. Jeremiah knows, and later in this lament, we’ll see that they actually do confess and say, we deserve this. For generations, they had been warned by God’s prophets, His spokespersons, telling them, stop walking in injustice. Stop worshipping false gods. I’m going to bring judgement, and they didn’t listen.
Last week, we looked at how one king, Manasseh, actually burnt his son alive as an offering to false gods. He actually slaughtered innocent, poor people in the city just because he was the strong one. This was not an innocent city. This was a guilty city that was judged by God. But yet it doesn’t make it any easier for someone like Jeremiah.
He didn’t participate in the evil, but he was caught up in a nation’s judgement. And so here he is penning these words, and he’s complaining. He’s not saying God’s unjust, but he’s saying this is unbearably just. Now even though Jeremiah is writing personally in the first person, these words are not something we found in his private prayer diary. These are words that he’s put in a book for the people of God to use, to be read by God’s people.
What Jeremiah is doing here is pastoring the people by giving them words when there are none. He’s giving them poetry to express the pain and to not just hold it in, but to bring that pain to God. It’s pastoral mercy. It’s words for when there are none. That won’t necessarily resolve the pain, but at least help them to express it. Jeremiah wants sufferers to pray, not to go into their shell, but to pray to the God who is sovereign over their suffering.
He wants us to pray in the darkness and the pain. But some of us avoid prayer, even if it’s not to do with our suffering. We avoid prayer sometimes because of wrong ideas about prayer. Carl Strobel and John Coe wrote a book called Where Prayer Becomes Real, How Honesty With God Transforms Your Soul. And at the centre of the book is this claim that prayer is not a place to be good, but a place to be honest.
I love that. Prayer is not a place to be good, it is a place to be honest. Here’s the fuller quote from the book: Prayer is not a place to be good. It is a place to be honest. Prayer is not a place to perform. It is a place to be present. Prayer is not a place to be right. It is a place to be known. Prayer is not a place to prove your worth. It’s a place to receive worth and offer yourself in truth.
Beautiful words. If Lamentations teaches us anything, it teaches us about honesty in prayer, even when the honesty is brutal and difficult to hear. God wants to hear from you. Let honesty with God permeate your prayers.
He is not afraid of your pain. He is not afraid of your questions. He already knows that they are there anyway. How could prayer be boring when you can bring whatever is on your heart to God? Whatever’s consuming your mind, whatever’s getting you down or causing you angst or giving you joy, you can bring it all to God.
Prayer is not a place to be good, to perform. Prayer is a place to be honest, to be yourself, to bare your soul to the God who loves you. You’re already accepted by God in grace anyway. God never accepted any of us based on our moral performance, based on the perfection of our prayers. God accepts us because of Jesus, because He died on the cross to pay for our sins.
You couldn’t be any more secure in His love. In Jeremiah’s opening complaint, he provides words for the people, and he gets brutally honest. But did you notice that in those first 18 verses, God’s name is not mentioned anywhere until the very end in verse 18? He’s just talking about God. He has done this. He has done this. He has done this. But then we finally get to verse 18. He says: so I say my endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord. Finally he names God.
That word Lord in your English translation, it’s all capitals. That is the original Hebrew word Yahweh. My hope from Yahweh. And something happens here. When Jeremiah actually names God as Yahweh, something shifts in the lament.
Mercies New Every Morning
We’re going to look at that next under the heading: Hoping in a God who cannot be anything other than compassionate. So in verse 18, Jeremiah uses God’s name for the first time. He doesn’t just use any name. He doesn’t use the generic word God. He uses the personal name, Yahweh.
This is the name that God used to describe Himself to Moses, to talk about who He is. And when He let His goodness pass by Moses on Mount Sinai, God declared who He is by saying: Yahweh. Yahweh described His character. The mere mention of the word Yahweh, shifts Jeremiah into a different thought process. In verse 19, he actually begins speaking to God. He says: remember my affliction.
And then by verse 21, all of a sudden, hope is beginning to well up within him. Verse 21: But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. What is giving him hope? It is the character, the unchanging character of Yahweh. He says in verses 22 to 23, and these are some of the most famous verses in the book that most Christians will have heard of.
He says, the steadfast love of Yahweh never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. Steadfast love, is the Hebrew word, it refers to God’s loyal, promise keeping, faithful love for His people.
His mercies, that Hebrew word refers to loving feeling or compassion. And one scholar, F.B. Hughey, writes on Lamentations that it comes from a word related to the womb. It describes the tender, caring love of a mother, which is experienced in a fresh and new way every day. God’s mercies are like a mother’s mercy to a little infant that never come to an end.
And they are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. That refers to God’s reliability. The name Yahweh, conjures up God’s character in Jeremiah’s mind. And you can see the key passage in the Bible behind what Jeremiah is saying here.
The key passage in the Bible for God’s character comes up in Exodus 34, where the Lord passes by Moses, and He says to Moses, “Yahweh, Yahweh, this is who I am, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love, {that’s that word again}, and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands.
The word Yahweh brings the character of God to mind, and this is what gives Jeremiah hope. So he says in verse 24: The Lord Yahweh is my portion, says my soul. Therefore, I will hope in Him. But still, Jeremiah is saying this when Jerusalem is smouldering in ashes.
How can he say all that about God in the wake of such devastation? Well, part of the answer is because the destruction, as difficult as it was, was never an expression of divine cruelty. It was a result of God’s unwavering justice. Jerusalem went astray into wickedness and did not repent after all the prophet’s warnings, and God will never pervert justice no matter how painful the penalty is. Imagine a judge in an Australian court of law, and his son gets brought before him one day, and he gets charged with something worthy of imprisonment.
This judge has always done justice throughout his life, and he does what is just. He sentences his son to prison. But afterwards, outside the court, he takes off his just judge garbs and the wig off of his head, and he goes up to his son and hugs him and weeps over his shoulders. That’s a bit like the picture of God that we’re getting here in Lamentations. A God who loves justice, but not the pain that it causes, who cares for these people even though He will do what is just.
It’s the unchanging, faithful, stable character of God that guaranteed justice would eventually come, and it did in a comprehensive, horrific way for Jerusalem. But it’s the same unchanging, faithful, stable character of God that guarantees Jeremiah’s hope. That’s why he says: I will hope in the Lord. That’s why the character of God is giving him comfort, because it’s the character of God that meant He couldn’t pervert justice, and it’s the character of God that means He loves Jeremiah and these people who were suffering.
Those verses we’ve just gone through, they’re the verses everybody knows. They’re the ones that Christians put on their coffee mugs and so on. But they’re not at the very heart of the book. We just looked at verses 22 to 24, but the very heart of the book are verses 31 to 33. So we’ll look at them now. And this is what Jeremiah says.
He says, for the Lord will not cast off forever. For though He cause grief, He will have compassion according to the abundance of His steadfast love. For He does not afflict from His heart or grieve the children of men from His heart.
Dane Ortlund, who wrote the beautiful book Gentle and Lowly, comments on these verses. He says, the one who rules and ordains all things brings affliction into our lives with a certain divine reluctance.
He is not reluctant about the ultimate good that is going to be brought about through that pain. That is indeed why He is doing it. But something recoils within Him in sending that affliction. The pain itself does not reflect His heart. The Reformed Puritans, because of verses like this, used to, call God’s judgements, “His strange work”.
God delights in justice, but He doesn’t enjoy the pain that it causes. He doesn’t lick His lips like some cruel tyrant that enjoys people in pain. And so this is why they call it “His strange work” because it’s not something that His whole heart is delighting in. Again, He delights in justice, but not in the pain, even of the wicked as they fall to justice. So what does God delight in doing with His whole heart?
What is His deepest joy? Well, interestingly enough, Jeremiah, in the book he’s better known for – the book of Jeremiah, prophesied about what God would do after this devastation. And here is God Himself speaking about restoring the people in Jeremiah 32:41. God says: “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness with all My heart and all My soul.” I’m not aware of many other verses where God says, “I’m going to do this with all My heart.”
Please let me know if you know of many others. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the author of Lamentations writes, God does not afflict from His heart. But then in Jeremiah, he wrote this, that God will rejoice in doing good to them with all His heart. God does not afflict or cause grief from His heart, but God rejoices in doing good to His people with all His heart and soul. It’s almost like God couldn’t wait to bless His people.
Zephaniah was another prophet who also talked about God’s plan to one day restore Jerusalem. And again, he pictures God not as this begrudging Scrooge who you have to squeeze blessing out of. Here’s how Zephaniah speaks of God’s plan to bless and restore in Zephaniah 3. He says: Yahweh, your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save. He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you by His love. He will exalt over you with loud singing.
This reminds me of a father who’s just rejoicing in a newborn child or maybe singing over them when they’re going to sleep, delighting in them. This is who God most deeply is. God cannot be anything other than compassionate, loving, and merciful.
God delights in His people and rejoices in their good. And I believe this is why in the darkest book of the Bible, Jeremiah’s placed this truth at the very heart of it. Because when you struggle to understand the heart of God in tragedy, you need to know what His heart really is. So he placed this verse at the heart of the book – that He, God, does not afflict from His heart or grieve the children of men.
I like how the CSB translated it. It says, He does not enjoy bringing affliction or suffering on mankind. Jeremiah wanted a devastated grieving people to know that no matter how much their circumstances were screaming at them: God hates your guts, He’s your enemy, curse God and die! – that God’s deepest heart and divine plans actually say: I love you. I hate seeing you in pain. I hear you. I see you. I could never forget my child. My mercy will never come to an end for you. My compassion is warm for you.
To the question: why hope in a God who judges so severely? …that question we raised at the beginning, the answer lies right here at the centre of the book, the heart of the book. This severe pain the people were in didn’t come from God’s heart.
He delights in justice, but He doesn’t delight in the death or grief of anyone, even the most deserving. Christians acknowledge that we are merely creatures before God. He has authority to do with us as He wills. We are His creation. He’s the creator.
But we are not serving a bad authority or a cold tyrant. God’s deepest heart is our joy and our good, not our pain. Now you might be listening, and you might still be sceptical. You might think, well, when a city is still smouldering with smoke, it’s a bit trite to say that God delights in doing good. And I get that.
The Bible gets that. That’s why Lamentations doesn’t hold back any punches. It’s honest, and the book ends without any great resolution, which is realistic for the situation. But the thing is: God isn’t all words and no action. He didn’t just promise He would do good.
He made good on His promise, and He demonstrated it with flesh and blood. Let me explain. You know, God actually relived the story of Israel within Himself, including all of its darkness and pain.
Let me elaborate on that. Does it strike you as a little odd that Jeremiah switches between talking about his pain as an individual and sometimes about the pain of the nation?
Sometimes scholars in this book, admit they don’t know. Is this Jeremiah speaking about himself, or is he now speaking as personified Jerusalem, which we looked at in chapter 1, or is he speaking on behalf of the people? It’s a little bit hard to discern at times. Well, we get a similar phenomenon in the book of Isaiah, that other great prophetic book. And there’s this figure in Isaiah called the suffering servant. Sometimes he’s clearly an individual, but sometimes he seems to be Israel.
So which one is he? For example, right in the middle of the second servant song in Isaiah, God says to the servant: You are My servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified. Okay. So the servant in this book is Israel, the nation. But then two verses later, the servant says, “And now the Lord says, He who formed me from the womb to be His servant, to bring Jacob back to Him and that Israel might be gathered to Him.”
So who is this servant? Is he Israel or is he the one that’s bringing Israel back? Well, these tensions that we find both in Lamentations and in the book of Isaiah get resolved in an individual: Jesus. The New Testament paints Jesus as a new Israel. Think about how the first book of the New Testament opens up, Matthew’s Gospel.
In chapter 2, Jesus is called out of Egypt, like Israel was in the exodus. In Matthew chapter 3, Jesus crosses the Jordan River, like Israel did. In Matthew chapter 4, Jesus spends forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. Didn’t Israel spend forty years in the wilderness?
In chapter 5, Jesus goes up on a mountain and gives His law in the Sermon on the Mount. Isn’t that what Moses did? Like a new Moses? Moses went up on a mountain and gave God’s law to the people. See, Jesus is reliving, redoing the story of Israel. Some scholars call it recapitulation.
And what Jesus seems to be doing is saying to Israel: you guys have failed. All the Old Testament is just about how they fail again and again and again, but I’m going to do for you what you couldn’t do. I’m going to do what you should have done. So He relives Israel’s story, and He lives a perfect life. In the wilderness, He doesn’t grumble against God like the Israelites did.
He stays faithful to God. He redoes Israel’s story the right way, but then He dies the death that Israel deserved to die on the cross. Jesus is the one who bore up under the rod of God’s wrath.
See, all this language in Lamentations 3, it could really be applied to Jesus at the cross. He was the one who was offered bitter gall to drink at the cross. He was the object of taunts by those who surrounded Him at the cross. Jesus is the demonstration of the Lord’s steadfast love and unfailing mercies. When He was struck, He did not evade. He gave His cheek to the one who strikes. He, of all people, had the right to complain but didn’t.
He was made to be like scum and garbage as He died on the garbage hill of Golgotha. He lamented even for the daughters of Jerusalem even when He was the one being crucified. See that in Luke’s Gospel. Why hope in a God who judges so severely? Because God in Christ underwent the judgement that His people deserved, even though Christ didn’t deserve it.
He puts flesh and blood on the claims to be good and gracious and willing to bless. See, even if God causes you grief, He does not delight in your grief, and He cannot be anything other than compassionate towards you. Jesus is the proof of it.
But the people who Jeremiah wrote for were six hundred years away from Jesus. They might believe God’s word to be true. They could trust in God’s character as steadfast love, but their situation and their everyday reality was still living in a foreign nation, all the memories of their loved ones who had died. It was still black with darkness and full of pain. At the heart of Lamentations 3 is resolution, but the people’s heart was still throbbing with unresolved pain. And so Jeremiah goes back into lamenting and the difficulty of the situation that they’re in. I think that’s realistic.
Confession Amid Unresolved Grief
He knows what they’re still feeling and continues to help them express it. So we’re going to look at that next under the third heading: praying amidst pain that can’t be anything other than unresolved.
So in verses 34 to 42, Jeremiah says, to crush underfoot all the prisoners of the earth, to deny a man justice in the presence of the Most High, to subvert a man in his lawsuit, the Lord does not approve. Now what he’s doing there in those verses is he’s starting to move the people back into a time of confession, and he’s saying this is the stuff that we did.
We were an unjust city. We’re a wicked city. We’re the rulers. We’re crushing the prisoners of the earth. They’re denying people justice. God does not approve of that. He will not overlook that. In verse 37, he says: who has spoken and it came to pass unless the Lord has commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come? Why should a living man complain, a man, about the punishment of his sins? He’s moving them into confession.
Let us test and examine our ways and return to the Lord. Let us lift up our hearts and hands to God in heaven. And then the congregation chimes in, the people chime in. We have transgressed and rebelled. It’s like we said all throughout this series.
This was a just judgement of God, and part of this pastoral help is not just helping them to express pain, but to own their sin and confess it to God. But it doesn’t make it easy. So the people also express their pain. They say, we have transgressed and rebelled, You have not forgiven. You have wrapped Yourself with anger and pursued us, killing without pity.
You have wrapped Yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through. You have made us scum and garbage among the peoples. Jeremiah himself can’t take it anymore. After he, just being in the people’s pain, though he’s the prophet who knows God the best, he believes what he’s just written about God’s unfailing love, the situation is so indescribably dreadful that he bursts out in tears.
Verse 48: He says, my eyes flow with rivers of tears because of the destruction of the daughter of my people. My eyes will flow without ceasing, without respite, until the Lord from heaven looks down and sees. My eyes cause me grief at the fate of all the daughters of my city. This shows us that even if you believe God is good and you have the right theology, you might not escape the pain of suffering. Faith and knowledge do not necessarily remove the pain of devastation.
If you are in a dark season and you’re feeling guilty, why don’t I feel more of the comfort of God? Why don’t I feel more of the joy of God? Don’t let the voice of the enemy speak to you like that. Emotions are not simple. They’re just responses.
And sometimes in the darkness of devastation, even if you’re trusting in God and you have the right theology and you know that He’s not done any injustice, you might just still feel at pain. You might just still feel grieved. And that’s okay. The fact that you’re here shows your faith in God. And you can take that to God and express that to Him.
Justice for the Downtrodden
But Jeremiah doesn’t end the lament here. He brings us full circle. At the beginning, he was complaining because God cannot be anything other than just, but it’s the same just character of God that he now finds confidence in at the end of the lament. So let’s look at that as we finish. Confidence in a God who cannot be anything other than just (in verses 52 to 66).
So in these verses, Jeremiah first recounts a story where he was treated horribly and how God rescued him. And it seems very likely in these first few verses, he’s talking about a story in Jeremiah 38 that’s recorded there. So in our verses, you might notice how he talks about being thrown into a pit and the waters burying him and so on and so forth.
Well, in Jeremiah 38, he records a story about how during the siege of Jerusalem, Jeremiah was prophesying and he was telling the people, this is God’s judgement. All your false prophets have been telling you: Don’t worry. It’s going to be all good. But no, God is not saying that. He’s saying you need to repent. And he was telling the people, go and give yourselves up to Babylon, and you’ll actually live. You’ll live as a prisoner, but you’ll live.
But if you stay in the city, you’re going to die. And there were some men in the city that didn’t like what Jeremiah was saying. So they went to the king and said: Let us kill this guy. Have you heard what he’s saying? He’s, like, demoralising the people.
And so King Zedekiah said to them, do with him as you please. So they took him, and they threw him into a well, into a cistern that didn’t have water. And he sank there in the mud. And I don’t know how long he was there for, but he was left there to die. So he couldn’t preach, couldn’t prophesy, and he was left there to die.
But eventually, he was rescued. And what Jeremiah is doing in these first few verses in this section is recalling the horror of that situation, but how God heard his prayers at the bottom of that well and how God did deliver him. He’s giving a testimony of God’s faithfulness to God’s people to try and encourage them saying: Hey, I thought it was as dark as it could get in that well, and God rescued me. There’s still hope. God is still merciful.
Keep praying. Keep turning to Him. This is why it’s so valuable to be sharing with one another what God is doing in our lives, to be hearing from people undergoing trial and asking them how they are processing what they’ve gone through as a Christian?
As Jeremiah thinks about the wickedness of those people who threw him into a pit for preaching God’s word, for telling the truth, he then moves into asking God for justice.
It’s what we call a prayer of imprecation. He’s asking God to judge his enemies, to curse his enemies. Now that’s confronting for us. We saw that in chapter 1 in the first week. That chapter also ended with imprecation.
And so if you’re wrestling with that, how can we pray something like that if we’re meant to bless our enemies? Jeremiah seems to be asking God to curse, so what’s going on here? If you want to try and untangle that, then let me just encourage you to check out the first message in this series where we did untangle that a little bit together. But what Jeremiah is doing is he’s asking for justice. He’s not asking for his own personal vendetta.
He’s not asking God: do it this way. He’s saying, “You’re the God who has justly judged this city, and I complained about this at the beginning of the lament, but You are the same just God who will see what my enemies are doing to me, and I ask You to be the same just God to them. Deliver me. I’m not taking revenge personally. I give that to You to take. So I’m praying to You, God.”
This demonstrates something important about the justice of God. It can be scary if you have a sense of your own shame and guilt, but it can also be really comforting if you are the victim who has been downtrodden. See, in the Western world, over the last few, I don’t know, fifty, hundred years, we’ve tried to get rid of belief in God. We’ve tried to get rid of the belief that there’s a God who judges.
We don’t like that. It sounds scary. It sounds mean. We’ve tried to replace it with things like love: Let’s just love everyone and we can accept everyone and so on and so forth.
And, obviously, we do believe God is love, but not that His love excludes His justice. Bad deeds, evil deeds, don’t just vanish into thin air. They cost something. We need to believe in justice as well. We need to believe in divine judgement as well.
The victims of school shootings in the US matter. The women and children who were oppressed under the Taliban matter. If you want to believe in love without any form of justice, you are preaching bad news to the countless victims of this evil world. You’re preaching good news to the privileged, to the powerful, but bad news to the downtrodden, to the victims of violence, the families who’ve had children taken from them, to those who live in constant fear for their lives in war-torn countries like Ukraine. Our world needs justice.
The Devastatingly Low Bar.
Justice is good news. It’s scary for those who know they’ve done wrong, but it’s a great source of comfort for the oppressed. And if you’re here today or you’re listening online, justice is scary, judgement is scary, then maybe, let me just ask, have you gotten right with God yet? Have you gotten right with God? God is not asking you to be good enough for Him.
He’s saying to you, Jesus was good enough for you. Jesus died the death you deserved to die. If you want to be right with God, all you need to do is accept that as a gift. It’s the lowest bar of all. God has not placed the bar up here and saying: Be perfect enough to get My acceptance, to escape My judgement.
He’s placed it all the way down low. He’s saying, be humble enough to admit your flaws and your neediness, and I will bless you with Jesus’ righteousness. The bar in Christianity is not too high. It’s just devastatingly, humiliatingly low. Lamentations chapter 3 shows us that even if God causes you grief, you can hope in Him.
For He does not delight in your grief, His character never changes, and He cannot be anything other than compassionate towards you. You know, this chapter of the Bible has inspired many Christians and works of art – and inspired the hymn that so many of us know well: Great Is Thy Faithfulness. But that hymn was written by Thomas Chisholm, who had his own fair share of suffering. Thomas was born into poverty in a Kentucky log cabin in 1866 with no formal higher education and came to faith at 27. He trained for ministry and was ordained in 1903, but his pastoral ministry barely lasted a year before his health broke down completely under the strain, forcing him permanently out of the pulpit.
He was never able to return to the ministry he trained for. This wasn’t a single crisis he recovered from. It lasted decades. And in 1923, at the age of 57, he wrote Great Is Thy Faithfulness, a song based on those beautiful verses in Lamentations 3.:
Great is Thy faithfulness, O God, my Father.
There is no shadow of turning with Thee.
Thou changest not, Thy compassions, they fail not.
As Thou hast been, Thou forever wilt be.
Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning, new mercies I see.
All I have needed, Thy hand has provided.
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.
Prayer:
Jesus, we give ourselves to You, and we pray, Father, that in this valley of tears, when we go through darkness and difficulty, when we cannot trace Your hand, that You’ll help us to trust Your heart, to know that Your heart is good, that it never ceases to be compassionate and merciful, that You never cease to be the God of steadfast love. Help us to trust You. Help us to find strength in You every morning, whether it’s a season of joy or a season of sadness. We commit ourselves to You. In Jesus’ name we pray.
Amen.
For a Podcast of this sermon go to:
https://openhouse.church/sermon/finding-hope-in-the-god-who-judges