If you would take your Bibles out and turn to Lamentations chapter 3. You can find that on page 688 in the Bibles located in the pew in front of you. Lamentations chapter 3.
What do you think about when you hear the words “teamwork,” “excellence,” “vision,” “dare to soar”? Well, for some of you here, those words might bring to mind certain motivational posters from the 80s and 90s. Usually on these motivational posters there was a photograph from nature, an animal perhaps, some big idea like teamwork, and then a motivational quote of some kind. They scream cheesy corporate office decor from the 80s and 90s! But they were also asking for a sarcastic parody version as well. And so there are such things as demotivational posters, and they include such topics as “resentment,” “dysfunction,” “meetings,” and “complacency.” Some people have even made demotivational posters about hope. Here are a few of the ones I have come across. “Hope – Always the first step on the road to disappointment.” “Hope – A comfortable alternative to actually doing anything constructive for yourself.” Or this one, “Hope – the frail scent of optimism, attempting to mask the pungent stench of despair.” I feel like those definitions of hope would fit in well with some of the despair that we have found in the book of Lamentations.
And yet, and yet what we find in Lamentations chapter 3 is nothing like that at all. And even though there is so much grief, there is so much darkness in the book of Lamentations, hope never surrenders to despair. No, in fact, hope is the main point. Hope is the main point of the whole book. Right here in the middle, the focus of these five laments found in Lamentations chapter 3, verse 21, “Therefore I have hope.” “Therefore I will hope in Him,” verse 24. “There may yet be hope,” verse 29. There may yet be hope. And we need something more than someone just telling us to, “Hang in there.” We need to see, we need to find where true hope is found. Rather, we need to see the One in whom true hope is found.
You’ve probably heard me quote John Stott before. His comment on that New Testament phrase, “eagerly waiting.” Eagerly waiting. Stott says, “We are to wait neither so eagerly that we lose our patience nor so patiently that we lose our expectation, but eagerly and patiently together.” That’s Christian hope. Eagerly waiting. And we find something like that on display in Lamentations chapter 3. And so we’ll let that be our outline for these verses tonight. On the one hand – waiting. Number one, waiting. And then number two – eagerness. Waiting and eagerness together. Lamentations chapter 3. Let’s pray before we read.
Our Father, we pray that You would give us an eagerness as we come to Your Word today, this evening. An eagerness to hear what You have to say to us. An eagerness to see where true hope is found. An eagerness to learn and to apply Your Word to our lives. We pray that You would give us a patience that as we hear these things and seek to apply them to our lives that You would do so in Your good time, and that we would do so for Your glory and for our good. We pray that we would see Jesus, that Your Spirit would work in all of our hearts, and we pray this in Christ’s name, amen.
Lamentations chapter 3:
“I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath; he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.
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.
He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding; he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate; he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow.
He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver; I have become the laughingstock of all my people, the object of their taunts all day long. He has filled me with bitterness; he has sated me with wormwood.
He has made my teeth grind on gravel, and made me cower in ashes; my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is, so I say, ‘My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.’
Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him; let him put his mouth in the dust – there may yet be hope; let him give his cheek to the one who strikes, and let him be filled with insults.
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.
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.
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?
Let us test and examine our ways, and return to the Lord! Let us lift up our hearts and hands to God in heaven: ‘We have transgressed and rebelled, and 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.
All our enemies open their mouths against us; panic and pitfall have come upon us, devastation and destruction; 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.
I have been hunted like a bird by those who were my enemies without cause; they flung me alive into the pit and cast stones on me; water closed over my head; I said, ‘I am lost.’
I called on your name, O Lord, from the depths of the pit; you heard my plea, ‘Do not close your ear to my cry for help!’ You came near when I called on you; you said, ‘Do not fear!’
You have taken up my cause, O Lord; you have redeemed my life. You have seen the wrong done to me, O Lord; judge my cause. You have seen all their vengeance, all their plots against me.
You have heard their taunts, O Lord, all their plots against me. The lips and thoughts of my assailants are against me all the day long. Behold their sitting and their rising; I am the object of their taunts.
You will repay them, O Lord, according to the work of their hands. You will give them dullness of heart; your curse will be on them. You will pursue them in anger and destroy them from under your heavens, O Lord.’”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
Number one – waiting. The waiting is the hardest part, especially when nothing at all is going right. Especially when you are in a dark place and there is no light at the end of that tunnel. Especially when it seems like the pain, it seems like the loneliness is your new normal, when you feel like you are trapped and there is no one paying attention to you, maybe not even God. Have you ever felt like that? Because that’s what we find in Lamentations chapter 3. Verse 2, “He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light.” Verse 3, “Against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” Verse 7, “He has walled me about so that I cannot escape.” Verse 8, “I call and cry for help and he shuts out my prayer.” The waiting, it feels like being stuck, like it’s permanent and like you’re helpless. The waiting, it can make you want to give up. It can make you feel like saying with the writer of Lamentations in verse 18, “My endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord.”
You know, one of those Biblical examples that we find of the Lord’s delays was when Mary and Martha sent for Jesus when Lazarus was sick. And John 11, John chapter 11 has this unusual juxtaposition, verses 5 and 6. It tells us on the one hand that Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. What does the very next verse say? “So when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.” He stayed two days longer. He stayed put for two more days, two more days, so that by the time Jesus made it to Bethany, Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. Lord, if You had not delayed, this would not have happened to us.” Martha could not understand why Jesus had not come sooner. We don’t understand how it was that Jesus loved them and yet He stayed away. And it’s hard to wait.
And yet so much – isn’t this the case – so much of suffering is about just that thing – waiting. And verse 26 says, “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” In other words, it is good to be patient. It is good to be patient with God and with the circumstances that He puts into our lives. The writer of Lamentations talks about what that means. It’s “bearing our yoke,” verse 27. It’s “putting our mouth in the dust,” verse 29. He says it’s even “turning the other cheek,” verse 30, “to the one who strikes us.” You see, there is nothing there, there is nothing here about holding God to the timeframe that we find acceptable. There is nothing there about trying to find shortcuts in order to get out of the trouble that comes into our lives, nothing about looking for distractions that will numb the pain. No, the Lord is good to those who wait, who wait for Him, who are patient with Him.
Do you remember Job’s friends? Do you remember what they did at first? They waited. They waited with Job. When Job was crushed, when he was basically unrecognizable, his friends came to him and they showed him sympathy. They wept and they tore their robes and they sprinkled dust on their heads and for seven days, seven days they sat on the ground with Job and no one spoke a word to him. And that was good. You see, so much of our ministry, our ministry of comforting others, is about being patient with them. And it’s about allowing them the time and the space to grieve and to mourn. It’s not getting frustrated when they’re not reacting like we thought they should. It’s not getting frustrated when they’re not getting over it when we thought they should. You see, the problem with Job’s friends was when they started talking. And what happened when they started talking was they started to offer their explanations. They wanted it all to make sense. But Job didn’t need explanations. He didn’t need for it to make sense. And they didn’t have the right explanations anyway. What they needed to do was be patient, to be patient with Job.
But do you know what else that means? And this may be the hardest one of all. It means if we are called to be patient, then we are called to be patient with ourselves. And we have to allow ourselves the time and the space to grieve, because no two people are going to grieve the same way. It is okay to not be doing as well as someone else in a similar situation. It’s okay when you thought you were doing better and then all of a sudden you’re not doing as well anymore. It’s okay when you are doing better than you thought you would be but you feel bad and guilty about that. It’s okay. It calls for patience. We have to show grace. We have to show patience with God and the circumstances in our lives, with ourselves, and with others – with others who are suffering. And here’s another one – we have to show patience with those who are trying to show comfort to us when we are suffering because they are going to same the wrong things at the wrong times and they may not respond as quickly or as often as we would like them to respond. And that requires patience as well, doesn’t it? That’s some of what it means to wait, to be patient.
One of the best things I’ve read about caring for the hurting was an article that was written by David Brooks in The New York Times over ten years ago. It was called, “The Art of Presence.” And he wrote about something that he had read from someone else from this family who had experienced two major tragedies, major tragedies in a five year period, and some of the lessons they had learned from going through those traumas, some of the lessons that they shared. And it came out in this article as a list or a series of “Dos” and “Don’ts.” Do be there. Most people need presence. C.S. Lewis wrote when his wife died, he said it was hard to take in what anyone had to say but he wanted them to be around. He said, “I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.” Don’t compare. Ever. Don’t relate it to your own loss. Let each trauma be respected for its uniqueness as its own thing. Do bring soup – something tangible. Don’t say, “You’ll get over it.” Do be a builder. There’s a difference between a firefighter in a sense, one of those people who are there on the scene right at the time of the emergency, but there’s a need for someone who is a builder, who stays. Someone who is there after the crisis helping to rebuild, maybe even years down the road. Don’t say, “It’s all for the best” or try to make sense of what happened. Maybe it’s not the right time for Romans 8:28.
Here’s Brooks’ summary – “I would say that what these experiences call for us a sort of passive activism. We have a tendency, especially in an achievement-oriented culture, to want to solve problems and repair brokenness, to propose, plan, fix, interpret, explain and solve. But what seems to be needed here is the art of presence – to grant sufferers the dignity of their own process and to simply sit through the moments of pain and uncomfortable darkness.” In other words, to wait.
But recognize it’s a certain kind of waiting. I saw a video recently and it was talking about, it was kind of introducing these sort of glasses that are called “belay glasses.” It’s rock climbing equipment, gearhead type stuff. And what it is, it’s these pair of glasses that they have these small mirrors and prisms right in front of the frames so that the person holding the ropes on the ground for the person climbing on the rock can look straight ahead but also see up to the person who’s climbing. And so what these glasses do is they help relieve the neck pain or the neck strain of the person on the ground while also keeping the person climbing safe. And so it’s like they’re looking in two directions at the same time. They’re looking straight ahead and up. Lamentations is like that. The Christian life is like that. It is an attention to right now with a view up, with the end goal in sight. It’s waiting, but it’s not complacency, it’s not idleness; it’s something different. It is eager expectation. It’s hope even.
So we’ll see secondly in these verses waiting, but also eagerness. And you can tell this chapter, this poem, this lament is different. Can’t you? It is like, it like the storm clouds begin to break up. It’s almost like the sun starts to rise. And I remember being up on Roan Mountain in Tennessee one time in a thick, dense fog. And we stood at an overlook and I stared out into the distance as hard as I could stare, and it was nothing. It was just white, almost like it was a wall right in front of my face. I knew, I knew that there was a great view out there; I had seen it before. But on this day it wasn’t happening. There was no chance that I was going to see anything unless that fog lifted.
Well here in Lamentations chapter 3, the fog lifts, at least for a little while, and a brighter outlook begins to come into view. Doesn’t it? And it’s not hard to see if you’ve been following along, Lamentations 1 and 2, to get to this chapter, it’s not hard to see that this chapter is the turning point in the whole book, that the heart of the message of Lamentations is right here in these verses. Verse 21, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.” And there are a few words in Hebrew that can be translated as “hope.” Two of them are here in these verses. There is “yaka” and “kawa.” Verse 24, “The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope, yaka, in Him.” Verse 29, “Let him put his mouth in the dust. There may yet be hope, kawa.” And both of these Hebrew words, they carry the basic meaning of “to wait expectantly.” In fact, the second of those words, “kawa,” it is related to a Hebrew word for a cord or a rope. And so it’s like it’s something that can be stretched out and held tight so that there is a tension in it. “There is this feeling of tension and expectation while you are waiting for something to happen,” as one person has put it. There’s a tension that awaits a release or a fulfillment.
What is it? What is this eager expectation of the one who suffers in the book of Lamentations? What is his hope? It’s simple. Very simply, it’s found in verse 26, it is “the salvation of the Lord.” “It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” Now don’t let “salvation,” the word, “salvation,” become just another Christian buzzword of a catchphrase. Dr. R.C. Sproul tells a story about how when he was teaching as a professor at Temple University he was heading to teach one day across campus after lunch and a man approached him on the plaza, seemingly out of nowhere, and he just asked Dr. Sproul, “Are you saved?” And the first thing that came to Dr. Sproul’s mind, the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “Saved from what?” And it stunned the man. It flustered him a bit. He didn’t really quite know how to answer.
What is salvation? What does it mean to be saved? Saved from what? Well, the writer of Lamentations, at the very least, it’s salvation from the Lord. It is salvation from the wrath of God. Verse 1, “I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath.” And we saw it last week, didn’t we? That ultimately it was the Lord that brought all this disaster on him, and rightly so. It was a judgment for sin. “Why should a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?” as verse 39 says. He needs to be saved from the wrath of God, but he also needs to be saved from the violence of his enemies. Salvation to him means relief from their taunts, it means relief from their abuse, and repayment for all of their crimes against them. Salvation means that even though the enemy was the one carrying out God’s sentence of judgment, they would not be held faultless for their own grief. In other words, salvation means justice. It means justice that is judgment on those who are the ones bringing judgment.
Look at the last three verses of the chapter. “You will repay them, O Lord, according to the work of their hands. You will give them dullness of heart; your curse will be on them. You will pursue them in anger and destroy them from under your heavens, O Lord.” How can he be so confident? Why is he so confident of salvation? Why is he so eagerly expecting help and deliverance? Because it is salvation, it is deliverance of the Lord. “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands and forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty.” We have to ask the question – What gives life to these laments? What gives such boldness in these prayers? It is because they are based in a relationship. They are personal. They are deeply personal.
There is a lot of talk these days about how people are becoming less polite. There is a trend in our culture of growing harshness and being sarcastic. They say that some of it may be because we are becoming all too familiar of interacting with AI, more communication taking place that way. In fact, I made an appointment just last week by texting with an AI bot. And I’ll tell you, I didn’t use any exclamation points or emojis in my text, and I didn’t even say “Thank you”! We’re becoming more accustomed to that, of impersonal interactions.
But these laments, they’re not like that. These laments are with the personal Lord, with the covenant Yahweh is His name. The Lord who reveals His character. The Lord who makes promises and keeps them. The Lord who speaks and it happens. Why have hope? Because, “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” Because, “The Lord is good,” verse 25. “The Lord will have compassion,” verse 32.
And did you notice, did you notice what is the one word from the Lord in this chapter? It’s actually the one word from the Lord in this entire book. It comes in verse 57. “You came near when I called on you. You said, ‘Do not fear.’” Do not fear. Do not fear. How do we know? How do we know that the Lord is steadfast love and mercy, who does not change, and He is faithful to His promises, He will bring the salvation that He has promised, in fact He has done it? And the Lord who appeared in the burning bush to Moses, the Lord who revealed His glory in the cloud and the fire at the tabernacle and in the temple, He took on flesh and dwelt among us. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. Stricken, smitten and afflicted, pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities. “But I will divide a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong,” Isaiah 53. What’s that talking about? It’s talking about the cross and the resurrection of Jesus. That’s what it is to be saved from God’s wrath, to be saved from sin and death, to be saved and to be restored into a wholeness, into a shalom with God. It is salvation of the Lord. In fact, salvation of the Lord literally is Jesus’ name. His name in Hebrew is “Yeshua” – “salvation is of the Lord.” And we are told in Matthew chapter 1, “You shall call His name, Jesus, for He, He shall save His people from their sins.” Jesus literally is salvation of the Lord.
Do not fear, do not fear, but wait expectantly, and hope patiently. Oftentimes that means having to have a defiant faith. It means having to have a resolute determination in our trials, knowing who the Lord is, trusting Him even when we cannot trace what He is doing, knowing what His salvation is like even when it doesn’t seem like it. And I’ll close with the words from John Stott that I referenced earlier. Stott says, “It’s hard to keep this balance. Some Christians over-emphasize the call to patience. They lack enthusiasm and lapse into lethargy, apathy, and pessimism. They have forgotten God’s promises and are guilty of unbelief. Others, on the other hand, grow impatient of waiting. They are so carried away with enthusiasm that they often try to force God’s hand. They are determined to experience now even what is not available yet. And understandably anxious to emerge out of the painful present of suffering and groaning, they talk as if our bodily resurrection had already taken place and as if the body should no longer be subject to weakness, disease, pain and decay. And yet, such impatience is a form of presumption. It is to rebel against the God of history who has indeed acted conclusively for our salvation and who will, most assuredly complete, when Christ comes, what He has begun, but who refuses to be hustled into changing His planned timetable just because we do not enjoy having to go on waiting and groaning.”
May God give us a patient eagerness and an eager patience as we wait for His promises to be fulfilled. May God make it so. Amen. Let’s pray.Our Father, we hardly want to move on from these verses tonight as we think about Your steadfast love, Your mercies that are new every morning, Your great compassion that never fails, Your great faithfulness, how You are our portion and our hope is in You. And so as we go out from here singing once again, “Great is Thy faithfulness,” would You bind up all who are suffering and weary and worn out and give us a strength, a defiance, a determination, and a patient, eager expectation of what You will do in Your timing, for Your glory and for our good. In the name of Jesus we pray, amen.