Biblical Truths from West Palm Beach church of Christ

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Why doesn’t the book of Lamentations end with Lamentations 3? Why not end on the high note of Lamentations 3? Why not stop at Lamentations 3:22-23? The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness! Why can’t we end on the faithfulness of the Lord? Why not sing the song that Annie sang, “The sun will come out tomorrow” and proclaim that tomorrow is only a day away? Jeremiah is teaching the people that even with a renewed hope in God’s faithful love and mercy, the reality is still the reality. Real hope needs to accept the real situation. The people of God are living a new reality and must prepare for the new direction God’s hand will lead them. Life goes on. But life is changed. This is where Jeremiah and the people are in the mountain of lament. While we maintain our hope in God’s love, we must forge forward in the new reality. Open your copies of God’s word to Lamentations 4 and we are going to look at how Jeremiah teaches the people to accept their grief in the new reality…

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We have been looking at the suffering of Job. We have noted that his suffering and pain have been extraordinary. Further, Job’s friends have come to comfort and show sympathy to Job. But rather than succeeding, they have been miserable comforters to him. We have also noticed that Job’s suffering has caused him to feel separated from God. Job cries out that God has hidden his face from him and counts him as his enemy (cf. Job 13:24). Job longs for a return of God’s friendship (cf. Job 29:2-4). But rather than feeling close to God, Job feels hedged in by God (cf. Job 3:23). We can feel the same way when we are in the storm of suffering. We can wonder where God is. We can believe that God has turned his face away and no longer cares for us. A couple of lessons ago we addressed these false answers. But what I want us to focus our attention on in this lesson is how Job is able to move forward through his suffering. In fact, our next few lessons, Lord willing, are going to be an examination of Job’s words to learn and understand how we can work through our suffering and how to endure our hardships. But for today we are going to look at four statements that Job makes that teaches how to hold strong in our trials…

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Lamentations 3 is a description on how to have hope while grieving. Jeremiah and the people of Judah are grieving and broken over the destruction of Jerusalem. It is a time of shock, loss, and anguish. We have seen in our study of Lamentations that grief is not a straight line. We saw the prophet teaching the people in Lamentations 1 to offer their honest cries to the Lord. In Lamentations 2 we saw the prophet struggling with what God has done. But in the midst of this struggle, the prophet has proclaimed in Lamentations 3 that he will have hope when he sets his mind on the steadfast love of the Lord (cf. Lamentations 3:21-22). We noted in the last lesson from Lamentations 3 that the author speaks about the battle of the mind. When he thinks about his bitter affliction, then his soul is bowed within him. But when he thinks on the faithful love of the Lord, then he can have hope. This sets before us how the prophet teaches his readers to move forward with hope. The point of Lamentations 3 is not to simply think positive thoughts. The point is to realize the hope we can have because of God’s unchanging love and compassion for his people. But this hope is not theoretical. The rest of Lamentations 3 teaches us how to apply the knowledge of God’s steadfast and faithful love to our grief. Open your copies of God’s word to Lamentations 3 and we are going to finish our look at this lamentation and see how God’s character gives us hope through our grief…

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The purpose of Job’s three friends coming to see Job was to offer him comfort and sympathy (cf. Job 2:11). The friends have had many things to say to Job by the time we come to Job 16. Job has not found his friends to sympathizers or comforters. Listen to what Job says:

Then Job answered and said: “I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all. Shall windy words have an end? Or what provokes you that you answer? I also could speak as you do, if you were in my place; I could join words together against you and shake my head at you. I could strengthen you with my mouth, and the solace of my lips would assuage your pain. (Job 16:1-5 ESV)

Job calls his friends “miserable comforters.” All of their answers have been empty words and hot air. Notice in verse 4 that Job says that he could pile up words against them and shake his head at them like they have done to him. Instead, Job says he would strengthen and encourage them with his words, giving them comfort, rather than tearing them down…

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There is a temptation when reading or studying the book of Job to want to get to the end of the book. We are people who just want to get to the bottom line. We will be tempted to cut out the middle of this book and run to chapter 38 where God shows us or to chapter 42 where the resolution is offered. But the discussion that Job and his three friends have in chapters 4-27 are really important to understanding God and suffering. One of the reasons it is important to read these chapters is because these four people are talking about why Job is suffering. They are trying to come up with answers for suffering. They are trying to explain why Job is going through this trial. I want us to think about how this is exactly what we do. When trials come, what we also try to do for ourselves and for others is to explain why the suffering has come. We try to explain what God is doing. We are trying to make sense of our faith in God and how that relates to the suffering we are experiencing. We noticed in Job 3 from last week’s lesson that Job thinks that God has hedged him in (cf. Job 3:23). Job believes that this suffering indicates that God has turned on him and they are no longer friends with one another, but enemies (cf. Job 13:24; Job 29:2-4). So the friends now open their mouths and they are going to try to explain to Job why he is suffering. They are going to give Job the answers they think he needs to hear…

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We have been moving through the book of Lamentations looking at how the author of this book is teaching the people to grieve their suffering. Jerusalem has been destroyed. God had given the people over to the Babylonians because of their sinning against him. Even Jeremiah himself is having difficulties processing what he is seeing because the devastation is so vast (cf. Lamentations 2). We now come to the apex of this book of grief and lament. You will notice that Lamentations 3 is three times longer than the other poems in Lamentations. The other lamentations are 22 verses long, corresponding with the letters of the Hebrew alphabets. Lamentations 3 is 66 verses long, using the each letter of the alphabet three times. What we will see in this lamentation is the author moving the people from their struggle of grief to hope in the darkness of grief. In Lamentations 3 we will see the author use the word “hope” four times. Of the five lamentations, this is the only place where he speaks about hope. Therefore speaking about hope four times is quite notable since he does not use this word anywhere else in these poems…

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