“It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:22-23
How often have you heard that Bible verse? It is what I would call a “gem” in the Bible. It makes its way onto shirts, mugs, and home decor. I am sure you can think of many verses that get this privilege.
It is easy to pull these feel good verses from the Bible. We want to run to them. To claim them and live by them. And we should! However, they are not meant to stand alone. If we claim these beautiful promises without claiming the surrounding text, they will not completely fill us.
What is the context surrounding Lamentations 3:22-23?
Jeremiah had just gone through the devastation of Jerusalem. He had faithfully spoken the words of the Lord. In return he got ridiculed, thrown in jail, accused, and mocked. As he processes his own hurt and the devastation of the people and the country he loves so much, he pours out his heart to God in Lamentations.
Lamentations 3 begins with Jeremiah describing his anguish. He describes it in a way that says, “I feel like God has left me. I feel like God is doing this to me.” He even says, my strength and hope have perished from the Lord. He is in incredibly deep, deep hurt. His circumstances rightly justify these deep hurts.
When we as humans get this low what do we do? I know for years I ran. I ran to food, to my husband, to hobbies. I ran from these hurts. I cried and asked God “where are you, why don’t you care? You are faithful and just and good, but why doesn’t it feel like it?”
What does Jeremiah do? He doesn’t run from these hard truths. He doesn’t run from his circumstances. Oh how he acknowledges that they are there. He cries out to God with raw, real, broken feelings, but instead of running from them He runs to God. Nestled right between these hard, gut wrenching feelings, and “great is thy faithfulness” He says this:
“This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.”
Then Jeremiah goes on to press even further into God, in ways that are extremely hard for our human nature: “The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. He sitteth alone and keepeth silence, because he hath borne it upon him. He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there may be hope. He giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him: he is filled full with reproach. For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.” -Lamentations 3:24-33
How does Jeremiah deal with these very real broken feelings? Through paradoxes that don’t make sense to us. Through things that we as humans tend to run from; out of all the places we can find comfort….they don’t seem to hold it. What are the paradoxes we can pull from this passage?
- It is good to wait
- Hope Quietly in Silence
- Embrace the Reproach
- Trust God with our grief
Like all paradoxes, there is a fine balance. The Bible is filled with opposites that seem to contradict each other. Because God is good, somehow He makes a way to do both. As you read these paradoxes, keep in mind while there is a time to wait, there is also a time to work and do. While there is a time to quietly hope, there is a time to seek help from others. As we each tune into the Holy Spirit with a pure and open heart, He will teach us how to maintain this balance.
It is good to wait.
It is incredibly hard to wait. Especially in deep dark hurts. We want God to fix our hurts NOW. God asks us to wait. To EXPECT Him to show up in His time. It took 8 years for me to overcome anxiety and depression. Years filled with tears and asking God, why don’t you care? You can fix this, why don’t You? I ran from the wait. I tried to fix it instead of stopping and saying, yes Lord, I will wait. Waiting is not wasted time. In the wait, if we embrace it, we will learn lessons that will help us later.
Hope Quietly in Silence.
Oftentimes I find myself asking, how do I process these feelings? For example, my initial response when my husband and I are not on the same page is a quick verbal response. I want to make him very aware of my hurt feelings. We need to FIX it NOW! More times than not however, my initial response is laced with selfishness. God asks us to run to Him and process our emotions with Him. To hope in Him quietly. I need to step back and examine my heart before I speak. It’s human nature to want to fix other people and let them know that they hurt us. But when I am always focused on that, I forget that I am a broken person in need of Jesus to change my heart as well. I can’t change my circumstances, but I can change myself. When I press into the knowledge that God is my rest, that He is my salvation, that He is the righteous judge, I can silently run to Him for wisdom and patience. I can process my feelings with God before processing with man. When my heart is cleansed from human logic and selfishness, I can move forward to verbalizing my thoughts to other people.
“Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord. Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens.” (Verse 40-41)
Embrace the Reproach
Wow, this is a hard one. “He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there may be hope. He giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him: he is filled full with reproach.” We run hard and fast from this one. But did you notice, right in the middle of this verse (that makes me want to plug my ears and close my eyes) it says…so there may be hope. Jesus is the ultimate example of this. He was beaten, he was mocked, and he was killed all unjustly. Why? SO WE WOULD HAVE HOPE!
This verse is in no means justifying abuse. It is one of those really hard paradoxes to understand. One that we can only understand and live through the Holy Spirit. Reproach to us might mean being made fun of for choices we make that honor God. It might mean showing love to someone who continues to lash out at us. It might mean the physical persecution we know that happens around the world to our brothers and sisters. Loren and I just watched a documentary on a story from the Martyr’s Mirror. This man was in jail for 17 years (I may remember that wrong by a couple years). He was beaten, tortured. They were not allowed to pray. But every night he faithfully prayed. One of the guards stormed into his cell and yelled: WHY DO YOU KEEP PRAYING? You have nothing left! Your wife is a slave, your child is an orphan you are in prison– your God has abandoned you. What do you have left to pray for? The man simply said, ‘I was praying for you”. It’s these kind of things I naturally want to run from and act like they don’t happen. But they do. It is heart breaking– but I have to ask myself, do I trust God that much? Do I embrace reproach when it comes no matter how mild or severe so that there might be hope? This is hard stuff. Stuff that I would much rather skip over for the gems.
There is a very fine balance with this one. It doesn’t mean we lay down and allow abuse, It simply means being tuned into the Holy Spirit so we know how to handle reproach in a godly way. This may mean setting boundaries with family and friends, or it may mean praying for a guard who beats us. God will teach us the HEALTHY way to handle reproach.
Trust God with our Grief
God is a just God. He is faithful to punish those who sin against Him. He sees the people that hurt us. He sees the wrongs committed against us. He knows, and He will judge every man according to each mans works. (Romans 2:6, 1 Peter 1:17, 1 Corinthians 3:8). God knows when we have been mistreated, He knows when we are down and hurting. It is human nature to want to lash out, to become the judge and seek justice for our hurts. While again, there is a time to work through things, God is the ultimate judge. His word shows us that He is in control. I can imagine Him saying something like this: My sweet child, I am in control. I see you, I feel your pain…Jesus came and felt it and He intercedes for you. I am working all things out for good. Evil will not go unpunished. When you fight and claw to seek justice in your own way, you wear yourself out. Come to me, trust me with your pain and grief, you will find rest when you trust me over your own thinking. I promise, I will judge righteously. You don’t need to take this burden on yourself.
When we trust God with our grief we can trust His process and find freedom from the shackles satan wants to place on us. Does that mean our situation will get easy? No. But it does mean we will find strength from God who is constantly fighting for us. See how Jeremiah puts it in verses 49-59:
“Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any intermission. Till the Lord look down, and behold from heaven. Mine eye affecteth mine heart because of all the daughters of my city. Mine enemies chased me sore, like a bird, without cause. They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and cast a stone upon me. Waters flowed over mine head; then I said, I am cut off. I called upon thy name, O Lord, out of the low dungeon. Thou hast heard my voice: hide not thine ear at my breathing, at my cry.5Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not. O Lord, thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; thou hast redeemed my life. O Lord, thou hast seen my wrong: judge thou my cause.”
It is not easy to write these truths, and it is extremely hard to live them. I personally want to run from them. I want to pull the gems from the Bible and pray they will fix all my problems. I don’t want to push into hard things to take hold of God’s promises in the fullest way possible. But just like Jeremiah, I have found God’s faithfulness show up over and over in the middle of a hard paradox.
The gems in the Bible are incredible, they are true, the are POWERFUL. But, more often than not, they are surrounded by incredibly hard truths that God asks us to live out by His Spirit. Things that don’t make sense, but when we surrender completely to God, and run toward them instead of away from them, through the pain, the tears, and the heart break somehow we find hope. I personally have found hope and God in a much fuller way, when I do the things that go against my human nature.
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