Hope Planted
Scripture Reading: Lamentations 3:22-27
Lamentations is not feel-good reading. It is what it sounds like. It is a lamenting the suffering of God’s people under the harsh disciplining rod of God. Jeremiah goes to great lengths to find some way to put down in words what was being felt and experienced by the people of God.
They are without rest, groaning, like deer being pursued by a hunter, naked and exposed, being overtaken by a wildfire, crushed like grapes in a winepress, cut down, swallowed up, sick, ruined…and on and on it goes.
Lamentations is a book that describes a land over which thick, dark, foreboding clouds have descended. But amid his lament, Jeremiah looks up and sees a sliver of light penetrating those dark skies of judgment. He writes it down in chapter three. He plants a flag of hope in the middle of that barren landscape of judgment:
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; His mercies they never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness…
Some think theology is unimportant. What does it matter if we know anything beyond, “Jesus loves me this I know?” seems to be the spirit of their thinking. Jeremiah demonstrates the importance of good theology in days of darkness.
If you judge everything solely based on circumstance and what is happening around you and to you at any particular time in life, you might come to some spiritually devastating conclusions. Jeremiah grieved and suffered and lamented. But he also had hope. And his hope was founded on the realities of God’s unchanging character.
He looked around him at the ashes of a nation burned to the ground by God’s judgment and was able to still say, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies they never come to an end; they are new every morning…” Had he not believed that he might have wrongly concluded that the trials he was undergoing were proof that God did not love him and there was no mercy and only wrath.
Though Jeremiah lamented, he also sang. He said what was true about God, and then he turned his attention to God and proclaimed, “Great is your faithfulness.”
May God help us to plant a flag of hope in the ashes of our suffering and sing with Jeremiah, “Great is your faithfulness.”
