"Questions for Saints in the Time of COVID" Lamentations 3:37-39 Sunday Evening Worship Service

So also the hardest part is finding the book of Lamentations.

You already turned there for the scripture reading, so that's good.

If you haven't found it, it's right after Jeremiah, just before Ezekiel.

Lamentations.

It's only five chapters long, and as the title suggests, this is a sad, melancholy book.

The prophet Jeremiah wrote Lamentations, and it is quite different in tone and character and style from the prophecy, the prophetic book, Jeremiah, the book that bears his name.

This is a collection of poetic works, and each chapter, each of the five chapters, is a separate ode to sorrow.

And these are not psalms to be sung in worship, these are elegies, which means each chapter is a pathetic expression of sorrow that gives voice to the agony of profound loss and the most pitiful kind of grief.

You know what an elegy is.

It's a dirge, it's a mournful poem, usually written for the dead.

But in this case, it's a lament over the Lord's judgment against the city of Jerusalem.

And each chapter is a separate piece.

Each one is a standalone unit, and there is a structure to how these are laid out.

I was going to go into it in depth, but the clock is ticking.

So I'm going to skip a lot of the detail except to tell you that notice each chapter except the third has 22 verses.

And there's a reason for that structure.

The third has f has uh 66 verses.

It's three times as long, exactly three times as long.

And that's because each chapter is an acrostic based on the Hebrew alphabet, which has 22 characters.

And uh our chapter, the third chapter, uh devotes three verses to each letter of the alphabet.

So it's three times as long, but it's structured the same way as an alphabetical thing.

That was a typical um method of Hebrew poetry.

You know that Hebrew poetry, it's the thoughts that rhyme, not the words.

And uh there are lots of different ways to sort of get the sense out of Hebrew poetry.

Sometimes this line repeats the very next line, or it's the other way around, the line repeats the former statement.

Sometimes it's a contrast, and all of that, but here's something maybe you didn't know.

Sometimes Hebrew poetry is making use of rhythmic meter.

The number of syllables is important.

And if you heard someone recite a poem in Hebrew, there might be a distinct pulse to the words.

Typically, when the poet makes a parallelism, the first half of the couplet will have the same number of syllables as the second half.

And you can hear this throbbing like a drumbeat.

That aspect of the poetry, of course, is almost always lost in translations to English, but it's an important feature here in the book of Lamentations, because Lamentations uses what Bible scholars refer to as a kind of limping meter, where the second half of each couplet is one beat shorter than the first.

There's a definite rhythm there, but it limps, if you will.

And so in the Hebrew, if he makes a statement with four syllables, then the parallelism, the second part of the parallelism, uses only three syllables.

It's a kind of verbal syncopation that stresses the mournfulness of the dirge.

It gives it the texture and the cadence of virtually a death march.

And these are profoundly sorrowful songs.

They were written in the historical context of an event that to this day remains a source of sorrow and sadness that reverberates constantly in Jewish worship and Jewish literature and in Jewish tradition.

These five chapters were written to commemorate the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar and the deportation of the entire Jewish nation into the Babylonian captivity.

This was the most sweeping and disastrous defeat for the Jewish nation in all of recorded history.

And from that time until now, no king has ever sat on David's throne in Jerusalem.

That's how important this defeat was.

The city was utterly laid waste, and it looked and felt like the utter defeat of Israel's messianic hopes, the promise of a king who would always sit on the throne of David.

And now no one was sitting there, and no one has sat there for literally thousands of years.

So politically and spiritually and economically, in every conceivable sense, from a human perspective, things looked totally hopeless for the Jewish nation.

And when Jeremiah wrote these elegies, there quite simply was no ray of hope on the horizon, no sign of redemption, no sign of relief.

And the one thing that magnified and intensified the guilt and sorrow of the nation and all of the anguish that was attached to this was the fact that this prophet, Jeremiah, had been warning of judgment to come for more than 45 years.

And clearly he had been giving them warnings.

Jeremiah's warnings were not subtle or ambiguous.

In fact, the entire book of Jeremiah is filled with precise warnings about what ultimately happened.

In Jeremiah 25, 11, for example, he said, This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon 70 years.

And Jeremiah had preached these warnings for more than four decades, and literally no one took him seriously enough to repent.

And in fact, they drove Jeremiah into exile.

They called him a conspiracy theorist, an extremist, an alarmist, a merchant of doom, and all of these things.

And his life was literally constantly in danger because the people steadfastly refused to hear these prophecies.

They thought Jeremiah was the bad guy.

And the judgment came in stages when it finally came.

In effect, giving the people of Judah even more space to repent.

The Babylonians began to deport people from Jerusalem a decade before they demolished the city.

And so signs of this impending judgment were everywhere, and still the people refused to listen.

Sound familiar?

It's like our culture today, you can see it dissolving, and yet so few people want to pay any attention to the warning signs.

Jeremiah's warnings came to Judah with absolute clarity.

He was a prophet who spoke the word of God without any nuance.

His credentials as a prophet were impeccable.

They had no rational reason to doubt his word, but even when his prophecies of judgment began to be fulfilled and they could see what he had prophesied coming to life before their eyes, they only tried harder to shut Jeremiah up.

Used to wonder at the hard-heartedness of the people of Jerusalem, but frankly, today's evangelicals are cut from precisely the same cloth.

We're no better than them.

And in our culture, Christian conviction is obviously in a state of serious and rapid decline.

Moral values based on scripture are being overturned and wickedness is being normalized.

You're not even permitted to say in polite culture anymore that homosexuality and other worse sexual perversions are sin.

Faith itself is under assault from governments, mocked by the media, rejected in the academic realm, and the world has, of course, always been hostile to Christ, but never in my life as overtly as it is right now.

Last summer, Pastor James Coates spent 35 days in jail in Alberta, Canada, because he persisted preaching to his gathered flock.

Child molester was released from that very same jail because authorities were afraid the child molester might get the COVID virus.

But the pastor was not only denied bail, he was brought to the courtroom bound in chains.

And during all of that, I heard from countless evangelicals, including several influential evangelical leaders, who angrily argued that it was inappropriate to refer to that pastor's treatment at the hands of government officials as persecution.

They said he's getting what he deserved, and they wanted him to shut up and passively follow the drift of culture.

That is the same kind of response Jeremiah got from the people of Israel until the year 586 BC, when the Chaldeans finally laid waste to the city and destroyed every remnant of civilization in Jerusalem.

They captured Zedekiah, the king, the last of Judah's kings.

Jeremiah 39, verses 6 and 7 says, Nebuchadnezzar slaughtered the sons of Zedekiah at Riblah before his eyes, and then he put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains to take him to Babylon.

Jeremiah 39:6

And that's how Judah's line of kings ended in shame, with the king blinded, having watched his own prodigy put to death.

2 Kings 25 records that very same event this way.

2 Kings 25, verses 7 through 11.

2 Kings 25:7–11

They put out the eyes of Zedekiah and bound him in chains and took him to Babylon.

They burned the house of the Lord, that's the temple, and the king's house, and all the houses of Jerusalem, every great house he burned down, and all the army of the Chaldeans broke down the walls around Jerusalem, and the rest of the people who were left in the city, they carried into exile.

And the Chaldeans not only destroyed the temple, Scripture goes on to say, the pillars of bronze that were in the house of the Lord, and the stands and the bronze sea that were in the house of the Lord, the Chaldeans broke in pieces and carried the bronze to Babylon, and they took away the pots and the shovels and the snuffers and the dishes for incense, and all the vessels of bronze used in the temple service, the firepans also, and the bowls.

What was of gold the captain of the guard took away as gold, and what was of silver as silver.

And they took so many items made of precious metal that Scripture says it was simply too much to weigh, even.

They didn't know how much it was.

It was more than you could easily weigh.

Literally nothing was left of the glory that once was Jerusalem.

You remember that the Queen of Sheba came to see this city in Solomon's time, and she told him, I didn't believe the reports until I came with my own eyes and seen it.

And she said, Behold, half of it has not been told to me.

In other words, it was twice as glorious as anything anyone had ever described to her.

And now here we are, just a few generations later, and the Babylons, the Babylonians left Jerusalem basically a pile of desolate ruins, devoid of any hint of all that former grandeur.

And you get a feel for the national mood in Psalm 137, a famous Psalm that says this By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion on the willows where we hung our lyres, for there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?

There was not a Hebrew in the world who felt like singing at that point, but it was precisely at that point, immediately after the destruction of Jerusalem, that Jeremiah wrote these five sorrowful songs.

Notice how it starts, chapter 1, verse 1.

How lonely sits the city that was full of people, how like a widow has she become, she who was great among the nations, she who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave.

And it just gets sadder from there.

And Jeremiah, of course, we know him as the weeping prophet.

The prophetic book that bears his name is full of tender sorrow about the coming judgment.

The book of Jeremiah simply looks forward with profound grief at a judgment that was still coming.

But the Book of Lamentations looks back in despair at the fact that the judgment had now come and it was worse than anyone anticipated.

And the people of God were left with no obvious signs of any hope of deliverance.

And yet Jeremiah's gentle compassion is as evident as it was when he was trying to warn people that this is coming.

I'll be honest with you, if this is why I'm not like Richard Sibbs.

If I was in Jeremiah's predicament at that point, I think I would have been strongly tempted to write a scathing, I told you so, you know, with a caustic tone and the cadence of an angry rebuke.

My flesh isn't fully sanctified yet, I confess.

But Jeremiah identifies with the agony and the despondence of his people.

The book is filled with first-person pronouns, we, us, 38 times in the English translations, I or me only 57 times.

And when he uses the third person, they, it's normally in reference to they, the enemies of Judah.

He identifies with his people.

He takes care not to set himself apart from those who had rejected his prophecies for years.

He himself was one of the suffering Hebrews.

There's nothing accusatory, there's nothing scolding in this book.

When he mentions the nation's sin every time he includes himself, it's a confession.

It is not a condemnation, it's not an accusation.

And instead of an angry indictment, he pens these sorrowful obituaries for the city of Jerusalem and the Hebrew nation, and that's what this book is about.

So now look at the layout of these five chapters.

There is a, I want to just skim through it before we get to our text.

There's a distinct progression in the subject matter here.

It builds to an emotional crescendo in the middle, punctuated by a note of comfort and hope, and then it immediately becomes a lament again, and it ends with a prayer.

Chapter one is all about the profound and grievous mourning that now dominates the whole region in and around Zion.

Verse 1, how lonely sits the city.

Verse 2, she weeps bitterly.

Verse 3, Judah has gone into exile.

Verse 4, even the roads to Zion mourn.

Verse 6, from the daughter of Zion, all her majesty has departed, and so on.

And it all just seems utterly hopeless.

And the chapter ends on this note, verse 22.

Zion stretches out her hands, but there is none to comfort her.

All of it.

Very disconsolate and pessimistic.

It's how a lot of us have felt in recent years, recent days.

Chapter 2 then shifts focus from the despondency of the people to the anger of the Lord.

And it's a palpable fury, as Jeremiah describes it.

Verse 1, how the Lord in his anger has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud.

Verse 2, the Lord has swallowed up without mercy all the habitations of Jacob.

Verse 3, fierce anger.

Verse 4, fury poured out like fire.

Verse 5, the Lord has become an enemy.

All the way down to verse 22, which ends with this.

Those whom I held and raised, my enemy destroyed.

And then chapter 2 is like a, you could look at it like this.

That whole chapter talking about the fear of the Lord is like an extended commentary on Hebrews 10.31, where it says, it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

And then chapter 3 is that long chapter.

This is where I want to focus.

And we're going to zero in on three verses down in the second half of the chapter.

But first, here's a short survey of the whole chapter.

And by the way, I'm glad this is the longest chapter because this one gives us a kind of island of relief in the middle of a sea of desperation.

And although it starts and ends with the theme and the flavor of a desperate lamentation, the actual theme of this chapter is the Lord's mercy.

And Jeremiah manages to find a little glimmer of hope in this dungeon of darkness.

And what I think is significant is where he looks in order to find that hope.

He finds it in the truth he knows about God.

He looks to doctrine, specifically theology proper, the truth he knows about God.

He's not telling us about something he feels.

I mean, he did tell us about what he feels in those first two chapters.

But here in chapter 3, the ray of hope comes from not from anything he can literally see or apprehend with his senses.

This is not a revelation of some new truth.

It's not a voice from God that calls out to him in the darkness.

God still feels to Jeremiah as remote and as silent as he did in those first two chapters.

And in fact, the chapter opens with Jeremiah making precisely that confession.

Look at it.

Lamentations 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.

And Jesse read this, so you've got the sense of it.

He just goes on at one point, even describing the Almighty as a bear lying in wait for me and a lion in hiding.

Verse 12, he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow.

He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver.

That's the ESV, and actually the graphic language there reflects the literal meaning of the Hebrew text.

Verse 15, he's filled me with bitterness, he 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.

This is sheer agony.

That's what he feels.

But then in verse 21, that curtain of darkness opens up to unveil for us that one little ray of hope.

And Jeremiah turns to the doctrine of God, what he knows, not what he feels, and reminds his soul of the one truth he can cling to when the rest of the universe seems like it's filled with nothing but despair.

And these are the best known verses in the book of Lamentations.

More than one of our favorite hymns are based on this familiar text, verse 22.

And Jeremiah's theology informs his feeling, actually.

It puts aside his feelings of despair.

Informs him that in spite of everything he is currently suffering, he knows that the Lord is good and his steadfast mercy endures forever.

As Psalm 103, verse 9 says, he will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.

Psalms 103:9

And Jeremiah echoes that idea in verses 31 and 32.

The Lord will not cast off forever, but though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

And the prophet is reminding himself that God's love, not his wrath, but his love, is what defines God's relationship with his people.

Although he may discipline them, he does it for their benefit.

Look at verse 33.

For he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men.

Now, be careful how you read that verse.

This the idea here is not that God is emotionally conflicted.

This is not suggesting that God has lost his temper, as if he really didn't mean to subject the people of Israel to judgment, but he kind of flew off the handle.

It's blasphemous to think of God.

In those terms, as if he is driven by passions, you know, veering wildly from wrath to pity, just being angry or being kind in response to what we do.

We believe in the impassibility of God.

That's a Protestant touchstone, really, that means God doesn't have mood swings.

He's not moved by passion.

His anger and his compassions are not at all like human emotions outside of his control.

All of his affections are as fixed and immutable as his character.

He does not shift erratically between fierce anger and loving kindness.

He doesn't change his mind, scripture says repeatedly, and he doesn't actually change his mood.

We may see and experience his displeasure more than his mercy, sometimes when we sin, but God himself is the same always.

Numbers 23, 19, God is not man that he should lie, or a son of man that he should change his mind.

And his unchangeableness is the very reason we find hope in his mercy.

Has he said and will he not do it?

Or has he spoken and will he not fulfill it?

God's promised forgiveness and his mercy are sure and reliable because we know he doesn't ever go back on his word.

2 Timothy 2.13, even if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.

He doesn't have changes of heart.

And the prophet is making that point here, verse 33, in the New American Standard Bible says this he does not afflict willingly or grieve the sons of men.

And that, frankly, is a bad translation of the verse.

God does sometimes grieve the sons of men, and he doesn't do anything unwillingly.

But the Hebrew expression literally says he doesn't do this from the heart.

And what it means is, in fact, the ESV says he doesn't afflict from the heart.

Jeremiah is saying he doesn't subject his people to discipline or suffering in a capricious way, as if some surge of passion or some sudden whim has moved him and changed the way he really feels in his heart.

He doesn't do that.

God doesn't change like that.

And then the prophet goes on in the next few verses to recite some of the immutable principles of divine justice, reminding himself again with some doctrinal and theological principles, that God is always just and righteous and holy and above all good.

And that brings us to the verses I want to concentrate on.

Verses 37 through 39.

This is not the most familiar text in Lamentations, but it's a text I love because Jeremiah writes out three questions, each one pointing to some principle of theology proper.

He's giving himself a theological reminder, and he's giving us a theological lesson.

And each one of these questions has an answer that will be self-evident to anyone who truly understands the biblical doctrine of God.

You take everything God has revealed about himself, and the answers to these questions are crystal clear.

Jeremiah is not asking these questions because he doesn't know the answers.

He states these questions because he is reminding himself of some things he already knows.

And these questions are for the man of constant sorrow.

They serve as a reminder of the hope that every authentic believer can cling to, no matter how dark the dungeon may be that we currently find ourselves in.

So here's the passage.

Listen to these three questions.

Who has spoken and it came to pass unless the Lord 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?

Now, by the way, remember this chapter I said at the beginning is an alphabetical acrostic.

And these three verses are the triad that begin with the letter Mem in Hebrew.

It's the thirteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

And Jewish commentators like to assign specific meanings, hidden meanings, to numerical values, to letters in the quest of some puzzling meaning in the text.

And some of them have claimed the letter mem speaks of the womb.

Others say no, it's a symbol of water.

Others say no it's a reference to the Torah.

Really, the only significance I can absolutely be sure of in this acrostic arrangement is that these three verses are purposely grouped together as a unit.

They go together.

They're part of a single unit.

And so let's think through these three questions one at a time.

First of all, who is there who speaks and it happens unless the Lord has ordained it?

Now, bear in mind what Jeremiah is doing here.

He is answering his own despair with principles of biblical doctrine.

These are facts about God that he knows is true are true, even though they might not seem true, they might not feel right under the present circumstances.

And the whole chapter is the most intensely personal section of the book of Lamentations.

The other chapters are dominated by plural pronouns, we, us.

But in this chapter, starting with the very first verse, he shifts to first person singular, I and me.

I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath.

He has driven me away.

And chapters one and two and chapters four and five, the ones that sandwich this section, aim at expressing the grief of a whole nation and instructing some very hard-hearted people.

But chapter three is unique.

This is Jeremiah reminding and instructing himself.

And it turns out that Jeremiah is a thoroughgoing Calvinist.

The first question is a reminder to himself of the absolute sovereignty of God.

Whose command was ever fulfilled unless the Lord decreed it?

And the answer, obviously, that is that unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.

Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain.

That you'll recognize from Psalm 127 and in Isaiah 46, verses 9 through 11, God speaks.

Isaiah 46:9–11

God himself says this I am God and there is none like me, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.

I have spoken and I will bring it to pass.

I have purposed and I will do it.

Which all of that means no one can thwart the will of God.

You can make all the plans you want to, but if God doesn't permit it, it isn't going to happen.

It's also the point of Psalm 33.

Let all the earth fear the Lord, let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him, for he spoke and it came to be.

He commanded and it stood firm.

The Lord brings the counsel of the nations to nothing.

He frustrates the plans of the people, but the counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.

Which is to say, nothing ever happens that God did not plan for and ordain.

And furthermore, no matter how bleak or ugly or evil everything around us might seem to be, God is still able to make all those things work together for good.

He has a purpose in everything that comes to pass, and his purposes will not be derailed by the evil things that men do.

In the words of Romans 9.19, who can resist his will?

And the answer?

No one.

So this first question calls for an unqualified affirmation of the absolute sovereignty of God.

Although it seems like things have gone badly, God has not given up his providential control over all of creation.

And even though the Lord's chief prophet describes himself as perplexed and punished and pummeled by the wrath of God, the prophet knows enough sound theology to remind himself that God has not lost control.

Nebuchadnezzar and the Chaldeans meant all of this for evil, but you can be certain that God ordained it for good because his purposes are always good.

Scripture says, 1 John 1 5, God is light and in him is no darkness at all.

Zechariah 7 19, how great is his goodness and how great his beauty.

James 1 13, let no one say when he is tempted, I am tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, nor does he tempt anyone.

And James goes on to say that God is in fact the giver of every good and perfect gift, and in him there is no variation or shadow due to change.

In fact, here was Jesus' summary of the character of God.

Matthew 5, 48, your heavenly Father is perfect.

Psalm 145 says, Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.

The people of God shall pour forth the fame of his abundant goodness.

So we know that no one can bring anything to pass unless the Lord has ordained it.

The ESV says, unless the Lord has commanded it.

But it's not talking about God's commandments telling us what we should do.

Obviously, people do disobey the Lord's law, but this verse is talking about the Lord's eternal decree, his plan and purpose for the ages, what he himself will accomplish.

And everything is right on track, no matter what evil his fallen creatures might do.

They may think they are defeating the purpose of God, but that is not the case.

Nothing can happen unless the Lord ordains it, and that's the whole point of this verse.

And in Jeremiah's time, just like today, whenever the subject of God's sovereignty comes up, the question immediately arises: well, if God is that sovereign, why is there evil?

God is not the author of evil.

If he's both perfectly good and truly sovereign over everything that comes to pass, why do bad things happen?

And why, in particular, do bad things happen to God's people?

Why do sound and solid Christians get sick and die in a pandemic at roughly the same rate as anyone else?

And more specifically, why would a faithful prophet like Jeremiah have to start this lament with the statement, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath?

He was perhaps arguably the most godly person in the nation.

Why Jeremiah?

Why is he suffering along with everybody else?

How come he's not exempt?

How is that fair?

And Jeremiah asks this second question as a response to that, verse 38.

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that everything comes, both calamity and blessing?

Now again, this demands a clear answer that affirms the sovereignty of God.

God is sovereign not only when good things happen, but God is still in control even when bad things happen.

And I need to clarify what this verse means.

Jeremiah is not raising a question here about the ontological source of evil.

It may be a bit misleading if you read from the King James Version, verse 38, in the King James reads this way out of the mouth of the Most High proceed both evil and good.

And the ESV is only slightly better.

It says, Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that good and bad come?

And that may sound like God is speaking evil into existence, but we know that's not the case.

In the first place, to quote James 1.13 again, God cannot be tempted with evil, and he doesn't tempt anyone.

He's not the author of confusion, and therefore he cannot be the creator of evil.

And you have to understand it like this.

First of all, evil is not a created thing.

Evil is the destruction of what God made that was good.

And after everything in existence was created, Scripture is very clear about this.

Genesis 1.31, God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good.

So it can't be the creator of evil.

Evil can't even be something that God brought into existence.

And the answer is because it's not a created thing at all, it's simply the marring of a perfect creation.

So what does verse 38 mean?

Well, most English modern translations make it a little more clear.

This prophet here is contrasting blessing and calamity, good fortune versus adversity.

And I really like the New King James Version here.

It says, Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that woe and well-being proceed?

Which is to say, God dispenses blessing and he also dispenses adversity.

And in both cases, he does it with perfect righteousness.

When calamity befalls, the people of God can be absolutely certain that the devil didn't catch God off guard or slip some diabolical purpose past the notice of God's all-seeing eye.

The devil cannot afflict Job unless God grants him freedom to do so.

Satan can't sift Peter like wheat without the express knowledge and authorization of God.

1 Corinthians 10 13, God is faithful who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able.

Which means whenever we suffer afflictions, we can be certain that God has some good and profitable purpose in subjecting us to that thing.

That may not make the heartaches or the misery or the misfortunes any less painful, but it does give us an anchor of hope to cling to, because it provides real comfort in the midst of agony.

That God has a good purpose in this, and he will accomplish something good with it.

Spurgeon said it like this.

I'll quote him exactly.

He said, How greatly this ought to confront, comfort you who are sorely tried.

Every twig of the rod of correction has been made by God, and every stroke of it is counted by him.

There is not a drop more gall in your cup than the Lord has ordained.

He has weighed in the scales of the sanctuary every ingredient of your medicine, and mixed it with all his infallible skills, so that it may produce the cure of all your ills.

Should not this make you rejoice in the Lord?

And he went on to say, Who beside God knows how much we are able to bear?

Our consolation arises from the fact that God knows exactly how much we can bear.

We have no idea ourselves what we can bear.

God knows just how much you can bear, so leave yourself in his hands.

Some people hate the idea that God is sovereign because it raises questions that they're simply too lazy to work through and answer, and invariably they will claim that this is a theoretical truth with no discernible practical benefit and no real-world application.

And why do you even fuss with this idea?

But here, right here, is the principal practical benefit that we derive from the doctrine that God is sovereign.

This is our guarantee that good will come for us from every trial we go through, so that every fiery dart of the devil that goes through us and every conceivable calamity that ever might fall on us, God has a good purpose in it.

And we naturally rejoice that God is sovereign when things are going well and truth seems to triumph over falsehood.

It's like the football player at the end of the game who won and he praises the Lord.

There was one a couple of weeks ago who lost and praised the Lord anyway, and I like that.

It's easy and almost automatic to recognize God's sovereignty when things are going well.

You know, gratitude fills our hearts when everything's going our way.

Even the most militant Arminian will sometimes accidentally affirm that God is sovereign.

He made this happen.

But when things go badly, when you suffer, when you face the consequences of your own sin, and especially when it seems like you're suffering under the curse of sin for no obvious reason, those are the times when it's most helpful to know that God is in absolute control of every detail of everything that happens.

And we may not always see what his purposes are, but we can unreservedly trust that whatever he is doing will be good, and specifically it will be good for us.

Jeremiah knew that, of course.

Divine sovereignty was a recurring theme in his prophecy, and it's no wonder that that doctrine, the sovereignty of God, also surfaces at this, the high point of the Book of Lamentations.

But part of the question still remains unanswered, namely, why Jeremiah of all people?

Why would this faithful prophet be subjected to all the same griefs and hardships as those who had treated him so shabbily when he tried to warn them that this judgment was coming?

And that's what prompts this third question, verse 39.

Question number three: Why should any living person complain when he's punished for his sins?

And the fact is, not one of us ever really suffers the full consequences or the due penalty of sin.

God's discipline is always administered with love and mercy.

And no matter how bad it feels or how long it lasts, God's discipline is never the full measure of what our sins actually deserve.

And I'm thankful for that.

Look back at verse 22, that familiar text that we frequently sing about.

If you've ever memorized this passage in the King James Version, verse 22 says, It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.

And the NIV has a similar translation.

Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed.

That's what the verse actually says in the Masoretic text.

Luther's German translation says, Because of the Lord's mercies, we are not utterly consumed.

And Kyle and Dalich also prefer that translation.

It's because of God's mercy that we're not just burnt up completely.

But the earliest Hebrew manuscripts actually make verse 22 a straight synonymous parallelism, and it goes like this the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end.

That's what you have in the ESV, and that's how most of the modern English versions have it.

And I don't frankly know enough about Hebrew or textual criticism to give you any dogmatic opinion on which way that verse should be translated.

It definitely changes the meaning.

But I will tell you this: either way you translate that text, what it says is obviously true.

It is absolutely a fact that if the Lord's mercies were not inexhaustible, we would have been doomed and destroyed and consigned to the eternal flames of hell long ago, every one of us.

In fact, God Himself says that to the Hebrew nation in Malachi 3, verse 6 I, the Lord, do not change, therefore, you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.

Malachi 3:6

And again, the biblical appeal is, notice, to the impassability and immutability of God.

The fact that he doesn't change his mind and he doesn't change his mood.

He's not subject to mood swings and temper tantrums, and his faithfulness is seen in his unchanging, absolute perfection, and one element of that is his inexhaustible mercy.

And all of us have benefited from that immeasurable, never-ending kindness.

Verse 39.

Why should a living man complain a man about the punishment of his sins?

Because the fact that we are living at all is a benefit derived from the mercies of God because the wages of sin is death.

Only a living person would ever even make such a complaint.

The wicked dead have no plea before God.

All they're left with is an eternal sense of their own guilt, endless regret for whatever opportunities they squandered, and shame for whatever misguided sense of pride caused them to think that they deserved any kind of favor at all from a perfectly holy God.

The redeemer.

Dead will spend eternity thanking God and praising Him with the profoundest gratitude for His great mercy and grace and love that preserved us from what we actually deserve.

No matter how much we suffered here on earth.

And until you see it from God's perspective, you'll never fully grasp these truths.

Jeremiah asks himself these three questions in order to remind himself of what his own dilemma looks like from heaven's perspective.

Notice the anguish Jeremiah felt didn't necessarily diminish.

The sense of national defeat that came with Israel's captivity didn't go away.

And in fact, the Babylonian captivity lasted 70 more years after he wrote this.

But while the world around Jeremiah continued to unravel, at least he knew he was standing on solid ground.

And God gives more grace.

You can be certain he gave more grace to Jeremiah because he opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

And notice that what follows our text is a call to prayer.

Verses 40 and 41, and then verses 42 through 66, all the way to the end of the chapter, are also a prayer that ends this chapter.

Chapter 1 ended with three verses of prayer.

Chapter 2 ends with three verses of prayer.

Our chapter ends with 25 verses of prayer.

It's the longest prayer in the book of Lamentations, even though the entire closing chapter is devoted completely to prayer.

Remember, chapter one is all about the nation's despondency.

Chapter 2 is all about the Lord's anger.

Chapter 3 sounds like it's about to start out being about the prophet's affliction, his personal affliction, but it's actually about the Lord's mercy.

And then chapter 4 is about the punishment of sin and a confession that God is never unjust when he permits us to suffer.

Chapter 4 is the only chapter in these five that doesn't end with a prayer.

And then chapter 5 is completely given over to prayer.

And specifically, it's a prayer for the Lord's mercy.

Chapter 5 is the only chapter, by the way, that is not an alphabetic acrostic.

But it ends on a forlorn note.

Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored.

Renew our days as of old, unless you have utterly rejected us and you remain exceedingly angry with us.

And so the entire book has just one ray of hope in the very middle.

And apart from that, there is no sense of triumph or deliverance anywhere in it.

That, of course, is the nature of a lamentation.

And let me say this it is appropriate for Christians to express grief.

I've done a lot of funerals and memorial service for precious saints who have died over the last two years, most of them not from COVID, but they died in seclusion, cut off from loved ones and family.

And I know we like to stress that there's an element of celebration in a memorial service when any believer dies, but it is also appropriate to mourn.

Remember, Jesus wept at Lazarus' tomb, even though he knew he was about to raise him from the dead.

So it's fitting to grieve and to cry with inexpressible sorrow when someone dies, or whenever we suffer from the effects of the curse of sin.

And the prophet Jeremiah reminds us here that even in that grief, even in the most profound outpouring of earthly woe, our grief is not hopeless.

We suffer, but not like those who have no hope.

And for believers, there's always hope in the midst of sorrow.

And by hope, I mean what Scripture means when it uses that word.

It is the earnest expectation of glory.

It's not a vague wish, it's a certainty.

We hope for that glory.

We wait for it with expectation.

Because that is what awaits those who trust Christ as Lord and Savior.

Remember Romans 8 18, the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed in us.

And that is what all the events of history are leading to: the revealing of the sons of God, the culmination of all divine blessings in the glory of heaven for all eternity.

And you might ask, well, how can we have that hope if it's true that the wages of sin is death?

If what we really deserve is worse than the earthly sufferings we've ever experienced, what hope is there for sinners?

And the answer is that's why Christ came.

He lived a sinless life, and then he bore the sins of his people while he suffered death on the cross, taking the outpouring of divine wrath against sin, which fell on him, and in exchange he offers eternal life to all who turn from their sins and lay hold of him by faith.

He rose from the dead to prove that the atonement was complete.

And in that, my friends, we have so much more than the bare glimmer of hope that Jeremiah wrote about in the Old Testament.

We have the full revelation of the way of salvation.

And if you've never turned from sin and trusted Christ, there frankly is no other real, no more real, no more permanent, no more satisfying answer to the melancholy or despair that you may sense when you suffer the pain of your sin's consequences.

And if that's where you are today, I invite you, I urge you to turn to Christ in faith.

If you are a believer and you're wondering why God allows you to suffer the woe and anguish of sin's curse and sometimes to permit distress and discouragement to go on for a prolonged time, remember, Israel's captivity lasted 70 years.

Most of us have not suffered that long.

The COVID thing hasn't even been two years yet, though it seems like 70.

And if you're a believer who's struggling, I hope you find hope, if not comfort, in the knowledge that God is sovereign.

He is in charge even when it seems like our circumstances are out of control.

He carefully measures out our trials with generous doses of his inexhaustible mercy.

And in the end, he himself is your portion and your promise.

And in the context of eternal glory with Christ, Christ, I promise you will rejoice at the way he saw you through and gave you the deliverance you may be craving.

Let's pray.

Father, we confess with the people of Judah that we have transgressed and rebelled.

We can't protest, that we don't deserve panic and pitfall, devastation and destruction.

But we pray with Jeremiah, restore us to yourself, O Lord, that may we may be restored.

Renew our days as of old, and may we live in your blessing as you give us grace to follow Christ, in whose name we pray.

Amen.

And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thank you for joining us today.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

Our service times and church information are on our website at ibc.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to tms.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel of Jesus Christ with boldness.

May the Lord bless you.