Waiting For the Lord
For our last Sunday of the year, we will have one unified service as we continue Part 4 of our Bible series, “Why You Need to Act on What You Don’t Want to Hear” with the Book of Lamentations.
Advent is a season of waiting, and as any child this time of year can tell you, waiting isn’t easy. Waiting is also one of the themes of Lamentations, how do we wait for God and all the good things he has promised us, when everything around us is falling apart?
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Waiting For the Lord
It’s the day after Christmas and I’m here to talk about suffering. While Christmas is a time of great joy, it’s a time of more than just joy. Both in the story of Jesus’ life and often in our own lives, Christmas is a mix of joy and suffering.
The days leading up to the birth of Jesus were hard and difficult. Joseph wondered how Mary had become pregnant and almost divorced her. They made the long and difficult journey up to Bethlehem. Mary gave birth in a barn among the animals. But after Jesus is born everything changes. Shepherds come to adore the baby and tell how angels proclaimed his birth. They take Jesus to the Temple and prophets proclaim that he is the salvation of the world. Wise men from the east arrive to worship Jesus with gifts.
Then everything falls apart. Warned by an angel that their lives are in danger from the jealous King Herod, they flee to Egypt, where they have to wait. Not knowing how long they would be there or what would come next, they waited and only returned much later when Herod had died and the text says even then Joseph was still afraid of Herod’s son and successor Archelaus.
And then for about thirty years almost nothing happened. Other than one trip to the Temple with the child Jesus, after the flight to Egypt, the gospels mention nothing happening until Jesus’ ministry began when he was thirty.
Imagine that. After a miraculous conception, after being told your son was the savior of the world, after your son was worshipped by wise men from the East, watching as your son does nothing for thirty years. He was just a carpenter. After one season of repeated direct communication from God, of numerous miraculous signs and proofs of God’s love for them, next to nothing for years. They had to wait, and waiting isn’t easy. Any child can tell you after finally getting their 2 Christmas gifts, any shopper can tell you after standing in the long lines at the store this time of year, waiting isn’t easy.
Waiting can bring out the worst in us; it can make us stressed or angry or depressed. We wait when there is nothing we can do to change a situation. There is nothing a child can do to make Christmas come sooner. Waiting forces us to confront our own weakness, to face the fact that there are problems we can do nothing about, except wait.
And the Christian life is full of waiting. Our lives can often be like Mary and Joseph’s. For a season, we hear from God, God seems close to us and everything is going well, but then everything falls apart. For a time we take our faith very seriously, pray every day, read the Bible everyday, but then work goes wrong or our family goes wrong or our health goes wrong and God seems far away.
What should we do, when God seems to have abandoned us, when we suffer? When after going up to Bethlehem, the city of David, David who was the holy king of Israel, and in Bethlehem hearing from shepherds and wisemen that this child is the savior of the world, when after that we have to flee for our lives to Egypt, the land where the Israelites were slaves; what should we do?
For this, we turn to the book of Lamentations. Lamentations is just about the lowest point in the whole story of the Bible. It comes right after all the curses and warnings we heard from Jeremiah last week, that the Israelites need to turn away from their wickedness and sin or else their nation is going to fall. If the Israelites don’t stop worshipping idols and oppressing the poor and perverting justice and shedding innocent blood, God promises to break them like a piece of pottery, to throw them out like a bunch of rotten fruit, to send the Babylonians to conquer and destroy them.
And when the Israelites heard all these warnings, what did they do? The Israelites did what we all do when someone tells us we’re doing everything wrong, they made him shut up. They locked Jeremiah in prison and burned his writings. But sure enough, God’s word through Jeremiah was true and the Babylonians attacked and Jerusalem was besieged, pillaged, and burned by King Nebuchadnezzar of the Babylonians. Even the Temple, the holy dwelling place of God on earth, was desecrated and looted and wrecked. And the Israelites, whom God had led out of slavery in Egypt to make them a free people and a powerful kingdom, were led off in bondage, to be slaves again in Babylon.
After all that, Lamentations was written, lamenting the destruction and the suffering of Jerusalem. We’re going to look at just one section of it; listen to Lamentations chapter three, verses one through thirty-two.
I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath.
He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light.
Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand against me all the day.
My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones.
He hath builded against me, and compassed me with gall and travail.
He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.
He hath hedged me about, that I cannot get out:
he hath made my chain heavy.
Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer.
He hath inclosed my ways with hewn stone, he hath made my paths crooked.
He was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places.
He hath turned aside my ways, and pulled me in pieces:
he hath made me desolate.
He hath bent his bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow.
He hath caused the arrows of his quiver to enter into my reins.
I was a derision to all my people; and their song all the day.
He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood.
He hath also broken my teeth with gravel stones, he hath covered me with ashes.
And thou hast removed my soul far off from peace: I forgat prosperity.
And I said, My strength and my hope is perished from the Lord:
Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall.
My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.
This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.
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.
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.
As you can tell this is one of the absolute lowest points of scripture. There are few books as depressing and dark as Lamentations, and though it’s hard to believe, our scripture for today is one of the most hopeful parts of the book.
The basic message of the text is simple, the Israelites are miserable because their city has been destroyed. They are lamenting everything bad that has happened to them. But what does that have to do with us? What does a two-thousand-year-old complaint have to say to us today?
To paraphrase the Church Father Athanasius: While all of the Bible speaks to us, some of the Bible speaks for us.
All of the Bible is a message from God talking to us, but some of the Bible shows us how God’s people have talked to him in the past.
The classic example of this is the book of Psalms which teaches us how to pray and how to praise God. When Psalm 23 says that the Lord is my shepherd, that isn’t just God telling us about his character, it’s also God showing us how to praise him, what qualities to ascribe to him.
Likewise, Lamentations isn’t just a recording of how miserable Israel was when Jerusalem was destroyed, Lamentations also teaches us how to talk to God when we are miserable: we lament.
We don’t hide our misery or disappointment from God.
There is no point in hiding anything from a God who knows everything.
Instead, we open our hearts to God and lament.
Laments are common in the Bible. We hear them in the Psalms, like Psalm twenty-two which begins: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.” This is a way we can talk to God.
Turning more closely to the scripture for today, how does the author lament? When he wants to express his despair to God, what does he say and how does he say it?
First, he acknowledges God’s sovereignty. God is in control. God has done this to him. As the author says in verse two, “He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light. Surely against me is he turned;” And then again and again for the next dozen verses, he. God has brought this affliction upon him.
Now the author isn’t quite giving us the full story here. God had given a thousand warnings before it reached this point. God had given the Israelites the Law to warn them what not to do and he sent the prophets whenever they went wrong, including Jeremiah who warned that this particular affliction would come if they didn’t change their ways. And only after failing to follow all these warnings, did the affliction and punishment come.
So it’s not as though it’s God’s fault. It’s not as though God punishes just for fun, as verse thirty-three says: “he doth not afflict willingly.” But there is no denying that God is the one ultimately in control. That he is watching over everything that happens, even our suffering.
When like the Israelites we do wrong, God’s goodness requires him to punish sin and correct us. Suffering comes from sin. He wouldn’t be a good God if he let people be stolen from and murdered and didn’t do anything about it.
The trouble for us is, just as often as we are the ones being saved from oppression by God punishing the wicked, just as often we are also the wicked ones who God is punishing to save others. God intervenes to save us from evil, but the evil he saves us from is in ourselves.
As Solzhenitsyn said “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart.” We are both who God wants to save and who God is saving us from.
Now when we say suffering comes from sin and that our own mistakes bring punishment, we have to be careful. This does not mean that whatever happens to us is our fault; Christians don’t believe in karma. God isn’t keeping a cosmic ledger of how much pain we inflict on others and then making sure we suffer just as much. After all, Jesus suffered without sinning.
Suffering comes from sin not on an individual level but on a creational level. The whole world is full of people doing wrong all the time and we’re all mixed up in it. We all do wrong and there’s no escaping it. And consequently God is constantly intervening in our world. This is all very messy from the human perspective, and it’s not karma, we don’t deserve whatever happens to us, but it’s not chaos either.
And in all this, whatever goes wrong, whatever we suffer, we must acknowledge that God and no one else is in control. Think of Jesus, praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before his crucifixion; Jesus said he was sorrowful unto death and he prayed to God saying “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt.”
God wasn’t the one about to betray Jesus, Judas was; God wasn’t about to condemn Jesus, the High Priests and Pilate were; God wasn’t about to crucify Jesus, the Romans were. And yet Jesus’ prayer looks to God as the one ultimately in control. When we suffer and we lament, we must acknowledge that God is sovereign.
The second thing the author of Lamentations does is this: he remembers God’s faithfulness. After listing in great detail all the ways he has suffered, he says: “Remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.” His memories of his sufferings make him humble; he sees his own weakness.
But then he remembers something else: “This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. 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.”
Now he moves beyond just acknowledging that God is in control, to remembering that God is faithful. God isn’t just in control of the world, he is actively working to save the world.
When we suffer, there are two things we can focus on. When the author focused on himself and all that he had gone through and everything that had happened to him and how he had suffered. He was miserable, he forgot prosperity, his strength and his hope had perished.
But when he focussed on God, he had hope. When he remembered that God had preserved his life through everything he had been through, when he remembered how many times God had delivered him and the Israelites before, he had hope.
Throughout the Old Testament we see how God is always faithful to his people, but the people are always forgetful. God delivers them with all sorts of miracles, but the people forget and look to other gods instead. Whenever we suffer we should remember how God has faithfully provided for us in the past. When Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt, they must have remembered how God had faithfully brought them this far, how God had kept them together and brought them to Bethlehem and shown them messages from shepherds and wisemen and warned them before Herod could hurt them.
God had been faithful to them before and God’s compassion doesn’t fail. God is not like the rest of us whose emotions change from day to day, who are nice when we’re in a good mood and who are mean when we don’t get enough sleep or haven’t had enough to eat. God is always good. The Psalms say over and over: His mercy endures forever. God’s compassion does not fail. His character is always the same. He will always be faithful. And so when we remember God’s faithfulness to us before, we can be confident that he will provide for us in whatever we are going through now.
More than that, God’s mercy is new every morning. God’s love for us does not grow cold, he does not get tired of us and our mistakes, his love is new every morning. Even if we were to mess up every day, even if we were to go down the wrong path for years and years, God’s mercy is new every morning. Every day God is ready to forgive us and love us.
In the gospel of Matthew, Peter asked Jesus, how many times should I forgive someone? Seven times? Jesus said not seven, but seventy times seven. God has new forgiveness every morning of our life. We should forgive like God forgives, and love like God loves. His mercies are new every morning.
The third thing the author of Lamentations does is this: he waits for the Lord. Once he remembers how much God loves him and how God has been faithful to him, he can patiently endure his suffering and wait for the Lord. He says: 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.
At first glance, this almost seems too easy. We just have to wait for God, but as I said earlier, waiting can be hard. It’s hard to admit that things are out of our control and to trust that they’re in God’s control instead. It’s hard to sit still, to wait “quietly” as the verse says, without complaining.
Moreover, waiting implies that you eventually take action. It’s only waiting if you do something when the wait is over.
If you go down to the bus station, down to the Barnstable Park and Ride, and you sit there doing nothing for hours while the Plymouth and Brockton buses and the Peter Pan buses go off to Boston and Providence hour after hour. Then you aren’t waiting for a bus, you’re just sitting. You need to get on the bus.
If you get in the line at Stop & Shop, but come to the register with no items, no money, you weren’t waiting, you were just standing there.
If you put a cake in the oven at three hundred and fifty degrees for thirty minutes, but you don’t take it out, you weren’t waiting for the cake to bake, you were just burning it.
Waiting means, waiting necessarily implies that when the right time comes, we act, we do something. Waiting says right now I am passive, but as soon as the right moment comes, I am going to do something.
Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt but they didn’t stay in Egypt. When the angel told them to go back, they went back. Waiting for God didn’t mean that one day God magically teleported them out of exile and back to safety; waiting meant that when the time was right, God told them what to do and they did it.
The most famous verse about waiting for God comes from Isaiah forty, verse thirty-one: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.”
When we wait on the Lord, it is not because God is going to magically fix all our problems without us having to lift a finger. We wait because our strength comes from God and if we wait for his leading, God will renew our strength so that we can accomplish what He has planned for us.
So when we suffer, when things fall apart, when God seems to have abandoned us, Lamentations teaches us to do three things as we call out to God. Acknowledge God’s sovereignty; God is in control. Remember God’s faithfulness; God has been good to us. And wait for the Lord.
And God doesn’t call us to do anything he is not willing to do himself. And while the words of Lamentations can show us how to suffer well, more than that, they show us how Jesus suffered. Jesus, more than any of us, is the man who has seen affliction. Lamentations says: 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.
Jesus was accused and reproached but was silent before his accusers. Jesus was struck but turned the other cheek. Jesus sat alone when all of his disciples abandoned him. In the prime of his life, at thirty-three, Jesus bore the yoke of the cross for our sake. Jesus has seen affliction.
And Jesus acknowledged God’s sovereignty, when he asked God to take the cup of the crucifixion away, but prayed nevertheless that God’s will be done.
Jesus remembered God’s faithfulness; he was certain that God would deliver him and showed that when he told the thief on the cross that this day, he would be with him in paradise. Even on the cross, Jesus knew that God was faithful to save him and to save others.
Jesus waited for God. Jesus was dead in the tomb for three days. Even though Jesus himself was fully God, he waited for the Father to raise him, as a fully dead human being, from the grave.
And even now God is waiting for us. Waiting for us to repent and believe in him. Second Peter three nine says “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.”
God has promised to set everything right with the world, to remove every bit of evil and suffering. And God keeps his promises. So why hasn’t he done it yet? God is no slacker. God is waiting for us to change, because if we don’t change and follow Jesus, when God sets the world right, we won’t be part of it. But God doesn’t want anyone to perish; he is long-suffering. God waits. God’s mercies are new every morning and he is waiting for every one of us to turn and believe in him.