The book of Lamentations consists of 5 poems of lament, or expressions of sorrow and mourning that come from great suffering. The context for the book as a whole is the destruction of Jerusalem in 587/586 BC by the Babylonians. This judgment of God for Israel’s unfaithfulness was long foretold, but here having been experienced, the full impact of the grief and pain are expressed. It’s possible, but not certain, that the prophet Jeremiah wrote this book, which is why it shows just up after the book of Jeremiah in our Bibles.
Our text, in chapter 3, is the first part of the the third poem. This whole poem is an acrostic where every 3 lines of text begin with the 22 successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This passage contains an amazing expression of hope for the future, from a person who knows suffering and hopelessness, which can help us to know how to think more clearly about our own hope for the future, no matter what our context might be. Let’s begin with the writer’s –
Great suffering and hopelessness
1 I am the man who has seen affliction
under the rod of his wrath;
2 he has driven and brought me
into darkness without any light;
3 surely against me he turns his hand
again and again the whole day long.
God’s judgment is described as affliction, wrath and darkness. And it is relentless.
4 He has made my flesh and my skin waste away;
he has broken my bones;
5 he has besieged and enveloped me
with bitterness and tribulation;
6 he has made me dwell in darkness
like the dead of long ago.
These verses speak to his lack of health, his suffering and how he is like someone who is in Sheol, the realm of the dead, which is a place of darkness.
7 He has walled me about so that I cannot escape;
he has made my chains heavy;
8 though I call and cry for help,
he shuts out my prayer;
9 he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones;
he has made my paths crooked.
There is no way out from his suffering and God is not answering his prayers.
10 He is a bear lying in wait for me,
a lion in hiding;
11 he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces;
he has made me desolate;
12 he bent his bow and set me
as a target for his arrow.
He is like a person mauled and torn apart by a wild animal, like the target for an archer.
13 He drove into my kidneys
the arrows of his quiver;
14 I have become the laughingstock of all peoples,
the object of their taunts all day long.
15 He has filled me with bitterness;
he has sated me with wormwood.
He is full of arrows, he is shamed and full of bitterness. Wormwood is a plant with a bitter taste.
16 He has made my teeth grind on gravel,
and made me cower in ashes;
17 my soul is bereft of peace;
I have forgotten what happiness is;
18 so I say, “My endurance has perished;
so has my hope from the Lord.”
He has no peace, he can’t remember what happiness is, and his endurance is gone. This is a person who knows what hopelessness feels like, as he says in v. 18, my hope has perished. Then the poem goes on to talk about –
Finding hope again
19 Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
20 My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.21 But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
He gives a brief prayer for God to remember his suffering, because he can only remember it and be overwhelmed by it. But v. 21 begins in a different direction. This is where he remembers who God is, and this gives him hope.
22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
24 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
Remembering who God is, gives him hope. Specifically two qualities are mentioned:
- “steadfast love” – which can be translated as kindness, faithful love or great love.
- “mercies” or compassion. It is the love that a parent has for a child.
And then God’s “faithfulness” in giving this steadfast love and mercy is highlighted:
- God’s steadfast love “never ceases”
- God’s mercies “never come to an end”
- “They are new every morning”
This is his portion or allotment in life. God’s ever renewed love. He has lost everything else – his city and home were destroyed and no doubt he had family who were killed. And yet this is enough. As v.24 says, “’The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’”
A word of hope for us
Now I can say with great confidence that I have not suffered as much as the writer of this poem has. And I thank God for that. But precisely because he has suffered so much, he has the ability to speak to us. For if he can find hope in God in his circumstances, surely we can as well.
Whether we are being disciplined for our sins, as was the case here with Jerusalem, or God is just letting us go through hard times to train us and build our character, or we are experiencing good times God’s steadfast love and mercy and his faithfulness in giving these is what sustains us. It is the basis of our hope for the future.
This is the text I first shared with you when I came 9 years ago; my first sermon as your pastor. I told you that our hope in that time of transition was not in me, or in you, or in our circumstances, but only in God. And so I end by saying the same thing to you today.
As your pastor I now commend you into the hands of our God who faithfully gives you his steadfast love and mercies day by day. And I encourage you to have a strong hope for the future, because of who God is.
Christian teaching 
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