I was reading the great and terrible third chapter of Lamentations this morning (just a little something light to start off my day) – I am struck by the honesty that can descend on a human being when he has reached the end of himself, and all his illusions are gone.

The great prophet wails in the ruins of Jerusalem:

I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of His wrath.

He has led me and made me walk

In darkness and not in light.

Surely He has turned His hand against me

Time and time again throughout the day.

He has aged my flesh and my skin,

And broken my bones.

He has besieged me

And surrounded me with bitterness and woe.

He has set me in dark places

Like the dead of long ago.

He has hedged me in so that I cannot get out;

He has made my chain heavy.

Even when I cry and shout,

He shuts out my prayer.

Jeremiah suffered something that most of us have never faced – the complete destruction of everything he knew. And the absence of the God who had animated his bold and tragic prophecies for so long.

Even when I cry and shout,

He shuts out my prayer.

I appreciate (although I cannot articulate it well) the honesty of the prophet. He knows that it isn’t the cruel Babylonians who have destroyed him.

God has.

God is the one who has laid the siege, not Nebuchadnezzar. Do I understand these things?

No.

But my Lord is greater than I can understand, and His ways are higher, His thoughts deeper, and His purposes beyond comprehension. I tend to keep Him at a safe distance, and relate to him via the dry vehicles of logic and stated truths. Nice and safe. And God is indeed the great Logos and the Author of Truth. But my Lord is also a warrior poet, an artist without parallel. He inspired his weeping prophet to write these words in a Hebrew acrostic poem in the middle of the book of Lamentations, and in the midst of destruction and hopelessness. For some reason that amazes me. A poem when I would have simply been shrieking. If Jeremiah can write these words prostrate in the rubble and blood of shattered Jerusalem, surely I can cling to and hope in God in the midst of my easy, untroubled life?

This I recall to my mind,

Therefore I have hope.

Through the LORD’s mercies we are not consumed,

Because His compassions fail not.

They are new every morning;

Great is Your faithfulness.

“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,

“Therefore I hope in Him!”

The LORD is good to those who wait for Him,

To the soul who seeks Him.

It is good that one should hope and wait quietly

For the salvation of the LORD.

It is good for a man to bear

The yoke in his youth.

Let him sit alone and keep silent,

Because God has laid it on him;

Let him put his mouth in the dust–

There may yet be hope.

Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes him,

And be full of reproach.

For the Lord will not cast off forever.

Though He causes grief,

Yet He will show compassion

According to the multitude of His mercies.

For He does not afflict willingly,

Nor grieve the children of men.

He does not afflict willingly. But He does afflict, in His wisdom and His love, and for a time. He will not cast off forever. Which means that we can hope! His faithfulness is great, and His mercies are new, every single morning.

I pray for a new morning in the life of the one who feels cast off, who has lost hope, who’s chains are heavy and who’s prayer seems shut out. God is not absent. The cynics and fools have it wrong – God is not dead. He is here, alive and the Author of life, and He will not cast off forever. His faithfulness is greater than we can imagine.

That’s one reason we sometimes have trouble imagining it.