Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

I am the man who has seen affliction
    by the rod of the Lord’s wrath.
He has driven me away and made me walk
    in darkness rather than light;
indeed, he has turned his hand against me
    again and again, all day long.
He has made my skin and my flesh grow old
    and has broken my bones.
He has besieged me and surrounded me
    with bitterness and hardship.
He has made me dwell in darkness
    like those long dead.
He has walled me in so I cannot escape;
    he has weighed me down with chains.
Even when I call out or cry for help,
    he shuts out my prayer.
He has barred my way with blocks of stone;
    he has made my paths crooked.
Like a bear lying in wait,
    like a lion in hiding,
he dragged me from the path and mangled me
    and left me without help.
He drew his bow
    and made me the target for his arrows.
He pierced my heart
    with arrows from his quiver.
I became the laughingstock of all my people;
    they mock me in song all day long.
He has filled me with bitter herbs
    and given me gall to drink.
He has broken my teeth with gravel;
    he has trampled me in the dust.
I have been deprived of peace;
    I have forgotten what prosperity is.
So I say, “My splendor is gone
    and all that I had hoped from the Lord.”
I remember my affliction and my wandering,
    the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
    and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
    and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
    for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
    great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
    therefore I will wait for him.”
The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
    to the one who seeks him;
it is good to wait quietly
    for the salvation of the Lord.
It is good for a man to bear the yoke
    while he is young.
Let him sit alone in silence,
    for the Lord has laid it on him.
Let him bury his face in the dust—
    there may yet be hope.
Let him offer his cheek to one who would strike him,
    and let him be filled with disgrace.
For no one is cast off
    by the Lord forever.
Though he brings grief, he will show compassion,
    so great is his unfailing love.
For he does not willingly bring affliction
    or grief to anyone.
To crush underfoot
    all prisoners in the land,
to deny people their rights
    before the Most High,
to deprive them of justice—
    would not the Lord see such things?
Who can speak and have it happen
    if the Lord has not decreed it?
Is it not from the mouth of the Most High
    that both calamities and good things come?
Why should the living complain
    when punished for their sins?
Let us examine our ways and test them,
    and let us return to the Lord.
Let us lift up our hearts and our hands
    to God in heaven, and say:
“We have sinned and rebelled
    and you have not forgiven.
“You have covered yourself with anger and pursued us;
    you have slain without pity.
You have covered yourself with a cloud
    so that no prayer can get through.
You have made us scum and refuse
    among the nations.
“All our enemies have opened their mouths
    wide against us.
We have suffered terror and pitfalls,
    ruin and destruction.”
Streams of tears flow from my eyes
    because my people are destroyed.
My eyes will flow unceasingly,
    without relief,
until the Lord looks down
    from heaven and sees.
What I see brings grief to my soul
    because of all the women of my city.
Those who were my enemies without cause
    hunted me like a bird.
They tried to end my life in a pit
    and threw stones at me;
the waters closed over my head,
    and I thought I was about to perish.
I called on your name, Lord,
    from the depths of the pit.
You heard my plea: “Do not close your ears
    to my cry for relief.”
You came near when I called you,
    and you said, “Do not fear.”
You, Lord, took up my case;
    you redeemed my life.
Lord, you have seen the wrong done to me.
    Uphold my cause!
You have seen the depth of their vengeance,
    all their plots against me.
Lord, you have heard their insults,
    all their plots against me—
what my enemies whisper and mutter
    against me all day long.
Look at them! Sitting or standing,
    they mock me in their songs.
Pay them back what they deserve, Lord,
    for what their hands have done.
Put a veil over their hearts,
    and may your curse be on them!
Pursue them in anger and destroy them
    from under the heavens of the Lord.

• Lamentations 3:1-66

Noted Biblical Scholars, Teachers, and Preachers Comments

Lamentations 3:1-20 ‘the man who has seen affliction’: “Jeremiah’s distress in such tragedy comes from God. Even the righteous experience ‘the rod of God’s wrath.’”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Lamentations 3:1 ‘no matter the trouble, others have been there’: “To suppose no others ever felt as they do is a mistake most people make when in trouble. We should not think no one was ever so broken in pieces as we are. In fact, this chapter is full of sorrow. It is a most graphic portrait of a heart that is awakened and made to feel its lost estate. The first part of this chapter is one of the saddest in the whole hook of God. Yet the chapter does not end as it begins. There is daylight for the poor sufferer after all. We must read Jeremiah’s sad utterances in the hope that, if we have ever known experiences similar to his, we may learn where to find comfort even as he did.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:2 ‘led into darkness’: “This seems to be the hardest part of our lot—that God should lead us into darkness. Yet that is the sweetest thing about our trial because, if the darkness is in the place where God has led us, it is best for us to be in the dark.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:3 ‘struck with heavy blows’: “As if when a man is about to strike, he strikes not with his open hand but turns his hand, so the prophet says God did with him. He felt that he was being stricken with the heaviest blows God seemed able to give.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:4 ‘experiencing excessive grief’: “As people through excessive grief sometimes appear to grow prematurely aged, so the prophet says he had gone through grief.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:7 ‘weight is too heavy to move’: “As the convict sometimes drags about his chain and has a ball at his foot, so the prophet felt as if God had shackled him with a heavy chain so he could not move because of its terrible weight.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:8 ‘unheard  or unheeded prayer’: “What a sorrow is this—to feel that even prayer itself is unavailing! You must not think, because sometimes your prayers seem to be unheard or unheeded and you are allowed to continue in sorrow, that therefore the Lord does not love you.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:13 ‘’: “Jeremiah felt as if God’s arrows were not merely shot at him but that they had actually hit and wounded him in his vital parts.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:16 ‘grit in the cake’: “People of the East usually baked their cakes on the hearth, and frequently there would be in the cakes pieces of grit, perhaps large lumps of cinder, and sometimes small gravel stones that would break the teeth.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:21 ‘hope lives on’: “In all his sorrow Jeremiah still had hope. Oh, what a mercy it is that hope can live on when all things else appear to die!”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:22 ‘God’s mercy is shown to us each day’: “All men are recipients of God’s mercy. Don’t think for a minute that when you repented and came back from the swine pen to the Father‘s house that mercy then began to operate. No, mercy had been operating all the time. Lamentations says, ‘It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.’ So remember that if you hadn’t had the mercy of God all the time, stooping in pity, withholding judgment, you‘d have perished long ago. The cruel dictator is a recipient of the mercy of God. The wicked murderer is a recipient of the mercy of God. And the blackest heart that lies in the lowest wallow in the country is a recipient of the mercy of God. That doesn’t mean they’ll be saved or converted and finally reach heaven. But it means that God is holding up His justice because He’s having mercy. He is waiting because a Savior died. All of us are recipients of the mercy of God.”

• A. W. Tozer, The Attributes of God I

Lamentations 3:23 ‘every day brings mercy’: “If every day brings its trouble, every day also brings its mercy. No one can say that so truly as the person who has known what it is to prove God’s great faithfulness in the midst of great affliction.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:24 ‘’: “With his mouth full of gravel stones and made drunk with wormwood, with overwhelmed sorrow, yet Jeremiah says, ‘The LORD is my portion.’ Whatever else we have lost, we have not lost our God.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:25 ‘Wait!’: “Even though it is out of the depths of the utmost distress that we seek God, we will find him to be good to us. ‘To those who wait for him.’ We must not be in a hurry. We should not expect to be delivered out of our trouble the first time we begin to cry out to God. ‘Wait for him.’”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:26 ‘’: “God’s time is always the best time. To deliver us just now might be to deprive us of the benefit of the trouble. We must bear it until it produces ‘the peaceful fruit of righteousness’ (Heb 12:11).”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:27 ‘The yoke in his youth’: “This speaks of the duty from God, including disciplinary training, that Jeremiah received in his youth (cf. Jer. 1:6, 7).”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Lamentations 3:28 ‘affliction leading to meditation’: “When it makes a person get alone to contemplate and meditate, affliction is already doing that person good.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:29 ‘the humble shall find hope’: “That is the way to find it—not lifting our mouths to defy the Lord, or to murmur at him, nor yet opening our mouths in boastfulness, but putting our mouths in the dust. A humble, penitent, resigned, silent, submissive spirit will soon find hope.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:30 ‘give his cheek’: “The Lord Iesus did this (cf. Is. 50:6; 1 Pet. 2:23).”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Lamentations 3:31 ‘God still loves us’: “We must get a grip of that blessed truth of God. The Lord may, to all appearance, cast us oft for a little while, but he will not cast us off forever.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:33 ‘’: “That is not God’s way of acting. Tyrants may do so, but the tender, compassionate God—our gracious, loving Father—will never do that. If we lie in the dust before him, he will not tread on us.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:52-63 ‘My enemies’: “Jeremiah’s description of persecution sounded much like the time when his enemies at the palace had cast him into a cistern (cf. v. 53; Jer. 38:4—6). God reassured him in answer to prayer (v. 57), and redeemed him (v. 58) by sending Ebed-melech to rescue him (cf. Jer. 38:7-13). Jeremiah pleads for justice to be rendered on those enemies (vv. 59-63).”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Lamentations 3:58 ‘our champion and redeemer’: “What a comfort it is that Christ in heaven is our champion, our great advocate, and that he pleads our cause before the throne of God. Even more, he who is our champion is also our Redeemer; and, therefore, we are doubly safe.”

• Charles H. Spurgeon, from sermon notes

Lamentations 3:64-66 ‘Repay them’: “This imprecatory prayer for divine vengeance would be answered in Babylon’s fall (cf. Is. 46; 47; Jer. 50; 51; Dan. 5). It would also receive its ultimate answer at the Great White Throne judgment (Rev. 20:11-15).”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

 

My Thoughts

Lamentations, as a book of the Bible, is written in the same style as Psalm 119, except the fifth chapter.   Lamentations 1-4 are each acrostics, with each segment of the poem starting with each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, alphabetically.  Lamentations 3 may look longer, divided into three verses per poetic segment, but all other chapters are twenty-two verses (Lamentations 5 not written as an acrostic but maintaining the pattern). Note: In Psalm 119, each segment of the acrostic poem is divided into eight verses. Without some English translations noting the Hebrew letter, the acrostic pattern is then lost in translation.

The author identifies himself as the man who sees affliction.  He then describes his own affliction.  Lamentations starts with Jerusalem as a widow.  It then shifts into a lament for the women.  Now the affliction is for Jeremiah himself.

He was tormented in many ways by the royal court.  He was mocked and ridiculed by the people in so many different ways.  It reminds me of the POW camp training that I experienced.  I was the highest ranking person in the camp, although I was unaware of that distinction until afterwards.  What made me remember that training is that I had to experience every type of torture and punishment that they were allowed to inflict.  Only then could I be instructed to be the prisoner in charge, so to speak.  Jeremiah seemed to have been given every torture, torment, and punishment up to death.  He barely avoided death on more than one occasion.  Thus, when he speaks of affliction of all kinds, he is qualified in saying it.  When he speaks of God hearing his lament from the pit, that was a literal statement, probably from the cistern, but when in a real prison, it could have been a dungeon or basement within Jonathan’s house.

And yet, about a third into this chapter’s lament, he says that he has hope.  God’s compassion never fails.  And as the song goes, “Great is Thy Faithfulness, Great is Thy Faithfulness, morning by morning new mercies I see.”

Then, Jeremiah speaks of the yoke being placed while young.  When the book of Jeremiah starts, Jeremiah resists the call, saying that he is too young.  Now, he comes to the same realization that the physical fight is best done while young.

Consider the military.  They can retire after twenty years.  For someone fresh out of high school, they can retire before turning forty years old.  I knew many who went to other careers and spent enough time there to collect two full retirement checks.  And they often ensure that you do not spend past thirty years in the service.  I once had a first sergeant who lied about his age and served during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.  He tearfully said goodbye to us when the military said he was too old.  Now, general grade officers can only retire by act of congress.  They can be much older.

But with this in mind, I recently counted a variety of aches and pains.  It has been roughly 40 years since I last wore the uniform.  The yoke of affliction is best to be placed on the young.  If they did to me now what they did then, I would not put up with it.  The phrase “I’m too old for this” comes to mind.  I know of what Jeremiah speaks.

But the focus of this affliction is the punishment that God had Moses prophesy in the first five books of the Bible.  If Israel messed up, they would become exiles in a strange land.  As Jeremiah says here, why should we complain about the punishment that we deserve?  Should we not praise God for having shown us mercy until this point?

We must repent.  That is as true today as it was in the time of Jeremiah.  And note: Jeremiah did not deserve his punishment as the others did, but he joined them in Egypt, in exile, after all the torment and torture from his own people.  In Lamentations 3:50, there is that poignant phrase, “until the Lord looks down and sees.”  Otherwise, did Jeremiah ever lament that God could not see him in the pit?  No, God saw him.  God heard him.

And as Lamentations 3 ends, Jeremiah asks an imprecatory prayer to pay them back for what they did.  Veil their eyes so that they will not repent.  That seems harsh.  I have written in the past that when you are angry at a type of people or a group of people or a nation, imprecatory statements can be just.  “God, punish those that persecute your faithful followers.”  Once a face is applied, then we have a problem in that we are to love our enemies.  The only true way to live in peace is through forgiveness that is mutual.  But God will eventually look upon those who are not His, those who never had a repentant heart, and cast them into the Lake of Fire.  And those who accepted Jesus’ gift of salvation will cheer, for those sent into the Lake of Fire take sin and death with them.  We will be holy in the sight of our Heavenly Father.  We will praise Him all the more for giving us the gift of eternal life, something we could never earn on our own.

Some Serendipitous Reflections

“Lamentations 3: 1. Have you ever felt like the poet in the opening section of this chapter (vv.1-18)? Were you able to express those feelings to God? If so, how? If not, why? What kept you from giving up completely at that time?
“2. What portions of Scripture are especially helpful to you in difficult times? What hymns are especially meaningful to you? Why? Do you know these by heart? What benefit might there be in memorizing them?
“3. When you’re feeling forsaken and chastened how do you express your feelings? How do you avoid wallowing in self-pity? What is the danger of being too stoic or unemotional? What can you do to balance these two extremes?
“4. Do you grow more during easy times, or during tough times? What help does verse 33 (also Ho 5:3-5; Jas 1 :2-4) give you in thinking about affliction?
“5. In what ways do we lift up our hands, but not our hearts when we are in trouble (v.41)? What does true repentance look like? What do truly repentant people do? What will happen if you dare to embrace the Lord’s discipline as does this poet (see also Heb 12:11)?
“6. Based on Judah‘s experience, how seriously does God take the issue of sin? What does Jesus’ death on the cross add to this picture? How then should we treat sin in our own lives?
“7. What ‘compassions’ or ‘faithfulness’ (vv.22-23) has the Lord shown you this week? How have you shown your gratitude to God?”

• Lyman Coleman, et al, The NIV Serendipity Bible for Study Groups

Lamentations 3 had one set of questions.

Substitute whatever group for any reference to a small group or ask who could come to your aid.

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Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.