The Hinge of Hope: Arguing Your Way Back to God
Introduction: The Sanity of True Lament
We live in a sentimental age, an age that has traded the robust, sinewy faith of our fathers for a therapeutic, cotton candy deity. When suffering comes, as it always does, the modern world has only two bankrupt responses. The first is a brittle stoicism, a stiff upper lip that denies the reality of the pain. The second is a squishy emotionalism, which makes a god out of our feelings and demands that the universe validate our victimhood. Both are lies, and both will leave you shattered when the walls of your own Jerusalem are torn down.
The Bible, in its rugged honesty, gives us a third way. It gives us the gift of lament. Lament is not faithless complaining. Lament is not the whining of a spoiled child who did not get his way. True, biblical lament is a form of spiritual warfare. It is the act of a covenant child grabbing hold of the horns of the altar, in the midst of chaos and darkness, and arguing with God on the basis of God's own character and promises. It is refusing to let God go until He blesses you.
And there is no greater school for this holy art than the third chapter of Lamentations. Jeremiah, writing from the smoking ruins of God's holy city, has been plumbing the depths of despair. But right here, in the very center of the book, the poem pivots. This chapter is the hinge on which the entire book of sorrow turns toward hope. It is a master class in how to preach to your own soul when your soul is bowed down to the dust. It teaches us that the path out of the pit is not to ignore the darkness, but to find the bedrock of God's character at the bottom of it, and to build our house there.
The Text
Remember my affliction and my homelessness, the wormwood and gall. Surely my soul remembers And is bowed down within me. This I will return to my heart; Therefore I will wait in hope. The lovingkindnesses of Yahweh indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness. “Yahweh is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I wait for Him.” Yahweh is good to those who hope in Him, To the soul who seeks Him. It is good that he waits silently For the salvation of Yahweh. It is good for a man that he should bear The yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone and be silent Since He has laid it on him. Let him put his mouth in the dust; Perhaps there is hope. Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes him; Let him be saturated with reproach. For the Lord will not reject forever, For if He causes grief, Then He will have compassion According to His abundant lovingkindness. For He does not afflict from His heart Or grieve the sons of men...
(Lamentations 3:19-66 LSB)
The Deliberate Turn (vv. 19-24)
Jeremiah begins by staring his misery square in the face. He does not minimize it.
"Remember my affliction and my homelessness, the wormwood and gall. Surely my soul remembers and is bowed down within me. This I will return to my heart; Therefore I will wait in hope." (Lamentations 3:19-21)
The taste of "wormwood and gall" is the taste of bitter poison. This is the cup of judgment. His soul is not just sad; it is "bowed down," crushed under the weight of reality. But then comes the pivot, the most crucial intellectual and spiritual move a man can make. "This I will return to my heart." What is "this"? It is not the affliction. It is what he is about to say next. He is making a conscious, deliberate decision to stop listening to his feelings and to start preaching truth to himself. This is not positive thinking. This is covenantal recollection. He is choosing the curriculum for his own soul.
And what is the truth he preaches? It is the bedrock of all reality.
"The lovingkindnesses of Yahweh indeed never cease, For His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness. 'Yahweh is my portion,' says my soul, 'Therefore I wait for Him.'" (Lamentations 3:22-24)
The word for "lovingkindnesses" is hesed. This is not a flimsy, sentimental affection. This is God's covenant loyalty, His unbreakable, sworn allegiance to His people. Jeremiah, sitting in the rubble of a city destroyed by God's judgment, declares that God's covenant loyalty has not, in fact, failed. How can this be? Because the covenant always had curses for disobedience and blessings for obedience. The judgment itself was an act of covenant faithfulness. But hesed also means God will never ultimately cast off His people. His compassions are plural, they are relentless, and they are "new every morning." God's mercies have no expiration date. Every sunrise is a fresh declaration of God's sustaining grace. And so he roars from the pit, "Great is Your faithfulness." This is not a whisper from a comfortable pew; it is a war cry from the ruins. The conclusion is that if God Himself is your "portion," your inheritance, then you have lost nothing of ultimate value, even if you have lost everything else.
The Goodness of the Yoke (vv. 25-33)
This hope is not a ticket out of suffering, but a way to endure it rightly. God's goodness is found in the waiting.
"Yahweh is good to those who hope in Him, To the soul who seeks Him. It is good that he waits silently For the salvation of Yahweh. It is good for a man that he should bear The yoke in his youth." (Lamentations 3:25-27)
Our culture despises waiting and sees all suffering as pointless evil. The Bible declares that it is "good" to wait silently and "good" for a man to bear the yoke. A yoke is for discipline, for labor, for submission. God uses affliction as His gymnasium. He is training His sons, building spiritual muscle, and breaking our pride. To learn this lesson in your youth is to be equipped for a lifetime of faithful service. The man who has never borne a yoke will be a useless man.
This submission has a distinct posture.
"Let him sit alone and be silent Since He has laid it on him. Let him put his mouth in the dust; Perhaps there is hope... For the Lord will not reject forever, For if He causes grief, Then He will have compassion... For He does not afflict from His heart Or grieve the sons of men." (Lamentations 3:28-33)
The silence here is not despair. It is the quiet recognition of God's absolute sovereignty. "He has laid it on him." If you do not believe this, you will either descend into bitterness against your circumstances or into rage against God. But if God has laid the yoke on you, then you can be still. Putting your mouth in the dust is the posture of utter humility. And it is from that low place that the seed of hope can sprout. Why? Because the God who lays the yoke is a Father. His rejection is not final. His grief is purposeful. He does not enjoy afflicting His children any more than a loving father enjoys disciplining his son. His heart is for compassion; His motive is redemption.
Sovereignty, Sin, and the Silent Heavens (vv. 34-54)
Jeremiah then wrestles with the problem of evil and the reality of sin. God is sovereign, but He is not the author of sin.
"To crush under His feet All the prisoners of the land... These things the Lord does not see with approval... Is it not from the mouth of the Most High That both calamities and good go forth? Why should any living person or any man Complain because of his sins?" (Lamentations 3:34-39)
God does not approve of the sinful actions of the Babylonians. He hates injustice. And yet, nothing happens unless He commands it. Both good and calamity proceed from His mouth. How do we resolve this? By looking in the mirror. The ultimate reason for the calamity is not the Babylonians, but Judah's sin. Therefore, the right response is not to complain about the instrument of judgment, but to repent of the sin that necessitated it. "Let us search out and examine our ways, And let us return to Yahweh" (v. 40).
But this theological clarity does not erase the lived experience of agony. Jeremiah is brutally honest about how it feels to be under God's judgment.
"You have covered Yourself with a cloud So that no prayer can pass through. You have made us mere scum and refuse... My enemies without cause Hunted me down like a bird; They have silenced my life in the pit And have placed a stone on me. Waters flowed over my head; I said, 'I am cut off!'" (Lamentations 3:44-54)
This is what it feels like. God seems impossibly distant. Prayer seems to hit a brass ceiling. The world treats you like garbage. Your enemies triumph. You feel hunted, buried, and drowned. This is the dark night of the soul. Biblical faith does not require you to pretend you do not feel these things. It gives you the language to speak of them, to cry out to the very God who feels so far away.
The Cry From the Depths (vv. 55-66)
And that is precisely what he does. From the bottom of the pit, he prays.
"I called on Your name, O Yahweh, Out of the lowest pit. You have heard my voice... You drew near when I called on You; You said, 'Do not fear!' O Lord, You have pleaded my soul's cause; You have redeemed my life." (Lamentations 3:55-58)
The moment he calls, God acts. He hears, He draws near, He speaks peace, and He takes up the legal case of His servant. God becomes our divine attorney, our advocate who pleads our cause. This is a staggering reversal. The one who was judged now finds his justification in God.
This confidence in God as his advocate leads to the final, startling section: a prayer for God's vengeance.
"You have seen all their vengeance... I am their mocking song. You will recompense them, O Yahweh, According to the work of their hands... You will pursue them in anger and destroy them From under the heavens of Yahweh!" (Lamentations 3:60-66)
Our timid, modern ears recoil at such language. But this is not petty, personal revenge. This is a righteous appeal for cosmic justice. Jeremiah is handing the sword to God and asking Him to act as the righteous judge of all the earth. He is praying for God's kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. A world where evil is not judged is a moral horror. To pray for judgment on God's enemies is to have a high view of God's holiness and justice.
The Gospel According to Jeremiah
As we read this, we cannot help but see the shadow of another. Who is the one who truly bore the yoke for us? Who was saturated with reproach and gave His cheek to those who struck Him? Who was hunted without cause, silenced in the pit of a tomb with a great stone rolled over it?
Who cried out from the lowest pit, feeling the heavens were covered by a cloud, crying, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?" Who drank the cup of wormwood and gall, the full cup of God's wrath against sin, down to the dregs?
It was the Lord Jesus Christ. This chapter is His story. He endured the ultimate lament so that we would not have to. He was cut off so that we could be brought near. He was rejected forever in those dark hours on the cross so that we could hear the words, "The Lord will not reject forever."
Because of Christ, the promise of verse 22 is ironclad for all who are in Him. The hesed of God will never cease for you, because it ceased for Christ in your place. His compassions will never fail you, because the Father's compassion failed Him there. When you are in the pit, your hope is not in your own ability to climb out. Your hope is that Christ has already been to the bottom of the pit for you. He is your advocate. He has pleaded your soul's cause and redeemed your life with His own. Therefore, you can wait with hope, for His faithfulness is not just great; it is finished.