The Lord’s Day Morning
August 28, 2005

Dr. Derek W. H. Thomas

Now turn with me if you would to the Book of Lamentations. The Book of Lamentations...it comes by way of a conclusion to the Book of Jeremiah, often thought to be written by Jeremiah, and we’re going to look this morning at what is probably one of half a dozen of the best known and best loved texts in all of the Bible. (If you don’t know this text, I don’t know where you’ve been!) "Great is Thy faithfulness...."

Before we read the passage – and we’re going to read a passage that’s slightly bigger than the one advertised in your bulletin – we’ll be beginning at verse 21 of chapter 3 of Lamentations and reading through to verse 24. Before we do so, let’s look to God in prayer.

Our Father, again You know our hearts. You know all there is to know about us, and we thank You for a word that is infallible and inerrant, breathed out by You, that holy men of old wrote as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Help us now to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, and all for Jesus’ sake. Amen.

This is God’s holy word:

Amen. And may God bless the reading of His holy and inerrant word.

Who doesn’t know those words? Thomas Chisholm, the hymn writer, wrote them in 1923, and of course they’re based and taken from the text that we have before us this morning: Lamentations, chapter 3.

Lamentations 3, like many other parts of Scripture, is written in a very peculiar and very definite style. It’s an acrostic based on the Hebrew alphabet. In Lamentations 1, 2, and 4, each of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet begins a separate successive verse of the chapter. In Lamentations 3 – it’s a much longer section – each letter begins three verses in succession.

I. The context of God’s faithfulness.
    Before we can look at the text this morning, we need to look at its context. That’s true of any text, but it’s particularly true of this one. Imagine that many of you know this text off by heart. It’s a favorite text. It’s one I’m sure you cite and recite to yourself and to others again and again, but I wonder this morning if you have ever looked at the context in which it sits.

That’s the first thing I want us to do this morning. Verses 22, 23, and 24 all begin with the eighth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but we have to take the previous letters of the Hebrew alphabet, going all the way back to verse 1. Let’s look at it together. If you’ve got a Bible before you, I urge you to take a look at this. It might astonish you, if you haven’t been in Lamentations 3 for a while. I don’t think in all of Scripture – now, this is a bold statement – but I don’t think in all of Scripture there is a greater contrast than what you’re going to find here.

Verse 1:

Drop down to verse 15:

Astonishing, isn’t it? That’s the context of this great text, "Great is Thy Faithfulness." I doubt there’s a darker pit in the whole Bible. Maybe Job 3, possibly Jeremiah 20, possibly the 88^th Psalm. And in this darkness comes this light that shines, a message of God’s faithfulness comes from a book that is set in the midst of national and ecclesiastical disaster. It’s describing...it’s probably Jeremiah who’s describing it...the downfall, the destruction of the city of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. ...the decades, 15-20 year period before that where there were constant assaults upon the city until it finally fell. Jeremiah’s probably writing some 10 years after the event, and he composes a series of poems, five of them in all, describing the catastrophe of the loss of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple where God was worshiped. The stones of the temple, the walls...you got upset because of the sanctuary, I know it! Imagine if you’d seen the temple burned to the ground, stones blackened with ash.

Lamentations is not the original name for the Book of Lamentations. Lamentations was the name given to it by the Greek translators who came after the exile when they didn’t know Hebrew well anymore. The original Hebrew title is taken from the first word of chapters 1, 2, and 4. It’s the word how. How in the world can this ever have happened? How could God allow this to take place? It’s meant to convey a sense of profound shock. As you read through these poems, you hear something of the circumstances that surrounded the destruction of Jerusalem – the thousands of people who died, brutally savaged...women, mothers, who were reduced to eating their children...yes! In Jerusalem! Prior to 586 when they were besieged and surrounded and they were starving, they were reduced to cannibalism. The cream of Judah’s citizens were taken into captivity, and they couldn’t worship God anymore because the temple was gone.

And it’s not just the Babylonians who did this. It’s not just Nebuchadnezzar who is to blame for this. Turn back to chapter 1 and verse 12.

God did it! God did it! That’s the problem! It’s one thing to look at trials and tribulations and terrible things and say ‘Satan did it’, but it’s another – especially for us...especially for us who believe in the sovereignty of God, and the decree of God, and the will of God, and the paramountcy of God’s involvement in all things...yes, God has done this. Not for us, you see, when terrible things happen, ‘God wasn’t there.’ Oh, no! God is right there in the very midst of it. How could You? How could You? Lamentations is saying. That’s the real problem, isn’t it?

II. The core of God’s faithfulness.
    Secondly, I want us to see the core. If we see the context of God’s faithfulness, I want us to see in the second place the core of it, the heart of it.

Do you know what this word is, faithfulness? Do you know what this word is in Hebrew? Yes, you do! Amen. Amen, that’s what it is. It’s the amen of God. It’s a word that is used in

II Kings 18 to describe the very pillars of the temple, because it was meant to be something steadfast and sure, and dependable – like a rock. [Chevy – like a rock!] That’s what he’s saying. God is utterly dependable. God is utterly trustworthy.

In the midst of all of this mayhem that brings him to the very dust itself, he’s asserting the steadfastness and immovability, and the trustworthiness and the dependability, and the rock-like nature of God. It’s the word Jesus will take, translated to another language. You remember on some occasions, Jesus, when He’s about to say something really, really important, He’ll preface it. The King James rendered the word verily, verily I say unto you...truly, truly I say unto you. Everything that Jesus says is true, but now I want you to pay attention because this is really, really, really true!

And you notice in verse 21 [chapter 3] he says "I call to mind...." I call to mind – a deliberate thing. You see, this may be true - the death, the brutality, the destruction of Jerusalem, the savagery, the problem, the trial, the difficulty that brings me to the very dust itself, but there’s one thing else that’s true. There’s something else that’s true, and I call it to mind. I do a deliberate act of reflection and call to mind, God is faithful.

Now you’re running ahead of me! So stop! Stop! I can’t reconcile these two. I can’t answer all of the vast number of questions that all of this is throwing in my direction, and when I look at it, it brings me down. But I turn my back on that, and I bring this to mind: God is faithful. Yes, there’s that. I don’t understand that; I know that He is involved in that; I know that nothing happens without God willing it to happen, without God willing it to happen before it happens, without God willing it to happen in the way that it happens. But I can’t answer those questions. But I know this to be true...I know this to be true: He is a Rock. He is a Rock.

Exodus 34:6 – "He is abounding in love and faithfulness."
Deuteronomy 32:4 – "He is a faithful God."
Psalm 89:2 – "You established Your faithfulness in heaven itself."
Verse 8 – "Your faithfulness surrounds You."

God is faithful, and over and over and over, like a needle stuck in a groove of a record [...got to be over 50 to know what I’m talking about...] a needle stuck in a record: click...God is faithful; click...God is faithful; click....

III. The companions of God’s faithfulness.
    Thirdly, I want us to see the companions of God’s faithfulness. If we’ve seen the context of God’s faithfulness and the core of God’s faithfulness, in the third place I want us to see the Companions of God’s Faithfulness, and there are two of them.

The first one is at the very beginning of verse 22 – lovingkindnesses, or in some of your translations, steadfast love, or in perhaps one of your translations, great love. There is the faithfulness of God, and then there is the steadfastness of God. There is this steadfast love of God, there is this covenant love of God, and the word is in the plural: steadfastnesses, because you can’t adequately say it in the singular because it’s so multi-dimensional, and it’s so great, and it’s so vast. So you’ve got faithfulness, and you’ve got steadfastness or lovingkindnesses, or the second companion (in the second half of verse 22), compassions, or, as in one translation, mercies. It’s the word you would use for a mother’s love for her children.

We sang a psalm earlier on this morning, Psalm 103, and in that psalm it said something like ‘God is like a father to us.’ God is like a father to us. Well, it’s not the father figure here, it’s actually the mother figure. God is like a mother to us.

Mothers, you’ve been in bed at night and you’ve shed tears on behalf of your children. You’d have done anything to take their place, to change their circumstances. You’ve got up in the middle of the night to young crying children and you’ve nursed them, taken them in your arms and comforted them, patted them on the back. You’ve sung lullabies to them, kissed them, hugged them, reassured them of your love. You’ve sat there nervous as a kitten when your little children are about to perform in a school play or in a spelling bee or something...play football. You’ve been there when they’re hurting.

And you see what Jeremiah is doing when he speaks of the compassions of God? Why do you think he’s written all these verses that go before? Why does he rehearse before he begins to say "great is Thy faithfulness"...why does he take twenty verses to rehearse in God’s presence all the bad things, the terrible things, the horrendous things, the unspeakable things? Do you think Jeremiah thought for one minute that God didn’t know about this? No, my friend. The reason why he does that is because he wants to solicit the compassion of God. He wants to solicit the compassion of God.

In 1996, in Christianity Today, Susan Shelley, a director of Christian Education in a church in Chicago, she was telling us about the birth of her first child, Mandy, a daughter, born with microcephaly, a small brain. She writes extensively, pages, about the seizures that would grip Mandy several times a day, the constant medication, the visits to the hospital, the surgeries that they went through, the nights that they spent without sleep, the tears that they shed, the tensions that came into their marriage as a result of it. And then, unexpectedly, she discovers she’s pregnant again. And she visits the doctor, and she says the doctors tells her in what she says is a matter of fact voice that the fetus was malformed. The aorta attached incorrectly, missing portions of the brain, a club foot, cleft palate, cleft tongue, possibly spina bifida. It is a condition, he said, incompatible with life, and he urged her to have an abortion. And she said no...and goes to full term and delivers a little baby boy. And the nurses say to her and her husband, "Do you have a name for him?" "Toby," she says, "Short for the Bible name Tobiah, which means God is good." When her husband was recounting this story to a group of alumni at Wheaton College, he concluded with these words: "Life is hard, and God is good." Life is hard, and God is good. That’s Lamentations: life is hard, and God is good.

That’s what Jeremiah is saying: Life is hard, and God is good. His mercies are literally new for the mornings. Astonishing....

IV. The confidence of God’s faithfulness.
    Which leads to a fourth part: Confidence of God’s Faithfulness. The Context; The Core; The Companions; The Confidence of God’s Faithfulness.

Do you notice a subtle change that takes place between verses 21 and 24? In 21, he is speaking, as it were, about God, but by the end of the passage he is speaking to God. "Great is Thy faithfulness." This isn’t some cold, abstract, religious, philosophical notion that he has. This is something which he is asserting in the very presence of his Lord. "Your faithfulness is great."

And two things flow. Notice at the beginning of verse 24, "The Lord is my portion." It’s hard to translate it. It comes from the language of the Levitical priests and the allotment that was theirs, but basically what it means is "God is everything to me. God is my life. God is my all."

And then twice, at the beginning in verse 21 and then again in verse 24, like bookends – "I will hope in Him." Some of your translations will translate one "I will hope in Him" and translate the other "I will wait for Him." Hope/wait – do you see what he’s saying? I’m faced with these incredible problems, trials that come into my life, into my family, into my marriage, into my home, into my church, but I will wait for Him. I won’t try to answer all of the problems. I won’t try to answer all of the questions. I will sit by His feet and wait for Him. I’ll wait with patience. I’ll wait with confidence. I’ll wait with assurance. And when God wants to explain it to me, I’m ready. And if God decides not to explain it to me, but simply to ask me to believe Him on trust, I’ll do that, too, because there is one thing that is a non-negotiable. There is one thing that cannot change. There’s one thing that cannot be denied. God is faithful. Great...great is Thy faithfulness.

Dear hurting, grieving, sorrowing heart, will you say that this morning? Will you stand in the face of whatever providence has thrown in your direction and assert with absolute confidence, "God is faithful. He sent His Son, my Savior, to die for me."

We’re going to sing No. 32, Great Is Thy Faithfulness, and the acoustics are a little challenged, so I want you all to get that voice from down below somewhere and let it out: Great is Thy faithfulness!

Let’s stand to praise God.

[Congregational Hymn: Great Is Thy Faithfulness]

Receive the Lord’s benediction.

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.