Bearing an Unbearably Just Anger

And He has multiplied in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation. And He has laid waste His booth like a garden, laid in ruins His meeting place. The Lord has made Zion forget festival and Sabbath, and in His fierce indignation has spurned king and priest. The Lord has scorned His altar, disowned His sanctuary. He has delivered into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces.

They raised a clamour in the house of the Lord as on the day of festival. The Lord determined to lay in ruins the wall of the daughters of Zion. He stretched out the measuring line. He did not restrain His hand from destroying. He caused rampart and wall to lament.

They languished together. Her gates have sunk into the ground. He has ruined and broken her bars. Her king and princes are among the nations. The law is no more, and her prophets find no vision from the Lord.

The elders of the daughters of Zion sit on the ground in silence. They have thrown dust on their heads and put on sackcloth. The young women of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground. My eyes are spent with weeping. My stomach churns.

My bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city. I cry to their mothers, where is bread and wine? As they faint like a wounded man in the streets of the city as their life is poured out on their mother's bosom. What can I say for you? To what compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem?

What can I liken to you that I may comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion? For your ruin is vast as the sea. Who can heal you? Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions. They have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes, but have seen for you oracles that are false and misleading.

All who pass along the way clap their hands at you and hiss and wag their heads at the daughters of Zion. Is this the city that was called the perfection of beauty, the joy of all the earth? All your enemies rail against you. They hiss. They gnash their teeth.

They cry. We have swallowed her. This is the day we have longed for. Now we have it. We see it.

The Lord has done what He purposed. He has carried out His word which He commanded long ago. He has thrown down without pity. He has made the enemy rejoice over you and exalted the might of your foes. Their heart cried to the Lord.

O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears stream down like a torrent day and night. Give yourself no rest, your eyes no respite. Arise. Cry out in the night. At the beginning of the night watches.

Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord. Lift your hands to Him for the lives of your children who faint for hunger at the head of every street. Look, O, and see, with whom have you dealt thus? Should women eat the fruit of their womb, the children of their tender care? Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord.

In the dust of the streets lie the young and the old. My young women and my young men have fallen by the sword. You have killed them in the day of Your anger, slaughtering without pity. You summoned as if to a festival day, my terrors on every side. And on the day of the anger of the Lord, no one escaped or survived.

Those whom I held and raised, my enemy destroyed. This is the word of the Lord. It's quite a complaint, isn't it? In this passage, we hear about the holy anger of the Lord. There's no escaping it.

I researched the Hebrew word for anger and how much it comes across the Old Testament. We'll put a graph on the screen that shows you where it appears in each book. As you see, the Mount Everest there, that is Lamentations. That is how much the Hebrew word for anger comes up in this book of the Bible. There is simply no escaping it.

And then the next graph will show you how much it appears in the book itself, in different chapters of the book, and you can see in our chapter today, Lamentations 2, is where the anger of the Lord is its most concentrated. This is why the sermon today is called bearing an unbearably just anger. Bearing an unbearably just anger. There's no escaping the holy anger, the just wrath, the rightful judgement of the Lord in this passage. A good God does get angry at evil.

God describes Himself as slow to anger, but that doesn't mean He never gets angry. His anger will eventually be kindled if evil goes on unchecked. And so I guess the question this raises for us is why should any of us seek Him or pray to Him? We're all deeply flawed. Jesus Himself called us evil.

If there is evil in us, mustn't God be our sworn enemy if He is just and He must punish evil and He will always punish sin? Why bother praying to a God who always judges sin? Why did Jeremiah and this surviving remnant bother praying to a God who had destroyed the city in punishment? Why bother? That's the key question we're going to be exploring today.

We're going to explore that together as we continue our series in the book of Lamentations. This book was written by the prophet Jeremiah in the wake of the utter devastation of Jerusalem. The city was under siege for a year and a half. Famine affected the people. The weakest died first.

Cannibalism was occurring for people just to survive. And when the walls were finally broken through, the Babylonians came in, and they slaughtered, and they took people off as slaves into exile on the long march back to Babylon. It's a situation so hard to comprehend that words seem inadequate. And that's why we've called this series words when there are none. Because in the wake of this catastrophe, Jeremiah picks up a pen and writes.

He writes words for the people, words to express their pain, their distress, and their prayers to God. The entire book is a series of laments, that's why it's called lamentations. A lament is a form of prayer which sufferers have used for millennia to express their pain and protests to God. And as we listen to the words in this book, even though it's a book written for guilty sufferers, people that were punished for their sin, we still have an opportunity to learn the language of lament, to learn the poetry of pain. So let's get into this chapter together, and we're going to explore it under four headings.

And the first one is this, when God becomes the enemy, the holy anger of the slow to anger God. That's what we see in the first eight verses. So I mentioned that the word, the Hebrew word for anger gets repeated a lot in this book, but it appears especially in these first eight verses, then disappears for a little bit, and then bookends the chapter at the end again. One of the other things that we see repeated as a phrase in this chapter is the phrase without mercy or without pity. So we see that at the beginning of this chapter.

We'll put a graph on the screen. This phrase without mercy actually doesn't occur in chapters 1, 4, and 5, obviously, and you can see from there, it occurs most in our chapter. That's another theme. It's the anger of God. It's this pitiless, comprehensive punishment that has fallen down on the people without mercy.

And that's what is being explored and lamented and protested and expressed in this lament. Let me just read a few of the words again from chapter 1. Notice how Jeremiah is saying that it's the Lord who has done this. He says, verse 1, how the Lord in His anger has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud. He has cast down from heaven to earth the splendour of Israel.

He has not remembered His footstool in the day of His anger. The Lord has swallowed up without mercy all the habitations of Jacob. In His wrath, He has broken down the strongholds of the daughter of Judah. He has brought down to the ground and dishonoured the kingdom and its rulers. He has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel.

He has withdrawn from them His right hand in the face of the enemy. He has burned like a flaming fire in Jacob consuming all around. He has bent His bow like an enemy with His right hand set like a foe, and He has killed all who are delightful in our eyes. In the tent of the daughter of Zion, He has poured out His fury like fire. The Lord has become like an enemy.

What a relentless description of the fierce and holy anger of the Lord. God had warned that judgement would come for generations, and when it finally arrived, it was unbearably just and totally unsparing. Isn't that an interesting phrase though that we just ended with there? The Lord has become like an enemy. Jeremiah didn't say the Lord has become an enemy.

He has become like an enemy. Why does he say that? Because it was the Lord who inflicted famine on the people. It was the Lord who brought Babylon against him. It was the Lord who caused many to die from starvation and others to be taken captive to Babylon.

So how can Jeremiah say the Lord has become like an enemy? Isn't God just the enemy of this city, full stop, after what's happened? Well, yes and no. Let me explain. Yes.

God was the enemy of the city in a sense because this was not just fatherly loving discipline to help his people grow. This was punishment and judgement for continual unrepentant rebellion. There were many wicked kings in Judah, that's the Southern kingdom of Israel where Jerusalem was, that led up to this destruction, but one was particularly responsible for this judgement that finally fell. His name was Manasseh. He put pagan altars inside the temple to encourage people to worship false gods inside the Lord's temple.

He burned his own son alive as an offering to false gods. He filled Jerusalem with blood, slaughtering innocent and vulnerable people. So God rightly pronounced judgement on him and the nation. He led the people astray into idolatry, injustice, and evil. So God was going to purge the nation, so to speak.

In this sense, God was the city's enemy. This was not fatherly discipline. This was the punishment of a just judge. He was judging a rebellious people who had committed all kinds of evils. But in another sense, God is not the enemy, especially of the people that Jeremiah is writing for in the aftermath.

Although everyone in the city experienced this disaster, remember, not everyone was killed. Jeremiah survived. Some of them survived. Ezekiel 9 talks about this. Ezekiel talks about this judgement that was coming against the city, and he sees this vision of this man with a writing case, with writing instruments.

And this is what it says in Ezekiel 9:4. And the Lord said to him, the man with his writing case, pass through the city through Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it. You see, even though it was a wicked city, there was a faithful remnant in the city who hated the evil that was happening. And spiritually speaking, God marked them out to be spared from death. The judgement was punishment against an unrepentant city, but not everyone in the city was unrepentant, so some were spared.

God was not against those people that he marked out. He was not against them as their enemy. He spared them. I believe this is why Jeremiah says the Lord has become like an enemy. Jeremiah was writing lamentations for the remnant who survived, many of whom had received this spiritual mark and been spared the judgement.

God wasn't Jeremiah's enemy, but Jeremiah lived in the city and the nation that was experiencing God's fury against evil. To him, God felt like an enemy even though He wasn't Jeremiah's enemy. And some of us can relate to that. This is how God's people feel at times. We might not be caught up in a city that is experiencing the Lord's direct judgement, but sometimes the Lord's providence, that's the teaching that God guides everything, good and bad, towards His good ends.

The Lord's providence sometimes brings so many painful things into our lives and crises into our lives that it shakes us to the core, and it feels like God is an enemy even though He isn't. That's the experience of everyone, like John just mentioned. He was shell shocked, but he was never angry with God. We all have different experiences of this. But some of us experience the pain, you feel like, God feels like He's against me.

How could He allow this? In that place of darkness and suffering, we learn deep lessons about the sovereignty and the lordship of God. It reminds us that He is Lord. He is free to do as He pleases. I think this is one of the reasons why the word lord shows up so much in the book.

I'm not talking about in your English translations the word that's capitalised, l o r d. That's the Hebrew word Yahweh. I'm talking about the Hebrew word Adonai, which might have a capital l, but then a normal lowercase o r d. And that word just means lord, master, and it comes up a lot in this book of Lamentations. And I think it comes up because it's the experience of the author.

He's experiencing God as Lord. You see, when you experience the sweetness of God's presence, you get to know Him as father, as shepherd, as friend. But when you experience God's severe providence, when you are caught up in disasters and crises, when it all seems too much to bear and you wonder how a heavenly father could allow this, you get to know God as Lord, as master, as Adonai. When you suffer deeply whilst knowing that God is your father who is absolutely in control of all things, it teaches you deep lessons. It teaches us about the lofty otherness of God.

It teaches us that He is the creator, and we are creatures. He is the potter, and we are the clay, and He can form the clay as He wills. We don't give advice to God about how He conducts His affairs. We realise that while He is good, He is not safe in the sense that we won't go through pain in this life. We learn that life is about His story, not ours.

His glory, not our comfort. We learn that He is not under our control. He is Lord. And I think it's a much needed lesson for us in the West who have made the individual sovereign know God is sovereign. And sometimes that means His purposes, while ultimately loving and good, will involve our temporary pain.

But some of you feel like temporary. This isn't a little bit of temporary pain. This feels permanent. This feels unbearable. And no one knew that better than the people of Judah after Jerusalem's destruction.

Let's look at that next under the second heading. So we've looked at when God becomes the enemy, the holy anger of the slow to anger God. Now we're going to look at when justice finally falls, the crushing weight of unbearable anger. So Jeremiah shifts now from crediting the Lord with the judgement against Israel and complaining about it to describing its crushing results. He says, verse 9, about the city, her gates have sunk into the ground.

He has ruined and broken her bars. Her king and princes are among the nations. The law is no more, and her prophets find no vision from the Lord. The elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground in silence. They have thrown dust on their heads and put on sackcloth.

The young women of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground. My eyes are spent with weeping. My stomach churns. My bile is poured out to the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, because infants and babies faint in the streets of the city, and so on. Jeremiah prophesied that this crushing judgement would happen.

He warned about this. The people of God have been warned about it for years. In fact, in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses warned the people that if you don't obey God, that curses will come upon you like exile and destruction and famine. And yet the reality of this is so unbearable that Jeremiah weeps until his eyes are spent and vomits in shock at the horror around him. It's an unimaginable horror what the scene would have looked like, what the people went through in the city.

And Jeremiah is one of the Lord's chosen. He's on God's team, but he wasn't shielded from the horror of judgement against the nation's sins. But it wasn't just Jeremiah who experienced this. The text says that infants and babies suffered too. Now I know what you might be thinking.

How could a good God do this? How? There are philosophical answers that preserve God's goodness and suffering, but that's not where Lamentations goes with this. It doesn't go to toward cold logic. The amazing thing is that a man who witnessed these atrocities, Jeremiah, is still writing and praying to God.

He himself was a victim of these things, but he didn't turn away from God or disbelieve the goodness of God. We'll see that in chapter 3 next week. What we're being given in this chapter is not a philosophical answer for suffering, but language to lament it. We're given the poetry of pain. Jeremiah is wrestling to hold on to the goodness of God, and we'll see that especially next week, whilst bearing his soul before the Lord in distress and anger.

One of my favourite poets is William Cowper. Cowper wrote some of the hymns we still sing today, and he wrote the Olney hymns with John Newton. John Newton's the famous man who wrote Amazing Grace. But Cowper also suffered from severe depression for most of his adult life. He was hospitalised.

He was sent to an asylum for insanity for, I think, eighteen months. He believed at points that he was beyond hope. He had this impending sense of doom, and he kept writing poetry through these bouts of depression and suffering. And here's one of his poems written in the middle of that struggle. He says, God of my life, to thee I call.

Afflicted at thy feet, I fall. When the great water floods prevail, leave not my trembling heart to fail. Friend of the friendless and the faint, where should I lodge my deep complaint? Where but with thee whose open door invites the helpless and the poor? Did ever mourner plead with thee, and thou refuse the mourner's plea?

Does not the word still fixed remain that none shall seek thy face in vain? That were a grief I could not bear if thou did not hear and answer prayer. But a prayer hearing, answering God supports me under every load. Fair is the lot that's cast for me. I have an advocate with thee.

They whom the world caresses most have no such privilege to boast. Poor though I am, despised, forgot, yet God, my God, forgets me not. And he is safe and must succeed for whom the Lord vouchsafes to plead. That's the poetry of pain. That's a word of lament.

He's complaining to God, but turning to God with his complaint and trusting in God when his feelings are unresolved. Sometimes terrible things happen that we do not understand and we cannot explain, but the God who remains sovereign over it all is the God who will receive our complaint. But at this stage in the chapter, Jeremiah has not actually turned to God directly yet. He's described what God has done. He's described the brutal aftermath, and next, he attempts to comfort the people even if it's futile.

Let's look at this next under the third heading. When deception and cruelty abound, a prophet condemns the heartless. In these verses that Rob read for us earlier, Jeremiah tries to comfort the people, but he says, to what can I compare you? This situation is so dire. I can't compare you to someone else and say, oh, don't worry.

They got through it. And he condemns the false prophets in the lead up to this, this situation. They kept telling the people, no. Peace is coming, and you're going to win, and prosperity is coming. They seem like the nice guys, but they were actually heartless and ruthless because they paved the way for certain pain.

They should have exposed the people's iniquity given the tough message that could have led to repentance and potential mercy, but instead they were preaching prosperity and peace when that there was none coming. So Jeremiah condemns them. And he also condemns the surrounding nations, these cruel nations who when they saw Jerusalem razed to the ground were gloating over it, celebrating over it, throwing parties when people were starving and dying. But the most difficult thing in this section is perhaps what Jeremiah says in verse 17, where he says, the Lord has done what He purposed. He has carried out His word, which He commanded long ago.

He has thrown down without pity. He has made the enemy rejoice over you and exalted the might of your foes. So Jeremiah condemns the heartless neighbours who are rejoicing over their pain, and then he says, God made them do it. This is the mystery of God's sovereignty, that we are responsible for our actions and our will is not violated, and yet God remains sovereign and in control without doing injustice. I think we tend to minimise the sovereignty of God when difficult things happen.

God never commits evil nor tempts anyone. That's true. But he isn't just allowing free agents to do whatever they please. The bible teaches that he is guiding all things towards his good ends. That's providence.

Even the gloating of Israel's enemies remains under His sovereign control. Our human will is not violated. We are free to sin if we wish, and yet God remains in control, guiding everything towards His ends. How those two things fit together is a mystery to me, but it seems to be how the Bible explains it. The key verse for understanding this is Genesis 50:20.

When Joseph said to his brothers who sold him into slavery, as for you, you meant evil against me, but over and above that, God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive as they are today. Not that God reacted to it. Oh, that bad thing happened. Now I'll try and change things. No.

God actually meant that for ultimate good. Here's one of our historic statements of faith that strikes the balance for us. It says, we believe that this good God, after He created all things, did not abandon them to chance or fortune, but leads and governs them according to His holy will, in such a way that nothing happens in this world without His orderly arrangement. Yet, God is not the author of, nor can He be charged with the sin that occurs, for His power and goodness are so great and incomprehensible that He arranges and does His work very well and justly, even when the devils and wicked men act unjustly. God is in charge of every single thing, not just the good things, but even cruel and evil things.

God punished Jerusalem for the city's cruelty, for child sacrifice, for idolatry, and part of that punishment included causing her neighbours to rejoice over her. Verse 17, He has made the enemy rejoice over you and exalted the might of your foes. It's terribly cruel what these neighbours did. God condemns them for it through Jeremiah, and yet God remains sovereign over it. It was part of His punishment against the city whose sins had piled up to heaven.

Now at this stage in this lament, Jeremiah still hasn't spoken directly to God. And that brings us back to our key question from the beginning. Why bother? Why bother praying to a God who does perfect justice? Why bother praying to a God who always judges sin when we approach him as people who are flawed and sinful?

Well, the thing is, Jeremiah does, even if someone has experienced this devastation. He not only does pray to God in the final few verses, he encourages all of God's people to lift up their hands to Him. And let's explore this under the final heading, when you can only complain to God, tears stream down and hands rise up. Let me read it again for us. Jeremiah says, their heart cried to the Lord.

He keeps speaking about the city like she's a person. Jerusalem's a lady or Zion or Judah. It's different names that are used. O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears stream down like a torrent day and night. Give yourself no rest, your eyes no respite.

Arise, cry out in the night at the beginning of the night watches. Pour out your heart like water before the presence of the Lord. Lift your hands to Him for the lives of your children who faint for hunger at the head of every street. Jeremiah calls the people to cry out and lament. He doesn't think it's all hopeless, but it's not totally resolved.

He says, look, O Lord, and see, with whom have you dealt thus? Should women eat the fruit of their womb, the children of their tender care? Should priests and prophets be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord? And here's Jerusalem's voice again. The city says, in the dust of the streets lie the young and the old.

My young women and my young men have fallen by the sword. You have killed them in the day of Your anger, slaughtering without pity. There's that phrase again. Anger without pity. You summoned as if to a festival day, my terrors on every side, and on the day of the anger of the Lord, no one escaped or survived.

Those whom I held and raised, my enemy destroyed. I don't think Christians are used to talking to God like this. But here, these words are. Words of complaint, words inspired by the Holy Spirit. This is not sin.

This is scripture. Words inspired and given to the people of God to pray back to God. Why bother praying to a God who always judges sin? Well, the God who punished the sins of Jerusalem is the one who inspired and gave these words to her survivors to protest their pain. Why would God inspire Jeremiah to write these things?

Why would an enemy give permission to people to cry out and complain? You might say, well, maybe God's cruel. Maybe he just likes to hear their pain. But that couldn't possibly be true. See, God didn't only inspire words for the people to cry out to him, but God also inspired words that he himself would cry out in complaint one day.

One of the famous psalms of lament, Psalm 22, is written by David. It's a complaint to God about unbearable suffering, but it opens with a verse that may be familiar to you. Psalm 22:1, David writes, my God, my God, why have You forsaken Me? And a thousand years after David, six hundred years after the fall of Jerusalem, a man cried out these same words of complaint. But it wasn't just any man.

He claimed to be God in the flesh. He claimed to bear the sins of the world. He claimed to drink the cup of God's anger against sin to its very last drop, and His name was Jesus. Jesus was God's prophet like Jeremiah. Jesus was on God's team like Jeremiah was.

But unlike Jeremiah, Jesus wasn't finally spared. Jesus was put to death. Just before He died though, after suffocating on the cross for six hours, Mark's Gospel tells us that Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? Which means, my God, my God, why have You forsaken Me? There are those words again.

A thousand years after Psalm 22:1, Jesus cries them out from the cross. God in the flesh crying out to God, why have You forsaken Me? It's a mystery. God in the flesh, Jesus Christ, cried out in lament and protested the unbearably just anger of God. A cruel God would not choose to become the sufferer.

A cruel God would not write Himself the most unfair part in the story, but God did in Christ. Why bother praying to a God who always judges sin? Because the God we prayed to underwent the judgement our sin deserves. Though He is Lord of all, though His ways are beyond us at times, He is not against us. He is for us.

Whatever in our lives seems to be meant for evil, God means it for good. Your tears and complaints are heard and received by a tender father because Jesus was treated like God's enemy so that you can be God's child. The God who judges sin and the God who sometimes wounds us in His mysterious plans is the God who invites us to shed tears and raise hands in protest and lament, laments that He will receive as a tender father. When everything goes wrong, when life feels unbearably dark, when the light cannot be seen at the end of the tunnel, when it seems as though no redemptive purpose could be in your troubles, you can be honest with God. You can take your pain and protest to Him in lament.

And if you're not sure how to pray this way, just look up the Psalms of lament. Maybe you are uncomfortable with complaining to God. Maybe you worry. Is there a sinful way of doing this? And there is.

There is a sinful way of pointing the finger at God and accusing Him. So use the Psalms of lament. Use the words of scripture. They don't always follow this process, but generally, the psalms of lament take us through a four step process. First, turn.

It's actually turning to God. Rather than just sitting in the ashes in our pain, you turn to God. You begin to speak. Second, complain. Tell Him what's wrong.

The hows, the whys, bring it all before Him. Third, ask. Ask for what you need. And then fourth, trust. You are God.

I know You are good even when I just don't feel that right now in this situation. I trust in You. I put my hope in You. Turn, complain, ask, trust. Because your tears and complaints to God are received by a tender father because Jesus was treated like God's enemy so that you can be God's child.

So let's close our time together in prayer, and I'm going to adapt the words of lament that we find in Psalm 13 to lead us in this prayer. So let's pray together. How long, O Lord, will You forget us forever? How long will You hide Your face from us? How long must we take counsel in our own souls and have sorrow in our hearts all the day?

How long shall our enemy be exalted over us? Consider and answer us, O Lord, our God. Light up our eyes, lest we sleep the sleep of death, lest our enemies say, I have prevailed over them, lest our foes rejoice because we are shaken, but we have trusted in Your steadfast love. Our heart shall rejoice in Your salvation. We will sing to the Lord because He has dealt bountifully with us. Amen.