So death, destruction and disorder, disease and despair. These all seem to be words in our news every day. In our own lives we may have faced one of these or two of these struggles in this past year. But there's places in our world like Haiti, Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Tigray province in Ethiopia, where there's violence, civil unrest, disease, poor living conditions, poverty, and widespread destruction. And when we read the book of Lamentations, we find another picture of death and destruction and disorder. There are some differences in Lamentations that distinguish it from the destruction in other places in the world at other times. First of all, Jerusalem is the holy city, the temple of the one true God. How could he allow heathen forces to destroy his people, his land, and his house? Also, the destruction of Jerusalem was foretold, it was prophesied even by Moses in Deuteronomy, and more recently Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. And then the depths of despair and the destruction of Jerusalem, despite how horrible it is, it also gives rise to hope for God's people. And that's why today I'm going to speak to you on hope amidst hopelessness. And so I'm going to break this down into two parts. So there's going to be a teaching part and a preaching part. And so for the teaching part, I'm going to give you an intro to the book of Lamentations. For the preaching part, I'm going to focus on one specific text. And so with regards to background on the book of Lamentations, in our English Bible, it's right after Jeremiah, because Jeremiah most likely wrote Lamentations. The subject matter, the language, the overall emotional tenor, there's really no reason to think that someone else besides Jeremiah or his scribe Baruch wrote the book of Lamentations. Jeremiah began prophesying in the 13th year of Josiah's reign, according to Jeremiah 1, and that puts the book of Lamentations being written when Jeremiah was approximately 60 years old, depending on how you figure Jeremiah started prophesying when he was a youth, how old that would be. Most of the Old Testament prophets, however, did not live to see the fulfillment of their prophecies, but Jeremiah did. And Jeremiah was not happy that he got to see the fulfillment, because what he prophesied of was the destruction of Jerusalem and the deportation of the Jews. And so I will read one of the many prophecies that Jeremiah prophesied in Jeremiah 4, 26 and 27. I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger. For thus says the Lord, the whole land shall be a desolation, yet I will not make a full end. And this promise that God would not make a full end is fulfilled, and Lamentations is a reaction of the people who are left, the survivors, Jeremiah being one of them, to the destruction. Lamentations is a poem. It is not a historical account of the destruction of Jerusalem. I was trying to explain this to our girls earlier today and we've watched a few operas and what happens in opera is something happens, and then the opera singers sing about how it makes them feel for about a half an hour. And then something else happens, and then they sing about that for another half an hour. So in Jeremiah 52, we have the historical account of the destruction of Jerusalem. And then in Lamentations, we have the poem. We have the emotional reaction. We have the wrestlings with what is really going on. Jeremiah's processing this. And so, Jeremiah 52, I will read for your, to refresh your memory. This happens in the reign of King Zedekiah, the last of the kings of Judah. Zedekiah was 21 years old when he became king and he reigned 11 years in Jerusalem. I'll skip down to the end of verse 3. And Zedekiah rebelled against the king of Babylon. And in the ninth year of his reign, in the tenth month, on the tenth day of the month, Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, came with all his army against Jerusalem and laid siege to it. And they built siege works all around it. So the city was besieged until the eleventh year of King Zedekiah on the 9th day of the 4th month. So we went from the 9th year of Zedekiah, 10th month, to the 11th year, 4th month, so about a year and a half of siege. On that day, the famine was so severe in the city that there was no food for the people of the land. Then a breach was made in the city and all the men of war fled and went out from the city by night. And so the Chaldeans capture all these men, put them to death. The king of Israel fled and they captured him. The Nebuchadnezzar killed all King Zedekiah's sons in front of his face and then put his eyes out. And then we skip down to Verse 12 and following talks about the captain of the bodyguard, Nebuchadnezzar, or Nebuchadnezzar, who burned all the houses in Jerusalem, including the temple. He tore down the walls and he completely annihilated the city. He took all the gold and all the bronze and all the silver and took it out of the temple. He tore down the bronze pillars of the temple and everything of value in the temple was taken. And the people were exiled to Babylon. At the end of Jeremiah 52, in verse 30, we find out that 745 persons were carried away. And understanding that the city of Jerusalem probably had thousands of people in it before the siege began, we realize that most of the people of Jerusalem died either from starvation or disease or were killed by the Babylonian army. And so that's the context, the horrendous circumstances that Lamentations is talking about. And so, in Lamentations, it's a poem with five divisions. All of the divisions in our Bible we call chapters. I'm tempted to call the divisions of Lamentations cantos, because that is what you call divisions of a poem, just to emphasize the fact Lamentations is a poem. As a poem, each of these verses in the chapter starts with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And so it's like the ABCs, so to speak, although I doubt it was used to teach kids their ABCs because of the content. But the first verse of chapter one starts with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, second verse of chapter one starts with the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and so on and so forth. Now, there are two differences. One is chapter three. And so chapter three, instead of having 22 verses, has 66 verses. And so the first three verses of chapter three start with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. And each three verses start with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter five breaks the pattern, and it does not use the ABCs of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter five actually has more of a thought thrust, and more of a argument that Jeremiah is trying to reason through, and we'll talk about that in a second. So in outlining the book with five divisions, we have a five-point outline of the book. So the first chapter, or the first canto, is the key word is affliction. It's talking about the affliction of the city. And you see the word affliction many times in this chapter. You have the city described in its desolation, and Jeremiah gives no question as to who caused the desolation. In Lamentations 1-5 he says the Lord has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions. Now one thing as we read Lamentations that was very confusing to me at first until I spent a lot of time trying to sort it out. was as you're reading through Lamentations, you will see first-person pronouns. You'll see I, my, me. And we know that Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations, and so initially we jumped to, okay, this is Jeremiah speaking about himself. That gets us in trouble in Lamentations 1, because we read about my children, my young woman, my young men, my lovers, my priests, my elders. And the speaker in Lamentations 1 talks about transgressions. My transgressions were bound into a yoke, et cetera. The Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand. And we know, for one thing, we know for sure, Jeremiah didn't have any children. He was not married. And so as we look at what the speaker in Lamentations 1 is saying, we realize that the speaker is actually a personification of the city, Jerusalem. Chapter 2 has a different angle that it's looking at the destruction on Jerusalem, and the focus is on the Lord and his anger. The key word in chapter 2 is anger, and in verse 1 we see how the Lord in his anger has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud. In verse 3, he has cut down in fierce anger all the might of Israel, and we see God's anger against Israel displayed in Lamentations 2. The first person speaker in Lamentations 2 is not a personification of the city. It's a distant observer saying things like, what can I say for you? To what compare you, O daughter of Jerusalem? What can I liken you to that I may comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion? For your ruin is as vast as the sea. And so Chapter 2, the focus is on anger, the anger of God. There's a shift in Chapter 3. And the key word in Chapter 3 I'm going to talk about a little bit later is the word hope. We do not see the word hope in any of the other chapters in Lamentations, and in Chapter 3 we have the word hope four times. Now, in all the other chapters of Lamentations, the first-person pronouns are used very infrequently. In Chapter 3, first-person pronouns are just about everywhere, and it is a very personal chapter. It's talking about the speaker is not the personified Jerusalem. The speaker is definitely a man, an individual. As he says, I am the man who's seen affliction. He talks about his flesh and his skin wasting away, his bones being broken. And so here in chapter three, we're talking about a real person, potentially Jeremiah speaking as himself for himself in Lamentations three. In chapter four, We have the key word of change. Lamentations 4 starts out, how the gold has grown dim, how the pure gold is changed. And each verse here contrasts what has been before to what is now. The focus again is on the city. It used to be a city full of delight, full of joy, and now it is a desolation. Chapter 5, the key word is remember. That's the first word of the chapter. Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us. And as I mentioned before, this chapter has more of a logical progression to it. And so he says, remember, O Lord, what has befallen us. Look and see our disgrace. And then he goes through the next several verses to talk about their disgrace. And point by point, he talks about how they've been disgraced. Each of these points are evidence that they have been forgotten by the Lord, and in verse 20, he sums it up asking, why do you forget us forever? Why do you forsake us for so many days? And he ends with a prayer for the Lord to remember them, saying in verse 21, restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored. Renew our days as of old. And so that's an overview of the book of Lamentations. That's the teaching part. Now, the preaching part will look at a specific text. We'll turn back to Lamentations 3, and I will read the text, verse 16 through 33. Lamentations 3, 16 through 33. He has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes. My soul is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what happiness is. So I say, my endurance has perished. So has my hope from the Lord. Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall. My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me, but this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will 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 wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid 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, and let him be filled with insults, for the Lord will not cast off forever. But though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love, for he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men. All right, well, bow our heads for a short word of prayer before we go into this text. Heavenly Father, I pray as we approach this word, we've seen the background of this book, we've seen the despair and destruction that you and your sovereignty wreaked upon Jerusalem, and I pray you'd help us to understand this text and understand how this can speak into our lives. And may we glorify you, and magnify you, and love you more because of it. In Christ's name I pray, amen. All right, Lamentations 3, hope amidst hopelessness. I want to look at four things briefly. Number one, how has hope perished? Number two, how is hope remembered? Number three, how is hope pursued? And number four, how is hope realized? First, how has hope perished? The speaker in Lamentations 3 does not waste any time telling us what his situation is. He starts off, I am the man who has seen affliction. If anyone has seen affliction, he has. But he also is very clear about where this affliction came from. He says, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath. And again, Pronouns are important here. He talks about, under the rod of his wrath, he has driven me, he has made my flesh and skin waste away, he has besieged me, he's walled me round about, he has blocked my ways, he, he, he. And we kind of know who he's talking about, but he waits until the end to actually give the antecedent to all these pronouns, he. Verse 18 is when he reveals who he is. He says, He knows, he recognizes that this affliction, the source of it, is indeed from the Lord. And it is the same Lord, the Holy One of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the one who gave the city of Jerusalem to David and Joab, the one whose glory filled the temple when Solomon dedicated it. This is the same Lord that Jeremiah is saying is the one who has brought on all this affliction, the one who has made his hope perish. But how has Jeremiah's hope perished? He's suffered physically. He says, he made my flesh and my skin waste away. He has suffered with extreme hunger, as everyone in Jerusalem has. He has had any light of hope removed from him. It says in verse 2, he has driven me and brought me into darkness without light. In verse 6, he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. Jeremiah is taking language from the war. He says it's not so much the Babylonians that have besieged me, it is God who has besieged me. He says In verse 5, he has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation. Verse 7, he's walled me about so I cannot escape. He has made my chains heavy. He is even saying that God has turned against him. God has come after him. God has targeted him. In verse 10, he is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding. And in conclusion, He has lost his happiness, he has lost his endurance, he has lost his hope. He says in verse 17, my soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is, so I say my endurance has perished, and so has my hope from the Lord. And so, In this lament of how much affliction Jeremiah is going through, we realize that this is applicable for us today. Many people today have forgotten what happiness is. Many people today are bereft of peace. Many people are at the breaking point of their endurance, and many have lost their hope. And so, We don't look at this book and say, well, this doesn't apply to me because my situation is good. I live in America. We don't face these kinds of trials. But it is definitely a word for us. A word that can help us prepare for hardships that may be coming in the future. A word that may help us deal with people who are going through unimaginable struggles. And Jeremiah first recognizes that these struggles are under God's sovereign hand. As bad as things are, it's not a mistake. It's not an accident. It is God's action. God is entirely in control of everything that has happened. Next, we see how is hope remembered? So, at the end of chapter 18, Or chapter 18. At the end of verse 18, Jeremiah has lost hope. And he says in verse 19, remember my afflictions and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall. My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. He remembers, that's all he can think about is these afflictions, these wanderings. the wormwood, the gall, that's all he wants anyone else to remember about him at this point. And the more he thinks about his suffering, the more his soul bows down, the more depressed, despondent, and discouraged he gets. But, but, the next word is but. This is the contrast, this is the hinge of the passage. This is where everything changes. Jeremiah says, but this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. And so this is what we can call to mind as well and have hope. But what does he call to mind? Verse 22, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. What he calls to mind is the nature of God, who God is, and what he is like. God is love. His steadfast love never ceases because God is eternal. He is unchangeable. His love is steadfast. His love never ceases. He is merciful. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Even mornings when there's no food. Even mornings when the Babylonians have your city surrounded. Even mornings when all the houses that you can see for miles are up in smoke. God has mercies that are new every morning. God is faithful. He says, great is your faithfulness. Even though the ruin of Jerusalem was as vast as the sea, God's faithfulness is greater. Consequently, if we're faced with struggles, when we're faced with struggles, no matter how bad it is, we can call this to mind. We can get our mind off the wormwood and the gall, and we can get our mind on who God is, what he's like. His steadfast love never ceases. So that is how we've seen how hope perished and how has hope been remembered. Now we want to see how is hope pursued because it's not like Jeremiah is walking through the streets of Jerusalem and all of a sudden he gets hit from behind by this big snowball of hope and he's like, oh, now I have hope. He actually has to seek it out. Verse 21 he says, but this I call to mind. He actively has to change the direction of his thinking from meditating on the wormwood and the gall to calling to mind God's promises God's nature. In verse 24, he says, the Lord is my portion. He's quoting scripture. This is something that comes up in the Psalms. And he says, the Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him. By quoting scripture to himself, he is placing his hope, his trust, his confidence in God, in what God has said before, the promises that will endure to the end. Then 25 and 26, he says, the Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. So he waits, and he seeks. Waiting and seeking sound like opposites because waiting sounds passive and seeking sounds very active. And so he is seeking the Lord, but he is also waiting for the Lord. What is the difference? There's not really much of a difference. You can wait and seek in the same way, and I'll illustrate this with an example. If you go to a restaurant and the waiter seats you and waits on you and brings your food, and then you don't see him ever again. Like, your water's empty. You're ready for dessert, but you're like, where is the waiter? Well, he's waiting, but he's in the corner looking at his phone. And you're like, what's going on with this guy? Well, he's waiting, but he wants you to go after him. On the other hand, you've got another waiter that is anticipating your every need. He fills up your water before it's empty. He's ready with a dessert menu even before you've almost just as you're finishing up your plate. He's ready to meet your every need. And so that is a waiter that's active in his waiting. He's actually seeking to see what you need and ready to fulfill that when you need it. And so consequently, if we've got that kind of image in our mind when we're thinking about waiting on God, we're not just like, okay, God, let me know when you're going to give me something good, and I'm going to go do my own thing. But when we wait on the Lord, we're actually actively waiting. We're seeking his face. We're anticipating him fulfilling his promises. We're looking forward with hope. We know that the Lord is good to those who wait for him. And this gives us hope. But it's not just hoping. Hope doesn't just come from resting in the promises of the Lord and trusting in the Lord. There's another aspect, too, because we cannot continue in our sin. And Jeremiah addresses this in verses 40 and 41. He says, let us test and examine our ways and return to the Lord. Let us lift up our hearts and hands to the God in heaven. We have transgressed and rebelled and you have not forgiven. So why had God not forgiven them? It's because they hadn't repented. They hadn't examined themselves. They hadn't returned to the Lord with their hearts. And so repentance from sin, as well as trusting in the promises of the Lord, are two very important parts of pursuing hope. Finally, I want to talk about how hope is realized. And in the Old Testament, This was a mystery, but now that Christ has come, we know fully how hope is realized. It is realized in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Jeremiah says, In verse 31 and 32, for the Lord will not cast off forever, but though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love. And how else did the Lord show his steadfast love to us but when he sent his son to give his life on our behalf? Jesus, when he came, and was suffering on our behalf could have easily quoted from Lamentations, saying, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath, because he received the full weight of the wrath of God. Verse 28 says, let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him and Jesus, as he was approaching the unjust judgment of Pilate, was approaching it in silence as it was laid on him. Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes. And Jesus certainly did. He was, he endured the insults thrust on him. He endured the striking. He went to the cross and died to pay the penalty for sin. And then, In the midst of this, Jeremiah says, yet there may yet be hope. And there was hope, because Christ rose from the dead. And what Isaiah called the sure mercies of David, what Jeremiah called the Lord our righteousness, we know as Jesus Christ, our Savior. And we can look to him as our source of the hope of eternal life, which God, who cannot lie, promised before the world began. And so, brothers and sisters, no matter how dark, no matter how dismal and depressed things are, we can call this to mind. We can have hope. We can examine our ways and return to the Lord. We can put our hope in Jesus Christ, and we can be assured that God, the steadfast love of the Lord, never ceases. And so, with that, we'll divide up into groups. We'll pray for another 15 minutes or so, and then we will close with singing, My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness.