Words When There Are None #3 - Finding Hope in the God Who Judges

Well, what a chapter.

What a prayer.

It's all over the place, isn't it? Full of pain and then hope, and then calling out judgment on their enemies.

What, what is this chapter? Well, it's what we call a lament.

lament.It's the poetry of pain.

This is why so many people avoid this book in the Bible, uh, because it's difficult to hear.

It's full of painful words, it's full of difficult things to hear, and they're there for a good reason.

Uh, these words of Lamentations, they were penned after the destruction of Jerusalem, and it is hard to describe how terrible that was.

Uh, the city was put to siege for 18 months.

People were dying from starvation within, and you can imagine the weakest went first, little ones and the elderly.

People, just to survive, actually cannibalized and ate human remains.

And when the city was finally broken through, the king's sons were slaughtered in front of his eyes before his eyes were gouged out by the Babylonians, and then everyone else was taken off as slaves back to a foreign nation while the city was destroyed and burned up.

I cannot imagine, I cannot imagine what that would be like.

It is indescribable.

And it's that kind of pain that we don't want.

We want to avoid it.

And maybe you're here, and you're here for the third week of the series, and you're like, "I'm sick of church feeling like a funeral.

I'm sick of going through this difficult book." But you know, for some of us, and there's some dear brothers and sisters here, maybe every day they wake up, they don't get to choose to avoid pain.

They wake up, and their reality is difficult, and their reality is full of physical pain and emotional pain.

And this is one of the reasons why we wanna spend time in this book, because God has put it in the Bible for us to listen to and to hear what he has to say and to help those dear brothers and sisters among us whose every day is hard.

And I said in our first week of the series, one of the other reasons why we wanna spend time in a difficult book is because wisdom is found in the house of mourning.

That's what we, uh, hear from Ecclesiastes.

In chapter seven it says, "The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth." That the party house, the house of mirth, is fun to be in, but you don't find wisdom there.

The house of mourning is painful to be in, but you discover wisdom there.

You discover perspective on what really matters.