The life of a Christian is often a hard life. Temptations abound, always trying to lure us away from God. The devil preys on our weaknesses, which are often way too willing to follow him instead of God. And so the book of Hebrews tells us to “fix our eyes on Jesus, the source and completer of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2).
What Scripture tells us is that we live as the children of promise. Our Lord has gone through death and come out alive on the other side. Because of that reality, we know the same awaits for us. But we only know that by faith. By faith, we know that even though we will die, we will also live. Because Jesus rose from the dead, so also will God raise our bodies to new life in Christ. And like Jesus, we will live forever and ever.
But that’s not how it usually feels in this life. We often feel dry, tired and worn out. We believe the truth of what awaits us, but that faith doesn’t leave our heads to enliven our bodies. The divine life we have in Christ should fill our every corpuscle with what awaits us, even changing how we think, live, and act. Yet, instead, we let rut of daily life sink us in a sludge that robs us of our God-given joy.
This suffering, even this sense of despondency, is nothing new for God’s people. After all, we are both saint and sinner. After all, we live in a sin-filled world, and so we suffer. The Israelites of old knew that first hand. They lived and experienced it.
They moved to Egypt to escape hunger and famine, only later for the Egyptians to enslave them. After God had freed them from Egypt, they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years–all because they wanted to walk by sight and not by faith.
In Jeremiah’s day, almost 600 years before Jesus was born, the Israelites suffered exile in Babylon. That was when Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations. A deep sadness fills that book–even an intense longing for the destroyed city of Jerusalem. The pain of being far from home and feeling as if you’ll never see it again permeates its pages.
If you read Lamentations, you will find it depressing. For the despair that God’s people experienced was real, and Jeremiah was speaking to their real problems! Yet, amid their despair, the beaming rays of hope break through the depressive gloom.
Despite what they may feel, Jeremiah knows that God will remain faithful. Jeremiah knows that their exile in Babylon will last 70 years and no longer. Although he and most of the Israelites living in Babylon would never see Jerusalem again, their children and grandchildren would.
The suffering will end. Hope will take on flesh and become reality. God will bring His people home to the land He promised to their fathers. He will bring them to the land that Joshua portioned out to the Israelites who crossed the Jordan into the land flowing with milk and honey. God will restore what the Israelites had lost. God will be true to His promises. The Israelites can live in hope.
Jeremiah’s words remind us of what God had said to the Israelites about the land He was giving them. Each tribe and family would receive a portion of the land. And even if a family lost some land because of debt, it would be restored to them in the jubilee year.
Leviticus 25 describes the jubilee year. That took place after seven sets of seven complete years. And so about every 50 years, even if an Israelite became an indentured servant to pay off his debt, he would be absolved of that debt and allowed to return to his own land.
That meant that every Israelite would have some land to call his own–all except for the priests. God told the Levites, from which came the priests of the Old Covenant: “You will have no inheritance in the land, nor will you have any portion among the people. I am your portion and your inheritance among the Israelites” (Numbers 18:20). And so 1,000 years later, Jeremiah, a priest from the tribe of Levi, said, “The LORD is my portion. Therefore, I will hope in him.”
Like the rest of the Israelites, Jeremiah longed to be back in Jerusalem. But Jeremiah had an added perspective. He was a priest. He was a member of the tribe to whom God did not give a portion of the land. He has no real estate waiting for him.
The Lord was his portion, and he hoped in Him. When Jeremiah went into exile, he took his inheritance with Him. The Levites lived from the tithe of the rest of the Israelites. They had no property of their own to bring in other income. The Levites had to depend fully on God for all that they needed.
This allowed Jeremiah to comfort the rest of the Israelites. He knew what he had, and it wasn’t land or property. He had God Himself. That meant that it was impossible for the Babylonians to take Jeremiah’s hope away from Him. The Lord was his portion, and He hoped in Him.
Jeremiah extended this comfort that he had to the rest of Israel. He said, “The LORD’s gracious love never ceases; his mercies never end.” Jeremiah told the Israelites that God’s love and mercy are never ending. God’s love never stops coming to us. And why does God’s loyal and enduring love never stop? It’s because in God’s nature is the desire to give of Himself in love. If He were to stop loving us, He would stop being the God that He has revealed Himself to be.
Jeremiah then says, “His mercies never end.” Mercy is an expression of love, a love that restrains, and even stops, the punishment that someone deserves. It’s easy to figure out why God’s mercies never end. It’s because, on this side of heaven, our sins never end. And so we never outgrow our need for God’s forgiveness.
Whether we realize it or not, sin permeates our every breath. We are sinners because we are descendants of Adam and Eve, not because we happened to do something sinful. Because of our inherited, inborn corruption, sin mars our thoughts, words, and deeds. And so, even when we are at our best, we are still sinning.
But God’s mercy is even more constant than our sinning. It brings to mind the words of the psalmist, which we spoke at the beginning of the service. “If you, O LORD, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness; therefore, you are feared” (Psalm 130:3-4).
Our Lord’s forgiveness gives us reason to rejoice. We rejoice that He gives us such forgiveness, without us having to earn or deserve it. Yet, the Psalms also tell us that our Lord’s forgiveness causes us to fear Him. We fear, for we know that our Lord needs such unspeakable heights of forgiveness because of the deep depths of our sin. We fear, for if God treated us as we deserve, instead of with mercy, we would only have eternal death. We fear because God is holy and innocent, and we are not. We fear Him because we need His forgiveness to live.
But Jeremiah comforts us. “The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him. It is good to hope and wait patiently for the LORD’s salvation.”
When we suffer in this life, we don’t suffer alone. Every indignity that Jesus suffered on the cross He suffered for you. Every scourge, every bruise, and every pound of the hammer that drove the nails through His flesh, He suffered for you. “As a sheep silent before its shearers, he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). Jesus waited quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
We only know seven words Jesus spoke during those darkest hours of human history. Our Savior spoke those words as He earned salvation for us fallen beings. He waited quietly as He worked His salvation for us. He waited, and then He died. He was carried into the tomb, and there His body waited. Then, on the third day, our Lord’s wait ended. Because of that, God’s mercies are new every morning. Great is His faithfulness. Indeed, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Our Lord’s hope was not in vain. God the Father was good to His Son who waited for Him. Jesus was raised from the dead, never to die again. Our Lord’s death and resurrection bring to us the assurance, the hope, of life eternal for both body and soul.
Like Jesus, we may have to suffer along the way. As the world hated Jesus, so may it hate us. After all, we are aliens and exiles here in this word, for our lives are hidden with Christ in God.
And so, in this fallen world, trials afflict us on every side. And during such suffering, the fullness of our Lord’s salvation is not immediately obvious to us. Sometimes, it can even hide within our suffering, which our Lord uses to soften our hearts, bringing us to trust in Him. And so we wait. We may not want to, but still we wait. For God gives us no choice, bringing us to see reality through the lenses of our faith.
Like Jesus, unless He returns before we die, our bodies will also have to wait in the grave. But our waiting will not be forever. For all of time, all of human history is barreling toward the Last Day, when God will raise our bodies and Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead. All creation waits, groaning, creaking, and crying out for the moment when Christ will appear on the Last Day. Then, He will reunite our bodies with our souls to be with Him in eternity.
As Jeremiah proclaimed so long ago, it is, indeed, good to wait for the Lord’s salvation! Amen.
