Psalm 23, Dark Mode: God Can Handle Our Grief

Well, good afternoon! Let's turn over to Lamentations 3. Lamentations 3. Actually, it's the passage that inspired the song we just sang, Great Is Thy Faithfulness. I don't know if Mr. Werner intended that or not, but that's where we're going today. When we experience tragedy in life, we can fall into a couple of ditches. One is that we might get angry with God. We might try to give God the silent treatment, in a way, as if we could. We might withdraw from God. Or we can go a different direction. We might slip into kind of a stoic denial of what's happened, that we actually have a problem. We might find ourselves saying, well, maybe I should just be thankful for everything that's happened before. What right do I have to complain? We might end up for a while in kind of a daze, where we're praying empty words of praise that we don't really quite believe. We can fall into these dishes sometimes, but sometimes what we need to do is lament. The point that I'd like to mainly leave you with today is that God can handle our complaints. God can handle our complaints. Sometimes we need to lament. Lamentations 3, of course, is a big difference between what we go through and what Jeremiah is talking about here in Lamentations. This book is documenting a key moment in history. It's documenting this moment where God's curses in Deuteronomy 28 are being fulfilled. There's a collapse of society. The country is failing. The city is failing. Families are failing. The economy is failing. There's suffering. Most of all, the temple is destroyed. This is the end of the world right here. But there are things that we can relate to in it. Lamentations 3, I'm going to read the first 12 verses here. This is Jeremiah, who, up to this point, has sort of stepped into different voices. He's stepped into the voice of the city as a woman, as an observer, different perspectives. Here, most people think he's stepping into the voice of an every man, or sort of the whole city or nation as a man. And he writes this in Lamentations 3.

He has been to me a bear, lying in wait, like a lion in an ambush. He has turned aside my ways and torn me to pieces. He has made me desolate. He has bent his bow and set me up as a target for the arrow. Now, it's not immediately obvious, but many Old Testament scholars have looked at this passage and noticed that it is built on the metaphor of a sheep and a shepherd. And what's the most famous passage of a sheep and a shepherd in the Bible? It's probably Psalm 23, most likely. And what this passage gives us is kind of a reverse version of Psalm 23. In Psalm 23, the good shepherd settles his sheep in green pastures and leads them in still waters. But here, this man is driven away by the shepherd and forced to walk in dark places and does not see light. The good shepherd restores my soul or renews my life, you could say. But here, he has aged my flesh and my skin and broken my bones. A good shepherd leads his sheep along right paths. But here, he has made those paths crooked. A good shepherd protects the sheep from attackers and even as they walk in the darkest valley. But here, he is the attacker. He is a bear waiting in ambush, a lion in hiding. A good shepherd, you would expect them to raise their bow to defend the sheep against the predator. But here, he bends his bow and targets the sheep himself. In Psalm 23, I fear no evil, for you are with me. But here we read, Even when I cry and shout, he shuts out my prayer. The rod of the good shepherd comforts his sheep. Here, the man is beaten by the rod of his wrath. In Psalm 23, I shall not have need of anything, I shall not want. He anoints my head with oil, my cup runs over. Here, he left me desolate. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. Here, surely he has turned his hand against me time and time again throughout the day. Psalm 23 describes dwelling happily in the Lord's house. But here, the man has instead been walled into a tomb, trapped and weighed down with his chains. That's a heavy prayer, isn't it? That's an intense complaint to God. It's not truly bitterness toward God, but it is bringing before the Father the full bitterness of his circumstances. It is quite a heavy prayer. And in the case of Jerusalem, of course, there was great sin. It has many allusions to Deuteronomy 28. And so this is the document that proves that God was going to make good on those curses as well as the blessings in Deuteronomy 28. So there is an awareness of that on the part of Jeremiah, writing in this section. He's not speaking as an innocent victim. And yet, he grieves just the same. And our own grief that we go through, in things that happen to us when tragedy befalls us, they're not necessarily the result of a specific sin sometimes. They're maybe not our sin, maybe not somebody else's sin. Yet we still grieve just the same, and they can still make God feel distant at times. But songs like this, that we have them in the Bible, they show us that God can handle our grief. He can handle our grief. He can handle our hard questions. And those questions can even form the basis for growth.

In fact, later on in chapter 3, Lamentations 3, in verse 40, we see the first glimmers of hope for positive steps forward, a self-examination that's just beginning there, that is going to grow and produce the foundation for what will be a return, a return from exile years later.

The book of Lamentations makes a turn. It makes a quiet but important turn in verse 22 of chapter 3, verse 3, 22. And this is the song that we know as, Great is Thy Faithfulness. In verse 22, it says, Through the Lord's mercies we are not consumed, because his compassion fails not. They are new every morning, great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I hope in him. At this key moment, you get a network of words together. You get the words, mercies, compassion, and faithfulness.

This is a call back to Exodus 34.6, which I've talked about before, the most quoted verse in the Bible, by the Bible, which is bringing you back to a specific moment in time. It's reminding of this moment in time where God came down and he said, I am Yahweh, Yahweh El, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loyal love and truth. And three of those words show up right here again.

It connects you to this moment that was just after the golden calf incident. The ink was not dry on the covenant, and already Israel had failed. There was this moment, this period where we didn't know what was going to happen. Was God going to wipe out Israel and start over with Moses? He could have, but then he didn't. He showed that he was faithful where they were faithless. That's a moment that's being recalled here in this poem.

This chapter is the most intensely poetically patterned in the book. There's a number of what are called acrostic. They're alphabet poems in the Bible where each line starts with the next letter of the alphabet. This one is a very unusual one. In chapter three, it's a triple acrostic where you have three lines at a time that start with each letter. The first verse in chapter three is, ah, ah, ah, then buh, buh, buh, guh, guh, duh, duh, duh. By the time we get down to God's loyal love is khesed, that kicks off the khet letters. There's this triple khet sound that happens in verses 22 through 24. Khesed, the Lord's, through his khesed, we're not consumed. Karashim knew they are every morning. Portion of mind, the Lord is, which is the word khelki. But you go on to verses 25 through 27, and this is the next letter. It's tet, which what you see here in the English is this word good. It's the reason why the word good gets repeated three times here, because the word good in Hebrew is tov. So what you get is, tov the Lord is to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. Tov it is that one should hope and wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. Tov it is for a man to bear the yoke in his youth. Do you remember how Psalm 23 ends? Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. Surely tov and khesed shall follow me all the days of my life. In other words, the writer of Lamentations here has been giving us Psalm 23 dark mode, basically, for the first 12 verses. And now we're coming back to it. We're coming back to the Good Shepherd. He's bringing it back around, and he's saying, there is hope here. There's hope here. There's an earnest expectation for the Good Shepherd, even though right now, in the ashes of Jerusalem, it can't be seen. We jump straight here. This is a sermonette. We can't go through the whole book. The author took chapters to get to this point. And when you're going through Lamentation in your own life, it can take weeks to get to this point where you see the ray of light. It can take months. It may even take years in some cases. But there is this point that we need to get to, and it doesn't end the grief. It doesn't end the grief, but the healing can begin when we get to this point. One day Jeremiah is going to be resurrected. He lamented over the temple falling, and he will know one day how God himself came to earth, tabernacled with men, and that there was another temple that fell and was raised in three days and three nights, so that we could all become the temple where God dwells. Can you imagine when Jeremiah sees the fullness of that, what he'll think? So for us, sometimes we're not okay. Sometimes we're not okay. We don't have the right to judge God in those times, but nor do we need to just put on a happy face. God is relational. He's relational, and that means that he would rather have our real complaint than our empty praise. He can do a lot more with the first than he can with the second. A third of our Psalms in the Bible are laments. They're here for us. There's going to be a time when God wipes away every tear, and until then, we can take comfort, and we can find comfort in the process of using these Psalms. There's comfort to be found in the practice of lamentation.