It’s a tough read. At first glance it feels a bit like going on a long car ride with a Debbie downer. Page after page is filled with expressions of deep pain. At first glance a lament feels out of place in the context of good news. But as we dig deeper, we find that it’s actually the soil from which gospel truth springs.
Nobody will show up for your pity party. Whining is usually void of the gospel. But that’s not the case with a lament. A lament is a prayer expressing sorrow, pain, or confusion. There are several laments in the Psalms. And there is an entire book called Lamentations.
It’s a tough read. At first glance it feels a bit like going on a long car ride with a Debbie Downer. Page after page is filled with expressions of deep pain. At first glance a lament feels out of place in the context of good news. But as we dig deeper, we find that it’s actually the soil from which gospel truth springs.
We will explore how to find the gospel in the book of Lamentations. But first we need to learn how to find the gospel in the Old Testament in general.
How Do You Find the Gospel in the Old Testament?
I suppose before understanding how to find the gospel in the OT, it’d be helpful for us to define the gospel. The simplest definition is one given by JI Packer: God saves sinners. If you’d like to put a bit more meat on your gospel presentation, I use two different frameworks with four points each. The first is God—Man—Christ—Response. The second is more of a story: Creation—Fall—Redemption—Glory.
The first presentation centers upon God’s character and how humanity fails to meet God’s holy standard, as such the judgment of God is upon us. But the good news is that Jesus Christ fixes this by fulfilling what is required through his life, death and resurrection. Our only fitting response, then, is to respond to Him in repentance and faith. When this happens, we are united to Christ and his record becomes our record.
The second presentation centers upon the overarching story of the Bible. God lovingly created us to love Him and enjoy Him forever. We were made for rest, rule, and relationship. But we made shipwreck of this, and so rather than having the blessings of obedience we are under the curse of disobedience. Rather than having peace (rest), purpose (ruling), and healthy relationship we often experience the opposite. Ultimately, we are alienated from God. But thankfully God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to bear our curse and to fulfill what God intended for humanity. As such we now experience the blessings of Jesus’ obedience in our place. He restores the rest, rule, and relationship we were created to enjoy. Someday everything will be ultimately restored and we will live in a new heaven and a new earth.
We could write entire books focusing on these various themes of the gospel. But every gospel story follows this basic skeleton. No matter where you find yourself in the Old Testament (or the New Testament) you can find one of these various threads. Every place in Scripture is either telling you something about God, something about our rebellion, something about His rescue, or something about our future restoration. If you can spot this, then you can fill out the rest of the story.
How Do You Find the Gospel in Lamentations?
The book of Lamentations is written by the prophet Jeremiah during the Babylonian exile. It was a time of intense and unapparelled suffering. It, like Psalm 88, is an expression of what happens whenever the covenant curses of Deuteronomy fall upon a people, instead of the covenant blessings.
Lamentations is an acrostic poem. It is beautifully written, reminding us that some of the greatest works of art are sourced in some of the greatest experiences of pain. Eugene Peterson also makes a helpful observation when he says, “The acrostic form makes certain that nothing is left out, but it also, just as certainly, puts limits upon its repetitions. If there is a beginning to evil, there is also an end to it.”
Just as with most psalms of lament, there are a few “positive” notes which are struck in the poem. But for the most part it is bleak. How, then, does it connect to the gospel? Exactly in the way in which Peterson mentioned. Jeremiah’s lament has a God-ward direction. It is looking for rescue.
We see in the story of the Bible that humanity has rebelled from God. All of the good promises, all of the blessings of covenant relationship, are forsaken through our rebellion. It happened to the first couple, it happened to the wilderness generation, and it happened again in the time of Jeremiah. What we read in Lamentations is our lot. This is what we deserve through our rebellion. Sadly, it’s what we have chosen. This is the consequence of removing ourselves from the care of a good God.
There is something both beautiful and difficult in Lamentations 5. Here the author doesn’t use an acrostic poem. It’s just an explosion of thought and emotion, as if he can no longer contain it. And the book ends with both hope and doubt. He acknowledges that God reigns forever and pleads for restoration. But it ends with these words:
“…unless you have utterly rejected us, and you remain exceedingly angry with us” (Lamentations 5:22).
We are left with that cliff-hanger. Will they remain in exile? Will God’s displeasure remain upon them? We know from the rest of the story that God brought them back into the land. And we know that they rebuilt the temple. And we know that it was in this rebuilt temple, and after this exile, that the Son of God came. And this Son of God instituted the new covenant.
A new covenant means that in Christ we will never be ultimately rejected. God’s anger has been averted and poured out upon Jesus instead of upon us. The good news of Christ is the answer to the pain of Lamentations.
But such a word might leave us confused. We’re not meant to read Lamentations and say, “Whew, thankfully we don’t need to read a book like that again! The new covenant makes void Lamentations.” We are meant to learn from it and to understand that sorrow and pain and such are woven into the gospel. It’s often the context in which the gospel is lived out, at least until God makes all things finally and decisively right. These words from Christopher J.H. Wright should be considered:
“…the language of lament is seriously neglected in the church. Many Christians seem to feel that somehow it can’t be right to complain to God in the context of corporate worship when we should all feel happy. There is an implicit pressure to stifle our real feelings because we are urged, by pious merchants of emotional denial, that we ought to have ‘faith’ (as if the moaning psalmists didn’t). So we end up giving external voice to pretended emotions we do not really feel, while hiding the real emotions we are struggling with deep inside. Going to worship can become an exercise in pretense and concealment, neither of which can possibly be conducive for a real encounter with God. So, in reaction to some appalling disaster or tragedy, rather than cry out our true feelings to God, we prefer other ways of responding to it.”
Unsurprisingly, the book of Lamentations can teach us how to properly lament. The good news of the gospel often shines brightest in the context of deep suffering. When we learn to express our sorrow and our ache to God, we are well positioned to also receive the balm of gospel healing.
Lamentations is a hard book. But life is hard. If we're willing to acknowledge that both the good news of Jesus and present suffering can be simultaneously true, then we can see the gospel even in the valley of Lamentations.
Sources
Eugene Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, 122
Christopher J.H. Wright, The God I Don’t Understand, 52
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Mike Leake is husband to Nikki and father to Isaiah and Hannah. He is also the lead pastor at Calvary of Neosho, MO. Mike is the author of Torn to Heal and Jesus Is All You Need. His writing home is http://mikeleake.net and you can connect with him on Twitter @mikeleake. Mike has a new writing project at Proverbs4Today.
