GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LAMENTATIONS 3:43-45
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43 “You wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us,
killing without pity.
44 You wrapped yourself with a cloud
so that prayer passes you by.
45 You have made us scum and garbage
among the peoples.
Here God is shown wrapping himself up in two ways: With anger, and with a cloud to hide himself. With anger, he pursued and chased after the people of Judah as they were forced to walk into exile. The mere departure of the Jews was not enough for many of them to acknowledge his anger over their sins. Otherwise, he would not have kept up the punishment while they were going, nor after they arrived.
Also, for the Jews in exile, their cross (the first cross) was to feel as if their prayers were not being heard by God. We saw in Lamentations 3:8 that there are some prayers God does not hear. Those are the prayers of the wicked; the prayers of unbelievers. Now this is expressed in a new way. It is as if the prayers could not find the Lord’s ears. The Jews would have walked up and down and around many mountains as they traversed the Fertile Crescent. Mount Sha’ir in modern Syria is a minor example but on a likely trail that they took– it is tall enough to be cloud-covered on many days. Within such a cloud, it’s easy to lose one’s bearings. I had that experience once on Mount Rainier in Washington.
God doesn’t open other people’s mail. A prayer that is not addressed to him is not one that he will listen to. If a prayer is spoken in unbelief, even using his name, then it isn’t addressed properly, and won’t get to him. Jesus gives us the correct name and address in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven.” We should not expect that God would ever listen to a prayer for Baal, or “God in Shambala,” or to any of the saints in heaven, or to anyone in hell.
But what about the image of a prayer not finding God because he has hidden himself? Is this because the one praying is an unbeliever? It is because the one praying is unrepentant, and therefore under the burden of unacknowledged sin. This is a person who has said with their thoughts, words, and actions, “I don’t care what God thinks of my life. I’m going to live as I please and make the choices that I think I have to.” They should never expect that God will hear their prayers. “Certainly God will not listen to an insincere cry, and the Almighty will not pay attention to it” (Job 35:13). So much for the first cross.
On the second cross, the cross of Christ’s suffering, we suddenly witness the Almighty Father’s pitiless killing and wrath. He has surely wrapped himself in anger to hurl down all of his punishment and fury upon his Son on the cross. Christ received everything we are sentenced with, so that when he prayed again and again, “Take his cup from me,” is was as if the prayer was getting lost in a cloud, or sent to the wrong address. But the truth is simply that the Father’s answer to his own beloved Son was, “No, I will not take this cup from you. You must drink it down until it is empty, and until you are dead. For them.”
The Father made his own Son into scum and garbage among the peoples. And in this case, “the peoples” does not mean some peoples, but among all mankind. They are represented there in their two divisions: Jews and Gentiles, the priests and the Romans. Simon, the man from North Africa (Cyrene) was there as well, and we could speculate about others, but to a Jew in Jerusalem, “Gentile” meant anyone and everyone who was not a Jew. And today, Christ is still held in contempt in as many places as he is revered as God. Where are there Christians and there is no hint or threat of persecution? Where are their believing hearts where there are not also those who have rejected him, turned away from him, and betrayed him? His cross, the second cross, was a bitter cross in more ways than we can imagine.
The further actions of God show his displeasure with sin. He made the Jews in Babylon “scum and garbage” living in the middle of a foreign nation. Paul picks up this image and talks about the life of Christian missionaries under the third cross: “To this very moment we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed, we are harassed and homeless, and we work hard, laboring with our own hands. When we are cursed we bless; when we are persecuted we endure it. When we are slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the scum of the earth, everyone’s garbage, to this very day.” (1 Corinthians 4:11-13).
When we suffer such things as being scum and garbage in the eyes of others, or even in fact, we can contrast those things with the advantages of being forgiven children of God. The Christian carrying a cross can say, “I am like a bruised and rotten apple through and through, and people turn up their noses at me, but I also have this shiny side, the side that says I am forgiven, and I am pleasing to God on account of Christ and the faith he has given to me that trusts in Christ for my forgiveness and for every good thing. The Greek poet Pindar (a contemporary of Malachi and Esther) said, “Foolish men cannot bear trials with good grace, but the noble can be always turning what is beautiful to the front.” Our crosses humble us, and hold down our sinful nature– which cannot be held in check without those crosses. So when the crosses get especially heavy and ugly and the splinters make us bruised and make us bleed, we turn away from what is evil there, and delight in God’s gifts. We take joy from the beauty of God’s creation. We receive God’s blessings with thanks, and bury the punishments the devil hurls at us, and the annoying things, the pains, the griefs, and we bury them deep. All of the hurts in the world are not worth losing our faith over. Trust in Jesus. He will come and find you. He will set you on his shoulders, bleating and complaining though you might be, and he will bring you home.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Lamentations 3:43-45 scum and garbage