The book of Lamentations was called the book of Eicha, which means “The Book of how”, because it raises those kind of questions: How in the world are all these things happening to us? If there is a God, how are we in such a mess? How are we going to get out of this struggle? Let’s take a look at some interesting things about its structure. Chapter 3 has 22 stanzas. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 letters. Each stanza begins with a successive letter from the Hebrew Alphabet. The first stanza begins with “alef” or A, the second with “bet” or B, the third “gimel”, et al. Not only that, each stanza has 3 lines, each line starts with the same letter. You may start feeling like the writer may have receive some help from up high…

Take a look at Lamentations 3.1 – there is a very interesting phrase there: “I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord’s wrath.” We usually understand wrath as a symbol of anger. Is that how we understand this passage? Wrath has a deeper significance. The Jews understood wrath as a mix of the feelings of passion and the feeling of mourning, closer to disappointment that to anger. Imagine this: someone who loves you so much, and believes in you so much, and it’s committed to you so much, that when you fail to live up to who you truly are created to be feels the pain of your failure in his own heart. Someone so passionate about you that when you forget your own sense of value, dignity, calling, destiny… feels the same pain we feel when we mourn, when we grieve. And then that person, despite of his love, has to correct you, discipline you, redeem you. That’s a different way to understand “God’s wrath”. A God infinitely committed to love you, care for you, help you to fulfil your destiny, that when he sees how our sin, our selfishness, our last of focus or our focus in the wrong things… our lack of faith in who we truly are get in the way, is committed to correct you, to set you back in the right path, to remind you who you are and whom you belong to. And sometimes that means to allow us to face the consequences of our sin so we can grow and we can be truly transformed. Because regardless of our circumstances, in the middle of the storm, our safest place will always be God’s character.

See verses 22, 23: “Because of the Lord’s great love”. The Hebrew word for love here is “Chesed”: love, grace, compassion; it carries the idea that God keeps his word. And that his love goes on and on and on… beyond circumstances.  “His compassions” is originally “rachamim” and the root is that just as a mother protects the baby in his womb, that’s how God cares for, nourishes, and protects the ones he loves. Which reminds me a lot of my own mum… Mum was typically calm. She didn’t like to create a fuss, she didn’t get bother by small stuff. But there were a few things that will set her off, and none more than injustice. Wherever she saw injustice she feel compelled to speak, to defend, to make a stand. Especially if that injustice was directed at her children! Them momma goose will appear and you better got out of the way! But the thing that really upset her was when we, one of her children, would act unjustly or rude or disrespectful against someone else. That would make her cry and she would tell us very clearly “I didn’t raise you to act like that.” That phrase hurt more than a beating (I’m talking about the 70’s here!) because we knew that we had hurt her. The sense of disappointment was clear and we would do anything to change that! Because deep inside we knew that she loved us and that there was nothing she wouldn’t do for us, therefore when we hurt her we knew that there was no way to justify or explain it. We needed to change. Do you think it is a coincidence that God would use the image of womb when he wanted to explain how constant, how trustworthy his compassions are? And the last word to consider here is Faithfulness, “emunah”: the root is amen, “so be it”. You can always trust his word because he will always keep it- and sometimes we need to get over our mistrust on people who have failed us in the past to be able to embrace a God who is the same yesterday, today and forever, that will never leave us or betray us. Why do we hope and why do we trust? Why do we insist in living this way, the Jesus way?  Because he is who he says he is!                                                                                                                                                          In conclusion: God is for us, his love never fails, and you can trust his heart forever.                      The question is then: if there is a God, and his love is so amazing, what would take for him to show wrath against us? What would tick him off? Why in the world would he exercise his rod of wrath??? If he loves, if he cares, if he is like a mother, why would he exercise punishment in wrath and anger? The answer can be found in verses 34-36: Justice.

What was Israel doing that tipped the scale to a point in which in his love, grace and mercy God had to deal with them with punishment? Crashing prisoners; denying basic rights to people; perverting justice. They were supposed to be a light to the nations, but in their entitlement they were misrepresenting God.  

If we have been witness to something special over the last few years is an awakening in the struggle for justice. And we can see that in a global scale (think about the fight to stop human trafficking), in issues at a national scale, but also at community levels – and even maybe at a personal level to many of us. We live with the reality that at times the greatest expression of love is the manifestation of justice, and the greatest negation of love is the denial of justice.

The question that grows out of this text is: am I practicing justice?

To crush under your feet all the prisoners of the earth… to crush is to beat someone to pieces, to reduce them to dust. The idea is that when we beat prisoners to dust we have violated the justice of God. The text identifies prisoners, they are people at the image of God. If you go through the list of Biblical characters that were prisoners, you will find Joseph, Daniel, Peter, Paul… and Jesus. A question that we need to consider is: How do I treat the least of these? The homeless, the poor, the jobless, the marginalised, the disable, the ones that are down, the ones that need help. God wants us to treat people justly. When I mistreat and when I ignored them I am denying them the dignity that God intended for them when they were created, the plans that he has for their lives, his dreams about each one of them.

To deny the rights of a person before God; what rights is he talking about? Deuteronomy 16.18 tells us that part of the covenant is to judge people fairly:  to consider them as humans, to see them as God sees them. I remember one day when I was in my first years in YWAM and I was leading a team in Bauru, a city in the countryside of Sao Paulo state in Brazil. Our team was invited to perform an evangelistic drama at a Youth Rally. My character was central to the drama and showed someone going through different stages looking for solutions. When I arrived at the church I was dressed for my character, and I wasn’t allowed in! When the situation was clarified and I went inside the church, the Pastor was asking if I was truly a Christian. Up to that moment no one had talked to me, so they were judging only the appearance, making a judgment based on the exterior. I was particularly fired up that evening when it was my turn to share after the drama!  When we have judged unfairly, we have failed justice. How do I make judgements about others? How we speak about people going through difficult circumstances as divorce, breakups, family conflict, unemployment, break downs… when they are not at their best and they need a reflection of the heart of God.

To deny (to wrong) a person in their cause; the idea is that you have a dispute among two people, and if I take advantage over the other person, or if I twist the truth to make me look good and make them look bad, I have wrong that person in their cause. How do I handle people when I have a dispute with them? Am I able to still seeing them from the perspective of God, or do I have to bring their down in order to feel as the victor in the dispute? Have we seen situations in which we win the fight, we win the debate, but we lose the relationship? Could we reimagine those situation from a place of loving justice, when we can still stand for what is right but giving the person a sense of dignity and value instead?

Verse 40 calls us to return to the Lord! “Shuve” (teshuva, repentance) is the action here, when I walk back in the direction of the Lord. It’s a turning around, going back to God, reviewing my steps and finding the places in which I need to make amends, ask for forgiveness, right my wrongs, acknowledge my mistakes. Repentance without redemption is empty! That’s why verse 41 then says “let us lift our hearts (inner attitude) and our hands (exterior attitudes)”. Our inner life manifests through our acts and my words. We need a change in attitude and in our actions. The calling is to show the fruits of our repentance in practical ways.

God is good, faithful, caring, and protective, as a mother; but he cannot stand injustice. What sets God off? Injustice. So we humbly ask ourselves: How we treat the least among us, how I make judgement about others, and am I treating people fairly even when I have conflicts with them? And when I find answers that show me that I have fallen short of our destiny to be Christ’s hands and feet in our community, failing to represent his character, then I engage with God in his work of restoration, believing in his dream to redeem every person, and to build his Kingdom in every culture of the world.

May his love fill our hearts and be shown through the words we speak and the deeds we create. May his justice flow as a river until we see the Kingdom manifested in our world. And may we live a life in which love and justice walk together for the glory of God!