Fresh Mercies

Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The faithful love of the LORD never
ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh
each morning. I say to myself, “The LORD is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope
in him!”
Lamentations 3:21–24

One of the prophets who watched Judah’s transition from compromise to captivity was Jeremiah. He prophesied for forty years, and he wept as he preached, all the while witnessing the erosion of apostasy. We have two of his books in the Old Testament. The first, of course, bears his name. But the second book, in my opinion, is even more eloquent. It is Jeremiah’s journal of woe, called, appropriately, Lamentations.

We rarely use that word nowadays, but it’s a great word. To lament is “to cry out with words of grief.” It’s like a wailing cry in the middle of the night. It represents the sadness brought on by loss. And Jeremiah, as he stumbles through Jerusalem, once the stronghold of Zion, remembers and records all that they’ve lost.

Jeremiah remembers when they were a people of God. He remembers the warnings, and now, with a sigh, he records the failures. He reminds his readers that his people had set in motion a cycle of complications. By the way, that cycle is regularly repeated. It isn’t limited to the ancients. Disobedience always brings a cycle of complications. God faithfully sets them in motion. When we compromise truth, we begin to be afflicted.

Jeremiah and his fellow Jews have certainly “seen affliction.” That’s the beginning of the cycle. When you do wrong, when you compromise with the truth, you begin to be afflicted, because God doesn’t let His children play fast and loose in the traffic. He faithfully disciplines those He loves. He wants to bring us back. And so, in His mysterious will, He faithfully afflicts us with the rod of righteousness.

Does Jeremiah’s lamentation resonate with you? Have you ever found yourself under that smarting rod of God? You may be there right now. You’ve walked away from His truth and are now suffering the consequences. Who hasn’t been there? The pain is borderline unbearable. And it’s supposed to hurt . . . so that we will run to God, whose mercies are new every morning.