QUESTION

Who is Jeremiah talking about in Lamentations 3:10–11 when he writes,

He is to me like a bear lying in wait,

Like a lion in secret places.

He has turned aside my ways and torn me to pieces;

He has made me desolate.

ANSWER

The answer to this is right under our noses in Lamentations 3, but we ask the question because we find the answer quite shocking. Read the whole chapter, and it’s clear whom Jeremiah is talking about: God is to him like a bear lying in wait, like a lion in secret places. God has turned aside his ways and torn him to pieces; God has made him desolate.

Is Jeremiah wrong to speak this way about God?

No.

Jeremiah lived a truly afflicted life. Not only did he witness and suffer Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the holy city Jerusalem, but he himself suffered unjustly at the hands of the leaders of God’s people. They hated him so much for his proclamation of God’s judgment that they threw him into a muddy cistern where he nearly starved to death (see Jer. 38:1–13; cf. Lam. 3:53). No wonder he felt hunted and attacked by God!

Part of the reason Jeremiah felt that way is because he knew that none of these things, even the most painful, could happen apart from God’s will. As it is written in this same chapter of Lamentations, God is sovereign over all things that happen to us:

Who is there who speaks and it comes to pass,

Unless the Lord has commanded it?

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High

That both good and ill go forth?

(Lam. 3:37–38)

This statement of God’s sovereignty echoes righteous Job’s rebuke to his wife when she looked at his suffering and told him, “Curse God and die!” But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” We are then told, “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (Job 2:9–10).

Neither Job nor Jeremiah cursed God when they attributed their affliction to Him. Even those who suffer righteously suffer at the hand of Almighty God.

The clearest demonstration of this is in the death of Christ. In his sermon at Pentecost, the Apostle Peter proclaims the sovereignty of God over the atrocity of Christ’s crucifixion:

Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through Him in your midst, just as you yourselves know—this Man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put Him to death. (Acts 2:22–23)

The Jews nailed Jesus to the cross by the hands of Roman soldiers, but all of it happened according to God’s plan. And just like Jeremiah, Jesus experienced the rejection of God in His suffering. Even more innocently than Jeremiah, Jesus could cry out to the LORD, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matt. 27:46; cf. Ps. 22:1).

Jesus was not accusing God of evil when He said that. Christ’s death on the cross was the fulfillment of what God had spoken long before through the prophet Isaiah:

The LORD was pleased

To crush Him, putting Him to grief…

(Isa. 53:10)

We have in Jeremiah’s life a prefiguring of this righteous suffering of Jesus Christ.

At the time of Jeremiah, the people of Judah were justly suffering the rod of God’s wrath (Lam. 3:1). They chiefly experienced it through God’s sending the Babylonians to lay waste to Judah and Jerusalem. Though he himself was innocent, Jeremiah still saw himself as one of God’s people, and he joined himself to them in his confession of their sins:

Let us examine and probe our ways,

And let us return to the LORD.

We lift up our heart and hands

Toward God in heaven;

We have transgressed and rebelled,

You have not pardoned.

You have covered Yourself with anger

And pursued us;

You have slain and have not spared.

(Lam. 3:40–43)

Jeremiah knew the nation deserved severe punishment from God. But that did not keep him from faithfully identifying himself with them. In fact, for him to do so was very Christ-like: Christ took the sins of His people upon Himself as if they were His own sins, even to the point of suffering the just punishment for those sins.

Since the coming of Christ, the people of God continue to live an afflicted existence. Suffering is a normal part of the Christian experience. (More on that here.) But Jesus tells us, especially when we suffer persecution, we should rejoice and be glad! “For in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5:12). (Remember from the example of Job that Satan can persecute us through ordinary means like sickness and loss.)

But make no mistake, even righteous suffering can feel like being forsaken by God. The Psalms express this constantly. It’s very difficult to suffer persecution, sickness, or loss without feeling like God is far away from us, especially when the wicked seem to prosper. But we should not be discouraged when we experience hardship. Rather, we should take up Jeremiah’s famous refrain that stands at the center of Lamentations 3. Even after descending to the depths of saying,

My soul has been rejected from peace;

I have forgotten happiness.

So I say, “My strength has perished,

And so has my hope from the LORD,”

Jeremiah is still able to say,

This I recall to my mind,

Therefore I have hope.

The LORD’s lovingkindnesses indeed never cease,

For His compassions never fail.

They are new every morning;

Great is Your faithfulness.

“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,

“Therefore I have hope in Him.”

The LORD is good to those who wait for Him,

To the person who seeks Him.

It is good that he waits silently

For the salvation of the LORD.

(Lam. 3:17–18, 21–26)

The beginning of Lamentations 3 describes Jeremiah’s experience of God, which certainly felt like rejection and hostility. By the end of the chapter, however, he is able to remind himself of what is true, that God has not forsaken him, and that all he need do is wait patiently on God until God sees fit to deliver him from his plight.

A Note on God’s Discipline

Sometimes we justly suffer God’s discipline because of our sin. He takes away a treasured possession. He sends sickness or injury. He causes relationships to be broken. We get fired. We get arrested. We get spanked. All these things happen according to God’s will to real Christians because of their sin. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to draw a one-to-one relationship between a particular suffering and a particular sin, but that shouldn’t keep us from making a connection when the connection is obvious. If we think we are never disciplined by God for our sin, then what we’re really saying is that God is not treating us like sons. His discipline is a sign of His love, and the son that is without discipline is an illegitimate son (Heb. 12:4–11).

A Note on How We Pray

We should adopt Jeremiah’s corporate attitude when we pray. God’s people today have blood on their hands. The clearest demonstration of this is that we have participated in and promoted the wickedness of abortion. Even if some of us as individuals have not physically murdered our own children, we should mourn the wickedness of God’s people in our day and cry out to the Lord with Jeremiah saying, “We have transgressed and rebelled!” (Lam. 3:42).

But let’s be honest. How many of us are as righteous as Jeremiah was? How many of us can say that we have kept our hands clean and our hearts pure (Ps. 24:4)? How much more, then, should we be willing to own the sins of the church and accept the discipline of God that results?