The Big Read – Lamentations

Powerpoint Pictures: Superman; Hulk; Andre the Giant; B.A. Baracus; Hagrid; Martins Licis

In a Tug of War competition, would you want the following people to be on your side, or on the opposing team – the team against you.

Superman.  Hulk.  Andre the Giant (Wrestler); B.A. Baracus (A-Team hardman); Hagrid (Giant); Martin Licis (current World’s Strongest Man).

You’d want them to be on your side.

They are all big, strong, powerful.  With them on your team, you’d surely defeat and be victorious over the opposition.

What about the Lord Jesus?

Jesus – the Son of God – who is mighty and majestic, high and exalted, ruling from the throne of heaven, holy and awesome.

What about Him?

Do you want Him to be for you (on your side) or against you?

Of course, you’d want Him to be for you.  To be on your side.  And if we are trusting in Him as our Saviour and Lord, He is.

But there are times when it doesn’t feel like He is – and in fact, He is not.

In the book of Lamentations, a book of the Bible that you probably don’t know a lot about, we are taught something really important.  Something that we really need to know, which is that sometimes when we sin and we don’t say sorry and change the way we are behaving, Jesus needs to fight against us.

Jesus doesn’t destroy us but He does discipline us, like your parents do when you do something wrong.  He does this by bringing hardship, suffering, misery, and bad news into our lives to get us to see that what we are doing is wrong and that we need to turn to Him and ask Him to forgive us.

The book of Lamentations was written after He had to do that to the people of Israel.

The people of Israel had been sinning against God and doing some really wicked things and were not sorry at all.  So, God fought against them by sending the Babylonian army to defeat them and destroy Jerusalem and the temple and take people as prisoners back to Babylon.

It wasn’t nice, but it was needed.

But wonderfully Jesus won’t always fight against His people.  He will again fight for His people and will crush all their enemies, sin, Satan and death, once and for all.

We’re told that, *“The LORD is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.” (Lamentations 3:25-36)*