God’s Faithfulness (Part 1 of 2)

If we're honest, sometimes what we experience in life can leave us feeling hopeless.

But that doesn't mean we should just give in to despair. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg teaches us how to rely on God's faithfulness when we're completely overwhelmed. Lamentations 3 verse 1.

Jeremiah is speaking essentially as the representative of the people. He says, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath. He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light. Surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long. He's made my flesh and my skin waste away. He has broken my bones. He has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation. He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago. He has walled me about so that I cannot escape. He has made my chains heavy.

Though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer. He has blocked my ways with blocks of stones. He has made my paths crooked.

He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding. He turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces. He has made me desolate. He bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow. He drove into my kidneys, the arrows of his quiver.

I have become the laughing stock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long. He has filled me with bitterness. He has sated me with wormwood. He has made my teeth grind on gravel and made me cower in ashes. My soul is bereft of peace.

I have forgotten what happiness is. So I say, my endurance has perished, so has my hope from the Lord. Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall. My soul continually remembers it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul. Therefore, I will hope in him.

I will hope in him. Amen. Well, our task now this morning is the whole notion of the faithfulness of God. I wonder, would you agree that the most common way in which the word faithfulness is routinely heard today in everyday conversation is when it is prefaced with the negative prefix un. So you hear faithfulness most often addressed in terms of unfaithfulness.

The world of business practice at all kinds of levels, not only nationally but internationally, is marked by all kinds of ethical unfaithfulness. And as if that were not bad enough, when we turn to the affairs of church life, we discover that in our own generation and in the generations that have preceded us, unfortunately, on so many occasions, the biggest news has been news of an unfaithfulness in relationship to the sufficiency and the authority of Scripture. So it is against, if you like, that background, not exclusively so, but I think you would agree that there is a measure of accuracy in what we're saying, and it is against that background, and in striking contrast to it, that the Bible then speaks consistently and superlatively of the faithfulness of God. And let me just give you one or two references.

You can make a note of them if you choose, and you needn't turn them up. But in Deuteronomy and in chapters 7 and 9, know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations and repays to their face those who hate him by destroying them. In other words, God is absolutely faithful in relationship to his character, faithful in following through on his threats and faithful in fulfilling his promises. The Psalms are full of it. Psalm 36.5, your steadfast love, O Lord, writes the Psalmist, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds. Just the idea of looking up into the heavens and saying, how faithful is God? And the Psalmist says, he's so faithful that even the very heavens that are so vast above me here could never encompass the extent of his faithfulness. So he built up this wonderful picture of God as he makes himself known, the extent of his faithfulness encompassing all of the heavens and beyond, his faithfulness surrounding him as an expression of his being, and his faithfulness then being conveyed from one generation to another generation. And the vast disparity which exists between the unreliability of man and the absolute trustworthiness of God is classically stated in Numbers, when Balaam addresses Balak, if you remember Numbers 23.19, and he says to Balak, God is not man that he should lie or a son of man that he should change his mind. Has he said and will he not do it or has he spoken and will he not fulfill it? Now, it would be tedious to continue beyond this.

You only need a concordance and you can do all this work for yourself. Or on your laptop, you plug in the faithfulness of God and you'll be able to do a great panoramic survey of these things. And as you take them all and you put them down and you reflect upon them, what we're being told from the Bible is that God is 100% reliable 100% of the time. 100% reliable and 100% of the time.

As James says, he doesn't change like shifting shadows. You don't find him one way one morning and another way the next morning. He is absolutely consistent in himself and with himself, abiding by all of his promises and holding true to every warning that he sounds. God is utterly reliable.

Utterly reliable. There is nowhere that we can go from his presence. If we make our bed in the depths of the earth, he is there.

If we ascend into the extent of the universe, there he is there. He knows when we sit down. He knows when we rise.

He knows the words of our mouths before we even speak them. And this is the God that we meet in the Bible. So we could, as I say, continue to move around through Scripture, dealing with the matter topically. But I decided that it would perhaps be more beneficial to us to anchor ourselves just in a passage of Scripture. And there is no surprise, I think, on your part that we would turn to what is maybe the classic passage on the faithfulness of God.

Classic, at least, for those of us who've been brought up singing hymns. And the hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness, which is found or grounded in the verses that we've just read, has really anchored these verses in the minds of generations. And probably if we didn't know any other place in the Bible, we would know this place if someone asked us to speak concerning the faithfulness of God. As I'm going to point out to you, I think that many of us have got no notion of the place in which these verses are set.

And as we look at that this morning, I think we're going to find it to be quite startling, and I hope quite helpful. Many of the sections of the Old Testament are written in an acrostic form, so that letters of the Hebrew alphabet are there at the beginning of a section. For example, in Psalm 119, it is written in an acrostic form, and every eight verses begin with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Here in Lamentations, that is true in the surrounding chapters. It is different in chapter three in that the acrostic, it sets up with clusters of three verses at a time, so that every time there's a change, every time it comes, so it's in one, four, seven, and so on. And that then sets up the way in which Jeremiah pens these things. And what I want us to notice, first of all, and importantly, is the context in which these verses come. When you go in Christian bookstores, every so often they actually have books in them that are worth reading. But a lot of the time, they just have a bunch of tchotchke in there that is of no use at all, unless you want to buy someone for a maiden aunt who lives in Minneapolis that you don't really like.

And so you can give her one of these little things there. And they have all kinds of beautifully created verses. And don't misunderstand me, especially if you're a proprietor of a Christian bookstore, but I call them shaving mirror verses or bedroom verses. And Great Is Thy Faithfulness is got to be in the top 10% or top five. And if you ever said to somebody, what about Great Is Thy Faithfulness?

Where does that come from? They say, well, it comes from a hymn. And then they might know that it comes from the Bible. They might be able to trace it to the Old Testament. They might be able to get it to Lamentations. But the chances are nobody really actually knows where this little verse comes from.

And I want you to notice it and notice it carefully. Because this statement of the faithfulness of God is set in a context that is as startling as it is unpredictable. It is set in a context that is phenomenally dark and horribly bleak. If we were deciding to have this scripture read, and we wanted to put a soundtrack underneath it, it ought to be probably a lone bagpiper, kept as far away as you can possibly keep him in the distance, playing not a jig, but a lament. Playing a lament. Some of us would be hard-pressed even to define the word lament. It is so little a part of our vocabulary, so little a part of Christian vocabulary.

Because Christian vocabulary tends to all be very cheery, all very smiley, verging on the superficial. And here in Lamentations, in the entire book, but certainly in chapter 3, any of that kind of superficial smug triumphalism, which we may be tempted to espouse and perhaps even to embrace, is very quickly washed away if we're prepared to pay attention to it. What he is saying here is akin to what the psalmist says in Psalm 88 verse 6, you have put me in the depths of the pit in the regions dark and deep.

That's what he's saying. He's saying, I am in the pit. I find myself in the darkness.

I find myself in the bleakness of these things. And it is in this context that we discover the expression of God's faithfulness. Jeremiah is reflecting on the events, presumably, that had taken place in 586 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar had come and done his bad work, and his cruel oppression had crushed in many ways the life out of the people of God. He is reflecting, if you like, then, on the Old Testament equivalent of 9-11. If you imagine the scenes there in New York City in the aftermath of 9-11, and then you multiply it significantly, then you begin to get a picture of the context in which Jeremiah is addressing these issues. Look, for example, at chapter 2, just for a moment. We won't go all the way through the chapter, at least not through chapter 2.

And look at what he's describing here. If we'll start at verse 8. The Lord determined, notice this, the Lord determined to lay in ruins the wall of the daughter of Zion. He stretched out the measuring line. He did not restrain his hand from destroying. He caused rampart and wall to lament.

They languished together. Notice who's responsible for this. This is what God has done. This is what God has done in the context of his people. But I thought Nebuchadnezzar did it. Nebuchadnezzar did it. Yes, but God did it.

Yes, he did. But Nebuchadnezzar did it. Was Nebuchadnezzar a pawn? No, Nebuchadnezzar did what he wanted to do, and actually fulfilled the eternal counsels of God. That's mysterious.

That's back to the question-and-answer time again. Nebuchadnezzar was responsible. God was ultimately in charge. Verse 9.

Look at the city. Her gates have sunk into the ground. He has ruined and broken her bars. Her kings and her princes are among the nations. The law is no more, and her prophets find no vision from the Lord. Gates, walls, king, law, all gone. And if you think that is bad, look down to verse 20 of chapter 2, and you discover that the community has now been reduced to cannibalism. Look, O Lord, and see, with whom have you dealt thus? Should women eat the fruit of their womb, the children of their tender care?

Should priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord? Again, I always think in terms of pictures and little video clips and everything, I don't make any. I can't make any. I don't know what I'm talking about, but it doesn't stop me imagining things. And I look at this scene here in chapter 2, and I'm playing a Paul Simon soundtrack underneath it, just quietly because you have to listen. And in the naked light, I saw 10,000 people, maybe more.

People talking without speaking, and people hearing without listening. Should the women be reduced to eating their children? Should the priest be slaughtered in the sanctuary of the Lord? Look at how the book begins. Verse 1 of chapter 1, how lonely sits the city that was full of people? How like a widow has she become? She who is great among the nations, she who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave.

She weeps bitterly in the night with tears on her cheeks. This is a personification of the city itself. And dramatically, if your pages open at chapter 1, dramatically, look at what he tells us in verse 12 of 1. Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?

Look and see. Is there any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of his fierce anger? Now you say to yourself, but wait a minute, I thought this was a talk on the faithfulness of God.

I thought it was going to be all cheery. Well, hold on. Jeremiah is suffering here as a representative of the whole nation. He says, I'm the man who's seen affliction. He doesn't mean I'm the only man who's seen affliction.

He says, I am every man, if you like. I am the representative of all those who have endured all these things under the rod of God's affliction. And he is a foreshadowing of another prophet who's going to come and who also is going to suffer. Now, it would be a long morning if we worked our way consistently through these verses, but let's just allow our eye to scan them. Look in verses 1, 2, and 3 at how he begins with these bold complaints. He's driven and brought me into darkness without light, turned his hand against me. All day long, I've seen affliction under the rod of his wrath. Verse 4, he says, my life is ebbing away. My skin wastes away.

My bones are broken. What's happening here? Verse 5, he's besieged, he's enveloped me with bitterness and tribulation, made me dwell in darkness. Verse 7, he's walled me in so I can't escape.

One of the things that history records is that the Assyrians, who were responsible for the devastation of the people in the city, the Assyrians had come up with a particular way of torturing people, and they put them in very, very enclosed spaces where the walls were so close to one another that you had just a slight amount of lateral movement, but you can either go forward, nor could you go back, nor could you go down, could you go up, and eventually you suffocated to death in the middle of all that. Presumably, that picture is in mind. Then in verse 10, the metaphor changes, and suddenly now the figure of speech is of a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding, tearing me. Then it changes again. Verse 12, he's like an archer who has bent his bow. He's made me a target of his arrow.

And he hasn't just hit me on the right shoulder. He's driven into my kidneys, the arrows of his quiver. And all the people look on now, and they taunt me, and I'm a laughing stock of all the peoples. I'm filled with bitterness. I'm filled up with wormwood. Instead of eating the bread of God, I've been eating the gravel of bale. My teeth grind on the gravel, nothing tastes. And as a result, I cower in ashes. Do you think verses 17 and 18 have any kind of ring to them? My soul is bereft of peace.

I have forgotten what happiness is. My endurance has perished, and so has my hope from the Lord. P.S., have a nice day. It doesn't work, does it? It doesn't fit. How are you going to get from this to, why don't you have Jesus as your life coach?

How are you going to get from this to the, he takes away, and in your presence, all my fears are washed away? What? Where do you get that from? That's one of my good friends that wrote that song. I like the song. But it's at best an approximation to truth.

It's not really true. In your presence, all my fears are washed away. While, if in God's presence, have you ever been fearful? Well, so what happened?

Were you doing something wrong? That your fears weren't washed away? When you got the cancer diagnosis? Did you just say, oh, I don't have cancer, really? All my fears are washed away.

They weren't washed away for me. No, you see, what I'm trying to get you guys to face up to is this, that the kind of message that usually goes along with the faithfulness of God is a message that is not really true to the Bible, and is definitely not true to human life. And it doesn't actually work well with people who are able to identify with language that says, I am bereft of peace, and I have forgotten what happiness is, and I don't think I'm going to be able to make it through another day. They don't need a message about, Jesus puts a smile on your face that even the dentist can't erase. They need to find out if there is reality in this theology, if there is substance in this thing.

Is there anybody here who understands? Alistair Begg with a message titled, God's Faithfulness. You're listening to Truth for Life, and Alistair returns in just a minute with a special invitation. Today's program was made possible by listeners who support Truth for Life by praying for this ministry and by giving regularly. If you are one of those listeners, thank you so much, and in appreciation for your financial support today, we want to invite you to request a copy of a book called, With All Your Heart.

You'll find details about the book online at truthforlife.org, or you can call 888-588-7884. Now, here is Alistair with a special invitation. I think one of the great benefits actually of going on a cruise ship, Bob, is that you unpack once, and then essentially you wake up in a new destination every morning.

If people have done this, then they know that to be the case, and if they haven't, then we'd love for them to join us. The Alaskan coastline is beautiful. The ship is terrific. The musicians, Laura Storey and Michael O'Brien, are wonderfully sincere and gifted folks, and hopefully the fellow that teaches the Bible will do a good job. So let me urge you to consider coming along with us, and on that occasion, I'll have the opportunity to put many faces with names that I already know, and hopefully we'll have a wonderful time together. Well, and you can learn more about how to make your reservation by visiting deeperfaithcruise.com, or you can call the cruise line directly at 855-565-5519. I'm Bob Lapine. Join us tomorrow as we conclude our message, God's Faithfulness. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.