EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
(ח) Lamentations 3:22. The hopefulness which had begun to lift a desponding soul points to the ground on which it may become secure. Its hazy outlook is seeming to clear, and, as in all true ideas of human relationship to God, that which is felt as a privilege for the individual is regarded to be a privilege for all souls also who seek the Lord. One voices the confession of the remnant of Israel thus: Jehovah’s mercies, not in one form, but in many forms they affect men, and, whether shown to individuals or communities, they counteract the wasting tendencies of evil. A striking proof of His varied graciousness is manifest in that we are not consumed. More will follow. His continuous action is a token that His nature and name is the All-gracious; for his compassions fail not.
Lamentations 3:23. Every day sees some renewal of them; there is “daily help for daily needs,” as great is thy faithfulness. God is faithful to all that He has promised in creation and grace.
Lamentations 3:24. This perception that the Lord is gracious, pitying, and trustworthy, leads on, not merely to verbal profession of the knowledge of God, but to an acceptance of Himself as the dear and only treasure of the heart. My portion is Jehovah. None in heaven for Him; none on earth desired with Him.
HOMILETICS
THE DIVINE FAITHFULNESS
I. Evidenced in our preservation in the midst of the greatest afflictions. “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed” (Lamentations 3:22). The same Divine power that called us into being is exerted every moment to sustain that being. The enemies of our life threaten us every moment. We walk in the midst of secret and unsuspected dangers. A whiff of subtle and mysterious vapour, and the throb of life is for ever stilled; the crumbling of a few inches of shale beneath our feet, and we are precipitated into the abyss of death; the slightest overbalance on the slippery deck, and we are immersed in a watery grave; the accidental divergence of the knife or firing of the rifle, and we receive our death-wound; the horse stumbles, and the rider lies dead at its feet; the lightning flashes, and the unsuspecting passer-by is stricken into a livid corpse; the careering locomotive leaves the metals, and many homes are darkened with desolation and sorrow; the volcano opens its treacherous side, and thousands are swallowed into the depths of its burning lava. How unfathomable is the mercy and how undeviating the faithfulness that have spared us to this hour! “One shall be taken and another left;” but how is it that others are taken and we are left? How is it that we have been to so many funerals, and no one has yet been to ours?
II. Revealed in its greatness by the daily renewal of the Divine mercies. “They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:23). Our wants are constant; so is the Divine provision. The arrest in the outflow of Divine mercies for a single day would mean unspeakable suffering to millions. The Divine supply is ever ahead of our daily needs. Every Divine blessing has the freshness and the fragrance of the morning about it. “They are new every morning”—unfailing as the morning dawn, bright and joyous as the morning sunshine, brilliant and sparkling as the morning dew, sweet and invigorating as the morning air. Every new day, as it pours its cornucopia of gifts upon the world, is an infallible witness to the Divine faithfulness.
III. Is the assured foundation of the soul’s hope. “The Lord is my portion, therefore will I hope in Him” (Lamentations 3:24). The hope of the prophet began to dawn amidst the deepest gloom when he remembered that God answered prayer (Lamentations 3:21); but now it is strengthened and confirmed when he is assured of the constancy of the Divine mercy. Israel’s hope of help from Egypt, or from any of her professed allies, was shattered, that she might be taught to seek refuge alone in God. Amid the wreckage of all earthly hopes the soul finds a sure foundation for hope and confidence in the unchangeable mercy and faithfulness of God.
LESSONS.—
1. Affliction which reveals the fickleness of earthly things also reveals the unchanging faithfulness of God.
2. Daily mercies are constant reminders of the Divine faithfulness.
3. The Divine faithfulness is at once the hope and satisfaction of the soul.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 3:22-23. The views of a saint in his afflictions. He contemplates—
1. The lightness of his affliction in comparison of his deserts.
2. The multitude of the mercies yet continued to him.
3. The unchangeableness of God under all His dispensations.
4. The beauty of religion as displayed in these views.
They compose the mind, elevate the soul, and honour God.—Simeon.
Lamentations 3:23. Dayspring mercies. I. These words seem to speak of the inexhaustible wealth of God’s forgiveness. But for the daily renewal of God’s mercy to His people they would have been utterly cut off. His faithfulness to the covenant was great beyond all human parallel. No new day would ever brighten and glow over the cowed, comfortless, half-relenting remnant of the holy seed, but for God’s readiness to forgive. They had sinned away their covenant birthright, but God’s compassion hovered near to restore it again. And is it not ever so with God’s people? In times of chastisement and in times of prosperity alike they need to be ever encircled by God’s forgiving grace. Close by one of the great cities of the East there is a large stretch of grass that is always green. Sometimes the showers are rare and scanty, and the thermometer mounts to an appalling height, and one wonders to see the grass green and lush as though it were growing in some English meadow. It is kept so by a heavy dew that never fails to fall in the night-time. And so with our life of consecration. There is no dawn without the dew of abounding love and compassion descending to keep it green. II. These words seem to suggest the resourcefulness of Divine Providence. The mercy that is ever fresh to pardon is ever fresh to guide and shape the circumstances in the midst of which the pardoned life is spent. The text is in direct conflict with the clock-work theory of the universe. Providence glories in freshness and originality—it abhors unintelligent routine. The tied-up helm and the sail square-set to the wind are no types of God’s providential methods of dealing with us. Life is full of bends and rapids and shallows and whirlpools, and an automatic providence will not meet the terrific emergencies of its swiftly passing moments. Sail and helm alike are in His hand, and answer to His touch through every flashing second. Astronomers at one time puzzled themselves over a problem in solar physics. How was the heat of the sun maintained? It seemed a natural inference that, as it was always giving off heat in stupendous volumes, ultimate exhaustion must one day come. Within recent times the suggestion has found wide acceptance that the sun is constantly drawing meteors, asteroids, and comets to itself, and that the heat is maintained by the impact of these bodies as they fall into the sun. Things come to us from time to time that seem out of all accord with the harmonies around us. Strange difficulties, stumbling-blocks, tribulations, start up in the path of our daily life. These things are drawn into the circle of God’s control and government for their solution, and it is in this way that the very glory of God’s providence is maintained. III. These words seem to suggest the unfailing truth and faithfulness of God in His relation to His people. God’s renewed mercies are linked with the morning because the return of the day is one of the most perfect and intelligible symbols of constancy to be found in the economy of Nature. The rains may come and go upon a system to which science has found no clue. Winter sometimes pushes itself far on into the spring. A late spring and an early autumn may squeeze out the summer. A flood may quite change the face of a country. Islands have been known to disappear in some of the convulsions of Nature. The mariner has looked for his landmark, and it is gone. Empires may rise and perish with no hope of a resurrection other than an ignoble disinterment at the hands of the archæologist. But no ill chance can befall the day-spring. And as infallibly as the welcome day-dawn steals at its own hour into our homes, so infallibly do the Divine compassions arise upon the lowly and the contrite. God reflects the benignity of His own face into the flush of dawn, and makes it the parable of a faithfulness upon which you can always count. IV. These words suggest the unfailing promptness of God’s ministrations. “His mercies are new every morning;” that is, just as soon as, or even before, we begin to need them. We receive our salvation, guidance, and defence, not of our own work, but of His free love. If it were of our own work, we must needs wait for the nightfall before we could receive any recompense. Wages are paid at sunset. But it is all His gift. So the mercy in which we rejoice comes to us with the dawn, before we have done a solitary stroke of work. The regulations of the court at Pekin are so framed as to give to the Chinese Empire an example of promptness and despatch. The emperor always receives his cabinet ministers and councillors at three or four o’clock in the morning—long before day-dawn. And so God awaits His servants with new pardons, new counsels, new honours in His kingdom, long before the day-dawn. An ingenious botanist, by watching the hours at which certain flowers opened, hit upon the pretty conceit of constructing what he called a flower-clock. God’s matchless mercies, like circles of thickset bloom that break into splendour with a rhythm that never halts, are measuring out the successive hours of our life. No winter comes to blast the flowers, and the clock is never behind time. V. These words suggest the perpetual freshness of the Divine Nature. God’s compassions are unceasingly new because they well, pure and fair, out of the stainless and infinite depths of His Fatherhood. They have the ever-renewed and living sweetness of His own spring-like nature in them. His daily mercies come to us clothed with the enkindled grace of His own matchless smile, and full of the light of an immortal May-time. He cannot give or do without putting the buoyancy of His own untiring and eternal youth into each boon and act.—T. G. Selby.
Lamentations 3:24. (Compared with Deuteronomy 32:9). Choice portions.
I. The Lord’s portion is His people.
1. The Church of God is the Lord’s own peculiar and special property. As a king may have ample possessions, to all of which he has undoubted right, but still has royal demesnes and crown-lands which are in a very special sense his own, so hath the Lord of all a peculiar interest in His saints. They are His by sovereign choice, by purchase and by conquest.
2. The saints are the objects of the Lord’s especial care. The Lord is the eternal watcher of the universe and never sleeps; yet in a very distinct sense He is the guardian of His Church. 3. The Church is the object of the Lord’s special joy. I do not read that God delighteth in the cloud-capped mountains or in the sparkling stars, but I do read that He delighteth in the habitable parts of the earth, and His delights are with the sons of men.
4. God’s people are His everlasting possession. He will never sell His people at any price, nor, if He could have better people instead, would He change them. They are His for ever.
II. The Lord is my portion.
1. True believers hare the Lord as their sole portion. St. Augustine was wont very often to pray, “Lord, Give me thyself.” A less portion than this would be unsatisfactory.
2. As God is our only portion, so He is our own portion. Do not be satisfied with generals; come to particulars. Men go to hell in bundles, but they go to heaven separately.
3. The Lord is to His people an inherited portion. We owe it to the fact of our birth—a child of God by being born in the image of His Song of Song of Solomon 4. This heritage is ours by choice. We have chosen God to be our portion. Better to have Christ and a fiery faggot than to lose Him and wear a royal robe.
5. God is His people’s settled portion. The covenant of day and night may be broken, the waters may again cover the earth, sooner than the decrees of grace be frustrated. The Lord is my all-sufficient portion. God fills Himself. If He is all-sufficient in Himself, He must be all-sufficient for us.—C. H. Spurgeon.
ILLUSTRATIONS.—Divine faithfulness. Visiting a dying Christian woman, Dr. John Brown once said to her, “What would you say, Janet, if, after God has done so much for you, He should let you drop into hell?” She calmly replied, “E’en as He likes; but He’ll lose more than I will.”
—You may be faint and weary, but my God cannot. I may fluctuate and alter as to my frames and feelings, but my Redeemer is unchangeably the same. I might utterly fail and come to nothing if left to myself; but I cannot be so left to myself, for the Spirit of Truth hath said, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.” He will renew my strength, either by changing my weakness into strength, or by enduing me with His own power. He is wise to foresee and provide for all my dangers. He is rich to relieve and succour me in all my wants. He is faithful to perfect and perform all His promises.—Ambrose Serle.
Divine Providence. It is the fault of the present day to think and to act as if man could do everything, and to forget God’s special providence. Hence that busybodiness which distinguishes the religious world, and prevents that depth of piety which is the result of sober, calm reflection, and which shows itself in doing calmly and unostentatiously, not what seems likely to be attended with the greatest results, but simply the duty our hand findeth to do.—Dean Hook.
—Those believers who watch providences will never lack providences to watch.—Flavell.
Divine supply in emergencies. St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne was often in great poverty and pinched for food. “Never did man die of hunger who served God faithfully,” he would say when night found them supperless in the waste. “Look at the eagle overhead! God can feed us through him, if He will!”—and once, at least, he owed his meal to a large fish that the scared bird let fall.
Want anticipated. The wood-piercing bee will make a tunnel in a tree-trunk twelve or fifteen inches long and half an inch wide, which is divided into ten or twelve cells. An egg with a store of pollen and honey is deposited in each cell, so that as soon as the young bee is born it has its dinner awaiting it!—Ruskin.