EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
(מ) Lamentations 3:37. The reason for not mentioning any name of God, as in Lamentations 3:1-17, is now wholly dispensed with, and He is presented as conditionating all events. He observes man’s dealings with his neighbours. He provides that every transgression and disobedience receive a just recompense of reward. No injustice is permissible. If a man or nation could devise and carry out their own commands, then evil or good would come in spite of God. But who is he that saith and it comes to pass, unless the Lord has commanded [it]? His will is supreme. So it follows:—
Lamentations 3:38. From the mouth of the Host High does not the evil and the good come? It is a term of the age-lasting problem. He lets evil be done and punishes the evil-doer. He must work out His will, for He works within us to will and do that which is good. In both good and evil we are in close contiguity with God.
Lamentations 3:39. The right interpretation partly depends on whether or not we read this verse as one question. Both the Authorised Version and the Revised Version take the former course. The Hebrew renders this doubtful. It would warrant a division. For what should a living man, one in life’s school, and with all the possibilities of the education he is receiving from the Lord, complain? Let every one come to a more manly position, and they would see it needful to sigh over their sins. Sin brings on men the evils really to be lamented, and the space given should be filled up with repentance.
HOMILETICS
THE DIVINE RULE ABSOLUTE AND UNIVERSAL
I. That nothing happens without the Divine knowledge and sanction. “Who is he that saith and it cometh to pass when the Lord commandeth it not?” (Lamentations 3:37). The curse causeless does not come. Somehow, somewhere, and for some purpose, there is running all through the seething mass of what appears to us little else than a complex of sorrowful accidents, the activity of a prescient foreknowledge, a permissive providence, a governing will. “We see only results. To God, the beginning, with its antecedents all hidden and remote, is a presence. The wildest freaks of chance, as they seem, the most exorbitant anomalies in nature, the slightest incidents in the constitution of mind or matter, storm, earthquake and fires, the shoot of an avalanche, the dropping of a leaf, the wanderings of a comet, the birth, life, history, and death of a man, all come within the foreknowledge and are beneath the sovereign sweep of the purposes of God.”
II. That the mingling of adversity and prosperity is in harmony with the administration of infinite wisdom. “Out of the mouth of the Most High proceedeth not evil and good?” (Lamentations 3:38). If the life of man was an uninterrupted series of calamities, we might gravely question the wisdom and goodness of the Great Ruler; but the evil and the good are so nicely balanced one over against the other, that when God has finished His work there shall be no just ground for complaint (Ecclesiastes 7:14). The old divines used to say, “God is too wise to err, too good to be unkind.”
III. That, while life is continued, man should not murmur over his punishment, but repent of the sins which made that punishment necessary. “Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?” (Lamentations 3:39). The word living is emphatic, and implies that while God spares man’s life he has no room to murmur. Life is a boon that transcends in significance any amount of temporary suffering. Life is a grand opportunity for repentance, reform, and the accomplishment of noblest purposes. Every moment in life spent in complaining is worse than wasted. When we understand how completely the Divine mind is governing everything, we begin to grasp the true significance of life.
LESSONS.—
1. The government of the world is in the hands of a wise and loving God.
2. Affliction when used aright may be an unspeakable blessing.
3. Life is a gift fraught with great moral issues.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 3:39. Complaint under affliction. I. Some complaints allowable.
1. It is lawful to express what we feel and suffer in those ways Nature prompts us.
2. May complain to friends, relations, and acquaintances.
3. To God as well as to men. II. Complaints prompted by impatience with God’s dealings condemned.
1. It is long before God takes the rod in hand to correct.
2. He is soon prevailed with to lay it aside.
3. He lays no more on us than our sins deserve.
4. We enjoy many mercies in the meantime by which the bitterness of affliction is allayed.
5. God has a sovereignty of power and dominion to deal with us as He pleaseth. III. Complaints may be silenced:
1. By keeping alive in your heart a sense of God’s love in every dispensation.
2. By labouring to have a fresh remembrance of your sins.
3. By considering the extreme danger of quarrelling with and opposing God.—Conant.
ILLUSTRATIONS.—Spiritual insight into the Divine rule. There seems to be in religious men a prophetic faculty of insight into the true bearings of outward things—an insight which puts to shame the sagacity of statesmen, and claims for the sons of God, and only for them, the wisdom even of the world. Those only read the world’s future truly who have faith in principle as opposed to faith in human dexterity; who feel that in human things there lies truly and really a spiritual nature, a spiritual connection, a spiritual tendency, which the wisdom of the serpent cannot alter and scarcely can affect.—Froude.
Submission to God’s will. Stonewall Jackson was once asked, “Suppose, in addition to blindness, you were condemned to be bedridden and racked with pain for life; you would hardly call yourself happy then?” He paused, and said with great deliberateness, “Yes, I think I could. My faith in the Almighty wisdom is absolute, and why should this accident change it?” Touching him upon a tender point—his impatience of anything bordering on dependence—the test was pushed further. “If, in addition to blindness and incurable infirmity and pain, you had to receive grudging charity from those on whom you had no claim, what then?” There was a strange reverence in his lifted eye, and an exalted expression over his whole face, as he replied with slow deliberateness. “If it was God’s will, I think I could lie there content a hundred years!”
Evil overruled. Henry the Eighth’s divorce of Queen Catherine, and the refusal of the Pope to sanction it, led indirectly to the English Reformation and to the flinging off of the Papal temporal ecclesiastical power.
A life well lived. Tyndale’s work was done. He lived to see the Bible no longer carried by stealth into his country, where the possession of it was a crime, but borne in by the solemn will of the king—solemnly recognised as the Word of the Most High God. And then his occupation in this earth was gone. His eyes saw the salvation for which he had longed, and he might depart to his place. He was denounced to the Regent of Flanders; he was enticed by the suborned treachery of a miserable English fanatic beyond the town under whose liberties he had been secured; and, with the reward which has been held fitting by human justice for the earth’s great ones, he passed away in smoke and flame to his rest.—Froude.