We’re Not Doomed, Not Doomed I tell you!

April 25, 2020 Daily thought and prayer

Apologies to those who wondered why I was talking about Lamentations with a scripture heading of Jeremiah yesterday the reference should have been Lamentations 1: 1 – 3

Lamentations 3: 19 – 25

I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
²⁰I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
²¹Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:

²²Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
²³They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
²⁴I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”

²⁵The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;

One of the benefits of writing these pieces is that I keep coming across verses like this one that mean so much to me and I am sure so many others.

Yesterday we read from the start of Lamentations how the people missed Israel. They were carried off to a strange land where their captors mocked them and, as they said, we cannot sing the Lord’s song in a strange land.

The writer lists all the things that are wrong with them, and there are plenty, but at the deepest depth of his despair a thought comes to him and that thought gives him (and the whole nation of Israel and by implication all mankind in all times) hope that the trials will not last. He remembers that the compassion of God will never fail nor run out. Each and every day God renews his faithfulness to us all. We may not always return that faithfulness but that does not stop our God.

In these bleak times it may seem that God is far away from us, but he isn’t; it is at these times he is closer than ever, because it is now we need him most, even if we do not realise or acknowledge that fact.