LAW HOMILY: Hope in the Ashes

The First Commandment and Hope as Worship

Every week we go to the law of God because we want to understand what God says for his people. We want to understand his heart for his people, what he's commanding us to do, and to think, and to believe.

And every week we've been looking at the 10 Commandments. And one of the things I've been so encouraged by is that every issue that we face in our life can find its way back to the 10 Commandments somehow.

So in that spirit, we begin afresh our 10 Commandments by looking at Commandment one. This is the word of the Lord. "'Then God spoke all these things, saying, "'I am the Lord your God who brought you "'out of the land of Egypt and out of the house of slavery.

"'You shall have no other gods before me.'". This first commandment is not merely a demand for theological exclusivity, although it is that. It's not a dry, doctrinal formulation that floats around in our cerebral cortexes.

Untouched by the grit and grind of real sorrow. It's a commandment that calls for the total allegiance of the heart. And in this way, it's not only a call just to believe rightly, it's a call to hope rightly.

Because hope is not a feeling. It's really important that we understand that hope is not a feeling. Hope is a commitment to the promises of God. Hope is a worshipful commitment to believing that what God has said in his word is good and true, and that it will not fail.

And in that sense, hopelessness is more than sorrow. Hopelessness is idolatry. Hopelessness is having another God other than the God revealed to us in this first commandment. To put another God before the Lord is not always to bow before a bale or to burn incense to Dagon or Molech.

Sometimes it's to bow at the altar of fear. To offer sacrifices to our despair. To cry out, not to heaven, but into the echo chamber of self-pity. When the heart says, God cannot help me, it is saying, I need another God.

That is what makes hopelessness such a seductive idol, because it whispers to us that God is not enough. My circumstances have somehow found the hole.

In his omnipotence.

Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Hope in Desolation

No one understands this better than the prophet Jeremiah. For over four decades, Jeremiah stood as the lone trumpet against the tidal wave of sin and spiritual adultery that was creeping into the nation.

He preached in the days when Israel had turned the temple of God into a den of thieves and liars. Where the priests were bribed and the prophets were corrupt and the kings sold their souls to foreign powers through ungodly allegiances.

He warned them, he wept over them, he pleaded with them, he rebuked them, he fasted. He was even thrown into a cistern, left to die. He was mocked by the priests, scorned by the people. He was beaten, imprisoned, branded as a traitor for daring to say that Babylon was coming.

And Babylon did come. The wrath of God stormed through the gates of Jerusalem on the tip of a Babylonian spear. The walls were breached, the temple was set ablaze, the palaces were looted, the nation was left in ruins, and Jeremiah had to watch all of it.

This is what Jeremiah says in Lamentations chapter one, verse one through two. How lonely sits the city that was full of people. She becomes like a widow who was once great among the nations. She weeps bitterly in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks.

Lamentations 4 .10, he says, the hands of compassionate women boiled their own children. He said that, he saw that, that's what he watched. They became food for them because of the destruction of the daughter of my people.

Lamentations 2 .4, the Lord has poured out his wrath like fire. Now if anybody had reason to despair, it would be Jeremiah. If anybody had reason to say, I've given up, that's too much, I can't go any further than that.

That is more than I can take, I need a break. I'm leaving, I'm done, throwing my hands up, I've given up. If anybody could say that, it was Jeremiah. Based off what he saw, based off what he noticed, he saw the city that was promised to be the place on earth where God dwells, and he saw God level it.

If anybody could look and say, I have reason for suffering, I have reason for a pity party, and everybody would say, yeah, Jeremiah, you do you. And yet he does not do that. This is what he says in Lamentations 3 .21.

This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope. The Lord's loving kindnesses indeed never cease, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, says my soul, therefore I have hope.

In Hebrew poetry, something to remember is they write differently than we do. We write our stories to where they climax at the end. That's the crescendo. In Hebrew poetry, they write it to where the climax is in the middle.

So Lamentations 1 and 2, Jeremiah sounds like he's in despair. Jeremiah 4, Lamentations 4, sounds like he's in despair. But in the middle, he's saying, great is your faithfulness, your loving kindness is renewed every morning.

Why?

Because in Hebrew poetry, the center is the point. And what it proves to us is in the midst of a hard week, in the midst of paralyzing providences, at the center of our life is hope and the promises of God.

All of us at some level have gone through that week where we're tempted to give up, tempted to throw in the towel, tempted to say, this is too much. And what Jeremiah is saying is in the midst of the most awful and ugly circumstances, at the center of it, great is the faithfulness of God.

Great is his loving kindness, his mercy is new every morning. To be a Christian then, to be a Christian, is to look at your situations and to experience real pain. We're not the kind of people who are like, yay, I had another bad week.

We're not the people who are sadist, who enjoy pain, but we are the people who can look at pain and call it for what it is and call and remind ourself of who God is in the midst of our pain. To be a Christian is to look at your suffering and to say, I have hope.

And to do otherwise is to bow the knee to some other God. So when we look at the first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. Remember, that means fear. Remember, that means pity. Remember, that means hopelessness.

Remember, that means a kind of frustration where you're done, where you've given up. Hope in God, and you shall again praise him, is what the psalmist says. Speak to your heart in your hurt and remember the promises of God.

And where are you falling short? Because we all have.

Let's repent.

And let's give that over to the Lord.

Amen?

Amen.

Prayer for Hope in Christ

Let us pray. Together at first, and then I will pray for us. Lord, you know our frame. You know how weak we are. You know how prone we are to discouragement and melancholy and depression and frustration and anxiety and all sorts of emotions.

And Lord, you're not unfamiliar with the pain we feel. You came and lived among us and tabernacled with us. You experienced hunger. You experienced thirst. You experienced sleepless nights and you experienced fatigue and really long days.

You experienced betrayal. You experienced every sort of thing that we have gone through. You've been there. And yet, in that, you did not sin. And in that is where we find hope. That when all was lost, when the nation had turned on you, when they said, we have no king but Caesar, they delivered you over to Pilate.

And they beat you and they mocked you and they paraded you in front of jeering, onlooking, shouting crowds. And it says, for the joy that was set before you, you endured the cross. In the worst moment of human history, demonstrably so, where people became such animals that they killed the one and only God,.

You had hope.

You had hope when none of us would have hoped. You had hope when all of us would have been led to despair. You hoped for us so that in your death, burial, and resurrection, you could deposit that hope through us or in us by the Spirit of God.

Lord, let us, as people who've been sanctified and who are being sanctified, be a people that now imitate you in that hope. Be a people who, like Jeremiah, in the midst of hurt and pain and tears, can say, yet I trust him.

Yet I believe him. His loving kindness is new every morning. Lord, let us be a people that when the world looks at us, they can say, what is it that gives you this great hope? And we can turn and we can look at them and we can say, our Lord Jesus Christ who rose from the grave.

Lord, I pray that you would help us to be hopeful people. Lord, I pray that you'd forgive us as we've bowed down to much hopelessness. Lord, I pray that we would lay that down today and that we would receive the hope that you give us in your word.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Amen.