When troubles worsen

Posted at Reformation Scotland:

How we need to respond to moral decay with more than lament

In stark contradiction of God’s requirement to care for the vulnerable and carry one another’s burdens, the month of June 2025 has seen Westminster vote in favour of legalising assisted suicide and decriminalising abortion up to birth. How can we fail to mourn? Meanwhile there is small hope that those responsible for the grooming gangs scandal will be dealt with justly, while another month of Pride has perpetuated the normalisation and celebration of a variety of perverted behaviours. The church is muted and slow to point out obedience to God’s ways in response to any of these instances of moral decay, limping on in our own religiosity and underestimating how much we need to humble ourselves before God. Yet some of this sounds familiar when we look in the Book of Lamentations. In a situation of multiple devastating judgements, Jeremiah has somewhere to turn. He tells God all about it and asks God for mercy. Jeremiah’s laments are God-facing. David Dickson, exploring Lamentations in the context of the Thirty Years War and persecution of the Covenanters, finds echoes in his own time of the miseries experienced by Jeremiah’s people. In the following updated extract from Dickson’s comments on Lamentations 5, we see that, far from inducing apathy and a resigned shrug, the penitent acceptance of God’s just judgments means an energetic kind of patience, which never gives up on confessing guilt and appealing to God for relief and restoration.

A place to turn in trouble

In Chapter 5, Jeremiah closes the Book of Lamentations by laying out the miseries of the church before God in prayer. When they have grieved their fill, he lets their pitiful state lie before the Lord. This lets us see that God is the first and the last and the surest refuge of the distressed in their trouble, and there is no true relief for a sorrowful soul except in Him.

Do not lament needlessly in trouble, but fly to God. One says, “I have terrible problems in my marriage.” Another says, “I have wicked children.” Another says, “I have terrible problems at work.” Another complains of bad neighbours, another of sickness, another of physical pain, another of the sense of God’s wrath.

In all these, go to God. He is the only refuge. And let your prayer lie there, for prayer should be how you close your lamentation. Any worldly person, in sore trouble, will take a worldly courage, and cheer himself up, and take whatever comes his way. But that is not the right way to respond to trouble. Go and pour out your heart before God, and quietly and patiently wait for His time for deliverance. If some new reason for grief comes, mourn over again in His bosom, because there is no deliverance except in Him.

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