God’s anger “marks the end of indifference.” It marks the end of His patience with sinners, and ironically, it also signals the opening of the door to experiencing His mercy. This is the discipleship of Jeremiah—who spoke with compassion yet clarity and realism and counseled his people toward a relentless pursuit of the Lord through their pain.

God is love. He would never intentionally bring pain and suffering into my life. Therefore, the grief that I experience is from some impersonal force—like fate— something random and out of control. It certainly cannot be from God. He is too good to let me suffer.

Many professing Christians reason this way.

But the Bible clearly teaches that God is both infinitely good and in control of all creation—even the evil in the world. Though He is not the author of evil, He is Ruler over it, as the book of Job illustrates. And because God is in control of all things, we can have hope and turn to Him for mercy and grace in the face of overwhelming circumstances.

In Lamentations 2:1-22, Jeremiah did not stop with simply recognizing that the Lord was the One who was behind Judah’s horrifying circumstances. To simply say, “God did this,” and then stop would leave God’s people to dangle over the precipice of bitterness and despair. It would inevitably lead to hardness of heart and hopelessness. Instead, as pastor-poet, Jeremiah moved on to shepherd the severely disciplined nation and thus minister a measure of comfort and hope to them.

We, like Jeremiah, must live with the temporal consequences of sin in a fallen world.

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