A Cloud of Anger

Passage: Lamentations 3:40-45

In my work as a counseling intern, and later as a pastor, I’ve worked with a number of people whose marriages were in trouble.  In many of these cases, one or both partners had become so embittered – by a past affair; by a pattern of neglect or abuse; by a single irritating quality that, repeated over decades, had become intolerable – that almost no amount of remediation could soften their hearts to the possibility of love.  It’s as though an impermeable cloud of anger had settled into the middle of the marriage.  And try as they might, the partners seeking reconciliation couldn’t break back into the affections of the other. 

In Lamentations 3, Jeremiah describes the heart of God as “wrapped with anger”.  He says God has “wrapped himself with a cloud so that no prayer can pass through.”

The people of Israel had spent many years deluded, thinking that God had to accept them because they were his chosen people.  When they finally realized the grievous way they’d neglected their relationship, it was too late.  God’s heart was closed to them, and they were on their own.

This is our fear, when we’ve neglected our relationship with God and abused his love.  That he has cut us off and wrapped himself with anger.  That our prayers fall on an impermeable cloud.

But God’s heart is no longer sealed off from us.  God refused to guard his heart.  In the person of Jesus Christ he burst through through the cloud.  The anger with which God had wrapped himself fell upon Jesus at the cross.  Jesus became “scum and garbage among the peoples”, suffering God’s anger and rejection on our behalf.  And now, because of what Jesus Christ did on our behalf, there will never again be a cloud between us and God.  Jesus is our direct line to the throne room of heaven.  He is our guarantee that God’s only response, when we return to him, is love.