INTRODUCTION
He was only 15 years old when he staged his first con. Frank Abagnale, one of the greatest con men to ever practice his tradition of deceit, will forever be remembered as the one who got away over and over again, until he didn’t. Frank began his prestigious career as a con artist when his dad gave him a truck and a gas card to help him commute to his part-time job. Frank used the gas card to buy tires, batteries, and other automotive supplies “for the truck” and then returned them, convincing the sales rep to give him cash. Back then the amount he swindled from his father was $3,400, but that was estimated to be the equivalent of almost $28,000 today. This began a steady stream of ploys to con people out of their money. From the time he was 19 until he was 21, it is estimated he had created no less than 8 identities for himself. After stealing from his father, Frank got into bank fraud. He would write personal checks from an overdrawn account, and then would move to other banks when the banks froze his account. From there he began printing his own payroll checks and depositing them, and encouraging banks to advance him cash based on his accounts. From bank fraud he went to airline fraud, thinking that the uniform of an airline pilot would make him look more credible when cashing checks. It’s estimated that between the ages of 16-18 he flew over 1 million miles on more than 250 flights in 26 countries using the free flight and hotel opportunities wearing a pilot’s uniform allowed him. After the pilot scheme was discovered, he transitioned to the medical industry. Frank finagled his way into a Georgia hospital and got a position as a chief resident pediatrician. Since he was over several eager interns, he never really had to practice medicine and wasn’t found out until an emergency situation came up requiring the expertise of a doctor. From here Frank transitioned into the field of law, faking a Harvard diploma and passing the bar on his third try. He then took a position working for the attorney general, where he was finally discovered by a true Harvard grad who noticed that Frank’s stories didn’t quite line up. Frank was eventually arrested in France in 1969 at the age of 21, and 12 different countries where he had committed fraud sought extradition. He served a year sentence, reduced to 6 months in France, where he was held unclothed in a tiny, filthy, light-less cell where he was never allowed to leave. From there he served another 6-month sentence in Sweden, before being handed over to the United States where he was eventually sentenced for 12 years and served 6. But the theatrics didn’t stop there. On his way to the US Frank escaped from his plane as it taxied on the runway of JFK airport, made his way to a stash house where he kept $20k, and attempted a flight from Montreal to Brazil, but was caught again. In 1971 Frank escaped a federal detention center in Georgia while he was awaiting trial. He made his way to New York and Washington D.C., and was finally captured again after inadvertently walking past an unmarked police car.
Frank Abagnale thought he could get away. This is seen in the title of his 1980 biography Catch Me If You Can, which was turned into a movie in 2002. He thought he could continue slipping past the arm of justice, and continue conning the world into doing whatever he wanted. But there was a point in time when the fun ran out. He learned the very hard lesson that you can’t get away forever. For Frank, someone could and eventually did catch him. Your sin will eventually catch up with you. You will eventually have to pay for your crimes. Frank learned this lesson the hard way. After several years of escaping justice, he eventually had to own his mistakes and suffer the consequences. Even Frank Abagnale, perhaps one of the greatest con artists of all time, couldn’t get away forever.
Isn’t this the case with sin? Sometimes we feel like we can get away with sin. We feel like “well God’s going to forgive me anyway, so maybe it’s not as big of a deal as I thought.” And so we begin to let things slip. Maybe it’s something that’s not very noticeable in our eyes—a little white lie; a quick look at something inappropriate; just a little worry; one slang word. And we think since it’s something that’s small and subtle it won’t really catch up to us. It could be something that we kind of whitewash what it really is—I’m not angry, I’m just a little upset; I’m not worried I’m just a little concerned; it’s not lust, I’m just observing; I’m not bitter, I just have a good memory; it’s not gossip, it’s a prayer request. Everyone struggles with this! And we allow sin to slip into our lives subtly because we’ve told ourselves it’s not really that bad. Sometimes it’s something more than that. We have larger sins in our lives—we really do struggle with anger, we just hide it. We really do wrestle with fear, we just don’t talk about it. We are really anxious, we just refuse to admit it. We really struggle to not get bitter, we just call it something else. We haven’t been praying or reading the word, so we have to sound extra spiritual while we’re with our Christian friends. And even with these big things—larger sins in our lives, we might begin to assume: I got away with it. Well, nothing has happened yet, so I must be good. Maybe we even keep on doing it because nothing happened and we think we got away.
This was probably exactly what God’s people were thinking in the Book of Lamentations. They had gotten away with sin for so long that perhaps they began to stop trying to fight it. Maybe they whitewashed it—it’s not really that bad, or it’s just this one little time. But we learn from Lamentations Chapter 2 that you can’t get away with sin forever. One day sin will catch up to you. And Lamentations chapter 2 is all about sin catching up with God’s people and what that looked like in their lives. And it serves as a warning for us, and this is the big idea I want you to take away today:
Big Idea: You can’t get away with sin forever.
Transition: And from this chapter we find three realities about sin that teach us about the importance of dealing with our sin and not letting it fester.
So let’s look at Lamentations 2 and unpack it together
1. Sin brings God’s anger (vs. 1-7)
Explanation: First, we learn that sin brings God’s anger; it brings God’s anger. Boys and girls, you can draw Israel’s sin. I don’t really need to tell you that sin brings God’s anger—if you’ve spent any amount of time in church you know this. Sometimes, however, we become so familiar with something that we don’t allow it to really affect us. So let’s think this morning about God’s anger. We see it right of in verse 1—The Lord covered Zion with his anger. Imagine what this means. Think about what this looks like. You are God’s chosen people specifically chosen to have a special relationship with God, now you are covered with His anger. You don’t want to get here! You don’t want to get to this place in your spiritual life!
Continuing on in these verses we see in verse 2 that he brought them down to the ground. Verse 3 tells us that in his anger he cut off their strength. He consumed them like a fire. Verse 4 says he poured out his wrath like fire. Notice verse 5—this is huge! God has become like an enemy! Wow! God’s people aren’t acting like his people anymore so God isn’t acting like their God—he’s acting like their enemy! What a perilous place sin puts us in! And look at how this works itself out in verses 6-7—He violently treated his tabernacle; he destroyed the meeting place; he caused feasts and the sabbath to be forgotten; he despised king and priest in His anger; he rejected his altar, abandoned his sanctuary; delivered their walls into the hand of the enemy; and the shouts of the enemy filled his temple. What is going on here? These are places for God—the temple, the altar, these are places of worship. The Sabbath and feasts, are things God wants Israel to do—in fact, he commanded them! What’s going on here?
It’s as if God is saying “No amount of ritual can put off my anger and judgment.” God is saying “you can’t appease me with spiritual service and expect me to withhold my wrath.” God no longer accepts their gifts on the altar; he no longer wants their worship in His temple; their righteous works are repulsive to him. Why? Because they are not repentant. They are not turning from their sin and turning to God. I think God is telling Israel, and he’s telling us, that he wants our hearts. He is concerned about the inside more than the outside. Isn’t this what God told Saul in the book of Samuel—to obey is better than sacrifice? God has always been concerned with the heart of men. He has always desired heart obedience. He doesn’t want his people to just start worshiping him again and offering sacrifices. He wants them to start obeying from the heart—to turn to him in repentance and confession. This is what God wants of us today as well.
Illustration: I’m convinced that we don’t really get this many times today. We aren’t good confessors. We act as if God someone forgets or overlook our sin; or if our spiritual service somehow makes up for our sin in our lives. We forget that our relationship with God is like any other relationship. Imagine with me if someone gets angry at their spouse. Maybe they yell or lose their temper; maybe they say something unkind or hurtful. That relationship is broken and needs restored. And they’re not going to be able to go back to the way things were until that’s taken care of—the one who got upset humbly confesses and seeks forgiveness. Until that happens there’s going to be this tension between the two. Right? We can understand that!
Application: it’s the same way with God! Our connection to God is a relationship. And just as when we break a human relationship there’s anger and consequences and tension, so it is with God. So many times we forget that it’s that way; we don’t see it that way. We can come off of a week of living in sin and walk into church and sing the best praise songs imaginable, hear the best sermons ever, give the pastor the best commendation—“great sermon pastor”, and do our act of service in the church whatever it is, and we can do all that with sin in our hearts. And God doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about the songs you sing, the sermons you hear, or the service you do (great 3-point outline right there). Why? Because he cares about the heart. In Lamentations he was so concerned about the heart of his people that he destroyed their places of worship so they couldn’t worship him—God didn’t want their worship because their heart was sinful. And it’s the same way with us—if our hearts are sinful God doesn’t want our worship! And Lamentations 2 begins by reminding us of the anger of God—sin brings God’s anger!
2) Sin brings God’s judgment (vs. 8-17)
Explanation: as we transition into verse 8 we see that sin brings God’s judgement. And the next few verses focus mainly on the actual judgment and physical aspects of what God did to His people. We saw it already, but there’s more here. Verses 8-9 tell us that God was determined to destroy the walls. Walls were their defense. He is leaving them vulnerable. God is no longer defending them. It says He has not restrained his hand from destroying. Her gates sunk into the ground. Israel is left vulnerable and defenseless before her enemies.
Verse 9 tells us that the law is no more and the prophets find no vision from the Lord. This is utter spiritual bankruptcy here! Not only are their places of worship destroyed, but the people who were supposed to hear from God are not hearing from God. God is no longer speaking to them! What horrible judgment here! Verses 13-14 further mourn the condition here—what shall I compare you to . . . for your ruin is as vast as the sea! Your prophets have seen for you false and foolish visions and they have not exposed your iniquity. Do you realize how awful the judgment is here? The people who were supposed to be the spiritual leaders were leading the people astray! The prophets were seeing false visions, they stopped exposing iniquity. This sounds a lot like some pastors in our world today—they stop preaching the truth of the word and they are embracing instead of exposing sin. What an awful place to be!
Jeremiah brings this back to God and his judgment in verse 17—look at it.
Lamentations 2:17 NASB95
The Lord has done what He purposed; He has accomplished His word Which He commanded from days of old. He has thrown down without sparing, And He has caused the enemy to rejoice over you; He has exalted the might of your adversaries.
Notice the divine interaction here. God did this. God brought all of this. God sent His judgment on His people—sin brings God’s judgment! Jeremiah is very careful to make sure we understand what is going on here. All this evil and pain and suffering happening to evil, is not just random happenstance. This isn’t just sinful men working against God’s people, it is God. God is working against His people. God is sending them a reality check. And they should have known. This isn’t the first time God’s children rebelled against God. They had a long history of rebellion. They went through this cycle over and over again of sin, judgment, repentance, and restoration. And yet again, God steps in with a reality check. God is giving his hand of judgment against them for their sin, and it is not a light thing! God takes sin seriously! The problem is, too often, we don’t. To often God’s children don’t take sin as seriously as God does, and so he has to send reality checks, sometimes very difficult reality checks into our lives to bring us back to Him.
Illustration: I think a very clear example of this is the story of Ananias and Saphira in the Bible. Do you remember them? They were a husband and wife who claimed to follow Christ and they did something really bad. In the church, Barnabas, who was a known figure in the church, had sold a plot of land and donated the proceeds to the church to help the ministry. Ananias and Sapphira saw this, and they got an idea—maybe we should do the same thing. Sounds good right? Only they weren’t really in it to do service to the church, they were in it to get the fame. They wanted to make a name for themselves; their heart wasn’t really in it. So they sold their piece of land and decided they were going to donate some of the proceeds to the church. Nothing wrong with that, except part of their plan, was to lie and tell the apostles of the church that they were giving all the proceeds to the church. They should’ve thought through this; you can’t lie to the apostles and expect to get away with it! And they didn’t. They were severely punished with the loss of their life for their sin, as Acts 5 calls it, of “lying to the Holy Spirit.”
Application: you can’t expect to get away with sin forever. Your sin will eventually catch up to you. Ananias and Sapphira thought they could get away. God’s people in Lamentations thought they could get away. And there are people in this room toying around with sin who think they can get away with it and one day it will catch up to you. Don’t expect to keep on sinning and get away with it forever! Sin brings God’s judgment!
3) Sin Brings God’s care (vs. 18-22)
Explanation: as we transition to the last few verses of this chapter, we see a noticeable shift in the tone. After all the doom and gloom; after all the focus on God’s anger and judgment, we find a softer tone in what is written to God’s people. Let’s read.
Lamentations 2:18–19 NASB95
Their heart cried out to the Lord, “O wall of the daughter of Zion, Let your tears run down like a river day and night; Give yourself no relief, Let your eyes have no rest. “Arise, cry aloud in the night At the beginning of the night watches; Pour out your heart like water Before the presence of the Lord; Lift up your hands to Him For the life of your little ones Who are faint because of hunger At the head of every street.”
We learn that yes, sin brings God’s anger; yes, it brings God’s judgment; but it also brings God’s care. Because anger and judgment provide the opportunity to repent. The last few verses in this chapter are a call to God’s people to turn back and cry out to God. He says let your tears run. There is hope there; there is hope there!
Illustration: let your tears run. Growing up in conservative Baptist circles there was always a push for an emotional response. And I heard preachers preach from the pulpit “When was the last time you wept?” As if to say if you don’t have tears over your sin you’re hard-hearted. I’m not here to impose on you a false sense of brokenness, in my experience in those circles a false sense of brokenness is usually forced upon people, not by the power of the Spirit but by the passion of the preacher. This type of setting usually includes hard preaching with a guy who yells and screams at you and badgers you into a false sense of brokenness. That’s not me, and I’m not sure that is of God—so I do want to be careful here. But I would ask: do you get sad over your sin? Does it hurt you that you sin? Does it make you miserable that you offended a holy God? That’s what Jeremiah calls for here—he calls for God’s people to repent. Let your tears run. Let your eyes not have rest. Cry aloud in the night before the presence of the Lord. We have here the call to return to the Lord. To repent for our sins.
And notice the change in tone here from anger and judgment to hope and repentance. There’s a change here, and here’s the hope of this passage. Sin brings God’s care. Sin brings the opportunity to repent. God’s anger and judgment is a reality check in our lives to bring us back. Here’s the hope of this passage
No matter how far you walk away from God, it’s just one step to come back. God sends anger and judgment to bring us back, and this is why God sent Jesus!
He suffered the anger and judgment that we deserved; he suffered the fierce hand of God for our sins so that he could make it possible for us to come back to him time and time and time again! Yes, sin brings God’s anger, yes it brings God’s judgment, but praise the Lord, it also brings God’s care! Because amidst the pain and struggle we find here in Lamentations, God is reaching out to His children offering the opportunity to return, and that’s what he does for us! Sin is an opportunity for God to step into our lives and to compel us to come back to him. It’s as if God is saying:
“I know you’re not ok, and it’s ok, just don’t stay that way!”
Illustration: I am very open about doing counseling. And I love doing counseling. It’s a very hard and taxing ministry, but the reason I do counseling is that I get to step into people’s lives amidst the reality checks that God is sending them and help them figure out how to find God’s care in the midst of it. And I love to do that. And the reality of the matter is we are all supposed to be investing in each other that way—that’s what the Biblical description of the church is all about. We are to be investing in one another’s lives because we’re all sinners and we all get these reality checks from God.
Application: the truth is we never surprise God!
He knew we were going to be messy when he saved us, and he still did!
And that’s why amidst his anger and judgement he seeks to offer His care—he seeks to brings us back, and the means of bringing us back is the cross of Christ. This is where Jesus fits in. God can offer his care despite our sin because of Jesus—because Jesus ultimately took His anger and judgement for us on the cross! So what do you do if you see the anger and judgment of God in your life? You need to run to Jesus. You need to run to Jesus because it is through the cross of Christ that God is offering you His care. That’s the hope in this passage—that you can turn to God in repentance and confession and that is not something possible because of your own doing, God can only accept your repentance because of something he has done through his son Jesus! What a wonderful hope!
CONCLUSION
We opened with the illustration of the infamous conman Frank Abagnale, and we saw how his sin and life choices finally caught up with him. But I didn’t tell you the rest of the story. After Frank finished his sentence, he went to work for the FBI, helping with crimes committed by fraud and scam artists. From here he offered his services to banks to help them identify scams commonly used. In 2015 he was named the AARP Fraud Watch Ambassador and helped provide programs and insights to protect individuals from fraud. Frank’s sin had caught up with him; he had paid the price, but that wasn’t the end of the story. There was an opportunity for him to turn his life around. He didn’t have to be defined by that lifestyle. He was able to move past it and do good with the rest of his life. Though he had messed up; though his sin caught up with him, there was more of the story to be written.
The same is true in our lives, and here is the hope. You may be like Frank—your sinful choices and past mistakes have caught up with you, and there’s no way out! Sin awakened God’s anger in your life; sin awakened God’s judgment in your life, but sin also awakened God’s care in your life. It is not too late for you to turn to God. It is not too late for you to repent and turn back to God and seek his face—it’s never too late! Yes, sin has a high cost as we talked about last week. But when God steps into our lives and brings us those reality checks, there is grace involved. Because those reality checks of God’s anger and judgment are there to remind us of His care. They are there to draw us back to him like a fish on a line. It doesn’t matter how many steps you’ve taken from God, it only takes one step to come back.
NEXT STEPS
What are some next steps for you? Let me give you a few today:
1. Get serious about your sin
For you, perhaps you do need to cry; weep; mourn over how your sin hurts God and others. For you, make the commitment to do that. Turn from your sin, turn to God in confession and repentance, and get serious about it.
2 Corinthians 7:9–10 NASB95
I now rejoice, not that you were made sorrowful, but that you were made sorrowful to the point of repentance; for you were made sorrowful according to the will of God, so that you might not suffer loss in anything through us. For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death.
I have a diagram showing the difference between the two.
*Adapted from diagrams from the Biblical Counseling Alliance
2. Praise God for his grace amidst judgment
We don’t often think of it this way, but there is grace in judgment because God is bringing us back to him. Take some time and focus on that this week in your spiritual life—find a way to praise him.
3. Ask God to give you someone whom you can tell
If you’ve experienced this, find someone to tell about it today. Commit to sharing this truth with someone else—maybe it’s a friend or neighbor, or coworker. But committed to telling someone who is a sinner and hasn’t begun their relationship with Jesus but they need him right now.
Lamentations gives us the hard reminder that you can’t get away with sin forever. But it also reminds us, that part of the reason we can’t get away with it forever is because God is trying to bring us back.
