Building a Foundation of Hope

God revealed through Herbert W. Armstrong that the United States and the British peoples are prophetically known as the nations of Israel in the Bible. Others understood that truth, but only in a shallow way compared to Mr. Armstrong. God also revealed to Mr. Armstrong that the modern-day Israelis are prophetically known as Judah in the Bible.

These are God’s own nations, called to set an example for the world. Our nations have failed miserably to live up to God’s standards. Our crime rates are some of the highest in the world—and our morals are the lowest in the world!

And now even God’s own Church, God’s spiritual nation, has fallen away from God’s truth. Chapters 3 and 4 of Lamentations describe in vivid detail how God is going to punish His nations and Church for their many sins. They contain very bad news for our nations and the Laodicean Church.

The author of Lamentations felt this pain personally! He speaks for God’s nations and Church.

Israel—Mauled by a Wild Animal

Lamentations 3 begins, “I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light. Surely against me is he turned; he turneth his hand against me all the day. My flesh and my skin hath he made old; he hath broken my bones” (verses 1-4).

It appears from these scriptures that this prophet experienced some of the horrors described in these verses. Perhaps God’s Philadelphians will also. In verse 1, the verb “seen” in the Hebrew is raah, which implies personal experience. We know the author saw some of these events firsthand. He may have added some of what he saw and experienced to the book of Lamentations later. He felt the agony that God’s nations and Church will feel when God completely turns against His Laodicean people.

Verse 2 shows God is going to totally abandon His people. The word “led” is the Hebrew word nahag and means driven. This doesn’t describe God leading His Church by His Spirit—it shows that God is driving His Church and nations completely away from His blessings and protection into the worst curses ever.

Verses 3 and 4 reveal that God’s people will be put through exceptional suffering. They will experience intense mental agony, knowing that God is doing this to them. They have become victims of the very prophecies they once believed! God will wear them out, making them look like old people even though they may be very young. Their pain will be so great, it will be as if every bone in their bodies had been broken. That is acute pain!

Verses 5 through 9 show that none will escape. God has caused His people to be taken captive. They are locked, like a captive in chains, into the Great Tribulation—“that I cannot get out” (verse 7). Though God’s people make many prayers, God will not deliver them. There is nowhere for them to turn.

“He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old” (verse 6). Some of the Laodiceans are already in dark places. The “dead of old” in the Hebrew means dead forever! Those who don’t repent in the Great Tribulation shall be dead forever. Fifty percent of them are going to experience that very fate! What a seriously dangerous calling we have been given by God. All Church members who find themselves in the Tribulation will know that they must either repent then or die forever!

This spiritual knowledge is about eternal life and eternal death. How real is this to you?

Verse 9 states that the Laodiceans are “inclosed … with hewn stone.” It’s as if they are in a stone tomb. They must either repent or be in the blackness of darkness forever. Repentance is the only escape.

Never has suffering been expressed in such stirring poetry. It’s like a symphony of horror.

The author recognized that even if God’s people could find a path out of the maze, God is still waiting to destroy them. “He was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places. He hath turned aside my ways, and pulled me in pieces: he hath made me desolate” (verses 10-11). God is going to punish His nations and Church so severely that they will appear as if a bear or lion mauled them! What a horrible sight! Can you imagine the horror? A severed hand here, a severed leg there! This is God’s doing. Clearly, it is better to face God’s warning message today.

“He hath bent his bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow. He hath caused the arrows of his quiver to enter into my reins” (verses 12-13). Like a skilled archer, God is waiting to destroy His people with many arrows. For what reason?

Jeremiah spent many years of his life warning the people of their coming doom if they did not repent. But they rejected his messages. “I was a derision to all my people; and their song all the day” (verse 14).

Anciently, the people rejected the warning—and their punishment descended on them quickly. They were starved, taken captive and brutalized! Why is God going to punish His Laodicean Church? Because it has rejected Mr. Armstrong and the messages God gave the Church through him. It has also rejected the prophecies of Jeremiah and the revealed prophecies of the pcg.

God has been an ugly derision to the Laodiceans. They deride Him by how they scorn His message delivered by the pcg.

God is going to punish His nations, the Church and eventually the entire world until they admit that what Mr. Armstrong taught was truth revealed from God. It should not have been changed—but believed!

God’s People Repent in Tribulation

“He hath filled me with bitterness, he hath made me drunken with wormwood. He hath also broken my teeth with gravel stones, he hath covered me with ashes. And thou hast removed my soul far off from peace: I forgat prosperity. And I said, My strength and my hope is perished from the Lord” (Lamentations 3:15-18). The Laodiceans had strength and hope in God, but lost it. There is always hope in God. The greatest tragedy is losing that hope. However, 50 percent of God’s own people will repent and be able to re-establish that hope—this time forever!

Can we see why God had to punish them in the worst suffering ever on this Earth? It was the only way to save them so they could be born into His Family.

The Laodiceans still remembered God’s truth. “My soul hath [them] still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope” (verses 20-21). As they remembered and repented, the hope in God returned.

God had to plunge them into the Great Tribulation to resurrect their hope! There was finally a breakthrough. They were saved from being forever dead! If there is any way God can get us into His eternal Family, He will do it.

What a marvelous hope there is in our fiery trials.

“It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him” (verses 22-24). The God of hope is our portion. We are never without hope if we walk with God.

The very elect kept their hope in God—set the example and continued declaring the hope that finally brought the Laodiceans back to God.

God gives us eternal hope. When we are born into His Family, our eternal lives will be filled with hope.

God is a God of hope forever!

“The Lord is my portion” is a powerful statement. All we need is God. Stay close to Him and our lives are filled with blessings. Nothing matters but God! This calling is the greatest thing that can or ever will happen to you! Everything else is trivia by comparison. Hang on to God!

“The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him” (verse 25). Can we wait for God in hope—without grumbling and giving up? If we wait for God, even in death, we still have a magnificent hope.

Sometimes God has to put us into the fiery furnace to remove the dross from the spiritual gold. There is glorious hope in the fiery furnace!

“It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord” (verse 26). We must “hope and quietly wait” for salvation—without moaning or groaning! That is a real battle.

“He putteth his mouth in the dust; if so be there may be hope. He giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him: he is filled full with reproach” (verses 29-30). Sometimes we must find hope by putting our mouth in the dust—in the worst suffering ever. Whenever God smites it is for our own good—always!

Jeremiah suffered through all of the 19-year siege before Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah. Much of that time he was imprisoned and even in a dungeon. We must follow his example of suffering.

“For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men” (verses 31-33). God does not afflict willingly—He always corrects His sons in “the multitude of his mercies.”

That is often the way He restores or builds hope.

The leaders in God’s Church who were very quick to speak—to publicly preach wrong doctrine—will be silent in the Tribulation. Finally, they will have learned the lesson that it is better just to put their mouths “in the dust.” But it will take great punishment to bring them to this point. God’s Laodicean people will be willing to give their lives over to their captors—give their “cheek to him that smiteth”—because they realize the depth of their sin. They recognize that even though they must die, they will make it to the first resurrection and will be born into the Family of God. In all the tragedy, God’s people still find great hope.

“To turn aside the right of a man before the face of the most High, To subvert a man in his cause, the Lord approveth not” (verses 35-36). The Laodiceans have worked to “turn aside the right of a man.” That expression refers to legal rights according to Lange’s Commentary. This is about our six-year court case against the Laodiceans. They fought “before the face of the most High,” and God gave us even more than we asked for in the court case.

These are scriptures about God’s very elect who stood up for God. They stood up before the face of God and represented God and were given victory because they did, and the fruits are there for all to see.

The expression “in his cause” can refer to a lawsuit. The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible calls it “litigation, a judicial cause. The expression, used 60 times in the Old Testament, covers the entire process of adjudication.” Adjudication means to hear and decide a case or to serve as a judge. Then the Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible discusses “various parts of a lawsuit” and gives a list of scriptures.

God is giving the antichrists (1 John 2:18), who fought in court against Christ as the Head of the very elect, specific reasons why they must experience the Tribulation. God is going to show them what real justice is!

He is saying, Read in the book of Lamentations what is about to happen to you! I am not going to let you get away with that! You’re going to experience lamentations, mourning and woe from me!

How dare they fight before the face of the Most High? How could anybody possibly win that battle? God says He’s going to take vengeance, and the book of Lamentations makes that vengeance painful to think about! What about when we go into that Babylonian captivity if we don’t obey God? What will that be like—that Lamentations experience? How mad with starvation do you have to be for a mom to eat her own nursing child?! How mad is your brain, your psyche, when you have to go through something like that?

There are terrifying penalties for fighting against God and for failing to fight for Him in court! God is about to take vengeance. They have reached the point of no return. At the same time, those members who fought for God are going to escape Satan’s worst wrath. They are the ones who kept God’s law and continually received new revelation from God, as in this booklet you are reading. This truth is from the Most High God! (Lamentations 2:9). When God gives new revelation, the very elect deliver the message so you can receive and understand God’s revealed warning. It is painfully clear where the very elect are.

Turn again to God

“Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?” (Lamentations 3:39). There is no need to complain about the punishment of sin. It is a time to repent—not complain. That is where the Laodiceans get into trouble. They grumbled and groaned because of their punishment. They should have been repenting of their sins!

Even in the midst of all the tragedy of the Tribulation, many of God’s people will repent and turn back to Him. “Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord. Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens. We have transgressed and have rebelled: thou hast not pardoned” (verses 40-42). God’s people begin to “search and try” their ways. They will have to return to the truth as taught by God’s end-time Elijah (Malachi 3:18). In the Tribulation, God’s repentant Laodiceans will proclaim that what Mr. Armstrong taught, and what the Philadelphia Church of God held fast to, was the truth!

They begin to search their ways and “turn again” to the Eternal. These are God’s own people who turned to Him and then shamefully turned away.

Jeremiah says to all of us, “let us search and try our ways.” This is how we keep from turning away from God in the first place. This is something we must do all the time to avoid spiritual disaster.

Are you and I doing this now? Every day?

The Laodiceans will finally admit they have transgressed God’s law and rebelled. They learn deeply that God is not going to pardon unless they repent.

“Thou hast made us as the offscouring and refuse in the midst of the people. All our enemies have opened their mouths against us. Fear and a snare is come upon us, desolation and destruction. Mine eye runneth down with rivers of water for the destruction of the daughter of my people. Mine eye trickleth down, and ceaseth not, without any intermission, Till the Lord look down, and behold from heaven” (verses 45-50). Israel has gone from possessing fabulous wealth to embracing the dunghill. Its desolation is not hidden. The whole world sees it, and many of them help to punish Israel.

Tears are going to flow from many eyes like rivers of water. And those tears won’t stop until God intervenes for Israel and all of mankind.

“Mine eye affecteth mine heart because of all the daughters of my city. Mine enemies chased me sore, like a bird, without cause. They have cut off my life in the dungeon, and cast a stone upon me” (verses 51-53). Here we see indescribable suffering, and the daughters don’t escape.

Enemies of the Laodiceans and nations of Israel busy themselves all day long to sing about their destruction! (verse 63). They love seeing Israel in this unparalleled Tribulation. They love it so much that they sing about it throughout the day! This is the evil world in which we live.

Gold Becomes Tarnished

Chapter 4 of Lamentations supplements the lessons of chapter 2 by bringing into sharper focus the main cause for the Church being led into the Tribulation. The author shows that the main problem lies with the ministry.

“How the gold has grown dim, how the pure gold is changed! The holy stones lie scattered at the head of every street” (Lamentations 4:1, Revised Standard Version). These verses prophesied long ago that the majority of God’s end-time ministry would become Laodicean. God compares the end-time Laodicean ministry to gold that has become tarnished and to “stones of the sanctuary” (kjv). These ministers had God’s precious truth and then corrupted themselves.

The gold that “has grown dim” undoubtedly refers to the 50 percent of the lukewarm Laodiceans who will repent in the Great Tribulation. The gold has become tarnished, but it is still gold. The stones that have been thrown into the streets surely refers to the 50 percent of the Laodiceans who refuse to repent and are cast into the lake of fire. They are no longer spiritual gold and have no value to God.

But verse 2 shows that God’s very elect are doing a work at the same time. “The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter!” The very elect have remained humble, so God could shape and mold them.

Look at how God talks about those precious sons of Zion! You can see in the Revised Standard Version this is the most powerful kind of poetry: “The precious sons of Zion, worth their weight in fine gold, how they are reckoned as earthen pots, the work of a potter’s hands!”

How does God look upon His people? Precious! Fine gold! God wants to make us understand how He loves us! The saints of God are like pure gold! Do we see how precious that character is that we’re building? The ministers spoken of here are referred to as “fine gold,” a term similar to that of the “jewels” found in Malachi 3:17. God esteems His Family very highly, for they are rare—the Eternal’s most precious possession. These ministers have remained close to God and are upholding His truths.

Verses 1 and 2 of Lamentations 4 are more proof that a Church split was prophesied to occur. Verse 1 refers to a group of ministers as gold that became dim—or Laodicean. They were ministers of God who became tarnished! Verse 2 refers to the precious sons of Zion, who are compared to fine gold! They have surrendered to God and have been refined spiritually by Him.

That is how God viewed all of His people—but as you can see in verse 1, many of them have grown dim, and that pure gold has changed. What happened to those precious sons of Zion? They were deeply precious to God—noble, golden, pure gold—and then that gold degenerated.

It is totally contrary to the nature of gold to change like that! It should also be contrary to us. Woe be unto us if we allow golden character to tarnish or become like common stones.

Is our nature golden like God’s? Oh, how God loves the golden character that is preparing us to marry His Son!

Laodicean Ministry Cruel

The next verse gives another example of how the ministers have degenerated. “Even the jackals give the breast and suckle their young, but the daughter of my people has become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness” (Lamentations 4:3, rsv). The Laodicean ministers are cruel like ostriches. Compare this scripture with Job 39:13-18. Ostriches are very careless about their eggs, and if there’s any danger they’ll just run off and leave their young. An ostrich becomes “hardened” against her own young, treating them as if they were not hers. Even the ugly old jackal will suckle its young and fight for its young.

This is a very true picture of what happened within the Laodicean churches! The Laodiceans let their love wax cold (Matthew 24:12). The Laodicean ministers did not take care of their members as they should have. They passively allowed God’s people to be fed false doctrine. The Church is to be the “mother” of us all—a place where people can grow up in God’s precious truth. Who can grow under the tutelage of confusion? Many of the pcg members, before they left the wcg, were dealt with very harshly for questioning the many changes.

The Laodiceans have lost their love of God—and their love for God and for man. They won’t reach out to mankind with God’s wonderful message. They are doing a great disservice to our nations. They no longer thunder out a warning message about the coming punishment for sin. Prophecy has been intentionally pushed aside! Our nations should be warned that great trouble is on the horizon because of our corruption.

Lamentations 4:4-5 show that our nations’ children will starve to death. Even though the United States, the British peoples, and modern-day Israel (biblical Judah) have enjoyed the greatest wealth, our people will soon embrace “dunghills”—they will pick through garbage to survive.

Our people will be punished more than Sodom (verse 6) because our sins are worse. Sodom was not destroyed by men; it was destroyed by fire from heaven (Genesis 19:24). In this end time, calamities linger—famine, pestilence, starvation, pestilence, race wars, lamentations, mourning and woe! It’s all about to spring upon us. We must be ready. Sodom was destroyed in a moment. But those who survive the nuclear attack must suffer for years in the Tribulation or until they die.

Most people don’t even like to read of such horror. But it is better to read about it and repent than to experience it!

Verses 7 and 8 of Lamentations 4 show that the Levites, or ministry, must shoulder the blame for this trouble. The Nazarites are a type of God’s ministers today. Our ministers, like the Nazarites, are set apart by God to sacrifice for and serve God. They were “purer than snow.” They were spiritually very beautiful, like red rubies and highly polished sapphires. But they became good for nothing. They stopped doing their job of warning the world—now they too must share in its bloodcurdling punishment! Verse 8 reveals that the ministers’ skin becomes black with famine. They are no longer seen out in the streets with God’s people. They become so thin, they look like sticks.

“Happier were the victims of the sword than the victims of hunger, who pined away, stricken by want of the fruits of the field” (verse 9, rsv). Yes—there is coming a time when to be killed right away will be a far preferable fate.

“The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food in the destruction of the daughter of my people” (verse 10, rsv). This will happen in the Tribulation—and these are not the cruel women, these are the compassionate women! This is how even the compassionate ones act!

This is terrible news—but we cannot turn away from it. We must face it, because God wants His people to reach out and help the Laodiceans and try to shake them one last time!

Zion—Foundations Are Burned

“The Lord gave full vent to his wrath, he poured out his hot anger; and he kindled a fire in Zion, which consumed its foundations” (Lamentations 4:11, rsv). Here is another depiction of Zion’s total destruction. When a building is burned, usually the foundation is left standing. But with Zion, God intends to burn even the foundation! You cannot build on sin, you cannot build on evil, and you cannot repent 90 percent of the way. God says it will all be the pure character of God, or He’s going to destroy it—including the foundation. That is the only way to create the perfection of beauty.

God’s Church has never been punished more severely! Verse 12 shows that even the kings of the Earth are amazed at the destruction! The world can’t even imagine the kind of destruction coming on the Laodiceans and the nations of Israel.

Why did the Church have to endure such punishment? “This was for the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests, who shed in the midst of her the blood of the righteous” (verse 13, rsv). It is primarily because of the sins of the ministers! The ministers loved to speak smooth things, and the people loved to hear it, and look what happened.

Rather than warning people of the coming punishment for sin, the ministry led the people into sin!

God is going to put the blood of His people on the heads of the Laodicean ministry (Ezekiel 33:8). God likens the Laodicean ministers to murderers. As God views it, they “shed the blood” of the Church members and the nations of Israel (Lamentations 4:13).

“They wandered, blind, through the streets, so defiled with blood that none could touch their garments. ‘Away! Unclean!’ men cried at them; ‘Away! Away! Touch not!’ So they became fugitives and wanderers; men said among the nations, ‘They shall stay with us no longer’” (verses 14-15, rsv). God’s Laodicean people will become like despised lepers.

And the next verse shows who is behind all this tragedy. It is God. “The anger of the Lord hath divided them; he will no more regard them: they respected not the persons of the priests, they favoured not the elders” (verse 16). Jesus Christ has officially divided the ministry and the Church. The final separation of the Philadelphian and Laodicean ministry and members was begun on December 7, 1989, when the Philadelphia Church of God began as a separate entity from the Worldwide Church of God.

Verse 22 shows that the punishment for falling into Laodiceanism will come. It will be fulfilled to the precise letter. Why allow yourself to go through such torture—and far worse, lose your reward in God’s headquarters throughout eternity?

“The breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord, was taken in their pits, of whom we said, Under his shadow we shall live among the heathen” (verse 20). God’s Church, the ones called out of this world now, are God’s anointed. This is “one of the most important words in the Bible” (Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible). The kings and high priests were anointed ones. Already, God has anointed us kings and priests (Revelation 1:6) to help Him rule this world. We are the very Bride of Christ in embryo. We are in God’s true Church for the most special purpose you can imagine. We are God’s anointed ones!

Verse 22 of Lamentations 4 also ends with splendid hope: The people will never be exiled again.

Learn the Lesson of History

Lamentations 5 is a poem of 22 verses. It has the same number of verses as letters in the Hebrew alphabet. It is a precisely structured book recounting the history and prophecy of God’s people being destroyed.

Mr. Armstrong taught that one third of the Bible is prophecy and that 90 percent of those prophecies were written for our day. Anciently, God’s people were severely punished for rejecting God and His revealed truth. The punishment of the Laodicean Church and our nations is in the immediate future.

We all need to learn the lesson of history. We need to take warning that history is also prophetic—it’s about to repeat itself.

“Remember, O Lord, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach. Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows. We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us. Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest” (verses 1-5). Conditions are about to become terribly bad—our wealth will be enjoyed by others; our families will be destroyed by famine and war. People will have to buy water, and their own wood will be sold back to them. Once the Tribulation starts, these conditions will not end until God’s fury is spent. There will be no rest.

Verse 6 shows that our people will be enslaved by the Assyrians and the Egyptians. We know the Assyrians prophetically are modern Germany. Our nations will soon be subject to them. Anciently, the Assyrians were well known for their cruel, torturous practices. Verse 11 shows they will even be permitted to rape the women of the Laodicean Church! Could it be any worse? The leaders of our nations and the Laodicean Church—the “princes” of verse 12—will be tortured. All the people, young and old, will be subjected to hard labor.

Not many will survive! Please read the entire chapter.

Verse 18 describes Zion being inhabited by wild animals. This is a picture of what the Laodicean churches look like to God today: a desolate city filled with nothing but wild jackals running around and scavenging for food or shelter.

Although this is a terribly tragic scene, there is still hope. God’s people will have been brought to repentance. God’s people and nations will have finally learned that sin brings destruction (verse 16). They will turn back to God and realize that He will again give them a future place of prominence in the World Tomorrow and in His Kingdom. He will restore the former glory of our nations. God’s people will realize that God will not forsake them forever (verse 20).

“But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us” (verse 22). God is very wroth or wrathful against us. It is time each one of us understands the God of love—and wrath!

Why would God want us to understand more deeply the book of Lamentations today? Because the Laodiceans, America, Britain and Israel have reached the point of no return. And we must tell them so! Look at world conditions! Does anything good await us in the future, under the rule of mankind? There is only blackness and ugliness before us, as long as men are in power!

Let us be sure that we do our part to prevent this tragic fate from happening to ourselves, our families and our loved ones. Those of us who have come into the pcg will continue to warn the Laodiceans and the world of the coming Tribulation.

We must tell the world what is about to occur! It is time for all of us to stand up for God’s precious truth!