Restore us, O God, Cause Your Face to Shine

 Psalm 80:3

Restore us, O God; Cause Your face to shine, and we shall be saved!

 Lamentations 3:22-23;

Through the Lord's mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; Great is Your faithfulness.

These two verses, in context, are written in the middle of the worst of times for God's people. In psalms 80, there is a plea to God to restore His people; to cause His face to shine; to save us. The psalmist makes this plea in the middle of great despair and sorrow for God's people because as the psalmist puts it:

You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in great measure. You have made us a strife to our neighbors, and our enemies laugh among themselves (Psalm 80: 5-6).

Then in Lamentations 3, the writer is pronouncing these words right in the middle of affliction to God's people where they suffer through the famine, the sword, and pestilence. They were wasting away because God's judgments were upon His people who had forgotten him. The writer says:

My eyes fail with tears, my heart is troubled; My bile is poured on the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people, because the children and the infants faint in the streets of the city (Lamentations 2:11).

 This is just a little of what the whole of Lamentations and the 80th chapter of Psalms describes.

Nonetheless, thought great and terrible sorrow consumed these writers and those whom they saw around them, they remembered their God - the only One who could save. The only One who is merciful. Though these calamities are upon us, the Lord is not through with us, to do good to us. All He is seeking is that His people would come to Him. He is the source of goodness and love, but when His people depart from that in order to fulfill their own temptations, then that goodness and love also departs. For God is Holy. He does not abide in the dark. He is light.

May God restore us, and cause His face to shine on us, and save us. Amen.

 Persevere and endure until the end.