sermon: Lamentations (Part Three)
Jerusalem Speaks
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 28-Oct-17; Sermon #1403; 76 minutes
Description: (show)
You will recall that I started a series of sermons on the book of Lamentations before the Feast and I will be getting back into that with this sermon here. But it is only fair that I warn you that these sermons will contain very little that is jovial or even uplifting. I mean, the name of the book we are going into is called Lamentations! You would not expect there to be much much laughter.
A lament, by definition, is a formal expression of sorrow or mourning, especially in verse or song. It is also called an elegy or a dirge, and that is what we are going through. We are going through something that is pretty sad, pretty sorrowful, and I hope I do not get you down by some of these things that I say. But it is important that we go through these things as you will see in a few minutes.
It guarantees, though, that these sermons will be about grief. They will be about sorrow, mourning, complaining, moaning, tears, anger, recrimination, even against God; confusion, despair, and lots and lots and lots of weeping and wailing and tears. That is what this book is all about. It is not a happy subject. But it is a crucial one, especially for us, the sons and daughters of God, because we are supposed to be pursuing wisdom and we are supposed to be pursuing godly living. How do we live properly before God in a relationship with Him?
Solomon talks about this. Please go back to Ecclesiastes the 7th chapter. We will read the first four verses. And I am sure you will remember this from my dad's series that he went through, the whole book of Ecclesiastes. We are not going to parse this, you know, verse by verse like he did because that was just a short time ago. But I want to understand what Solomon's overall message here is in this first part of Ecclesiastes.
Ecclesiastes 7:1-4 A good name is better than precious ointment, and the day of death than the day of one's birth; it is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for that is the end of all men [meaning the house of mourning]; and the living will take it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by a sad countenance, the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
We need to understand what Solomon was getting at in an overall way. He is saying that we can gain a great deal of understanding and wisdom if we take the time to reflect soberly on death. That if we sit down on occasion and think about where we are headed, which is to the grave where everybody else is headed, and come to understand a few important things about the life that we have to live until then. We learn little that is worthwhile and apropos to eternal life at a party. Or at any kind of feast filled with a lot of laughter and mirth and cheerfulness. You just do not talk about those kind of things in that situation. You would probably get a nice big frown from the guy next to you because he does not want to talk about that. He is there at the feast or there at the party to have a good time and so he does not have to think about the stresses of this world.
But we have to in other at other times, because we are not always feasting and partying and that is a good thing, because Solomon suggests that too much partying turns us into fools. But we have to take the time to think about these things and a good time to do it is a funeral or a memorial service or, as we have before us in the book of Lamentations, a sad song, a dirge, or lamentation puts us in the right frame of mind to contemplate serious moral and theological ideas that have eternal significance and consequence. So we need to take the time to think about sad things.
As verse 2 tells us there, death makes us think about life. It makes us think about the meaning of life. What is the purpose of life? What is my practice? What is my way of living? Is it something that is good? Is it going to lead me to good things? Or is it going to lead me to the grave with no hope of salvation?
Verse 3 suggests when we soberly reflect on such things that our heart can be turned; it can be made right, is how it puts it there. The heart is made better. It is literally made right, made correct. So when you think about these things that are normally stuff that you would think about during a funeral or what have you, we can actually begin to see changes or make changes in our character. Make changes in our life that eventually make changes in our character. We can be transformed for the better.
So if we want to be wise, as verse 4 suggests, our heart, which is the center of our focus, our thoughts, our understanding, our memory (Hebrews used it a lot like we use mind), but our heart needs to dwell on these sober subjects every now and then. And so, that is one of the reasons why I am giving this series of sermons, so we can have a formal look, if you will, at these sad things.
Please go with me to II Corinthians 7. You might be a little surprised to be going here, but it is actually a similar principle that Paul brings up to the Corinthians when he talks about their godly sorrow. We are going to read verses 8 through 12. Remember, he had spoken quite harshly to them in I Corinthians because they were doing a lot of things wrong and he had not expected that of them when he had left them the time before. And so he was writing to correct them.
II Corinthians 7:8-12 For even if I made you sorry with my letter, I do not regret it, though I did regret it. For I perceive that the same epistle made you sorry, though only for a while. Now I rejoice, not that you were made sorry, but that your sorrow led to repentance. For you were made sorry in a godly manner, that you might suffer loss from us in nothing. For godly sorrow produces repentance to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death. For observe this very thing, that you sorrowed in a godly manner: What diligence it produced in you, what clearing of yourselves, what indignation, what fear, what vehement desire, what zeal, what vindication! In all things you proved yourselves to be clear in this matter. Therefore, although I wrote to you, I did not do it for the sake of him who had done the wrong, nor for the sake of him who suffered wrong, but that our care for you in the sight of God might appear to you.
Even though this has a slightly different sense than what appeared in Ecclesiastes, the general principle is the same. The Corinthians were made to sorrow, they were made to grieve, they were made to feel sad and miserable because Paul pointed out to them very directly what their sins were and how carnal they were. And this was especially tough to hear because they thought they were righteous and godly. They thought they were doing what God wanted them to do. They thought they were ultra-loving in their approach. But he excoriated them, lambasted them, telling them that they were still carnal, they were not getting it, they did not understand right. They were trying very hard to blend the Corinthian culture with God's way, and that was wrong, wrong, wrong—and he made them feel really bad about it.
But Paul, he says here in this passage, he was encouraged, though, that they had taken it well, they had taken it in the right way. Because instead of just making them depressed, their sorrow, which turned out to be godly sorrow, motivated them to change. They just did not stay sad. They felt an urgency to do something different, to make Paul glad for them, to make God, of course, pleased with their change in behavior and change in character. So they repented of their foolishness and of their sins. That is what godly sorrow does. Godly sorrow motivates to change to repentance.
And, as Paul goes on to say in verse 11, it also developed other good and godly traits in them, like diligence. They were on top of things. Eagerness to be right with God, they wanted Him to be pleased. Indignation, they were unhappy and angry at the sin that dwelt in them. Maybe one of the most important was it motivated them to fear. This could have several different applications, but the most important one is that it motivated them to fear God, to fear His disapproval, to fear His punishment. It also motivated them to fervent desire to do what was right. And zeal for God; they really wanted to please Him.
And all of this, as he gets to in the end of that verse, led them to a readiness to take action against sin. That is kind of what the word vindication means. Instead of how we would think of vindication, it means that they were ready to go out there and prove to God, prove to anybody who was looking that they were going to fight against sin to the bitter end and come out on the other end transformed. So, kind of a vindication, you would say, but a readiness to take action against sin.
Now, this is how our study of such sorrowful and sobering subjects as the book of Lamentations is supposed to play out. When we see all the sorrow and the terrible things that happened to Judah in in the book of Lamentations, it is supposed to motivate us to the same sorts of things that Paul mentions in II Corinthians 7:11, as well as to repentance overall. It is supposed to make us say, "Hey, that could be me," and then look at ourselves and say, "Yeah! That is me in one way or another." Or "I have this tendency, and if I don't do something about cutting that off at the pass, I'm going to end at this pass in the same boat as Judah and Jerusalem."
The proper effect of the book of Lamentations is to motivate us to change. That is what God wants us to get out of it. We see the sad plight that brought the subject, in this case, Judah, to such a tragic end, and it makes us think matters through. It makes us put ourselves in the situation and then begin to firmly reason things out with God at the center of our thoughts. It should make us ask such questions as:
How did this all get to this point? How did it come to pass that it got so bad? How did Judah react to the severe punishment that God was giving them? Why did God act so cruelly, so indignantly? Why was He so harsh? Did He have just cause to do what He did? Could He have been more merciful? Would it have worked if He would have held back just a little bit and not wiped them all out like He did? Or totally destroy the city or send so many into exile? Would it have been better that way? What were His actions designed to accomplish anyway? What was He trying to do? What was He trying to prove? What was He trying to make happen? And how does what happened apply to us?
It is easy for us to think, Oh, this happened 2,500 years ago. There is no way that it could apply to us. We are not Jews. We never bowed down to any altar, we never sacrificed our kids to Molech. We never did any of those bad things. But our thinking should consider that it might apply to us. And what can we learn from it? If it does apply to us, how does it affect us? What are we going to get out of it?
We can ask ourselves, OK, yeah, we are God's people just like Judah was God's people so it must apply to us in some regard. Are we on a similar path? Are we thus under similar judgment? Will we end up in the same peril as Judah? And then, of course, what can we do to avoid such a fate if we are?
Those are the kinds of questions reading something like Lamentations should spur in our thoughts and make us really answer. Not just kind of well, you know, that was bad. I will just go on. God really was harsh, was He not? OK, well, you know, fine, He can do whatever He wants—and not really think about the whys and the wherefores of all of that.
In other words, if we do this right, if we do our study in a godly way and make it really mean something, our godly sorrow that we pour into the book of Lamentations will produce sober meditation about life within a relationship with God and drive us to examine ourselves thoroughly against His Word to discover two things: Will we find any sin that is inhibiting our relationship with Him and root it out? And also, will we look for ways to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ because we fear ending up in the same horrible position Judah found herself in?
So we should take the time to study this, to figure out if we have some of those same sins that Judah had that kept her relationship with God at arm's length and it ruined it eventually. And to see if there are ways that we can grow in God's way of life, so that we can please Him and produce good fruit.
Now we are going to be getting into the last half of Lamentations 1 here but I failed to mention something last time that I think might be a fairly essential component of the book that we need to know. It probably was not necessary for us to know it the last time. But now that we are here in the middle of chapter 2 and there is a change, we need to understand that scholars have found at least three voices or three characters or three viewpoints in the book of Lamentations. It is not all just an author putting his thoughts on the page but there are at least three different viewpoints here.
In the part that we went over already, it was a narrator and that is the main voice in the book, the narrator or the author of Lamentations. The second is Jerusalem personified as a woman. We could call her Zion. We could call her Lady Jerusalem. I will probably end up calling her Lady Jerusalem quite a bit. But she is a character in the book and she is the voice of all Judah, specifically Jerusalem, but she is the voice of the Judean people. And then the third voice is what they call the community. That will not come into play until chapter 5 and the whole chapter of chapter 5 is pretty much the community, all Judah this time as a communal voice speaking together. It is a little different from Lady Jerusalem. It is almost like we could say that it is the communal voice of those people who have listened and are reacting in a more or less proper way to their plight here. But like I said, we will not get into that until chapter 5.
Now I am making it easy on you. Some scholars have found at least nine voices in this. I do not want to get into any of that because it just will put us in the middle of a lot of worthless scholarly arguments that do not really make a dime's worth of difference either way. Three are enough. The narrator, Lady Jerusalem, and the community is plenty.
We looked at Lamentations 1:1-11 in the last sermon. Like I said, it is told from the voice of the narrator with just a few comments thrown in by Lady Jerusalem. In this sermon we are going to finish chapter 1. We will start in verse 12 and go through verse 22, and the majority of this section is from Lady Jerusalem. It is from Jerusalem herself. She is speaking and complaining about her plight. She pleads for comfort from anyone and everyone that is around her, and she finds none, no one will console her. Not anybody, and at this point, not even God. So, like I said at the beginning, this is not a happy camper here that we have in Lady Jerusalem and she is not going to get any satisfaction, at least not in chapter 1.
Let us review what was said in the first 11 verses and hopefully we can get through this very quickly. The narrator in these first 11 verses sets the stage for us. He sets and describes the scene, filling in some of the backstory of what had gone on because he starts out with Jerusalem sitting there kind of on a dust heap and she is just already forlorn. So he is telling us as he goes through the first 11 verses or so what had happened to bring her to this state.
If you remember, he opens up with a series of reversals, and it essentially tells us the story just with that. She was full of people and now she sits lonely. She is all by herself. Everybody is gone. She was great among the nations but now she sits on a heap of dust, the ruins of Jerusalem. She was a princess among the nations, and now she is a slave. She has gone all the way from the top of the social order all the way down to the bottom of the social order. Her former allies, called her lovers here, are now her enemies. That is another reversal. She does not have any friends. Everybody around her hates her.
She was once wealthy, full of merchants and trading, and now she lives in poverty and want. She hardly has any food even to put into her mouth. Gone are all the trade, all the wealth, her religious festivals, all her leaders, the army has been devastated. And even all her young people, all her hope for the future, all the ones who are going to be having babies and having families, they are gone. Most of the young men are dead on the field of battle, or they have been taken away as slaves to Babylon. And the women, mostly, have been maybe raped or killed, and the rest who are left have been taken into exile.
It is a sad, sad situation. Anybody who is remaining, the poorest of the people, they are starving. There is just no hope. It is the worst thing that could ever have happened to Judah. And she is there witnessing it all and cannot believe what has occurred.
But it tells us in verse 5 that all this occurred because the "Lord afflicted her." The blame squarely rests on God. He did it to her because, really He was a just judge, but the blame, I guess to put it that way, should be on her because it says in verse 5 it was her "multitude of transgressions" that forced Him to do it. He did not really want to do this. But He had had enough. Her transgressions had piled so high that He could not ignore it anymore and He had to deliver a judgment. And He had to do it in great fury because of the way she just kept disobeying Him. And He so utterly devastated Judah and Jerusalem that nobody remains to comfort her.
This is said several times in the chapter. She is left to herself, all by her lonesome, we could say. She is forced to consider what brought her to this point. What path had she taken to bring her to this devastating end? All distractions were taken away from her. All that was left was ruin and rubble, so she had to sit there and think about why she was there in that position at that point in time.
Have you noticed her two outbursts as the narrator is describing the scene? In verse 9 she cries, "O Lord, behold my affliction, for the enemy has magnified himself!" Now this statement, this outburst has a heavy sense of, it is my enemy's fault. They did it. They are bad people. God, look at me, look what the enemy has done to me. Notice, there is no introspection, it is all their fault.
Her second one is in verse 11 as it ends. She attempts to invoke God's compassion, "See, O Lord, and consider, for I am scorned." But this is way too early for God's merciful intervention because she has not learned her lesson yet. She is still pointing the finger at somebody else. Because saying that "I am scorned," she is still pointing the finger at those who are scorning her and not at her own culpability in all this. Why is she being scorned? Because she is unclean spiritually. Because she has sinned. Because they abhor her for what she has done. So she, at this point, has neither considered her situation and its causes enough, nor has she reached any kind of proper conclusion. She is still looking for somebody out there to take the blame.
So, God makes her think things through. You are going to sit there until you understand why I punished you. How many parents have done that with their kids? OK, you are on timeout or whatever they call it these days. We used to say, OK, sit there in that chair, and when you have figured it out, let me know. Or you just stay there for 30 minutes and do nothing because I said so, you have been bad. But God, in a way, is doing the same sort of thing. He is making her sit in the midst of her destruction and reason things out, think things through.
Verse 12. These are her words as she is beginning to think things through. I am going to read the rest of the chapter so we can get the whole sense of it and then we will go through and pick out individual things.
Lamentations 1:12-22 "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which has been brought on me, which the Lord has afflicted on me in the day of His fierce anger. From above He sent fire into my bones, and it overpowered them; He has spread a net for my feet and turned me back; He has made me desolate and faint all the day. The yoke of my transgressions was bound; they were woven together by His hands, and thrust upon my neck. He made my strength fail; the Lord delivered me into the hands of those whom I am not able to withstand. The Lord has trampled underfoot all my mighty men in my midst; He has called an assembly against me to crush my young men; the Lord trampled as in a winepress the virgin daughter of Judah. For these things I weep, my eye overflows with water; because the comforter, who should restore my life, is far from me. My children are desolate because the enemy prevailed."
Zion spreads out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her; the Lord has commanded concerning Jacob that those around him become his adversaries; Jerusalem has become an unclean thing among them. "The Lord is righteous, for I rebelled against His commandment. Hear now, all peoples, and behold my sorrow; my virgins and my young men have gone into captivity. I called for my lovers, but they deceived me; my priests and my elders breathed their last in the city, while they sought food to restore their life. See, O Lord, that I am in distress; my soul is troubled; my heart is overturned within me, for I have been very rebellious. Outside the sword bereaves, at home it is like death. They have heard that I sigh, with no one to comfort me. All my enemies have heard of my trouble; they are glad that You have done it. Bring on the day that You have announced, that they may become like me. Let all their wickedness come before You, and do it to them as You have done to me for all my transgressions; for my sighs are many, and my heart is faint."
Sounds miserable, does it not? She is just in down in her cups. She does not see any hope. And she is just blaming everyone all around.
Back to verse 12. "Is it nothing to you all who pass by? Behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which has been brought on me, which the Lord has afflicted on me in the day of His fierce anger."
Now this first phrase, "Is it nothing to you" is a bit of a head scratcher, a puzzle to Hebrew scholars because no one knows for certain how it should be taken. The words in Hebrew can literally be rendered in English as, "not to you." I mean, that can open up a whole lot of different ways of thinking. It just says, "Not to you, all you who pass by." It might be some sort of common expression that we just do not have any understanding now of how it was to be taken. So it has prompted dozens of possible translations.
Some think it is a corrupted text and they suggest their own variations. Some take it to mean that Jerusalem is saying that what is going on in her life, in her nation, is none of the onlookers' business. So she is basically saying "Nunya" and trying to get them to turn away. But that is not the way it is because she immediately says, "Behold and see." So she is not telling them it is not any of your business. She actually wants them to look and see what she was going through, so that cannot be it.
The Jews have written that they think it means, may this tragedy never come upon you. It is not for you, you people, to have this same thing come upon you. But that cannot be right either because, she is too self-absorbed to be thinking about other people's goodness and their well-being. All she is thinking about is her own plight, her own sorrow.
So it seems as if because she has asked God to behold and see (she did that back in in verse 9, and she also does it in verse 11), it is far more likely that because God has rejected her, that He has not responded to her, that now she is reaching out to any passerby that comes along for a little bit of comfort. "Look what's happened to me," she is saying. She wants them to give her a little bit of help, you know, pat her on the back, give her a bite to eat or whatever it is. She is looking for them to understand her in her situation.
As we look at it in this form now, as words on a piece of paper in a book, this is actually an invitation to the reader to consider her plight. So she is reaching out to you as the reader and she is saying, "Won't you take a look at what's happened to me? Doesn't this apply to you too?" She is looking for commiseration from whoever, and in this case, it is a way that God has allowed us to be brought into the situation so that we can actually look at her situation and come up with the right conclusions. So you could think, you could say that even though Jerusalem is the one saying this, it is almost like God is telling us, "OK, take this opportunity to look at this situation and reason righteously about it."
So the sense here is more does not this situation apply to you too? She wants us to make a comparison to see if anybody has suffered more than she has and then to come up with proper understanding of why she is suffering so disastrously.
Now she does get it right that her affliction is from God Himself. She says that several times within this chapter. So there is at least an acknowledgement in words that she knows that it comes from God. She understands in her own way that God is sovereign and that she has angered Him. She understands that much. You could say that she realizes that she has suffered her Day of the Lord, her day of God's righteous anger. Because the prophets had prophesied of this for a long time. It was not something unknown.
Let us go to Amos the 5th chapter where Amos had said this to the house of Israel many years before, about 150 years before.
Amos 5:16-17 Therefore the Lord God of hosts, the Lord says this: "There shall be wailing in all streets [I think that is in terms of Jerusalem and not the northern kingdom.], and they shall say in all the highways, 'Alas! Alas! [Is not this what Jerusalem is saying?] They shall call the farmer to mourning, and skillful lamenters to wailing, in all vineyards there shall be wailing, for I will pass through you," says the Lord.
He is not passing by them this time. He is passing through them and when God passes through as a fire, there is devastation left in His wake.
Amos 5:17-20 Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord! For what good is the day of the Lord to you? It will be darkness, and not light. It will be as though a man fled from a lion, and a bear met him! Or as though he went into the house, leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him! Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light? Is it not very dark, with no brightness in it?
Of course, and that is what Judah found out to its shame.
Let us go to Ezekiel 7 and see another prophecy of such a thing. Ezekiel was writing about the same time as Jeremiah, so this is a contemporary prophecy.
Ezekiel 7:1-2 Moreover, the word of the Lord came to me, saying, "And you, son of man, thus says the Lord God to the house of Israel:
We are seeing this as a prophecy of Israel in the last days. But it also had application in type to what Judah was going through. So think of it from that perspective at this point.
Ezekiel 7:2-4 'An end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land. Now the end has come upon you, and I will send My anger against you; I will judge you according to your ways, and I will repay you for all your abominations. My eye will not spare you, nor will I have pity; but I will repay your ways and your abomination shall be in your midst; then you shall know that I am the Lord!'
He had to make sure; He had to wake them up and let them know who was who and that He, their covenant Master, was angry with them for their disobedience.
Ezekiel 7:5-12 "Thus says the Lord God: 'A disaster, a singular disaster; behold, it has come! An end has come, the end has come; it has dawned for you; behold, it has come! Doom has come to you, you who dwell on the land; the time has come, a day of trouble is near, and not of rejoicing in the mountains. Now upon you I will soon pour out My fury, and spend My anger upon you; I will judge you according to your ways [that is the second time He says that], and I will repay you for all your abominations. My eye will not spare [second time He said that], nor will I have pity; I will repay you according to your ways [there it is again], and your abominations will be in your midst. Then you will know that I am the Lord who strikes. Behold, the day! Behold, it has come! Doom has gone out; the rod has blossomed, pride has budded. Violence has risen up into a rod of wickedness; none of them shall remain, none of their multitude, none of them; nor shall there be wailing for them. The time has come, the day draws near.'
That was the thing that she had just gone through. God's anger poured out upon her, her Day of the Lord, as I called it. The question is, would Judah learn the lesson? Would Judah, those who remained and looking back on this day of the Lord, the day of God's fierce anger upon her, make or come to the right conclusion? Would she see her own guilt? Would that motivate her to change, to repent? Would things get better internally, spiritually? That is the question.
Back to Lamentations 1, verse 13. Actually before we read this, I want you to know that verses 13, 14, and 15 are a group. They should be read together or thought of together because they form a description of that day of wrath from Judah's perspective, and they are very descriptive. So I am going to take them verse by verse, but I want you to know that they are a group. They all go together because she is giving you her view of what went on and how it felt. You will see that as we go through.
Lamentations 1:13 "From above He has sent fire into my bones, and it overpowered them; He has spread a net for my feet and turned me back; He has made me desolate and faint all the day."
This first verse in this three-verse passage is a visceral account of the battle and siege of Jerusalem. Now notice, first off, that she again correctly concludes that it was God who did it. He—He sent fire into my bones. If your Bible is like mine, He is capitalized so it is obviously a reference to God. He was the one that sent the fire, though it was the Babylonians that physically lit the fires that were raging throughout Jerusalem while the siege and battle were taking place. The source was God Himself. He was the one that had motivated them to do it.
Now, in saying that He sent fire from above, it is not just saying that it came from God, but this is actually an allusion to something else and that is, what God did to Sodom. Now we could go into this quite a bit, that Ezekiel talks about Israel and Judah as sisters and they were worse than Sodom, right? Ahola and Aholiba and all of that. But here in Lamentations, we have another allusion to that. That God was sending fire from heaven, as it were, to reduce them to ashes for their perversion and their wickedness. That it went into her bones. This is not just a fire in the streets or in their homes. This fire that was sent from God went right into their innermost being, right to their very core, right to the marrow of each person who was in the city. It suggests a punishment that was personal and profound and searing, all the way.
You remember in Hebrews 4 it says that the Word of God is a great divider of things and it goes straight into the very heart of a person. This is a similar thought, that it went straight all the way down into the very innermost part of their soul, as it were, into their very life, and it seared them thoroughly, trying to disinfect the sin by fire. It is really an amazing image. It was not just the roofs burning or something like that outside. It went through and burned out their very innermost core because that is where the problem was. It was not in rafters, it was not in the hay that was in their barns or anything like that. It was in them. That is where the fire had to go to cause a disinfection of the uncleanness that was in them.
Then He spreads a net for them. The initial metaphor here is of a hunter hunting with a net. But in the scene of battle and of war (maybe I should put it more generally), this is an allusion to the siege. The siege of Jerusalem, the surrounding troops were the net and it was so tight that no one was going to get in or out. The problem was contained by God within the city. They were like fish in a barrel to Him. And so once they tried to get away they could not. It says they were turned away. They turned back.
There is an element of disgrace in that phrase that they turned back. It suggests that they turned away in shame because they knew they were guilty. There is not only that, they were ashamed that they were even in that predicament, that they had been brought to that point, and they were ashamed that they were so weak that they could not fight back. They could not beat the Chaldeans. They could do nothing because God had thoroughly hemmed them in and pinned them back to the point that they were unable to do anything. They were just flailing.
This blends into the next two lines, the final two lines, where it says that, "He has made me desolate and faint all the day." This takes the view of what is going on into Jerusalem, back into Jerusalem. And this is the result of the prolonged siege. They were faint, they were sick. They were desolate, they were sorrowful. They did not know what was going on. They were watching thousands of their people die in battle. They were watching thousands die awful deaths because of famine and then also because of disease, thousands more died. The entire populace was not only physically sick and weak, but they were demoralized and depressed. They had no hope whatsoever.
That is how Zion saw it. That is how Jerusalem, the people of Jerusalem saw what was going on. They felt utterly weak, ashamed, and hopeless. That is what God had done to them.
Verse 14, let us go on. "The yoke of my transgressions was bound, they were woven together by His hands, and thrust upon my neck. He made my strength fail; the Lord delivered me into the hands of those whom I am not able to withstand."
This is an interesting one. This verse begins with another questionable phrase, "The yoke of my transgressions was bound." Here, we have moved forward to a time after the fall of Jerusalem. So now we are in the stage of captivity and of exile and she sees a lot of her people being taken prisoner and being marched away. And they wear a yoke of bondage. That is how often they did it. They would kind of chain these people together and they were made to walk in step like you would yoke two oxen to plow your field or what have you. The idea here is not a yoke of necessarily servitude but a yoke of bondage, of enslavement. You are not yoked together to do work, you are yoked together to be enslaved and then put to work. So this is part of their captivity.
But this is no ordinary yoke of wood or of metal. This yoke that has been put upon them, thrust upon their neck, is a very violent term. This yolk is made, composed, of their sins and transgressions. It is like all of their sins and transgressions have been interwoven together to create this yoke, this binding instrument. And it has been thrust upon their necks, locked down, and now they were going to suffer for their sins. They were going to carry the burden of their sins on their shoulders and be yoked together with all their fellows who had done the same thing. They had to feel the burden of their sins as well as the punishment of their sins.
So the yoke, along with the Chaldeans in the battle, the Chaldeans in the siege, and their famine and all the rest that was going on, the yoke becomes an additional weapon that God used against them. He is saying, "Look, you sinned. OK, fine, you're happy in your sin. I will fashion a yoke that binds you in those sins. And you'll pay every last bit for them." It is really an amazing metaphor that he draws there. So, what he says there is, "[He] thrust it upon my neck and made my strength fail." God, through Jerusalem's words, is making them and us understand that it was the sins themselves leading to the punishment and such that they lead to, that weakened them. They had so many sins that they no longer had the strength to do anything. They could not withstand, it says here. Their sins had made them weak.
And that is what sin does. People think their sins make them strong, and stand up to God, and be the whatever it is that they think they are in their pride. But God shows the truth right here. Sin binds and weakens, and it makes you a slave, sends you into captivity. And you know what is interesting here? There is another admission from Jerusalem that she knew exactly what she had done. Because here, where it says "the Lord delivered me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand," she actually says, "my Lord." I do not know why the New King James did not translate it personally like that. She says, "My Lord delivered me into the hands of those who I am not able to withstand." She knew what had gone on. She was not innocent at all.
Let us go on to verse 15. The final verse of the description in this three-verse set returns to Jerusalem's military defeat. "The Lord has trampled underfoot all my mighty men in my midst; He has called an assembly against me to crush my young men; the Lord trampled as in a winepress the virgin daughter of Judah."
Again, we have another very interesting metaphor, a couple of them. One you will recognize about the trampling the winepress of His wrath. That is very easy to see. But Judah says here that despite having mighty men, men trained in war, men who were champions, as it were, they were no match for God. He trampled them like ants coming up against Him.
And notice what he says here, that He "trampled underfoot all my mighty men in my midst." That is an interesting phrase. Because God in the midst of Jerusalem or God in the midst of His people is usually a very positive thing. "Hey, God is in our midst! He's going to give us all kinds of benefits and blessings and He's going to protect us from our enemies." But this has an entirely different and negative meaning. When God is in your midst for judgment, that means ruin and destruction and death. He was like a big monster amidst all these little peons, you know, little people who have no strength, and he was just stomping left and right. Causing all kinds of destruction and death. So, His presence among them at this point, because of their sins, was a devastating curse leading to a slaughter. No one can withstand God in His anger.
Notice how he puts this. He switches the metaphor very quickly here and says that He called an assembly against me. When does God call an assembly? On the feast days. This is the same word, moed. He calls an assembly of people and they are supposed to come there as pilgrims and join Him in Jerusalem and make sacrifice and worship Him.
Well, what is this assembly? This assembly is far different. In this assembly, His people are the sacrifice. In this assembly, the pilgrims are the Chaldean warriors. He has called the enemy into His city, and they are going to have a feast on His own people. There is not going to be the joyous singing of worship of God. There is going to be the howls and screams of death.
He calls for a feast in which Jerusalem's young soldiers and literally, here, they are called My chosen ones, My little dearies, you know, My sweetlings or whatever. They are the ones who are going to be served up. They are the sacrifice and the blood flows like wine or like grape juice from a winepress. It is really an incredible picture if you allow yourself to look upon it that way.
So she says in verse 16, "For these things I weep; my eye, my eye overflows with water; because the comforter, who should restore my life, is far from me. My children are desolate because the enemy prevailed."
Of course Jerusalem's reaction is a bucket of tears. It is so awful and horrifying that she cannot stop weeping, and I can understand that it would be a horrible thing to have to experience. It would be better, she says, if someone would try to comfort her, but there is no one. This is like the third time it has been mentioned that she has no comforter, as it was said in verses 2 and 9. In fact, the wording here suggests that there is no comforter on the horizon at all. No one; no one; no one; no one will comfort her. She still holds out a slim hope that one might be found and so she has cried out to God, she has cried out to the onlookers for help. But no one has answered. And all her children, all the people of Judah, are just like her in this situation, desolate, appalled, horrified, incredulous, grieving, stunned that this could have ever have happened to them, the chosen people of God.
So the narrator, then, breaks in here in verse 17, "Zion spreads out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her, the Lord has commanded concerning Jacob that those around him become his adversaries; Jerusalem has become an unclean thing among them."
He divides these two speeches with this description here portraying her as pathetically stretching out her hands to anyone who comes by hoping that somebody will take notice and offer some help, but again we are told very straightforwardly that no one is going to help her. She finds no one to comfort her. Because? Why? This is the command of God. He has ordained that there be no comforter for her. He wants her to experience the full amount of the cup of His wrath. And so He has told all the enemies, "Don't help her, become her enemy. Make it worse. Squeeze her until there is nothing left."
So He has decreed that everyone around Jerusalem become her enemy and what He does is He makes them see her as defiled and unclean and if they were to touch her at all, they would become defiled and unclean. So they want nothing to do with her. She has become so unclean that God Himself no longer lives among them. He has departed; He wants her alone and desolate and isolated and forlorn and totally without help because He is teaching her a grievous lesson and she must work through it by herself. It is the only way that she is going to ever have any chance of coming to the right conclusion.
This emphasizes the fact that the problem is Jerusalem's all along. She must understand her own motivations and her own transgressions. She must stop pointing the finger at her enemies and those around her and acknowledge her own deep guilt. But she is not at that point yet. You might want to write down Isaiah 64:6-9. This is the kind of response God would have liked from Jerusalem, but she is not ready to give that answer yet.
Let us go on to verse 18. This speech, which is very much a complaint, is directed mainly at the nations who are shunning her or joining her enemies. So here we have, "The Lord is righteous, for I rebelled against His commandment. Hear now, all peoples, and behold my sorrow; my virgins and my young men have gone into captivity."
So she is essentially acknowledging that the Lord is righteous in what He has done against her because she did indeed rebel against His commandments, and she had been doing it all along. In fact, this same wording is used back in the Pentateuch. You might want to write down Deuteronomy 1:26 and Deuteronomy 9:7-24 where it says that the Israelites rebelled against His commandments, just like it says here. Literally, it is "they rebelled against His mouth, His words, His voice." And what this is saying here, to those who are thinking along with reading it with understanding here, that Jerusalem is essentially saying that she and all her people have rebelled against God just like they did in the wilderness—and it had never changed. This is the way they had always been because they were a stubborn and stiff-necked people and their repentance had always been momentary, just to appease God, it seems, and then they quickly slipped back into apostasy.
We know from the book of Judges that there is a cycle that they went through and they were always going from "Yay, we'll support God" and quickly they go downhill and they are pretty soon rebelling and God has to punish them and then bring a savior as well. So this cycle had gone through all the way to the end of Judah's kingdom.
That she is not ready to repent is mirrored here because as soon as she says this, that I have rebelled against God, she goes back talking about how sad she is and how her young men and maidens have gone into captivity. So once again, she has a momentary confession that her rebellions have done this, and then it goes back to being all about her and her sorrow.
Verse 19, "I called for my lovers, but they deceived me; my priests and my elders breathed their last in the city, while they sought food to restore their life."
She complains that her human allies left her in the lurch. If they had not done that, then she would have been a lot better off now. I mean, she is saying what treacherous fiends they were, what louts, they betrayed me. It is all about her still. And the result was that her priests and her elders, her religious and political leaders, have all died. She had no one to lead her. Everyone from top to bottom in the land was suffering, dying, or dead.
Verse 20, "See, O Lord, that I am in distress; my soul is troubled; my heart is overturned within me, for I have been very rebellious. Outside the sword bereaves, at home it is like death."
Now these last 3 verses are a prayer to God. She has turned to Him because there is no one else. Perhaps her mention in the last verse of priests and elders made her think of real contrition and seeking the only One who could truly help, and that is good, that is fine. So for a third time now in this chapter she asked God to see, to notice, to behold her, to see what she was going through. Because she has finally realized that because those louts, her lovers, they are not going to help, no one is going to help. The only one who could help would be God. So she is making small steps here, a little bit of progress.
She mentions here, she describes the psychological impact of what God has done in His wrath. Her extreme emotional distress. It is described viscerally, literally viscerally. That her bowels are churning or boiling. She, you know, just feels so upset inside. And her heart was turning upside down in her chest. She was feeling miserable emotionally, and intellectually too. She is a mess. She does not know what to think. She is confused, she is depressed, she is fearful, she is utterly alone, and she is lost. She does not know where up is she is so far down.
Now she ascribes her distressed condition to her rebellions against God, but we should not take this to mean that she really grieves about having sinned so badly, so terribly. You can tell from the context that she is distressed that her sins and her transgressions, her rebellions against God led to this terrible destruction and death. She is upset that her sins have come out to this end. She mentions that in the next couplet when she talks about "outside the sword bereaves, at home it is like death." She is saying, in the streets out there people are getting killed by the sword and inside the house people are dying from famine and disease. It is death all over and my sins caused this.
And that is what she is sad about. That sins caused the death and destruction, but she is not sad, necessarily, that she sinned! She is just grieving about the outcome of the sins, not necessarily making any strides toward repentance here. She is not cut to the heart because her sins were so terrible. She is cut to the heart because of the curse that it brought. That is two very different things.
In Psalm 51 (we might as well read a little bit of this), David showed the proper response to sin.
Psalm 51:1-4 Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; according to the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned, and done this evil in Your sight—that You may be found just when you speak, and blameless when You judge.
And he keeps on going, saying, look, the problem is me. Get rid of them. That is not where Jerusalem is. Notice what the Jews in Acts 2 say once Peter shows them their sins.
Acts 2:36-38 [Peter says] "Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Then Peter said to them, "Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."
That is the proper reaction, not, "Ooh, look what's going on around me. I'm terrible. It's a terrible thing that it's come to this pass." That is what she was sad about, not that she had sinned.
Let us take verses 21 and 22 back in Lamentations 1 together. She is talking about her enemies. "They have heard that I sigh, but no one comforts me. All my enemies have heard of my trouble, they are glad that You have done it. Bring on the day that You have announced, that they may become like me. Let all their wickedness come before You, and do to them as You have done to me for all my transgressions; for my sighs are many, and my heart is faint."
Her enemies, she says, they have done nothing to comfort me despite hearing her groaning and weeping and all of her loud complaints. She says this to show how callous they are to her plight and her suffering. But more than callous, she says, they are cheering my downfall. They are even thanking God, if you will, that He has punished her so grievously. So in her rage at this, she asked God to bring on her enemies their own day of the Lord. "Look, You've done this to me, God, and look how they are reacting. Go ahead and smite them with Your wrath just as You did me."
She is saying to God, look at them, they are more wicked than I am. Punish them like You have punished me. Because look how pitiful I am. That is essentially the idea that comes across here. She is essentially saying that the only thing that can give her comfort now is for her enemies to suffer and die as she and her people had. She is not near conversion. She is not near repentance. She is not even really near being sorry for what she has done. She may intellectually know that it was her sins that brought this to pass, but her character has not changed. Nice lady, huh?
So as we close the chapter, Lady Jerusalem has shown a great deal of grief, weeping and moaning and complaining all the time. She has complained several times that no one will comfort her. She has an awareness of her sin but no real repentance, and she has an extremely vindictive spirit. She wants God's immediate vengeance on her enemies. She is in no position at this point to repent. She is blinded by sorrow and pain and she is very, very far from the point of working through her situation before God. She has got a long way to go.
Let us finish in Psalm 81. This, by the way, is in Book Three of the Psalms, which is for the time of summertime and also the time when Lamentations was read, around the 9th of Av. This is what God wanted from her. Not what she showed, but this is what God wanted from her.
Psalm 81:8-16 "Hear, O My people, and I will admonish you! O Israel, if you will listen to Me! There shall be no foreign god among you; nor shall you worship any foreign god. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt; open your mouth wide, and I will fill it. But My people would not heed My voice, and Israel would have none of Me. So I gave them over to their own stubborn heart, to walk in their own counsels. Oh, that My people would listen to Me, that Israel would walk in My ways! I would soon subdue their enemies, and turn My hand against their adversaries. The haters of the Lord would pretend submission to Him, but their fate would endure forever. [He would know and He would punish.] He would have fed them [that is, Israel] also with the finest of wheat; and with honey from the rock I would have satisfied you."
All it would have taken, God says, would be if you had submitted yourself and obeyed. That is all He was asking for. That was all the covenant asked for. And He would bless them. He would have given Jerusalem everything she had desired, all those things she wanted in chapter 1 of Lamentations, if she had only obeyed the Lord. She needed to learn this before she could move forward.
My question is, have we learned this?
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Sermon Topics
The Gospel
