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Home , Book of Lamentations, Lamentations 1, Lamentations 3

Introduction to Lamentations:

3 Reasons Lamentations is Relevant to the Christian Life.

Introduction: Good Morning. I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas celebration a couple days ago, I know I did. Before we begin, This past weekend my brother Ron and his son Tony were hunting and fell through some ice. They were stuck there for a little over an hour before they were rescued and as you can imagine they’ll have some physical recovery to do from such a thing. Safe to say, cold water is not always your friend. So, please, would you keep them in your prayers over the next few weeks for the Lord’s healing, in every meaning of that word. I can’t tell you how much I’d appreciate it.

November 11th, 1918 marked the end of one of the most tragic and impactful events in world history. WWI cut a swath of suffering and disenfranchisement across the European continent with almost 9 Million Soldiers killed, another 7 million civilians, and a further 21 million wounded or displaced. It was called “The Great War” or “The War to end all Wars.” Of course it didn’t. During the 4 years of battle more than 2500 miles of trenches were dug into European soil. There was on soldier for every 4 inches of trench. These dirty, close quarters lead to the rampant spread of diseases across both sides. By 1918, 60% of all U.S. Army Deaths were due to the Spanish Flu alone. When the War had finally ended and the people of Europe and America were still counting the cost, Irish Poet and Nobel Laureate William Butler Yeats wrote these words:

“ Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

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Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

This poem by Yeats, of which I only read a part, is an example of a Modern . In it he goes about the task of pouring out his own despair, dread, and confusion at the sheer scale of what had happened. It was his way of marking the times, expressing his grief, and struggling to understand. WWI had shaped the borders and the History of all the nations involved.

Almost 2500 years before WWI there was another event that would forever shape the history of nations, especially one nation. In 589 BC Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, laid siege to the city of and for 18 months those inside the city were trapped, receiving attack after bloody attack on their walls, all while starving and without any means to get new resources. The siege finally ended in 587 BC when Babylonian armies finally broke through Jerusalem’s mighty walls and flooded the city like a plague, killing and destroying everything in sight. The city was not just conquered but everything of value was plundered and the Temple of was made into just rubble. Most of the cities thousands of inhabitants were either killed or taken into captivity and marched to Babylon as slaves. The City itself was burned to the ground. 587 BC marked the end of the nation of Israel as the world had known it forever. It is the lowest point for Israel in History.

In the wake of these events, another poet took to his pen and wrote these words: Turn with me to Lamentations chapter 1:

READ :1-5

Lamentations is perhaps the most neglected book of Scripture in the Canon, much to our detriment. In my research for this message I found that among the pastors and scholars who most inspire and instruct me, only one had actually preached a message from this book and just a couple more had written about it. But as one of these authors put it, “In a world where the tides of human suffering threatens to overwhelm whatever dykes we put in place to contain it, is there any book of the more relevant than this book which gives voice to the most awful pain

2 imaginable…?” Sure, we sometimes sing a song drawn from :23, Thomas Chisolm’s hymn “Great is thy faithfulness”. But aside from this, Lamentations is often all but forgotten. So, Today I take the task of introducing you to this wonderful book of the Old Testament and then briefly show you 3 reasons Lamentations is relevant to the Christian life; which also happens to be the title of this message. We won’t have nearly enough time to really reach into the depths of each passage and mine the Gold the Lord has left us there, but we will at least know where it’s from, What role it plays in the Canon of Scripture, and see some ways Lamentations applies to our lives today.

Provinence:

So, what is a Lament? Our Dictionaries define a Lament as “a passionate expression of grief or sorrow.” Of course a Lament, then, can take any form; song, poem, painting, speech. But in the context of the Canon of Scripture, a Lament takes the form of a Poem and there are many throughout the Old Testament. included several in the , notably chapter 14. The Isaiah and Habakkuk both included poems of Lament in their books as did . And it may surprise you to learn, the book of contains the largest number of Lament poems in the Scripture, numbering more than any other literary form in that book. But the most prolific example of this style is, obviously, the .

This book is entirely written in poetic form. The first 4 chapters consist of 4 Poems, with 22 stanzas in each poem, though our verse numbering doesn’t always reflect it. Acrostic means the first word of each stanza begins with each letter of the in order. So stanza 1 starts with A, stanza 2 B and so on. Chapter 3 is unique among the 4 because the poet emphasizes this by making each stanza just 3 lines long and starting each of the 3 lines with the same letter. So in our verses 1,2,&3 of chapter 3 would all start with “A” in the original Hebrew, 4,5 &6 with B and so on. It’s as though the Poet is expressing his grief and sorrow completely, from A to Z. Chapter 5 is not written in acrostic form but consists of a prayer written in the form of a lament poem with a matching 22 stanza structure.

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You’ve probably noticed by now that I keep calling the author simply “the poet” instead of a name. The fact is, we can’t really be sure who wrote the book of Lamentations. Most commonly it is attributed to the Jeremiah, in fact your Bible may actually say “The Lamentations of Jeremiah” as mine does. That is also why it is found immediately following his prophetic book, as this was the view of the Hebrews at the time of the writing of the some 400 years or so later. This Tradition was picked up by Christians as well and remained the common view until the 18th century. Thematically it certainly fits where it has been placed between Jeremiah’s description of the events of 587 BC in the latter chapters of his book and the . In this place it acts as a Memorial to those events.

Similar to the way we erect war memorials today to commemorate those events or the tomb of the unknown soldier to make sure we never forget those lost in our battles, Lamentations freezes this moment in time and intimately describes, not just what happened, but the people and their tears. Psalm 56:8 says “You have taken account of my wanderings; Put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?” and while the events of 587 BC happened as an act of God’s judgment upon his people for many years of sin and idolatry, He still loves them and understands their grief. So Lamentations acts as this bottle, a bottle filled with the tears and memories of what happened. This makes it more than just the silent witness of a stone statue or names written on a wall, it’s a living memorial that gives voice to the people, maintained by the hand of God Himself for His people, passed down through the ages. Their sorrow will never be forgotten. In fact after the restoration and the new temple is built, Israel never again returns to their formerly Idolatrous ways. So, it fits perfectly right here in Scripture after the book of Jeremiah.

Additionally, the book shares many form and structural similarities to Jeremiah’s book and clearly the subject matter is within his wheelhouse. 2 Chronicles 35:25 even says “Then Jeremiah chanted a lament for . And all the male and female singers speak about Josiah in their lamentations to this day. And they made them an ordinance in Israel; behold, they are also written in the Lamentations.” However, the event this text is talking about is the death of King

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Josiah, which happened many years before the events written about in the Book of Lamentations. The book itself claims no attestation, and form and structural arguments are highly subjective. So, while I personally think it’s most likely written by Jeremiah, it would seem unfaithful to the text itself to make that as a claim of fact. So for our purposes, I’ll simply keep referring to him as “the poet”.

Now within the poems, we meet a couple of important Characters. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce us to a character named Daughter of . In the Hebrew this is literally just Daughter Zion and she represents Jerusalem as a whole, the city personified as fallen royalty. Most of the time she is being described from the 3rd person but a few times she speaks for herself, twice in chapter 1 to express her loneliness and lack of a comforter and 3 more times to cry directly to the Lord. In Chapter 3 we are introduced to “The Man”. This is the voice of the poet himself, expressing his distress at what he’s gone through and what he’s witnessed. He carries through chapter 4 and then in Chapter 5 he leads the people of in a unified prayer to the Lord for restoration.

Briefly restated, the specific context of the writing of Lamentations is the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC as the execution of God’s judgment on the covenant nation of Israel after decades of infidelity despite decades of warnings from God. This is important to remember when examining or considering the overall Theology of the book of Lamentations. There are a few theological moods or veins running through these poems, one of which was mentioned earlier as Lamentations acting as God’s preserved memorial of the peoples sorrow and tears. But by far the most common theological thread running through Lamentations is the act of confession of sin. Through the voice of Daughter Zion, the Man, and the prayer of the whole community in chapter 5 we hear acknowledgment that their continued acts of rebellion and idolatry, having gone uncorrected (and perhaps even encouraged at times) by their religious leaders, had brought about God’s unassailable wrath through the agency of their earthly enemies. It’s given voice in every chapter.

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We must remember though, that this is a very particular voice, a very specific confession. It connects the specific events of 587 BC with the specific record of sin by Israel against the Lord that stretched back through the centuries.

It is absolutely not, and I can’t stress this enough, it is not a theology of sin and suffering which can be applied generally to just any situation where there are people suffering. Suffering isn’t always punishment for sin, just ask Job. No, It is actually quite the opposite of a general theology here. It is a theology of judgment, yes, but one directed by the covenant relationship between ancient Israel and the one true God, Yahweh. And despite all of the Poets declaration to the possibility, it is not proof that God has abandoned Israel forever, but quite the reverse. It is proof of that covenant relationship that verified that God indeed meant what He said and is as faithful to His threats as He is to His promises. But it would be wrong to stop there and simply and say then “Well that explains everything, they got what they deserved, case closed.”

That would be to utterly fail to listen to the voices of agony speaking in the text. Their acknowledgment of their sin is honest and their protests are directed at the proportionality of the judgment in relation to the sins committed. They are struggling with the utter scale of the judgment. Why do the innocent children suffer starvation in the laps of their mothers? Why do the righteous suffer alongside the unrighteous? They aren’t saying God is doing wrong, that’s not it at all. They say otherwise in the book itself, conceding that they deserve the punishment. In fact their protests imply a clear understanding of both the goodness and sovereignty of God. By addressing their sorrow to the Lord, they are essentially saying “we know you are Good and we know you control everything completely, so how could you let this evil continue?” And the book ends in a clash of all these things together; the sovereignty of God, the judgment of God, and yet proclamations of “Why” and “How Long, Oh Lord?” All while accepting that the Lord uses human agency to carry out His judgment and those human agents themselves have sinned in the carrying out of the judgment, for which they will also be judged further on down the road. And so verse 64 of chapter 3 states “You will recompense them, O Lord, according to the work of their hands.”

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Therefore we might say the theology of Lamentations is, as commentator Chris Wright put it, “Faith struggling with vertigo over the chasm between what it knows to be true about God and the realities of what it sees or experiences in this fallen world.” Plainly stated, it is faith seeking understanding.

So then, What can we, as Christians under the new covenant, receive from the text of the book of Lamentations? Briefly I’d like to show you 3 reasons the Book of Lamentations applies to us today.

Reason #1: It’s Missional

It’s missional in a couple of ways. First, Lamentations utterly blows away any romantic or sterilized ideas we might have about what War is. It shows us, in gruesome detail, that war is hell on earth. Reading this text forces us to hear the voices of those despairing at the loss of lives; husbands and wives, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors. To hear the cries of dying soldiers, of starving children, and those desperate & humiliated in the struggle for survival. It exposes the very real horror of war, even when it is as the result of God’s Judgment. The Daughter of Zion asks in chapter 2 verse 20, should such things happen? And the answer is of course, no they should not.

And so the Scripture calls us to the task of peace-making as a missional responsibility. Now, I’m not advocating pacifism, nor is this text or any other text of Scripture. But the Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 12:18 “If possible, so far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.” And the Lord Jesus Himself says in Matthew 5:9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.” So surely, anything that we can do, either individually or collectively, in the areas of conflict resolution or Ministries of reconciliation would have the blessing of the God of the book of Lamentations.

And war is often the result of political or imperial pride, as it was for Germany in WWI and WWII. Lamentations speaks as God’s critique of this kind of stately violence represented by Babylon. What Babylon did to Jerusalem is what empires and inappropriately prideful nations do to those who resist them. It’s one thing to have pride in one’s country, it’s quite another to try to impose that sentiment on

7 other nations through violent means. We Christians bear costly witness to this in the book of Lamentations and thus must take a firm stance against such irrational violence.

Secondly, Lamentations is missional insofar as the book assigns to us the missional task of hearing the voices of the oppressed and victimized and to bear witness to their anguish to advocate on their behalf. This applies foremost to our brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer for His namesake. Many Christians in places like Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, the Sudan, and North Korea, among other places, are experiencing this kind of suffering today. And just as we witness the suffering of Israel in the Book of Lamentations, we too have the responsibility to witness and weep with our fellow believers who suffer under such violence and oppression, such as those this past September in Tanzania, whose churches were burned down by Muslim extremists.

But weeping with those who weep is not limited to just Christian tears. We are given tears for the whole world. Where millions hurt or die from preventable or curable disease, poverty and hunger, social injustice and ethnic slaughter. Where human trafficking rings abduct and sell children into slavery. Lamentations give us the language for these tears and demands that we use it. Lament appeals beyond the World to the God about whom the poet says in :19 “You, Lord, Reign forever; your throne endures from generation to generation.”

Lament is missional because it presents this suffering to our sovereign and compassionate God with the longing that He would act and the faith that He ultimately will.

Reason #2: Lamentations teaches us why man needs a savior.

I might even say, in light of this past holiday, why we needed a Christmas to begin with. Firstly, Lamentations relates for us a number of the practical results of sin in order to compel us to faithfulness in opposition to rebellion. Among them include the social injustice that results at the hands of the greedy. We see this in Judah, where the poet describes in Chapter 4 that the daughter of Zion had become cruel in her greed, and as a result the tongue of infants cleave to the roofs of their

8 mouths with thirst. We also see this as the result of Babylon’s greed when finally entering Jerusalem. They pillage all the wealth of Judah and take away the people’s ability to even feed themselves, so much so that some resort to further sin, murder for the purposes of cannibalism.

By far the most emphasized result, however, is unabated loneliness. It begins in the very opening line of chapter one and continues through the rest of the book. For many today this may look like the loneliness that comes from secret sin. Spending inappropriate amounts of time viewing things on the internet which ought not be viewed. Secret acts of marital infidelity. Undiscovered acts of theft, either as in from a store or possibly from one’s own employer in the form of embezzlement. Secret sins like this often bring about the pushing away of others in an effort to continue keeping them secret, leaving only ones self with no hope of adequate comfort from the sins being held and nurtured. And what’s more, the broken relationships that result when these secret sins are discovered, dividing husbands from wives, employers from employees, and friends from friends. The message is clear, in an earthly sense, sin causes loneliness.

But Lamentations draws this out further and extends the principle to the realm of spiritual loneliness. Sin doesn’t just break human ties, it breaks ties with God as well. In the context of Lamentations specifically, this is represented by the breaking of the covenant between Israel and the Lord, resulting in God’s punishment and his temporary removal from their presence. But applying this principal in the context of the New Covenant, we see that sin, having driven a wedge between man and God, has caused the ultimate loneliness apart from God. Just as the sin of Judah resulted in earthly punishment in 587 BC with no power of their own to make reconciliation, the sin of the unbeliever results in eternal punishment with no power of their own to reconcile themselves to a Holy God. From whom then can they seek comfort? How can this situation be resolved? Lamentations answers this for us in the voice of the poet in chapter 5 verse 21, crying out with his people “Restore us to you, O Lord, that we may be restored;” He directs their cry at the only one who can restore, the only one who does have the power to save, The one true God, Yahweh. In chapter 3 he says “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I have hope in Him.” Because

9 of our sin and powerlessness, we need a savior, a redeemer, to restore us when we can’t. Which brings us to reason number 3

Reason #3: Lamentations teaches us about the God who Saves. Lamentations teaches us about the Lord in two ways. The first is directly. The poet not only describes the Lord as judge, but he describes a great deal more. In Chapter 3, for example, the poet tells us “The Lord’s Lovingkindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; Great is your faithfulness.” So not only does this God who saves have great compassion, but His compassion is unstoppable. It is irresistible. And it is always being renewed. He can say this because the Lord could have just as easily wiped Jerusalem off the face of the earth forever as he had with Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, in chapter 4 he makes this acknowledgment “…The iniquity of the daughter of my people is greater than the sin of Sodom, which was overthrown in a moment…” But instead of just wiping them out with a wave of His hand, though it would have been Just from God’s point of view, He had great mercy on them and saved some. He kept a remnant for later restoration.

Later on in chapter 3 we learn that God is Just with the statement “To deprive a man of justice in the presence of the Most High, to defraud a man in his lawsuit – of these things the Lord does not approve.” We also learn that God is sovereign when the poet asserts “Who is there who speaks and it comes to pass, unless the Lord has commanded it? Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both good and ill go forth?” Nothing comes to pass which is not in the Lord’s control. He is all powerful and in charge of all things. So we can see from these examples, Lamentations has a great deal for us to learn about Who our God is and what He is like. But this is not the only means it has for us to learn about God.

It may interest you to learn that among all the voices heard in the Book of Lamentations, God’s is not among them. Unlike Job, whose protestations were interrupted with chapter after chapter of correction by God, in Lamentations He doesn’t speak at all. Whether to interrupt or to correct or to comfort. He is utterly silent. And this silence is inspired. Just as the text itself is Inspired scripture, the silence of God in the text is likewise inspired. It doesn’t reflect abandonment or deafness, but instead it reflects God’s restraint. Because any words from the Maker would absolutely trump the human words recorded in the text. Think about Job for a second; when we consider that text, what do we remember about Job’s words? We remember that they are brief and sometimes wrong and were

10 utterly destroyed by God’s Words, right? But instead of that happening here, what we get is God allowing all of the words of the poet to stand unanswered. It keeps us from hastily leaping over the suffering to happy endings. The Lord honors human speech, forcing the reader to dwell in the words of the desolate and broken and actually consider them. It gives the text a very real power.

Many of us have experienced this silence from the Lord at one time in our walks or another, I’m sure. For me, there is no greater example than of the months between Christmas 2008 and October 2009. You see, for Christmas in 2008 I gave my father this Bible. He was not a believer, a cultural Christian you might say, and He asked me why. Very nervously I told him because while I knew he had bibles in the house, I also knew he had no desire to read them and I wanted to give him one he might be interested in reading. Now you have to understand, my dad was a man of arguments and reason. Whether he liked what you had to say or not, often if you were able to construct an argument that he could not pick apart or refute, he would accept it and listen. And so I told him that this Bible made the most important argument ever made in the history of mankind. And then I began explaining the from its pages and invited him to come to church with me sometime, if he felt like it.

Starting that night, and every single day following until he passed away in October of 2009 I prayed to the Lord for my father’s salvation. Now during that time there had been some small signs, dad would join me at church periodically or ask a theological question randomly, but nothing significant or compelling. And in the meantime my dad had had a small stroke and another heart attack and spent a good deal of time in the hospital. Yet the Lord was silent with me every day. That is, until the day after my father passed. You see, on that day my pastor came to my home to offer comfort and help me plan the funeral. And during the course of our conversation I learned that dad had started going to one of the churches weekly membership classes a couple months back as well as fundamentals of the faith classes. I learned that while dad was in the hospital he had met with dad a number of times to study scripture together and Dad had professed faith in Christ. And that just a couple weeks before his death he had asked to be baptized and they were already planning it. And yet the Lord (along with my dad) had been silent to me the whole time, I hadn’t known about any of it. Not because he was ignoring me, but in order to keep me fervent in my prayer.

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By staying silent, the Lord had kept me faithful to the task of prayer for my father’s salvation. His silence drove me to pray more often, to draw closer to Him in His word. His silence to me honored my prayers and kept me from jumping to conclusions about my father’s salvation too soon.

This is the God of the Book of Lamentations. He holds back from speaking in order to regard the words and prayers and confessions of His suffering people and then preserves them for all generations to consider and remember. Ironically, by doing this, by making Lamentations a part of His scripture, He then makes their words His own and speaks to us through them. Without doubt, we learn that this God who saves us from the consequences of our sin is one who truly loves His people compassionately, who honors his covenants, and is always faithful, even in His silence.

Conclusion:

To wrap up, these are just a few of the ways that the book of Lamentations is relevant for the Christian Life. The Lord preserved this poets words of sorrow and agony in the face of devastation and It drives us to compassion and advocacy for those suffering and wronged on the mission field. It sweetens our understanding of the Good News by explaining why we needed that news to begin with. And it tells us a tremendous amount about our God, Who brought us the good news and ultimately fulfilled it in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Lamentations is a text for our present time, and it deserves our attention.

Well let’s pray.

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