TOMS: Lamentations 3-5

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Sept. 25, 2006

It would be nice if Jeremiah ended his lamentations with hope for the future or a promise of good days to come.  Unfortunately, there are none, unless you count 3:22-24, which reads:

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases;

His mercies never come to an end;

They are new every morning;

Great is your faithfulness.

The LORD is my portion, says my soul,

Therefore I will hope in him.

Based on the rest of the passage, I think this is little more than a statement of fact on Jeremiah's part. Yes, he knows that God is faithful, and that He has a plan for all of this, but that doesn't take away the pain of seeing Jerusalem destroyed and seeing God's people suffer.

Pain and suffering are part of life, and to deny the existence of suffering or to offer platitudes about life being good all the time because we are saved is childlike at best and at worst nihilistic. God could have come through with a miraculous solution to all of Israel's and Jeremiah's problems, but He chose not to. He allowed Jeremiah to endure terrible heartache and suffering, all without an explanation. Of course, he was allowed the privilege of writing two books of the Bible, but I bet if you came to Jeremiah as he was penning these verses and offered him a choice of an easy solution or a chance to write Scripture, Jeremiah would have chosen the easy solution.  I'm pretty sure I would have, anyway.

But Jeremiah, like Job, accepts God’s wrath and trusts in His ultimate justice:

Who has spoken and it came to pass,

Unless the Lord has commanded it?

Is it not from the mouth of the Most High

That good and bad come?

Why should a living man complain,

A man, about the punishment of his sins? (3:37-39, ESV)

TOMS: Lamentations 1-2

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Sept. 23, 2006

Lamentations is the record of the prophet Jeremiah's grieving over the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. It's another one of these books that I often have a hard time understanding (but this one's easy compared to Ezekiel). I did notice one important passage that has a very graphic reference, but the prophets often used graphic comparisons of adultery and prostitution with Israel's worship of false gods and association with heathen peoples:

Jerusalem sinned grievously; therefore she became filthy;

All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness;

She herself groans and turns her face away.

Her uncleanness was in her skirts; she took no thought of her future;

Therefore her fall is terrible; she has no comforter.

O LORD, behold my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed.

(Lamentations 1:8-9, ESV)

The phrase that caught my attention was "she took no thought of her future." One of the things my home church pastor Elmo Parker used to say (and he probably still does) was that the devil never deals in the future: he always wants us to satisfy ourselves immediately, in the here and now. God promised the Jews a kingdom forever if they would obey His law, but they refused. They were looking for something new and exciting. Obviously this is true for us when it comes to our eternal state and our hope for eternal reward, but it is also true in practically all areas of our lives in this world. If we only live our lives for what brings us short-term pleasure and excitement we will soon regret some of the poor decisions we made. That's a lesson all of us have learned at some time or another, and it's a lesson too many of us (including me) have had to learn many times after we forgot it.

One more thing we must not overlook as we read this is that Jeremiah is displaying dark depths of emotion here in this book. A lot of people, including a lot of Christians, have the idea that showing emotion, particularly negative emotion, is somehow sinful. The life of Jeremiah, who is known as the "weeping prophet," demonstrates that this is not the case. Just because our tough-guy American society says people, especially men, shouldn't cry doesn't make it wrong in the eyes of God. A social faux pas does not always equal sin, just as there are also many things that are culturally acceptable that really are sins in the eyes of God.