Route 66: Lamentations - Rubble and Redemption

If you find Isaiah, keep going, find Jeremiah, keep going, find Ezekiel.

Back up there you go and you'll find Lamentations.

On display at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta is a marble statue by William Westmore Story and it's titled Jerusalem in Her Desolation.

William Westmore Story was a Harvard graduate, turned to a lawyer, but later in life wanted to give himself more to his artistic side and went to Europe for a decade and studied and fell in love with the artistry in Europe, particularly in Italy, and just fell in love with Europe and he began to craft figurines in marble.

Began to craft figurines in marble.

He was particularly noted for using biblical and historical women in his marble works, and this work is a marble of a regal and yet despondent woman who is sitting in her dejection on a pile of rubble.

It's quite a striking thing.

You can look it up and you'll see it on the internet.

It used to be on display in Philadelphia but now it's down in Atlanta.

William Story took his inspiration for this figure from the Book of Lamentations.

He crafted this woman as a personification of the city of Jerusalem, depicting in the women's features and in her dress and the things around her, this city of Jerusalem still numb in its grief and shock over what had happened to it.

The crumbled bits of mortar that the lady is around and sitting on suggest a city in ruins and unless you look very, very closely you won't notice.

But at her feet is a very tiny serpent.

The serpent signified sin and that the cause for her despondency and dejection and the rubble around her was because of her own personal sin.

Lamentations Probably not a book that you turn to quickly for a little like pick-me-up in the morning or a little inspiration for the day.

It's not that kind of book.

Its plaintive tone shows up right in the first verse, where striking images of isolation and desertion, widowhood and slavery hit you before you even get to verse two.

How she sits alone, the city once crowded with people.

She who is great among the nations, has become like a widow.

The princess among the provinces has been put to forced labor Boy.

When you read that first verse you feel how vivid it is and you wonder what kind of calamity have I just stepped into when I opened up this book?

Well, it's written by probably an eyewitness of the fall of Jerusalem and the depictions of that terrible event are very fresh and vivid here in Lamentations.

Just a little context.

As we know, after David, solomon reigned over a combined Israel, but when he passed away, the reign was given to his son, jeroboam, who listened to the counsel of his friends rather than the wise counsel of older men, and decided to increase the taxation on the people.

And they rebelled under Jeroboam and the ten northern tribes, splitting off into Israel and Judah, remaining with Benjamin.

And over the course of time, the kings in Israel were all wicked and most of the kings of Judah were wicked, and God, sending these warning prophets to Israel of a coming calamity, finally culminated that by bringing the Assyrians over the Israelites and they being drawn off into captivity.

Judah didn't heed that very vivid lesson of their fellow countrymen and neighbors and continued on in their downgrade of iniquity, again giving the same kind of warnings that they too would fall prey to the same trouble.

And then, in 587 BC, solomon's temple was destroyed and the people were taken away to Babylon in a series of three ways.

So Lamentations is the eyewitness account of all of that occurrence.

The very end of the people in the land of Israel.

Jerusalem and the people of Judah fell victim to the Babylonians because of three key things they had abandoned God.

Now, they didn't cease to believe in God, but they ceased to consider God as having anything relevant to say to their lives.

They continued on with the forms of worship, without a sense of the heart of worship.

They were really like true pagans, simply giving lip service to God.

The temple worship was formal, unsatisfying.

The religious leaders were catering to the people's felt needs, saying peace, peace when there was no peace and there were only a few people interjecting.

Truth, like Jeremiah was, they had not only deserted God, they had, by default, also deserted God's word.

When they considered God to be irrelevant, certainly they were going to stop paying attention to anything that he had to say, and so any of the statements in the book of Deuteronomy, for instance, that talked about covenant, blessings and curses, they simply passed off as old fables that had no meaning in their life whatsoever.

Most of the people had stopped reading the Mosaic law at all.

In fact, in the book of Jeremiah you can see an account of that when he is speaking about Josiah, who happens to find the scriptures and becomes alarmed at what he reads.

And you can tell just by the way that account is written in the Chronicles of Kings and also mentioned in Jeremiah that these kings had not been paying attention to God's word whatsoever, not even acknowledging its existence or knowing any of its content.

And because of all of this, they had transferred their trusts to, to political allies like Egypt and Babylon, and even, for a little time, to Assyria, when it profited them, rather than looking to Yahweh for their source of strength and guidance.

They also had a very false view of the temple.

Because the temple had been built and because God had shown false view of the temple, because the temple had been built, because God had shown his presence in the temple, they had assumed that as long as the temple exists, it will exist Because God had put his presence in the temple.

That means he's okay with it and okay with us, no matter what we do.

And so they had hearts of presumption.

They thought that God would be faithful to them forever, again, ignorant to the fact that God's judgments of covenant curses would come upon them if they departed from the living God.

So lamentations is a response to the judgment that came upon the people after warning, after warning, after warning had been given and unheeded.

Let's take a look at the book of Jeremiah.

Just have a look at the book itself.

You can see some interesting things about it.

Would look at the book itself, you can see some interesting things about it.

You might be seeing, interjected in between the verses in chapter 1 and chapter 2 and also in chapter 4, these strange words, right, what are those?

Well, that's the Hebrew alphabet.

You'll notice in chapter 3 that it's a little different Instead of in between every verse, it's in between every three verses.

You see that, right?

And then when you go to chapter 5, you don't see them.

But one thing you will know is there's 22 verses in chapter 5, just like there's 22 verses in chapter 1 and chapter 2 and chapter 4.

We'll explain that in just a moment.

The book of Jeremiah, like I said, is a factual account of the last days, desperate days of Jerusalem, closely related to those events that Jeremiah finishes his book with.

And it's not so much a part two of the book of Jeremiah as it is a response of the things that have happened.

The Septuagint gives us a little understanding about this book.

It has a little preface that's not found in the Hebrew Bible and it says this and it came to pass after Israel was taken captive and Jerusalem laid waste, that Jeremiah sat weeping and lamented with this lamentation over Jerusalem and said and then it begins, verse one.

When you read 2 Chronicles, you realize that these weren't the only lamentations that Jeremiah gave.

In fact, in 2 Chronicles, 35, verse 25, it says Jeremiah composed laments for Josiah.

2 Chronicles 35:25

To this day, all the men and women singers commemorate Josiah in the laments.

These became a tradition in Israel and are written in the laments.

These became a tradition in Israel and are written in the laments.

It's possible that some of those words in the laments that were in Josiah's time had been sort of transferred over, might even populate the book of Lamentations.

Jeremiah was known as the weeping prophet and when you read Jeremiah 14, verse 17, you find him crying in a lament.

Jeremiah 14:17

Speak this word to them.

Let my eyes overflow with tears, night and day, without ceasing, for the virgin daughter of my people has suffered a grievous wound, a crushing blow.

For the virgin daughter of my people has suffered a grievous wound, a crushing blow.

Lament is not a word that we use very often.

It's one of those words that seems to have gone out of our vernacular.

When my dad passed away, I put together a slideshow and underneath it was when my dad passed away, I put together a slideshow and underneath it was a violin solo that was called A Lament.

And as it moved picture by picture, through the biography of my dad in pictures, it played underneath all of that as something of a remembrance, but with a sorrowful tone, that life is fleeting and it comes to an end.

A lament is something like that.

It's a passionate expression of grief and loss.

It can take a couple forms it can be an individual lament or it can be a communal lament.

If you think of the book of Job Job crying out on his own on top of the ash heap, that's an individual lament as he bemoans his state and the trouble that he's in.

And when you think of the book of Lamentations the personification of the city, that woman sitting on the heap of rubble we have a corporate lament.

This is not just one person lamenting, this is the whole city lamenting.

And this lamentation, like I said, is found in five different songs.

Each chapter in our English Bible takes up one of those songs.

In chapter 1, we see the misery of Jerusalem's citizens.

In chapter 2, we get the impression of God's punishment upon Jerusalem.

And then in chapter 3 is a series of corporate responses to the trouble, however written as if it were one person.

The whole city is so unified in their emotion that they speak as one voice.

And then in chapter four, once again God's severity of judgment.

So chapter two and chapter four sort of dovetail with each other.

Chapter one and chapter five also have a similar theme and if you've been through this Route 66 series you know what's coming.

There's a movement toward the middle, called a chiastic structure, which means that the center is really where the main message lies, the cries of the people, the judgments of God, and something in the middle is where the main message of the book lies.

And we'll get there in just a second.

But one thing I want you to see here first of all is this structure that I've talked about.

Four of these five laments are what we call an acrostic, an alphabetic acrostic, and it begins with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and goes all the way to the last letter of Hebrew alphabet.

It would be like going from our A to Z or A to Z if you're from England.

What is this?

Why this form, this elaborate artistry of starting every verse with the consecutive letters from the beginning to the end of the alphabet?

Well, we're not given divine commentary on why that is, and so we're left to maybe surmise, but I think we can make some judicious guesses.

I guess is probably the best way to put it.

What we learn here is that these lamentations are not just disorganized cries of the heart, and sometimes, when life is very, very difficult, that's just how we do cry, right?

Sometimes it is just raw, disconnected, absolutely jumbled up, but these aren't like that Most of them aren't.

Anyway, there seems to be some order.

There is order to it.

Why?

I think it's because there is in this not only the attempt but the instruction to try to reflect on the meaning of the suffering and to try to get some shape to it.

If you have anything of an organized kind of mind, you know that it's helpful, when you have a lot of data in front of you, to try to find groupings and categories and listings of this data that's in front of you, trying to see the connecting points of various things that you're looking at and draw them off into various classifications and columns.

And all of that, try to find these unifying points.

I think the writer is doing something like that, but with our emotions, he's seeking to gain perspective in the middle of the suffering.

And this order is what helps give him perspective.

These five laments communicate something.

In their framework and in their form, the writer wants us to do more than just vent our feelings when things are horribly hard.

He wants us to gain perspective in the middle of that.

And so, because of the contours here, what I see in this are three different things.

First of all, the freedom to express our grief.

The freedom to express it, not to hold back.

It's there from A to Z.

It's there, the whole thing is there.

There's not one part of the alphabet that's left out.

There's not one part of our grief that we have to hold back from God.

We can say it all A, b, c, d, all the way to C, and God hears us.

But there's also something else that we can learn here.

We can trace the steps from A to Z and feel not only the freedom to express it all, but to know that we can exhaust it in the telling.

It goes from A to Z.

It doesn't go from A to infinity, wherever that might be, that.

There is a sense of fullness to it as well as freedom to speak.

But there's also underlying that reminder that there's a finality to our grief.

It goes from A to Z, then stops, and this is helpful for us to understand as freely as we can speak our grief, as fully we can speak our grief.

One day, grief, grief will end.

One day it will come to an end.

Now, again, those are just my guesses, but I think there's some reason why God would structure this this way around the idea of a lament.

And if you want to add some more to that for my learning, or disagree with me to my instruction, I'd be glad to hear it, but I think those might be helpful ways to think about what we face here.

So, instead of looking fully at the book of Jeremiah, I'd like for us to go to chapter 3 and just sort of center there, like I said, there's this movement to the middle.

1 and 5 are similar, 2 and 4 are similar.

Chapter 3 is unique and it's unique.

It's similar with the first four chapters.

And then it goes from the first to the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet, but it puts three verses under each of those letters rather than just one.

And in this we're taught something.

We're taught first of all to acknowledge our suffering, which I've stated already Whether that suffering be persecution or alienation, or the tragedy of our own sin.

In chapter 3, the city laments by crying out to God and, like I said, it's dominated by a first person reference, the language of I and the language of we.

It's as if the voice of the whole city could be summed up with one person's cry.

And what they're taught here is that they can come to God weeping.

They can come to God weeping.

They can come to God with their tears streaming that they don't need to clean up their mess before they can seek out their Heavenly Father Right.

And how often we might tell ourselves that we have to do that.

How often we feel hesitant to do that Because there's something within us that says we better be better before we talk.

Jeremiah, the Word of God doesn't speak that way here in Lamentations.

It's raw and it's's real and it's spoken, and God is not absent in this travail.

Look at verses 1 to 3 of chapter 3.

He says here in chapter 3, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath.

He has driven me away and forced me to walk in darkness instead of light.

Yes, he repeatedly turns his hand against me all day long.

He sees God intimately involved in this trouble they're experiencing and, like I said, the context here is one of their own making by rejecting the Lord and his word and his ways.

So, finally, after ignoring God and ignoring his word and ignoring his worship, they're starting to realize this is a living God who interacts with human history, and he's interacting with me now in this.

Verses 4 to 9, he speaks about being walled in, as if the fate of the city and this person is the same say.

And in verses 10 to 12, god is seen as a lion or a bear or a menacing archer taking aim at him.

He now realizes that God has come as his judge.

God has come and is refining his people, and so he's acknowledging the suffering that he's under and how difficult it really is.

But there's something else that he learns here and expresses here Not only to acknowledge the suffering, but he also turns to self-examination, self-examination, to self-examination.

Take a look at verse 39 for a moment.

He says in verse 39, why should any living person complain, any man?

Because of the punishment for his sins.

Let us examine and probe our ways and turn back to the Lord.

Let's lift up our hearts and our hands to God in heaven.

We have sinned and rebelled.

He's starting to realize that repentance is an important part of his prayer, not just bemoaning his condition, but bemoaning his heart's condition and examining himself in the light of God's holiness, and returning not just with lip service, but with a mending of his heart, the lifting up of his hands in true worship and acknowledgement of who God is.

And so he finds that repentance is more than just a concept.

It's a reality.

And so he's talking about taking steps of movement toward the God who's bruised him.

But there's more here.

There's also a reflection upon God's mercies.

So an acknowledgement of the trouble, a call to self-examination and a reflection upon God's mercies.

Now the writer of the lament here in chapter three asks God to remember some things.

Take a look at verse 19.

Remember my affliction and my homelessness, the wormwood and the poison.

God look upon me in this place, look at how bad it is.

But that's not all he remembers.

Take a look at the next verse Now.

I continually remember that and I become depressed.

Obviously, that's what we do when things are excruciating Keep repeating, repeating, repeating, repeating, over and over in our mind.

But he doesn't stop there Yet.

I hold this to mind and therefore I have hope Because of the Lord's faithful love.

We do not perish, for his mercies never end.

They're new every morning.

Great is your faithfulness.

I say.

The Lord is my fortune.

Therefore, I will put my hope in him.

The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him.

He remembers not only his suffering, but he remembers God's mercies.

And one of the first things that makes him aware of God's mercies is that he looks at himself and he says I'm still here.

I'm not completely annihilated.

God's judgment wasn't total upon me.

I have breath still.

There must be a reason why I'm still here.

It's by God's kind mercy that I still exist.

There must be a reason, and if there is a reason, it's found in God.

And if God has a purpose, I can have hope.

So he looks forward.

He looks forward and he begins to talk to himself.

Now the first thing is to wait on the Lord, verse 24 to 26.

I read into it, but let's read it as a little bit more separately.

The Lord is my portion.

Therefore, I will put my hope in him.

The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the person who seeks him.

It is good to wait who wait for him to the person who seeks him.

It is good to wait quietly, for salvation is from the Lord.

He realized that the crushing blow of judgment wasn't fully absolved yet, but one day it would be, and that the trouble, through the acrostic in its movement, in its finality, would come to an end and the time would come when there would be a refreshment from the Lord, that there would be blessing from the Lord.

He just needed to wait upon the Lord to acknowledge the Lord's glory, to worship him for what he deserves to be worshiped for and to patiently endure in hope for that day that's coming.

So he continues to look toward the Lord's faithful love and the outworking of his determinations in the midst of this grievous season.

This is what Lamentations teaches us.

It's a good book to read when we're going through trouble.

It's a good book to read when we can't understand national tragedies or worldwide calamities.

But it's also a good book to read when we're going through our own personal difficulties and sort of walking through its movement, following its form, so that we might feel the freedom to cry, to feel the fullness of our troubles, but to know that they come to a final end in the mercy of God.

This book continues to speak forward.

Because he was a desperately debauched and apostate nation that God continued to keep alive because there were promises he meant to fulfill.

And Jeremiah is hanging on to those.

The God to whom the poet prayed, the God to whom the poet brought himself in return, is the same God who promised, through the line of the people of Abraham, to bring a deliverer who would bring blessing not just back to this nation but to all people who called upon him.

That revelation of lamentations is the covenant faithfulness of God in the midst of unfaithful people, to use even them to fulfill his good purposes.

The key verses 22 and 23 of chapter 3, tell us just that, because of the Lord's faithful love, we do not perish, for his mercy is never end.

They're new every morning.

Great is your faithfulness.

Unless the Lord had been faithful to his covenant promises, unlike Israel was unfaithful to its covenant promises, it would spell the end of Israel and it would mean no hope for the Gentiles.

But here we are because there is a covenant-keeping, faithful God who will take even the most troubling people in their lowest point in life and continue to use and work through them to accomplish His good purposes and show mercy to more undeserving people just like us.

Let's pray again.

Father.

We thank you for your glorious word that reveals who you are.

We thank you that you're full of unfailing love and compassion, that you are faithful and that you have stepped again into human history, not like this time to bring Judah to its lowest point, but to step into human history to seek and to save the lost, to deliver the millions of undeserving sinners over these past many centuries, and certainly we can say this because of the Lord's great love, that we're not consumed, for your compassions never fail, lord.

Help us also to learn the patterns and the structure of how to deal with ourselves before you when things don't go the way we would like them to go, when life is full of pain and agony instead of pleasure and joy, when our situation is turned on its head rather than putting us on the top of the heap.

We pray, father, that we'd learn to express ourselves to you and to bring ourselves to you.

That we'd learn to look at our own hearts and to acknowledge those things that we have contributed in our calamity.

That we would remember mercy in the midst of judgment.

That we'd learn to wait upon you.

Mercy in the midst of judgment, that we learn to wait upon you and that we would have a hope in your faithful character.

Help us, father, to do this for your glory's sake.

We pray In Christ's name.