Learning from Lamentations
By Ian Hamilton, Editor, The Banner of Truth Magazine
Reprinted from the June 2021 issue #693
The Book of Lamentations is exactly what it says it is, a book of “lamentations.” In a series of five poems, Jeremiah laments the catastrophe of the fall and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. What God’s covenant people thought, and hoped, would never happen, happened — the Babylonian army came and devastated the city, destroying the temple. The tragedy is captured in 2:15. echoing words from Psalm 48:2: “All who pass along the way clap their hands at you; they hiss and wag their heads at the daughter of Jerusalem: “Is this the city that was called the perfection of beauty, the joy of the earth?”
The devastation and destruction were not the result of political incompetence or military ineptitude (Lamentations 1, verses 8, 12, 14-15). The tragedy was God fulfilling his promise made almost a thousand years before: “The Lord has done what he purposed; he has carried out his word, which he commanded long ago; he has thrown down without pity; he has made the enemy rejoice over you and exalted the might of your foes” (2:17). God had warned his covenant people where wilful disobedience to him and his covenant with them would lead (read Deuteronomy 28:15-68). The day of reckoning had arrived.
At the heart of Lamentations is God’s condemnation of the men who were entrusted to speak his word: “Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions; they have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes, but have seen for you oracles that are false and misleading” (2:14). The prophets were guilty of a two-fold dereliction: They spoke their own thoughts, not God’s, and they did not faithfully speak God’s cutting, convicting, humbling word, without which they would never know nor feel the weight and seriousness of their sin, nor God’s restorative blessing.
How like the times we live in. In my own nation of Scotland, these two evils have devastated spiritually and morally the national Church of Scotland. But the danger no less confronts confessionally faithful churches. Israel had not formally repudiated God’s word — it just ignored it and lived out its life shaped and styled by the times it lived in.
What can we learn from a book like Lamentations? Why is a whole book of the Bible — God’s word, that makes us wise for salvation, that is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path — why is a whole book devoted to a continual, almost unrelieved lament?
First, to impress on us the seriousness of sin. God takes sin seriously. Only too easily we can subtly make God in our own image. The atmosphere of the age can seep into our born-again minds and we rarely if ever hear words like, “Our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 10:31; 12:28-29). Over familiarity with God and his gospel can blind us to his burning holiness and majesty.
Second, to impress on us that even the most spiritually blessed of people can sink to unspeakable depths of wickedness. What is most remarkable is that this people had God’s written law. They possessed the Holy Scriptures and venerated them. They knew God’s many gracious promises. They had a blessed history, but none of this kept them from sliding into unbelief and moral tragedy.
There is a danger that even Reformed Christians can drift into — the danger of thinking that what we read in Lamentations could never happen to “us.”
In 1843, 474 ministers left the Church of Scotland and formed the Church of Scotland Free. Charles Hodge thought it the purest church in Christendom. Within thirty years that church, the church of Chalmers, Cunningham, Smeaton, and Martin, was infected by the deadly spiritual disease of “higher criticism,” — liberalism in academic dress. “Watch and pray.”
Third, to remind us that God always fulfils his word, for good and for ill (2:17). Judgement does begin in the house of God.
Fourth, to give us an authentic spirituality. Biblical spirituality is marked by realism, and that means by godly lament. Fifty-nine of the Psalms are laments. The Lord has given us these, often dark, laments, because we need a realistic spirituality. We need songs in minor keys. Jollity should never mark any service of Christian worship. I don’t mean there should not be joy. The apostle Peter writes of “Joy unspeakable as full of glory”. But notice the preceding verses (1 Peter 1:6-9). A book like Lamentations never allows us to forget the dark context of the life of faith.
Fifth, to encourage us that our circumstances are never beyond the sovereign will and purpose of God. Look how the opening verses of 2:1-6 read. How can this possibly encourage and even comfort me? Because “whom the Lord loves he chastens (Hebrews 12:5-6). Behind the betrayal of Judas, the jealousy of the Jewish leaders, the weakness of Pilate, it was the Lord who delivered up Jesus to the cross. Life is not a lottery. It is our God who reigns, even in the darkest of life’s circumstances. God’s sovereignty is not only a truth to confess, it is a truth to live by, and love (If you have access to Calvin’s Commentaries, read his exposition of Romans 4:20).
Sixth, to encourage us to seek the Lord while he may yet be found. These dark, solemn, difficult to read poems of lament, are not there ultimately to cast us down, but to give us hope. How can that be? Listen to Jeremiah;
“But this I call to mind, and therefore have hope: 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.’
The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.
It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord…
For the Lord will not cast off forever, but though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not afflict from his heart or grieve the children of men” (3:21-26; 31-33).
One of the striking features of Lamentations is that every verse begins with successive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Perhaps this was an aid to memorization. More likely, as Dale Ralph Davis suggests, it was a way of driving home the unrelieved intensity of the sufferings being experienced. Beginning with A (aleph) and ending with T (tau, the final letter in the Hebrew alphabet). Jeremiah walks through the horrendous suffering that had come upon God’s church. We are not spared the unimaginable awfulness. The Bible never hides from us the righteous judgements that the Lord executes in history. But nor does it hide from us the unimaginable grace that this same God holds out all the day long, in his Son, to his people and his world.
If you are reading this and thick darkness has overwhelmed you and God seems far off, in your pain cry out, “Father.” It may be all you are able to cry out, but if it comes from a life that has rested the weight of all that it is on God’s grace in Jesus Christ, that one word anchors your soul for time and eternity.
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