Lamentations

At the Neighborhood Church this last Valentines Day weekend we're in Lamentations, and explore how in God's justified anger and consequences for sin, there is hope as we experience and respond to discipline in humble faith and trust in God's character.

Sermon Notes:

Happy post-valentines day! Lamentations is a 5 chapter poem of lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem, to be read by the exiles who lost everything but God himself.

As we explore the consequences of sin and the themes of wrath, repentance, and hope, I pray that the Spirit of God would bring clarity, hope and comfort to us in our particular griefs and losses.

Father thank you for your Word. Would you bless us with what you want us to see, hear, feel, and remember. Regardless of where we are in life, let us draw near to you with humble hearts, in Jesus’ name.

Introduction: This book is a poem, written just after the siege and fall of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile. As an annual tradition during Tishah B’Av, jews gather to commemorate the destruction of the first and second temples, as well as other historic events of devastation, with fasting and a reading of Lamentations. The poem is read or chanted in the evening, in low lighting, and people often place themselves physically low, sitting on low stools or the ground when read, and the reading concludes with a departure in silence.

“How?”

Lamentations is the English name we give for this book, but its Hebrew name is the first word of the book, Eicha, which means ‘Alas!’ or ’How?’ Like ‘how in the world…?’ ‘How could this happen?’ ‘How did it ever get to this?’ These 5 chapters communicate viscerally the memory and present reality of the pain and loss brought about by turning away from God.

How deserted lies the city,
once so full of people!
How like a widow is she,
who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces
has now become a slave.

Once a city on a hill chosen by God himself for His presence to dwell in, where His chosen people to be the Light to the Nations were to worship at, are now both in utter ruin, deserted, alone. How?

For the exiles themselves, this one word can be be both fitting and haunting. Likewise for us, too, when the reality of our circumstances brings the sudden awareness of loss, crushed hopes and dreams, and how in a sense, it wasn’t supposed to be this way, and yet, here we are.

“Where are you”

A fascinating facet of this Hebrew word for the soul-crushing expression of despairing disbelief captured in Eicha, is that it has a fitting homonym. A homonym is a same or similar word with a different meaning, like ‘rose’ and ‘rose.’ When reading ‘Eicha, how?!’ the original readers would immediately see it’s homonym as well, Ayeka, which means, ’Where are you?’

This question happens to be the same question asked of Adam after he had sinned and was hiding in the garden. The purpose of this question was to bring Adam out of hiding, drawing him to repentance through giving him an opportunity for personal acknowledgement of where he’s turned away.

In grief and loss: ’How could this be?’ - it’s necessary to acknowledge the enormity of the emotional pain. And in grief and loss: ’Where are you?’ - it’s necessary to acknowledge our part in the pain, or our response to the pain regarding our relationship with God.

In both cases, turning away brings an exile. Turning away from God is not a fun experience.

Hebrews 10:31: It is dreadful to fall into the hands of the living God.

This last week marks 10 years for us at the Neighborhood Church, and it also marks 10 years since I went through an exile of my own doing. As I was going through an old hard drive looking for old school assignments from my undergraduate program and happened to find my old journal entries and reflections that chronicled that experience. Looking back over the entries, I remember the pain, loss and terror and it is indeed, dreadful, to turn away from God.

Here’s a quote from the first of 27 pages:

I felt a pull from the HS through the lyrics as if He was reaching out saying 'don't leave, turn back' and I thought 'no, if this is just a mental trick to get me back to being stuck [in that old way of living], I don't want you' and immediately felt a shift in relationship happen, felt alone, estranged. After finishing the work out, I went upstairs into the shower and immediately had an experience that I can only describe as hell. It was the feeling of a complete and utter death, irrevocable loss and indescribable terror, with scriptures instantaneously corroborating such as Esau's godlessness, unable to be sought even with tears. I collapsed at the sheer force of the 'reality' that had just been imparted to me in utter disbelief, questioning why the Father would ever do this to me.”

Eicha - How?!

What I continued to experience physically, mentally, and emotionally was: “Constant panic/fear and [racing] negative thoughts, pressure on chest, burning sensation on back of head, tingling on arms, clammy / cold hands, physical pain in heart, growing countenance of exhaustion”.

One might be tempted to say that it was merely a coincidence, or that I was having a mental health crisis, and it surely couldn’t be God’s wrath. But God made it abundantly clear that what I was experiencing was indeed due to disbelief, and turning away from Him in my heart. Devotionals, books, Bible reading, songs, and events all started to speak in one accord on the dreadful consequences of apostasy and disbelief. God even used my grandmother in the midwest, who had no idea what I was experiencing, to send me a package 3-4 days prior before this even happened, that had a CD of the last sermon from her church where the topic was, wouldn’t you know it, Hebrews 3.

So, as the Holy Spirit says:

“Today, if you hear his voice,

do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the wilderness,

where your ancestors tested and tried me,
though for forty years they saw what I did.

That is why I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.’

So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”

See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.

Eicha - how could this be?

Ayeka - Where are you? What was my part, and what will be my response?

Sin is deceitful! We can think it’s not as big of a deal, and yet the consequences are devastating! A little idol worship here, a subtle turning away there, and the end result is not a slap on the wrist, it’s Lamentations—destruction.

God is love, peace, truth, light, life, joy. Hell is the absence of God. If there was a ‘hell on earth’, it was during the siege of Jerusalem, where God actively poured out his wrath on the people of Israel for their apostasy. In my own experience, I described the wrath of God as ‘hell’. A day is coming when the wrath of God will be poured out on the earth for sin and unbelief in the Son of God. And there will be a day of judgment where the books are opened, and we will be judged by our deeds and whether our name is written in the lamb’s book of life. God’s wrath doesn’t come out of the blue. We are warned to hear what God is speaking to you ‘today’ and do not harden your hearts.

The people of Israel had warning signs but refused them. You and I have warning signs, but push past them. The world has warning signs, but rejects them. God’s wrath didn’t, and doesn’t, come out of the blue. But through sin’s deceitfulness, our faculties to observe God’s voice become dull, and our hearts become hardened.

Sin is a sensory issue.

When driving, recently traffic was bad coming home from work and I quickly put in my address into the GPS to see if there was any alternative routes that would get me there faster. I started taking the alternative route and it made sense at first, but after awhile I started to go pretty far out there, and realized that I was getting farther and farther from my desired destination because of the signs I was seeing! I looked at my GPS and realized that it was set to a similar but wrong address completely in a different town! We need eyes to see the signs before we arrive at a destination that we never intended.

Another example of needing sensitive senses, Ali and I apparently grew up differently, because I never used q-tips to clean my ears. This might be a weird example, but bear with me: recently Alicia noticed that I had a lot of earwax. Unless someone is actively looking for it, only someone close to you can really tell these things. I finally decided to try her suggestion to use warm water and a water squirter thing, and it actually worked. Apparently I was very overdue, because suddenly, for the first time in a long time, I started hearing high frequency sounds very acutely. I suddenly became painfully aware of how loud our children can be in our home, in the car, as well as other sounds of a shrill nature. Where things previously didn’t bother me, I now am taking extra care and precaution to stop or prevent them from happening, because it hurts more now than it did before! The same of true of those who have their sensitivities to sin ‘unclogged’—they feel the pain of it more keenly, are able to hear God’s voice and his direction clearer, and receive healing quicker.

What do you need, a q-tip for maintenance, or an session of water irrigation? Do you need to keep up spiritual disciplines to remain sensitive to God’s voice, or do you need a more intensive intervention to correct a problem that’s gone on for awhile? Don’t let sin deceive you. Listen to the Holy Spirit’s leading Now. Today.

In that season at times I was pretty close to the edge of hopelessness. A ‘cheer up, God loves you!’ Was ineffective, to say the least. Shallow theological conversations wouldn’t come close to breaking through the fear and terror of being under God’s wrath in the moment, or during the ensuing wreckage. I constantly struggled with the thought that God was immeasurably angry with me and that I was rejected forever. I needed validation of the wrath, but I also desperately sought hope. This is where Lamentations, and a few verses in particular, became an anchor for me. Praise God, He gave us Lamentations.

Structure:

In Lamentations, we read what occurred as a collection of memories embodied by various voices, first by ‘Lady Jerusalem’, then an individual person, and then the whole community.

The book is written with a chiastic structure that is often found in the Bible, where the writing is split up into beginning and ending sections that mirror one another, and the middle often being the crux or central point or theme, which is the case here.

Additionally, chapters 1-4 were written as an acrostic where each verse correlates with the progressive letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Acrostics can be devices to aid memorization, create an expected flow, and thematically to communicate totality (‘from A to Z’). By chapter 5, the acrostic breaks down as the writer relives all the pain of the experience, and with the final verse concludes with the plea for God to “restore us, that we may return, unless He really is that angry and really has rejected forever.”

Lamentations begins with an acrostic that captures from A-Z the totality of the suffering, and uniquely, the middle chapter of the book, is a triple acrostic and three times the length of the other chapters.

The Voice paraphrase is one of the few attempts to capture what the acrostic could feel like in English.

1 Afflicted, I have seen and know what it’s like
to feel the rod of God’s anger:

2 An absence of light and only darkness.
Darkness—that’s where God has driven me.

3 Against me and me alone, over and over,
God raises His hand incessantly.

4 Bones are broken, skin rubbed off, and my flesh wasted;
this is God’s doing:

5 Besieged in hardship,
wrapped in a husk of bitter poison and trouble;

6 Brought to darkness like those dead and decaying,
and left there alone to live.

7 Cut off from every avenue of escape, God has fenced me in
and tied me up with heavy chains.

8 Crying and carrying on do me no good;
God shuts out my prayer.

9 Closed in and blocked by walls of cut stone,
what paths I have left, He has twisted and confused my steps.

But as we move to the middle of the middle, we hear the entire focus of the book, which is a gentle message of hope amidst the pain and the fear of complete rejection due to deserved punishment. I’d like to read this aloud as we end today.

19 Grievous thoughts of affliction and wandering plagued my mind—
great bitterness and gall.
20 Grieving, my soul thinks back;
these thoughts cripple, and I sink down.
21 Gaining hope,
I remember and wait for this thought:

22 How enduring is God’s loyal love;
the Eternal has inexhaustible compassion.
23 Here they are, every morning, new!
Your faithfulness, God, is as broad as the day.

24 Have courage, for the Eternal is all that I will need.
My soul boasts, “Hope in God; just wait.”

25 It is good. The Eternal One is good to those who expect Him,
to those who seek Him wholeheartedly.
26 It is good to wait quietly
for the Eternal to make things right again.
27 It is good to have to deal
with restraint and burdens when young.

28 Just leave in peace the one who waits in silence,
patiently bearing the burden of God;
29 Just don’t interfere if he falls, gape-mouthed in the dust.
There may well be hope yet.
30 Just let him offer his cheek when struck.
Let him be the butt of jokes.

31 Kept in God’s care:
the Lord won’t reject him forever.
32 Kindness prevails: Even though God torments sometimes,
the greatness of God’s loyal love wins out.
33 Keeping us down: it is not the desire or way of God’s heart
to hurt and grieve the children of men.

Hebrews 12:5-7

And have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as a father addresses his son? It says,

“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline,
and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,

because the Lord disciplines the one he loves,
and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.”

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his child.

Final thoughts: my Eicha, my ‘how could this happen, how could the Father do this’ was calmed as I was able to trust that He loved me, and that in this He had not abandoned me, but was disciplining me for a good purpose. That is the purpose of Lamentations—to process the pain and come back to the Father. He loves you. He has great plans for you, not to harm you, but to give you a hope and a future.