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Tag: lamentations

Reflections: Jerusalem – a city of sacrifice

[ Lament over Jerusalem ]

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,

the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!

How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!

– words of Christ Jesus – Mathew 23:37

The Temple of Herod would be destroyed when Jerusalem again fell in the year of our Lord 70, not even four decades after the Crucifixion and Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross; followed by His glorious resurrection of the body, appearances to many believers and physical ascension into the clouds.

Yet prior to the controversial proclamations of John the baptizer and miracles of Jesus in the Temple and throughout Judah and many places, God had remained silent for centuries while Jerusalem suffered the consequence of a disobedient people who always rejected God and ridiculed or killed the Prophets of the LORD.

Captive Jerusalem before Christ lay vulnerable to the swords of the nations, even prior to the conquests of Rome. The LORD allowed its fall into ruin, for His people had not listened to their Prophets; therefore the LORD kept silence beyond their generations into the centuries.

These are the words of Jeremiah the Prophet, after the LORD had warned the people… after the people refused to listen… after the LORD allowed the calamity of which His Prophet had warned:

Lamentations 1

How Lonely Sits the City

1 How lonely sits the city
    that was full of people!
How like a widow has she become,
    she who was great among the nations!
She who was a princess among the provinces
    has become a slave.

²She weeps bitterly in the night,
    with tears on her cheeks;
among all her lovers
    she has none to comfort her;
all her friends have dealt treacherously with her;
    they have become her enemies.

³Judah has gone into exile because of affliction
    and hard servitude;
she dwells now among the nations,
    but finds no resting place;
her pursuers have all overtaken her
    in the midst of her distress.

⁴The roads to Zion mourn,
    for none come to the festival;
all her gates are desolate;
    her priests groan;
her virgins have been afflicted,
    and she herself suffers bitterly.

…

¹⁸“The Lord is in the right,

    for I have rebelled against his word;
but hear, all you peoples,
    and see my suffering;
my young women and my young men
    have gone into captivity.

¹⁹“I called to my lovers,
    but they deceived me;
my priests and elders
    perished in the city,
while they sought food
    to revive their strength.

²⁰“Look, O Lord, for I am in distress;
    my stomach churns;
my heart is wrung within me,
    because I have been very rebellious.
In the street the sword bereaves;
    in the house it is like death.

By the time Ezra and Nehemiah returned to the site of the destroyed Temple, God’s chosen people had completely forgotten the Law.

For a time they repented. Then once more God was forgotten in the land and Jerusalem remained only a dark shadow of promise once made to a people who failed to keep the Law in the words of their mouth and meditate on it every day and every night.

Have contemporary believers in Jesus Christ also done what is evil in the eyes of the LORD in these last days?

Hear the hastening approach of our Lord, King of the New Jerusalem…

March 28, 2015
In God We Trusted – 5

The political ‘spin’ has been spun.

The gradual fall is begun.

How? lament the People…

Why? In God we trusted.

“Lamentations” was derived from a translation of the title as found in the Latin Vulgate (Vg.) translation of the Greek OT, the Septuagint (LXX), and conveys the idea of “loud cries.” The Hebrew exclamation ekah (“How,”which expresses “dismay”), used in 1:1; 2:1, and 4:1, gives the book its Hebrew title. However, the rabbis began early to call the book “loud cries” or “lamentations” (cf. Jer. 7:29).

Lamentations 5

English Standard Version (ESV)

Restore Us to Yourself, O Lord

5 Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us;
look, and see our disgrace!
2 Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers,
our homes to foreigners.
3 We have become orphans, fatherless;
our mothers are like widows.

Before their cry of How? …while they were yet falling…

Hosea 14: Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God,
for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.
2 Take with you words
and return to the Lord…

Micah 6:12 Your rich men are full of violence;
your inhabitants speak lies,
and their tongue is deceitful in their mouth.
13 Therefore I strike you with a grievous blow,
making you desolate because of your sins.

Isaiah 58: “Cry aloud; do not hold back;
lift up your voice like a trumpet;
declare to my people their transgression,
to the house of Jacob their sins.
2 Yet they seek me daily
and delight to know my ways,
as if they were a nation that did righteousness
and did not forsake the judgment of their God

Zephaniah 3:

Woe to her who is rebellious and defiled,
the oppressing city!
2 She listens to no voice;
she accepts no correction.
She does not trust in the Lord;
she does not draw near to her God.

3 Her officials within her
are roaring lions;
her judges are evening wolves
that leave nothing till the morning.

Habakkuk 2: “Woe to him who heaps up what is not his own—
for how long?—
and loads himself with pledges!”
7 Will not your debtors suddenly arise,
and those awake who will make you tremble?
Then you will be spoil for them.

Obadiah

The Day of the Lord Is Near

15 For the day of the Lord is near upon all the nations.
As you have done, it shall be done to you;
your deeds shall return on your own head.

Lamentations 5:15 The joy of our hearts has ceased;
our dancing has been turned to mourning.
16 The crown has fallen from our head;
woe to us, for we have sinned!

19 But you, O Lord, reign forever;
your throne endures to all generations.
20 Why do you forget us forever,
why do you forsake us for so many days?
21 Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored!
Renew our days as of old—
22 unless you have utterly rejected us,
and you remain exceedingly angry with us.

Remember Israel? Remember Judah? Remember the Nations? Remember Rome?

Remember Great Britain? Remember America?

Do the Nations and Empires and Peoples remember God?

Are we not a falling people in the hands of an angry God (as Jonathan Edwards once warned)?

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

Enfield, Connecticut
July 8, 1741

Their foot shall slide in due time. Deuteronomy 32:35

In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, who were God’s visible people, and who lived under the means of grace; but who, notwithstanding all God’s wonderful works towards them, remained (as vers 28.) void of counsel, having no understanding in them. Under all the cultivations of heaven, they brought forth bitter and poisonous fruit; as in the two verses next preceding the text. — The expression I have chosen for my text, their foot shall slide in due time, seems to imply the following things, relating to the punishment and destruction to which these wicked Israelites were exposed.

[READ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God]

Will it be blessing? Or will we reap curse?

For once, in God we Trusted.

October 18, 2013
In God We Trusted – 3

Disclaimer & claim:

WE the PEOPLE of the LORD trust God.
Nations rise and nations will fall. The Prophet Jeremiah had warned Judah of their impending fall.

By now you must see the present application of Lamentations 3.

The warnings of the Prophets also speak to our nations.

We the people of the US have forgotten:

In God we trusted. Our heritage of faith is buried deeply in disbelief and rebellion.

Lamentations is indictment of rulers who do not hear the cries of their people or acknowledge the leadership of God.

Lamentations 3

English Standard Version (ESV)

Great Is Your Faithfulness

3 I am the man who has seen affliction
under the rod of his wrath;
2 he has driven and brought me
into darkness without any light;
3 surely against me he turns his hand
again and again the whole day long.

4 He has made my flesh and my skin waste away;
he has broken my bones;
5 he has besieged and enveloped me
with bitterness and tribulation;
6 he has made me dwell in darkness
like the dead of long ago.

7 He has walled me about so that I cannot escape;
he has made my chains heavy;
8 though I call and cry for help,
he shuts out my prayer;
9 he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones;
he has made my paths crooked.

Noah Webster, author of the first American Speller and the first Dictionary said,

“The Christian religion, in its purity, is the basis, or rather the source of all genuine freedom in government. . . . and I am persuaded that no civil government of a republican form can exist and be durable in which the principles of that religion have not a controlling influence.”

Think about this from a man whose mission was to educate our forefathers.

Civil government, to exist and be durable MUST have the principles of religion as a controlling influence: the MORALITY OF GOD – Good, and not evil.

19 Remember my affliction and my wanderings,
the wormwood and the gall!
20 My soul continually remembers it
and is bowed down within me.
21 But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:

22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
24 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”

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

Even responsible leaders of men will look to our future.

Thomas Jefferson, A Nation of Sheep will have a Government of Wolves

If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you & I, & Congress & Assemblies, judges & governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor. – Thomas Jefferson, To Edward Carrington Paris, Jan. 16, 1787

Yet the Prophet both warns and comforts the people who ask, ‘How?’

31 For the Lord will not
cast off forever,
32 but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love;
33 for he does not afflict from his heart
or grieve the children of men.

34 To crush underfoot
all the prisoners of the earth,
35 to deny a man justice
in the presence of the Most High,
36 to subvert a man in his lawsuit,
the Lord does not approve.

40 Let us test and examine our ways,
and return to the Lord!
41 Let us lift up our hearts and hands
to God in heaven:
42 “We have transgressed and rebelled,
and you have not forgiven.

Has our history revealed the truth of the complete plea to God of Patrick Henry…

or just a simple, secular sound-byte?

Jeremiah had warned those who once spoke of ‘life so dear or peace so sweet.’ Patrick Henry plead: Forbid it, Almighty God!

58 “You have taken up my cause, O Lord;
you have redeemed my life.
59 You have seen the wrong done to me, O Lord;
judge my cause.
60 You have seen all their vengeance,
all their plots against me.

64 “You will repay them, O Lord,
according to the work of their hands.
65 You will give them dullness of heart;
your curse will be on them.
66 You will pursue them in anger and destroy them
from under your heavens, O Lord.”

October 16, 2013