Dennis Tuuri

# Lamentations 2: The Lord in Anger Has Beclouded Her

Lamentations this second Sunday in Lent. What we just sang about is really the subject of Lamentations. The fall of Jerusalem, the temple in 586 and 587 BC at the hands of Babylon. And Lamentations is a lament, a eulogy as it were over this dead city. Today we move on to chapter 2. So please stand for the reading of God’s word. There is a chiastic version of this passage on your handouts which you can follow along in that or just listen or read in your own scriptures along with us.

So Lamentations chapter 2, let me just mention that Lamentations 2 follows the end of Lamentations 1 and Lamentations 1 actually had a cry similar to the psalm we just sang where it asked for God to judge those that were judging, those that were destroying Jerusalem. So Lamentations 1 rather ends with a bit of an imprecation being prayed, and it’s interesting then how Lamentations 2 begins: “How the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger.

He cast down from heaven to the earth the beauty of Israel and did not remember his footstool in the day of his anger. The Lord has swallowed up and has not pitied all the dwelling places of Jacob. He has thrown down in his wrath the strongholds of the daughter of Judah. He has brought them down to the ground. He has profaned the kingdom and the princes. He has cut off in fierce anger every horn of Israel.

He has drawn back his right hand from before the enemy. He has blazed against Jacob like a flaming fire, devouring all around. Standing like an enemy, He has bent his bow with his right hand, like an adversary. He has slain all who were pleasing to his eye on the tent of the daughter of Zion. He has poured out his fury like fire. The Lord was like an enemy. He has swallowed up Israel. He has swallowed up all her palaces.

He has destroyed her strongholds and has increased mourning and lamentation in the daughter of Judah. He has done violence to his tabernacle as if it were a garden. He has destroyed his place of assembly. The Lord has caused the appointed feasts and Sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion. In his burning indignation, he has spurned the king and the priest. The Lord has spurned his altar. He has abandoned his sanctuary.

He has given up the walls of her palaces into the hand of the enemy. They have made a noise in the house of the Lord as on the day of a set feast. The Lord has purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion. He has stretched out a line. He has not withdrawn his hand from destroying. Therefore, he has caused the rampart and wall to lament. They languished together. Her gates have sunk into the ground.

He has destroyed and broken her bars. Her kings and her princes are among the nations. The Law is no more. And her prophets find no vision from the Lord. The elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground and keep silence. They throw dust on their heads, and gird themselves with sackcloth. The virgins of Jerusalem bow their heads to the ground.

My eyes fail with tears. My heart is troubled. My bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people. Because the children and the infants faint in the streets of the city. They say to their mothers, “Where is grain and wine?” as they swoon like the wounded in the streets of the city as their life is poured out in their mother’s bosom. How shall I console you? To what shall I liken you, daughter of Jerusalem? What shall I compare with you that I may comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion? For your ruin is spread wide as the sea.

Who can heal you? Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions. They have not uncovered your iniquity to bring back your captives, but have envisioned for you false prophecies and delusions. All who pass by clap their hands at you. They hiss and shake their heads at the daughter of Jerusalem: “Is this the city that is called the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth?” All your enemies have opened their mouth against you.

They hiss and gnash their teeth. They say, “We have swallowed her up. Surely this is the day we have waited for. We have found it. We have seen it.” The Lord has done what he purposed. He has fulfilled his word which he commanded in days of old. He has thrown down and has not pitied, and he has caused an enemy to rejoice over you. He has exalted the horn of your adversaries. Their heart cried out to the Lord, “O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night.

Give yourself no relief. Give your eyes no rest. Arise, cry out in the night. At the beginning of the watches. Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift your hands toward him for the life of your young children who faint from hunger at the head of every street. See, O Lord, and consider! To whom have you done this? Should the women eat their offspring, the children they have cuddled? Should the priest and prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord? Young and old lie on the ground in the streets.

My virgins and my young men have fallen by the sword. You have slain them in the day of your anger. You have slaughtered and not pitied. You have invited as to a feast day the terrors that surround me. In the day of the Lord’s anger, there was no refuge or survivor. Those whom I have borne and brought up, my enemies have destroyed.”

Let’s pray. Father, open your word to us. May your spirit transform us. Strike the blow, Lord God, at our sins and restore us. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Lamentations is part of God’s word. Lamentations is about words. It’s about God’s word. And if we were to carefully record, you’ll see throughout the text we just read, many references back to Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28-29, various psalms in which God promises to bring the sorts of judgments that came upon Jerusalem in 586, 587, and then again in 70 AD. Actually, to make it more contemporary, every nation that builds itself on the word of God as this one has attempted to do has a great deal of interest—one would hope—in texts such as this.

Every city that moves from being an attempt to image the city of God and becomes instead the city of man transfers its loyalty from God to something else. This is a very important text for any nation, and beyond that it’s an important text for the body of Christ and the prophets to this culture, and beyond that it’s important for each of us individually. The Lord’s word will be fulfilled and we had best pay attention to it now.

This book is written in a wonderful way to bring attention to particular words and actually to bring attention to words period. As we’ve noted, there are five specific poems here. The first four are all acrostic. They go from alpha to tav, from A to Z. Although in the Hebrew there’s no Z. It’s the last letter: 22 letters down. It’s tav. But it goes from alef to tav. Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega. He is the Word and he is the letters of that word. The particular details of the word as well. And what Lamentations shows us is the importance and significance of word.

First of all, word divides this into five particular poems for us, right? The alphabetical, the acrostic nature of the first four clearly mark off different sections of these five poems and it helps us to separate them properly. And not only that, we talked last week and again in today’s handout: the first two of these Lamentations are actually specific words matched up toward a particular center of that particular chapter. So it’s chiastic, again drawing our attention to the specific words to give us a specific center which we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes in verses 11 and 12 which are a match.

I mentioned last week that there are chains that go on. Now we’re not taking the time to look at all this stuff but again in the handout I give you today for Lamentations 2, there’s an attempt to show the chaining effect which is more simple. It’s not as intricate as chapter 1. Remember Lamentations 1? It goes one and three have a match. Three and five, five and seven, two and four, four and six. It goes that way and so it creates this chain.

Chapter 2 is more direct. One and two, two and three, three and four. A tighter chain, less intricate, you could think of it as. The beauty of the wonderful structure of Lamentations breaks down. It dies away. And that’s our theme for Lent this season: that beauty dies away. The Lord disintegrates beauty in times of judgment. And so when you come in, you’ve got that theme verse: the splendor of Zion, the beauty of Zion is being taken away. And you’ve got representations of flowers where the beauty is dying away. And you’ve got these things where the beauty is dying away.

And in some of our lives right now, some lives in this congregation, beauty is dying away. In some marriage relationships. Beauty is dying away in some parent-child relationships. Beauty is dying away. And in some friendship relationships, beauty is dying away.

Now, that’s what happens. It actually happens with or without sin, right? What happens is a general context of what God does. As I get older, our beauty dies away. I mean, yeah, there’s a distinguishment in being old and all that, but hey, come on. Beauty is dying away, right? And that’s what happens. Entropy. Things go from a more ordered state to a less ordered state. Beauty dies away. Beauty has to do with order, symmetry, that kind of thing.

But beauty dies away very specifically in Lamentations because of sin. And that is the highlight of chapter 2: that beauty is dying away specifically because God has done it. God has done it. He, he. And we want to point to Obama. We want to point to the socialists. We want to point to whatever it is that’s causing us grief and trouble. We feel a drum beat in the loss of our nation. We feel a drum beat in the loss of liberty. We feel a drum beat in the deteriorating economic status we seem to find ourselves in. And it looks that way as far as the eye can see. We feel this. What do we do? How do we prepare? Good people are talking about that. How do we prepare for what is happening now and the drum beat of what seems to be happening in our culture—economically, morally, name the direction you want.

And we say, well, we’ve got these problems because of the socialists or Obama or whoever it is. But what this text tells us is “he, he,” referring to the Lord, the Lord, the Lord.

So this text is kind of an answer to verse one. It’s another beautiful thing. Verse one of chapter 1: “How lonely the city, right?” Verse one of chapter 2: “How he has brought a cloud on daughter Zion in his anger.” How matches. And we go from a statement of isolation. Yeah, there was some stuff about sin and God’s sovereignty in chapter 1, but we go from a description of her state—the dying away of beauty of relationships, isolation, social isolation—to now the explanation for that. That’s that way because the Lord God is angry. And what he’s going to do in this text is to show this reversal of all the blessings.

So there’s this beauty of the word. God’s word will be fulfilled. And when we reach the disintegration of beauty in our lives, what we should be doing and what this chapter brings God’s people to in the last three verses is crying out to the Lord. That’s the arc of chapter 2. He’s done it. You better repent. And the people in the last three verses cry out to God.

Now, that’s what we’re to do. We’re not to, you know, our first response isn’t community organizing, political organizing, you know, all that stuff. All that stuff’s good. You know, I’m into it. But what’s really—we’re into is: God is doing these things. His word is coming to pass. And in this particular book, that word has such beauty to it.

I kept thinking about this song played last night. My family didn’t appreciate it. “What are words for when no one listens anymore?” You know, if you read the lyrics without watching the video, it’s pretty good. Actually, the lyrics are good. And those of you that saw it—it’s from the Missing Persons or something. Some weird old thing from the ’70s. The guy with the long funny beard. I’m talking about ’70s songs again. Yeah, my barber closed at 2 yesterday. I got there too late. Sorry.

“What are words for when no one listens anymore?” Are you listening? Am I listening? Because the words here tell us that we may have gotten by with sin for a while. They got by with a lot of sin in Jerusalem. Decades of sin, centuries of sin. This whole process of the death of Israel, you know, didn’t begin—well, back in the 700s BC is when the northern tribes were taken into captivity. There was a whole lot of sinning going on for a whole lot of time and eventually God says it stops. That’s what he says here. It stops.

And if you think that your particular sin can just maintain as a part of your life because that’s what’s happened in the past: no. What good are words for if no one’s listening? Are you listening? Am I listening? Will we take seriously those funny little stones out there? Those little red things. Here’s one. Are we going to take these seriously? Are we going to try to put off sin? Are we going to try to make a break with sin through righteousness this Lenten season? Or are we just going to play little games with the stones?

Which is it? Well, this chapter beautifully lays out the fact that if we just play games with this, the Lord God is coming. He’s coming. His word, His word rather, will be fulfilled. Your life will continue to deteriorate its beauty. And there’ll come a time in some of our lives when the Lord will break our necks. That’s what he does here to Jerusalem. And there comes a time in this nation’s history when the Lord will break our collective neck.

And God’s people will say with Augustine, “If it didn’t happen, there’d be no God in heaven.” If it didn’t happen, if God doesn’t break the neck of a nation that’s unrighteous, sinful, that whose response to a national disaster—you know, to 9/11—was to hold a multicultural religious service at which all kinds of people call on all kinds of gods. I understand the politics of it. I understand that. I understand the fear of reprisals. Yeah, I understand all that. It doesn’t make any difference.

When the nation doesn’t cry out to Yahweh when the judgments begin and when the judgments continue—refuses to do that—God will at some point break the neck. We talk about Stalin killing a hundred million people as a bureaucrat in the Soviet Union and he did and it’s horrific and we hate it. We hate him because of that, right? What are we doing here? We’re zeroing in on half of his figure. We’re zeroing in on 50 million dead children in the streets of our cities. Okay, I mean 1973, right? Since then, a million kids a year. Do the math. We’re at and we’re almost halfway to Stalin. No sign, you know, that we’re going to put an end to this tremendous injustice.

And as I mentioned last week, I go to a justice conference which I’ve appreciated in many ways. Not one plenary speaker said one word about the death of 40 million babies or more in this country. If God doesn’t break that neck at some point in time, well, there’s no God. These words shouldn’t be listened to because they never come true. That’s what it is. But they are coming true.

And what we see is that the loss of freedom, the loss of economic vitality, you know, is the judgment of God upon us. He, he has done this, right? He’s doing it to our nation. He’s doing it to various portions of the world. He’s doing it to us individually though if we don’t repent.

By the way, Roe v. Wade, right? I didn’t realize till this week. Maybe I did, maybe I forgotten to my shame. Well, you know, we reversed Roe v. Wade. What good does it do Oregon? Not one bit. Because Oregon voted four years before Roe v. Wade. Our legislature approved abortion pretty much on demand. Did you know that? That’s Oregon. And I, I don’t know. I find this astonishing, but apparently one of the men that led this charge to legalize abortion was a Republican legislator who, as I understand it, hasn’t repented or recanted of all that.

He tried two years later to get rid of notice of husband or parents. That didn’t pass then. It’s of course the case now. But this guy who was doing this—Republican—and as I understand it—and if I’m wrong, I’m wrong—but as I understand it, he is the lobbyist for the Roman Catholic Church, the archdiocese of Portland, in the legislature. You know about this righteous indignation about contraception from the Roman Catholic Church? How many people have they excommunicated for killing of kids? I don’t know anybody. And I think you’d hear about it. I think you’d hear about it today if that was actually going on.

So, you know, we—this nation—we’ve been going in the wrong direction a whole long time. And if all we care about as it comes to politics, for instance, is the economy, we’re Marxists. All we care about is money. It’s all about money, then, right? That’s weird. That’s weird in a nation like ours if that’s all we care about and people get lambasted for it. Well, I’m off on a political tirade now, but that’s the message of this chapter, right?

Right there. You can hear it. As you hear this thing being read and as you look at the emphasis, that’s what’s going on. And it’s being portrayed for us here in a beautiful way, the words themselves.

And I’ve talked about this a little bit. Let me tell you one other interesting thing that David Dorsey points out. So this is five poems, okay? Which is a three and a two. And it’s not a three and a two just because I make that up. The first three chapters, even though in your translations it says there’s 22 verses, 22 verses, 66 verses, they’re all the same length. They’re all 22 verses with three stanzas per verse. And it just so happens that in chapter 3, the three stanzas in each verse are alliterated, right? So it’s a triple acrostic: AAA, BBB, CCC, right? Okay. So that’s, but you know, they’re the same. They’re 22 stanzas with three verses. No, 22 stanzas with three verses in each stanza poetically in terms of the meter of the thing. Okay?

And then chapter 4 changes that, right? So chapter 4 actually—you wouldn’t know—but chapter 4 has 22 stanzas with two verses each. Chapter 5 no longer acrostic—begins with alef, that’s it. Chapter 5 has 22 verse stanzas with one verse each. You see? Even in that which I didn’t talk about last week, it’s dying away. Things are dying away. Beauty is deteriorating.

And it gives us then three long acrostics and then two shorter ones. So it gives us the three and a two.

Let me read a couple of verses to you here. This is from Psalm 19. “The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork. Day unto day utters speech. Night unto night reveals knowledge.” 3-3-3. Got it? That’s a balanced approach. You see that a lot in the Psalms and in other poetic literature in the Bible. This 3-3.

But now listen to, as an example, Lamentations 3:4. “He has aged my flesh and my skin and broken my bones. Verse nine, he has blocked my ways with hewn stone. He has made crooked my paths.” You see the psalm I read was 3-3, balanced. But in Lamentations, it becomes a 3-2 frequently. It’s dying away. And the very structure of the book, you know, is that we have three nearly identical, across the same length chapters and then two that get progressively shorter.

Beauty abounds in this book and it’s structured in such a way as the beauty itself dies away as the book goes along. And so by the very writing of the English language, right, Jesus is Alpha and Omega. His word judges Jerusalem. His word itself—with the individual letters, etc.—are the focal point, are the artistic expression of the word of God bringing judgment, right? And so it’s this beautiful thing with the word of God that ends up destroying the city and it demonstrates that in the very way the material is written.

Now I mentioned this acrostic thing, right? Or not acrostic, I’m sorry, the chiastic structure. And you can either look at your handout as another element of the beauty of this poem and how the beauty dies away, going from chiastic in one and two to no chiasms anymore. Chapter 2, let me just read the common words and I’ve tried to highlight most of these on your handout, but in verse 1 and 22, the stress is the day of his anger, that’s the common phrase.

Verses 2 and 21 moving toward the inner talks about God’s lack of mercy. Verse 3 and 20 include consuming imagery. Things are being consumed or swallowed. 4 and 19 use the phrase pour out. 5 and 18 are connected by the use of Lord—Adonai. You know, if you read your English Bibles, if you got L uppercase, little o-r-d, that’s usually Adonai in the Hebrew. If it’s Lord, capital L-o-r-d, that’s Yahweh. So here it’s Lord Adonai is the matching term in verses 5 and 18.

6 and 17 use the name Lord Yahweh. 7 and 16 mention Israel’s enemies. 8 and 15 use the word daughter, although it’s used a lot in this chapter. 9 and 14 mention prophets and visions. 10 and 13 mention daughter Zion. And 11 and 12 describe fainting in the street.

Now, so what’s the point? Well, the beauty of the text takes us to a center. And you know the center is important, right? Let me just if you look either on your handout or another way, if you look verses 11 and 12: what’s the center of the message here? Okay, what’s the center?

Well, verse 11 says, “My eyes fail with tears. My heart is troubled. My life is poured out on the ground. My bile is poured out on the ground because of the destruction of the daughter of my people because the children and the infants faint in the streets of the city. They say to their mothers, ‘Where is grain and wine?’ As they swoon like the wounded in the streets of the city as their life is poured out in their mother’s bosom.”

The center is not just the pain of the city and the mother. The center is the tremendous pain to children, to our children. Okay. Now, so that’s the focus and that’s the beauty of this text takes us to that focus.

Let me tell you something else that’s sort of interesting. Verse 19. Look at verse 19 now. Yeah, I said that these are, you know, 22 stanzas with three verses per stanza except for verse 19. Okay, now the guy slips here, right? No, he doesn’t slip. He does something different to draw our attention to verse 19. He makes it four verses in this stanza. It stands out like a sore thumb. And so verse 19 is important. Verses 11 and 12 are important. They’re the beautiful center of this poem, right?

Verse 19 is important because the meter changes. Now we have a longer verse, the only one out of 22. What does it say? “Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches. Pour out your heart like water before the face of the Lord. Lift your hands toward him for the life of your young children who faint from hunger at the head of every street.”

What’s the emphasis again? Weep. Pour out your heart to God. That’s the proper response to judgment.

Now, we don’t talk about imprecation, imprecatory prayers yet against the Babylonians. That time will come. Hezekiah did that with the Assyrians. That time will come. But it comes after your repentance for your sins. And this is the reason. It looks like Nebuchadnezzar is doing this. And they actually say that in this text, right? The enemies say, “We did this. We did this. We did this.” And God says, “No, I, I.” And he says, “Pour out your heart. Why? What’s the motivation to do this? For your children’s sake, for the future. The future’s dying here. It’s being destroyed.

And the text itself and its beauty brings us to a deterioration of beauty. So there’s no progression left into the future. That’s what’s going on. And so God says at the very center of this chapter, “Your children are being killed in your streets. They have no nourishment. Forty million children dead in America since 1973. And we have the audacity to talk about other kinds of social justice for the 99 and one. Give me a break. Economic justice for people that typically don’t work while we’re murdering children by the tens of thousands every year, hundreds of thousands.

What is happening? Have we lost our minds? Yeah, we have. Because that’s what happens when you spurn the word of God. A country loses literacy. It loses the ability to reason. And the only cure for the sake of these children is to cry out to God as verse 19 tells us we’re supposed to do.

So this is what we’re supposed to do. And it’s pointed out in a dramatic way that this is what’s supposed to happen and the reason and the content of our prayers—a big part of that reason—is the motivation of the children of the Lord.

Praise God for Mr. Metaxas who wrote this recent biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I encourage each of you—actually every one of you—to check out YouTube. You just Google Metaxas—which I think is m-e-t-a-x-a-s—and prayer. And Metaxas about a month ago gave a talk at the President’s annual prayer breakfast. Did I mention this last week? I don’t think so. Doesn’t make any difference. Double witness, that’s good. You really should watch it.

And so he’s got Joe Biden right here, you’ve got Obama right here right as he’s standing here talking. And Metaxas talks about his own conversion as a Christian. Talks about the fact that he only wrote two books, two biographies rather: one on Wilberforce and one on Bonhoeffer. And he says in front of Obama and Biden and that whole event, he says, “In Wilberforce’s time, the question was they didn’t think blacks were fully human. And in Bonhoeffer’s time, Nazi Germany, they didn’t think that Jews were fully human. And who, he says, would that apply to in our time?”

Who, he says? And then later in his talk he makes very explicit that what he’s talking about are the unborn.

So we face this situation. Praise God for Metaxas, his biography and his ability then to give as he did a copy of his book to President Obama from Bonhoeffer. And praise God that we’re being urged by men like that to consider what’s going on here that is bringing upon us the judgment of God. And this second chapter of Lamentations has as its center and then as its call at the conclusion of it for what we’re supposed to be praying about—we’re supposed to be motivated on behalf of our children.

Now the motivation is also personal, right? Things happen to us, bad things happen to us. And this chapter is filled with a whole series of very dreadful judgments that represent a reversal. So if you want to write a word on your handout page—the outline I didn’t give you—you could put in there: reversal. Because what’s going on, particularly in those first 10 verses where God—it’s described that this is God’s judgment—what’s going on here is primarily a reversal. And you start right here in verse 1. The very title verse is “How God has beclouded her in his anger.”

Now in the Bible, if you marry somebody, you put your garment around her, right? And by the way, the woman doesn’t put her garment around the man. The man puts his garment around the woman. And now I’m sorry, but you know, from throughout the Bible and something as simple as this imagery that we find in Lamentations 1:1, there’s a distinction made between male and female. It isn’t just a matter of what particular roles women can do and not do or men can do and not do. There’s a huge deal going on.

Well, anyway, so a couple gets married. The imagery in the book of Ruth, right? He puts his garment around his wife. And God—his garment is a cloud. Okay? And we could turn to other places in the Bible. And when God marries his people, his covenant people, he puts his cloud around her. It’s kind of what’s going on at Sinai, this great cloud, right? He’s putting his garment over his bride. He’s going to protect her. He’s going to give her—you know, they’re becoming one flesh, right? Roll with that imagery for a little bit and then stop.

So he puts his garment around her. Here, he’s talking about the same thing, but now it’s reversed. Now, instead of her being up in heaven with him, he cast her to the ground. And he puts a cloud of fury or anger around her. Okay? Now it’s not around the two of them anymore. Now his garment—he’s divorcing her. He’s kicking her out. But even more than that, he’s putting his garment around her. That is his anger, his burning anger against her. It’s a reversal. Tremendous reversal.

You know, when God flares his nostrils and gets hot, that’s what the word fire kind of is, based on this flaring of nostrils—of God’s jealousy, his wrath. He’s like a raging bull, right? That’s what he does toward our enemies. We’re his bride. The church is his bride. And when somebody attacks his bride, anger flares up. He flares his nostrils at him and then he kills them. Okay? That’s what he does if we’re faithful.

But if we’re adulterous, wow, we get a little reversal going on. Those flaring nostrils that are supposed to protect us—now they come at us. And now he uses fire in his anger to destroy his bride, his adulterous bride. Big reversal of imagery in terms of marriage, the cloud, the fire. That’s what’s going on here.

Now, cloud and fire. What’s that about? Well, what does that remind us of? That reminds us of Exodus imagery. Now, all these images are sort of interlinked, right, in the Bible. I mean, there’s different ways of talking about the same thing: God’s relationship to his people. And the Exodus is one of those ways. And God leads us out. And his cloud and his fire and the sea consume our enemies. Okay? He’s a pillar of fire and a cloud going before them. He’s cloud and fire. And that’s what he’s going to be for us against our enemies.

And when he brings us out of Egypt through that cloud and that fire, he destroys them. You see, that’s what he does for us when we pray in imprecatory prayers. That’s what the idea is. You know, “Look through cloud. Look for your fire. Defend us. Defend your people. Defend those that are being persecuted and strike down those people. Burn them up in your anger”—unless they repent. Okay.

Well, now here the fire is turned against again his people. There are the Egyptians. Now, in the context of this, you know, the sea swallowed up the Egyptian persons that were pursuing his church, the soldiers. And what happens here? A couple of different times God swallows up his people. So the imagery is being reversed. He swallowed up our enemies. Now he’s an enemy to us. He’s swallowing up us.

He puts his bow in the sky, right? His, you know, the bow that shoots the arrows. He hangs up there on the living room ceiling for us to see that he’s not going to destroy the earth by flood anymore. And that promise stays intact. But what does this text tell us? Says he gets down his bow not to fight against our enemies, but to shoot arrows at us, at you, at me. He’s shooting arrows this way.

Now that same bow that’s supposed to be the sign of our peace—that God won’t curse the earth ever again with flood—that same bow that’s supposed to be assurance to us becomes fiery wrath against us and arrows. This table is supposed to be peace. But we come to this table and we’ve got those long-standing sins going on and we don’t think these red stones are important. We come to that table and it’s the ordeal of jealousy and he causes you to die, to get sick, to get worse, to become less beautiful, to have your life continue to disintegrate.

If your life is disintegrating little by little, don’t blame the taxes. Don’t blame this, that, or the other thing. Look first. And I tell you, I tell myself: look first at your own sin and commit. Put one of these things in your pocket or in your purse and say, “Lord God, please forgive me. Please turn me from my sins. I know you’ve turned against me.”

Now you see, all this reversal imagery is going on here. Feasts, right? The wedding is a wedding feast like this thing here. And what does this chapter tell us? If you listen carefully, what it said was: well, the feasts are no longer there. Feasts aren’t being happening anymore. The Sabbath isn’t really being observed anymore. And what’s happening instead? Those wicked people come in and they get about two lines in this poem and they say, “Man, this is like a feast. This is a good time.” They’re in the temple of the Lord feasting. Reversal imagery.

Our feasts become instead the feasts of our enemies, right? Instead of a ladder where we’re going up to heaven, no, God throws us down to earth. Instead of having a heavenly participation, we’re bowed down. We’re being sucked into the mud of the earth. That’s where we’re at in the language that’s given to us here: Mount Zion on the sides of the north, the city of the great king, right? The joy of the world. Is that how it goes? That song. How’s it go? Somebody sing it. The joy of the whole earth. That’s it. The joy of the whole earth.

Beautiful song. There. Two places that I know of where that verse, that phrase is used: in that psalm that we sing and we teach our kids to sing. And here. And here it is. What happened? It was the beauty and perfection of God. It was the joy of the whole earth. And how it has fallen. Reversal is the big picture here.

So, you know, the center is the kids, but you know, the idea is waking up to the fact that your life has been reversed. You’re not headed toward more beauty. It’s all falling apart. And as you go down that slope of unrepentant sin—either as a nation, if we do so; as a church, if you do; in your individual life—it’s a slippery slope. I mean, it really is a slippery slope.

Don’t count on the same gradual path you’ve been engaging in—whatever sin it is that you might be holding in your heart. Don’t count on just a little bit of disruption in your family. Count on the reverse. Count on the fact that if you continue in sin, that slope is going to get real slippery and you’re going to go real fast and the Lord God will bring you headlong into a ditch filled with urine and feces and other stuff. That’s what this is all about.

This tells us: get serious about life. Get serious about your sin and get serious about the word of God.

The only thing that’s really mentioned here specifically in terms of sin: okay, so chapter 2—a bunch of stuff about, you know, God has reversed their fortunes and it’s really, really bad and this is the way you’re experiencing it. That happens about verse 11 following. 1 to 9 or 10 is like these first couple of chapters. The first half of the chapter is kind of like fact: this is what’s happened. And then the second half is kind of like interpretation: this is the way it feels. This is the way you’re experiencing it.

And so we have this factual stuff that God is doing it in the first half of this chapter. And then it gets around to talking about the way it feels and our experience of what that judgment is like. And as I said, the arc of the chapter is to move us or to move the hearers—to move Jerusalem—to weep and to cry out before God for the children’s sake.

So by the end in verses 18 and 19, he’s saying, “Hey, you need to weep. You need to lament. You want to know how to deal with this? You want to know how to prepare?” As I said earlier, right, how you going to prepare for what’s coming down the line here in America? Yeah, we can talk about food. We can talk about money. We can talk about all kinds of things. We can talk about tent making jobs. All kinds of ways to prepare.

But this says what you do to prepare is to cry out. And 18 and 19 says: see, God has done it. You felt it. The only way out is to cry out to God in 18 and 19. And 20 through 22, that’s the prayer which they cry out to God. And as I said, that 18 and 19 ends in 19 where that great climactic conclusion of those first 19 verses is for the sake of the kids. Weep and lament before God.

Well, in the midst of all of that, there’s one verse that I know of that actually specifically mentions sin, a specific sin. That’s verse 14: “Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions. They have not uncovered your iniquity to bring back your captives, but have envisioned for you false prophecies and delusions.”

Okay? So what’s going on here is the prophets have given them false prophecies and delusions. Jeremiah 23—Jeremiah of course wrote Lamentations, even though it doesn’t tell us that. There’s all kinds of reasons why, which maybe at some point I’ll try to make a handout for you about—but Jeremiah 23 says this: “Thus says the Lord of Hosts, do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you. They make you worthless. They speak a vision of their own heart, not from the mouth of the Lord. They continually say to those who despise me, ‘The Lord has said, You shall have peace.’ And to everyone who walks according to the dictates of his own heart, they say, ‘No evil shall come upon you.’”

In other words, the specific problem is that people have despised God’s word. They’ve been led not in terms of God’s word, but they’ve been led instead by the prophets to false visions, things of their own heart. Okay, they have envisioned for you false prophecies and delusions.

God’s word—God’s word has not been at the center of what the false prophets have told Israel or Judah. And as a result of that, they’ve gone after other gods. Chapter 1 talked a couple of times about different lovers, right? And so the problem is—to put it in modern terminology—preachers are not preaching the whole counsel of God’s word. They’re not saying the law of God, what God’s word says to us.

And we can interpret that in different ways. And what is that law today? And how does it relate to the Mosaic law? Fine. But there’s some commands our savior gave us, right? “If you love me, you’ll keep my commands.” What does that mean? We can differ on exactly what it means, but what we can’t differ on is that there are commands, right? Yeah.

We can decide, you know, about this, that, or the other application of particular case laws from the Mosaic covenant and how all that stuff works. But far too often in our day and age the idea of law, command, has been put in diametrical opposition to grace and the gospel. And now increasingly prophets, reformed prophets are saying that this word—it’s got nothing really to do with your job or your marriage. But it’s all about Jesus, the gospel, forgiveness.

We’re at where we’re at as a country because preachers—you know, of which I am one—our cast, our guild, our people, have not led you into further obedience of God’s word. And in fact, we’ve led you away from God’s word to embrace false gods, lovers, providers.

Let’s talk about kids. Way too many churches had no response to Oregon in 1969, no response to Roe v. Wade in 1973, and way too many churches still. Why didn’t I hear about it at the Justice Conference? It would offend a lot of those people. That’s why. It’s seen in terms of women’s justice. Forget the baby. And so far too many churches have led God’s people into delusion.

And this is why we say that some 15-year-old girl, you know, who ends up having her baby killed and having to think about that for the rest of her life, even though she’s assured over and over again by the church of Jesus Christ her sins are forgiven—and they are—she’s less culpable. You. That’s what he’s saying here. Increased responsibility brings increased culpability and increased judgment. The priests die first. God’s city, God’s church. Well, we got privilege. We’re baptized. We got your feast every Sunday.

He said, “Well, you know, you think that is a safer place to be with me or a less safe place?” And he tells us it was not safe to be in Jerusalem when it was apostate. It was worse than being in Babylon. Okay? And so when the church tells its parishioners, “Well, abortion, it’s a matter of personal freedom, personal whatever it is,” and the 15-year-old girl hears that, and her parents hear that, and they go off, and then the school tells her the same thing. Yeah, yeah, she’s culpable. She’s sinned. But you know where’s the responsibility?

It’s just what he says here. Not only have you not done people any good, you’ve encouraged them to go after other lovers, others. So that she’s committed adultery. So that God’s cloud of protection is now a cloud of hot fiery anger and flaring nostrils against the church.

So the sin involved here is disobedience to the word. That’s it. The word of God—it’s going to bring judgment. The word of God properly understood, including its commands, is the basis; the twisting of that word by the church is the basis for what’s happened in the culture. And that’s the only sin that God goes after that I can really identify specifically here in chapter 2: a sin of not knowing the word and looking for other words, you know. And while we’re at it, we could throw in the kids cry out, “Where’s the grain and the wine? Where’s the nourishment we’re supposed to be receiving? Aren’t you Christian parents supposed to raise us in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?”

How come the culture has set up a system whereby a lot of people, either through just not thinking about it or through economic difficulties, social problems, whatever it is, how many Christian kids are being raised in the public school? Who then end up losing their faith in the government school system, right? More problems. More problems because people haven’t been taught the word of God because they haven’t been taught their responsibilities as parents.

You know, you look at a chapter like this chapter and you say, “How could God do such a thing to his own people?” But the question that the chapter wants you to ask is: how could parents do such a thing to their own children? How could they neglect them? How could they abort them? How could they not teach them the importance of God’s word? And how could they then engage in private sins they think are private—sins of relationship to the husband or to the wife, sins of relationship to the body of Jesus Christ?

How could somebody do that, alienate themselves from church or spouse and not realize the tremendous effects it has on their children? How could a parent do such things to a child—either killing them before they’re born, shipping them off to an apostate system for training, or having their own personal sins that they know ultimately the Lord God will judge and he’ll judge it in such a way as those kids are going to die, die in the streets—whether they’re put to death by their parents or not?

We know that in this siege mothers ate their own children. So the question isn’t “How can God do it?” The question is “How can parents do that to their children? How can we do it? Members of Reformation Covenant Church. We can’t anymore. We can’t. We have to break off with sins that affect our children.

Do you know why so many kids today are all messed up sexually? It’s because so many parents are. And specifically because so many dads are. And you think that won’t have an effect on your kid? You’re wrong. You’re just plain wrong. It doesn’t work the way we think it works. We’re not all rational beings where if we haven’t told our kids this, you know, or if we make sure they don’t see what we’re doing, it’ll be okay. Uh-uh. Life is far more mysterious than that, my friends.

I’ve seen counseling cases. Kids grow up imitating the sin of the parents they never knew the parents had. We’re much more covenantal. We’re much more nuanced in who we are. Your sins and particularly sins of relationship, right—breakdown of relationship with spouse—has a devastating effect. My sins have devastating effects on my children. Yours do too.

May the Lord God grant that this chapter is a wakeup call. Yeah, we want to call the nation to repent before God. Yeah, we want to do something about the horrible injustices going on in our country. But we want to start here, don’t we? Don’t we want to start? Oh, no. I’m quoting Michael Jackson with “the man in the mirror.” Sorry, but that is where we need to start.

Beloved in the Lord, we need to know that this beautiful word is a reminder to us that God’s word is real and it affects men and nations and it’s having its way right now in this country. Things are being played out. You know, people didn’t get to thinking the Jews weren’t people like that. That took some time. Took a process. There are things going on in our country right now that are moving us in the wrong direction. And God is doing this. He’s bringing his rod down on America.

May he bring us to join with the lamentation here and crying out to God, weeping and wailing for our children’s sake. If nothing else that we would indeed turn from our sins and our nation would be restored once more.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we do cry out to you. We thank you, Father, for your just blows. We thank you for your righteous indignation against our sin. We thank you for treating us first, that judgment begins with the house of God and then moves out to the culture. Father, we know that we’re too prone, just like those folks in Lamentations 1, to jump toward imprecatory prayers, imprecatory thoughts and irritation of what’s happened in our world without first turning to you to recognize that you are doing these things and you’re doing them because of our sin.

May we, Lord God, be careful this week to hear your word, to understand your word, to listen to your word, and to obey it, and to repent when we fall short. May we, Lord God, do this for the sake of our nation, the sake of our own personal well-being, but most importantly, may we do this as this chapter has taught us because of our children and the future of your people.

In Jesus name we pray. Amen.