by Larry Swinford

Created on: December 02, 2008

Explaining Lamentations

The book opens, in a common modern English translation (NKJV), saying:

How lonely sits the city

That was full of people

How like a widow is she

Who was great among the nations

The princess among the provinces

Has become a slave.

Wonderfully poetic and marvelously descriptive is this book that most people find painfully depressing. The Latin title, Threni, is derived from the Greek expression and often evokes the word "tears" in its definition. A nation with a proud past has fallen and that would be worth tears and mournful words of any people.

Judah has gone into captivity

Under affliction and hard servitude

She dwells among the nations

She finds no rest

All her persecutors overtake her in dire straights.

People in problems, people humbled and oppressed. What could possibly be the cause of such as this?

Her adversaries have become the master

Her enemies prosper

For the Lord has afflicted her

Because of the multitude of her transgressions

Her children have gone into captivity before the enemy.

The fact is clear that few like to lose, but this is not a story of some team losing a game. It is a people that lost a way of life, they lost their freedom, they lost their nation. Now they are slaves. Part of the shame is that as a parent watching the children separated from them in pain and helplessness.

But this misses the most important part, the why of the problem. "For the Lord has afflicted her because of the multitude of her transgressions." We sometimes like to talk about actions and consequences. Most humans often realize that when others have experienced the consequence of their faults, but Lamentations is a book of the realization that the people who were established in their place in the world by the actions of their Deity, have enormously crossed and failed that Deity.

In today's society there are many that would scoff at those conclusions. But this book was written by and for a people who were not two and a half millennia away from that crushing disaster. The book was written by and for a people who had an unusual though special relationship to their Deity. Other nations had gods that were aloof and to be appeased only when things went wrong, or perhaps by a regular ritual in order to make a preventative offering. Yet this people were taught that their Deity was present with them, was their Father and their Husband, that they were the spouse or children of this God. This was different. This wasn't chance, this wasn't a bad hop of the ball', and this was personal. They had failed their ultimate king, the leader of their family, and the head of their house.

The book of Lamentations is filled with commiserating with their failings and the consequences of their lives, but it is also a book of restoration and of hope. In the same place that it says, "He has aged my flesh and my skin, and broken my bones," we also see this:

Through the Lord's mercies we are not consumed

Because of His compassions fail not

They are new every morning

Great is Your faithfulness

The Lord is my portion says my soul

Therefore I 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 hope and wait quietly

For the salvation is of the Lord.

What is the result of all the pain and shame? See a remark near the conclusion:

Why do You forget us forever

And forsake us for so long a time?

Turn us back to You, O Lord

And we will be restored

We, as they, can lament of our well-deserved problems, our just desserts', or they, and we, can turn from our ways and hope in God's mercy when they, or we, recognize Him for who He is. It is this hope that turns sadness into joy.

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