12/13/12
Lamentations
A princess who has become a slave, weeping bitterly every night.
Princes who have become homeless beggars, starving and weak. 
Mothers who cannot feed their children and who in desperation boil their babies for food.
Beautiful buildings now burned out, broken down, and desolate.
The pictures we have seen of Holocaust victims, skeletal flesh, barely alive, this is what those left in Jerusalem looked like. 
Jeremiah writes his lament, his song of mourning for his beloved country.  He has done all he could. But he has not been able to turn the people to repentance, nor stop the wrath of God on the sinful.
"I am a man who has seen affliction" Jeremiah writes.  He is a witness first hand of what happens when people turn from God. God will not allow the guilty to go unpunished. ( Ex. 34:7)

Listen to this description of Jerusalem and picture it in your mind's eye.  " Jerusalem sinned greatly, therefore she has become an unclean thing.  All who honored her despise her because they have seen her nakedness; Even she herself groans and turns away. Her uncleanness was in her skirts; She did not consider her future; therefore she has fallen astonishingly. She has no comforter. " Lam. 1:8-9

Yet He is a God of lovingkindness and compassion to those who seek Him. "Let us examine and probe our ways, and let us return to the Lord" Lam. 3:40.   Repent, acknowledge sin and turn from it. Cry to the Lord for mercy.  He will restore.

We must take seriously the "wages of sin" - God has made it abundantly clear!  Death will come. Not a blissful nothingness.  But  a painful, desperate, hopeless, eternal separation from God - from all that is Good, from the only One who can offer comfort, from the ONLY source of Light and Life. Our only Hope is Jesus.  He drank the cup of God's wrath for us.  He suffered the punishment that we deserve.  He is the giver of Life.   Jeremiah, in the midst of horror, remembers the goodness and love of God.  It is his only Hope.  And here we find the words that bring joy and comfort to us "Great is Thy faithfulness" .

Jeremiah did not live to see his beloved country restored or the temple rebuilt.  But, he received the promise of a faithful God, a new Jerusalem, eternal dwelling place of the King who "dost rule forever" Lam . 5:19.  I look forward to the Day when faith will become sight and we will be forever with the  saints of light. I want to meet Jeremiah.