Deserted – Lamentations 1:1
The book of Lamentations sounds pretty dismal. It’s right there in the name. Read a few verses. It’s still dismal. We usually quote Lamentations 3:22-23, “The LORD’s love is surely not exhausted, nor has is compassion failed; they are new every morning, so great is his constancy” (REB). If one hasn’t read Lamentations, one might conclude it is a book of encouraging sayings.
But it is not. Oh, there is encouragement there, but that is not the starting point. The starting point is devastation, and a lament regarding that devastations.
Walter Brueggemann laments the loss of lament in Christian circles. You can find some discussion of his words on Alistair Adversaria.
I would choose a slightly different emphasis. I think the loss of lament has a great deal to do with a loss of self-honesty. You can’t be honest with God if you’re not honest with yourself. And a lack of honesty is going to hinder you both in your relationship with God and in your daily activities.
Job says, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21b). Good for Job! I’m talking here about those who can’t yet get to that “Blessed be the name of the Lord!” part. Often when we encounter someone in that kind of hardship, we say, “Trust in God!” and then moments later, “Are you trusting in God yet?”
In Lamentations, there are a lot of sad verses between “deserted” and the unfailing compassion.
In those verses, we see the struggle of Israel. One view of Jesus as the Messiah sees him recapitulating key moments in the history of Israel, and getting it right. We can also see in the struggle of Israel an example of what individual life is often like. I don’t mean getting stuck in the mud. I mean recognizing the mud and recognizing who we all actually are. You will not seek the good unless you recognize the difficulty, even the evil.
I’m planning to blog through Lamentations. Right now this task seems daunting. It troubles me to spend this much negative time. But I am thinking there may be value in the experience. So tomorrow we’ll get to weeping in Lamentations 1:2. Won’t that be fun!
And that’s the starting place: Deserted!
Note: This series will differ from my earlier verse-by-verse series on Psalm 119 in that I won’t always try to keep the message contained in the one verse. I’ll be spending more time connecting the dots with the rest of the book and related history and personal experience.
Featured Image Credit: Maria de Fatima Seehagen (iStockPhoto.com)
