17 Zion lifted her hands in prayer,
but there was no one to comfort her;
the LORD ordered Jacob’s enemies
to beset him on every side.
In their midst Jerusalem became
an unclean thing to be shunned.
Lamentations 1:17 [The Revised English Bible (Cambridge; New York; Melbourne; Madrid; Cape Town; Singapore; São Paulo; Delhi; Dubai; Tokyo: Cambridge University Press, 1996)]
“I’m praying.”
This is one of the most common comments among Christians, combined with “I’ll pray for you,” or “you’re on the prayer list.”
Honorable (or dishonorable) mention goes to “We’re sending thoughts and prayers.”
To back up our prayer claims we tell stories of answered prayer, whether from scripture or from our own lives. Daniel in the Lion’s Den makes a good example. Spending the night with hungry lions and coming out uneaten is quite a feat!
We’re less likely to talk about the times in scripture when praying didn’t come out so well. This verse is a good example.
Zion is praying, and we know the outcome. Exile is coming. The verse says God has commanded it. The prayers are not answered, not positively. Destruction comes.
Why is that?
One reason is that people are doggedly pursuing a path of destruction. If I get drunk, jump in my car, don’t wear my seatbelt, and proceed to drive recklessly, there are certain likely results. The best is actually if I get pulled over and charged with DUI. The worst is death—mine, or that of an innocent person.
But I prayed!
Yes. And God was probably trying to get through with an answer, but as I drove down the path to destruction, I wasn’t able to hear the answer.
Our verse says that the Lord ordered Jacob’s enemies to beset him on every side. Was God really trying to destroy Judah? It’s worthwhile studying this entire period of Israel’s history, not to condemn, but to learn from it.
Often God has us beset on every side, by wise counselors, by the prompting of the Holy Spirit, and by the unrelenting force of the laws of nature. If we don’t allow those barriers to derail our ride to destruction, who do we have to blame?
For years, I worked in IT, helping small businesses. I regularly told people that I could provide security tools and practices. Antivirus software could protect them. The one thing I regularly couldn’t protect someone from was their own actions. If you have a password and a secondary code that are both required for access, and you go ahead and give both of these to a bad actor, no amount of other security will protect you.
I remember a call from a client who said she had just accidentally opened what she was sure was a bad email attachment. I asked her what she had done. “Just what you told me to do. I shut down the computer as soon as I realized it.” I was able to get her system cleaned up and running in less than an hour. (The bad payload was ransomware with high potential to make one’s life miserable.)
At another office I walked up to a workstation to do some routine maintenance and noticed suspicious activity right on screen. I asked the user how long this had been going on. “Oh, I don’t know. Probably all day.” More than 12 hours and considerable expense later, the business got its network back. (Secure backups are wonderful!)
The software was there, the tools were there, the policies were there. Two very different results.
“I’m praying, Lord!”
“Yes, but are you listening?”
(Featured image generated by Firefly 4 Ultra according to a prompt generated by Gemini.)
This is why I weep over my plight, why tears stream from my eyes: because any who might comfort me and renew my strength are far away from me; my children have become desolate, for the enemy is victorious.
“Aloneness” has different meanings to different people.
I’m an introvert. This doesn’t mean I don’t like people, but social events are tiring for me. I particularly dislike social events that don’t have a program. Being expected to make small talk, or to show interest in random topics, makes me want to run and hide.
My wife has said that at a party, she assumes I’ll find a chair in a corner and tune out the scene.
So there is a positive sense to being alone, alone to think, alone to plan, alone to rest. Alone by choice.
Then there is the aloneness that is the result of abandonment. When things start going wrong you find out quickly who cares and who doesn’t. People forget you exist because you’re no longer involved in what is important to them from day to day. There is a descending spiral, as you seem too anxious and needy when a visitor does appear. They may not have the energy to fill the loneliness in your heart.
We tell others that there is no friend like Jesus. Yet sometimes we need the physical person in the room. “When I was in prison, you visited me,” says Jesus in Matthew 25:36. As Jesus often does, he reverses the situation as we see it. We’re thinking of seeing Jesus in the person who is visiting. I need a little encouragement from a real human, that physical person. But here Jesus is telling people what a good thing they did when the visited Him, Jesus, in prison.
When did that happen? When the visited the person who is alone. When you did it for the least, the most insignificant, the least lovely. It’s not even limited to those unjustly in prison. When you visited the least important person in prison. Even if they fully deserved to be there.
I follow my meditations when writing about these passages, and the meditations can go quite far afield. I want to bring this back to Judah and the exile, which underlies the text. Their country is destroyed. They have not friends. Potential friends only see targets and victims. Nobody is there to help because all those who were friends are destroyed or driven away. Judah is devastated and alone.
And yet …
They are still God’s people. We see this book preserved about mourning and lament, and we see the devastation, and restoration, partial though it appears. And we can look at this from the other side. What do you and I do about devastation? Do we ignore it and hope it doesn’t come to us? Or do we seek to change it?
As I think about this, I’m drawn away from my own attitude about aloneness and I’m led to ask myself how often I visit someone who is shut in. How often do I encourage someone who is discouraged? How often is my voice raised in defense of the weak, the hopeless, the victims? Do I care even for those whose problems seem to be of their own making?
I was talking to one of my authors recently and he told me he was headed to the Mexican border, where he would pray for refugees who were waiting there. He couldn’t even get to touch them, but he could pray, and he did.
So what will I do for those who, to the world, are insignificant? What will you do?
It’s very easy to become secure when we are surrounded by people who look like us and think like us. It’s even possible to do so by pretending that we think alike. But in such situations, we often create secure worlds that are mostly of our imagination. By clinging to established rules and to accepted stories, we build an illusion of safety.
But history has a way of shattering such illusions.
In the early 6th century BCE, the inhabitants of Judah lived in just such a secure world. Falsely secure. They believed that the physical presence of the Temple in Jerusalem acted as an iron-clad guarantee of their safety, irrespective of any of their actions. After all, wasn’t this the dwelling place of the Most High God? They had promises to their ancestors, David and Solomon and others that their royal house would endure forever.
Then came 586 BCE. The Babylonian armies breached the walls, the city was leveled, and the Temple was burned to the ground.
For the Judeans, this wasn’t just a military defeat; it was a collapse of everything they believed about themselves and their world. Their understanding of God, the land, and identity was shattered. They found themselves marched off to Babylon—a minority in an empire that dominated the middle eastern world.
How do you sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land (Psalm 137)? How do you maintain a faith when all the physical “props” of your religion have been completely destroyed?
A Tale of Three Messengers
When we look back at this historical crisis, we see that God didn’t respond by handing the exiles a neat list of rules. He didn’t provide them with an explanation that would make them feel good. Instead, He sent specific people to match specific groups in their unique situations.
In my book, When People Speak for God, I explored these distinct exilic situations through the lens of three very different messengers:
Jeremiah: Jeremiah had the agonizing, unpopular task of speaking to those still in Jerusalem who were living in denial. He didn’t just speak the message; he wept it. His life became a symbol of a God who refuses to give up on His people, even when they are marching straight into a disaster of their own making.
Ezekiel: Ezekiel was himself an exile among the captives by the Chebar canal. He was given a wild, wheels-within-wheels vision of God’s glory departing the Temple and traveling east. The message was revolutionary: Yahweh is not a territorial deity bound to Jerusalem. He is mobile. He can travel into the “unclean” dirt of Babylon to personally be a sanctuary for His people.
Daniel: Daniel and his friends had to serve inside the very halls of the pagan Babylonian court. They faced the daily temptation to compromise their identity to gain power, status, and comfort. Even further, to simply survive. Yet, through quiet noncompliance, they proved that one can master the learning of the dominant culture without letting the one true God be pushed aside.
Obadiah: This is the fourth of three! While my book focused on three messengers, a fourth, Obadiah, completes this picture by ministering to the remnants of Judah who were still living in a largely desolate land. I’ll expand on his message below.
Each of these prophets spoke for God in a way that met the people exactly where they were, showing them that exile was not the end of the story—it was a life-size classroom.
This experience preserved the identity of the Jewish people by effectively remaking it, by detaching it from physical Jerusalem. With the temple in ruins, the God of the temple remained God, universal and sovereign. God was not surprised and was certainly not threatened by the powers that overcame the Kingdom of Judah. God was not limited by space.
Obadiah, that fourth prophet, adds a special spice to that message. He most likely ministered in the territory of Judah after the exile. His message is addressed, however, to Edom. What is the purpose of this message, addressed to a foreign people?
To the people who would have initially heard it, the remainder of the Judean population, those the Babylonians didn’t consider important enough even to take into exile, it meant that God was still watching them. (Note that Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, also ministered in Judea, but he was quickly taken to Egypt.) He provides a similar message in Jeremiah 49. God was watching over the population of Judea, and was willing to challenge those who would harm even this lowly remnant of the once proud kingdom.
That message, however, indicates God’s concern for Edom and for other lands. There is no point in words of warning for someone if there is no action possible to turn aside the doom that is proclaimed. Giving a warning is an indication of concern. Compare Obadiah to Jonah. Note that in Obadiah we lack the backstory. We don’t know how directly he might have confronted the Edomites. But what if the Edomites did listen, and stepped back from the brink?
Scrambling Our Modern Labels
Today, we are living in our own season of cultural exile and disorientation. Many Christians feel that they are diminished and less than they used to be. They mourn the passing of a Christian nation, and the presence of people from so many faiths. These things shake our sense of identity.
Sometimes that is the best thing for us.
To be a witness for Jesus in the world as we are called to be we need to have two things, and these things often seem to contradict one another. First, we need an identity. You have nothing to share if you have no identity. But secondly, we need a presence in the world outside our personal, limited visions. A wonderful witness is worthless if nobody encounters it. Your piety is useless if it exists only in the bounds of the church, your home, or people like you.
Israel, and then after the exile of the northern tribes, Judah was called to be a witness. For this, they needed an identity. They built that identity around a city, Jerusalem, and the Temple in it. That identity tended to separate them from the world. There was a need to draw them out of that limited sense of identity to a realization of just how great a mission God was calling them to.
Building that new identity started with the shattering force of the exile. There was no way to have an identity built around a temple that had been destroyed. A territorial identity could not survive with a people scattered from that place.
Through these four prophets, God worked on that new identity, one that made God’s people connect with a broader world and realize that God was not so limited as they had thought. The shatteringly complex vision of Ezekiel 1 tells the prophet something very important: God is here at the River Chebar, just as he would be at the Jordan. Your limited view, Ezekiel, has been shattered. See the vision and learn that your God is greater than you ever imagined.
Limited Vision Limits
When our vision is limited, then our actions will be limited. When the people imagined that God would protect them in Jerusalem because the temple was there, representing God’s presence, that imagination limited their ability to be witnesses to the world beyond.
Ezekiel expanded that vision into Babylon.
Jeremiah taught the people that God was still active in Judah, even when God was simultaneously active in Babylon.
Daniel taught that God was not only active in the camp of the exiles, the people who had thought of themselves as God’s people. God was fully active in the court of the king of Babylon. Not only that, but the King of Babylon was, reluctantly, open to guidance from the God of distant Judea.
Only the concept of God as the God of Israel, or the God of Judah was too limited.
God was the God of Israel. But God was also the God of the entire universe.
Vision needs to be shaped by what is beyond our limited surroundings.
Finding God on the Periphery
If you feel that God’s message is getting lost in the world. If you feel that God is often absent even from the life of your church, you need to find that vision. The vision of the God who sits above those wheels and is served by the flying creatures who are unlimited in their movement.
And in case you think this message was just invented in the early 6th century BCE, the God of the scriptures is, and has always been, the God of the edges. We tend to forget that as we read. For Abraham, more than a millennium earlier, God has a call to something beyond imagination (Genesis 12). Over and over we see biblical characters called to things they didn’t imagine possible.
For Gideon (Judges 6 & 7), some 600 years earlier, God has a call to the edge. When Gideon is called, he is hiding from the enemy in a winepress. There is nothing bold about him. But God changes Gideon’s vision and lets him see what God can do through him, rather than what he can do himself.
God wants to expand our vision. To do that, he has to get us to abandon our own limited vision.
Will it take a disaster to get your eyes off your own limitations?
15 The Lord treated with scorn all the mighty men within my walls; he marshalled rank on rank against me to crush my young warriors. The Lord trod down, like grapes in the winepress, the virgin daughter of Judah.
The Revised English Bible (Cambridge; New York; Melbourne; Madrid; Cape Town; Singapore; São Paulo; Delhi; Dubai; Tokyo: Cambridge University Press, 1996), La 1:15.
I’m meditating on these verses, intending to write one meditation per day, though I haven’t been keeping up. It can seem like the elements of just staying alive are “marshalled rank on rank against me.” If it’s not one thing, it’s another!
Now in the historical context of this book at this verse, this is about the people suffering conquest and exile, and that by cruel conquerors. I want to emphasize that a key reason for this book being in the Bible, in my opinion, is to let people know it’s OK, and even healthy to acknowledge difficulties. Running around pretending things are fine when they aren’t isn’t healthy, and it isn’t productive. You can’t fix what you don’t recognize.
But in meditating I started to think about the way we talk about troubles in our lives. I’m talking especially about those of us who are in some kind of ministry work. What do we say when obstacles are put in our way?
Well, I’ve noted quite a variety, depending on who is talking and their attitude at the time.
I must be doing something right for the Lord, because the devil’s after me!
I must have missed God’s calling or instructions, because I can’t get through these barriers.
I need more people to pray for me, because prayer is powerful, so more prayer is more powerful!
I must keep my faith face on so nobody knows the trouble I’m seeing. (With apologies to the hymn!)
I must be very open and honest about this so other people realize that they’re not alone in having troubles.
How do you know just how to react?
How do you know, for example, whether the devil’s after you, or whether you’re encountering hardship because you have lost your way?
You don’t. But that doesn’t really matter that much, because what you have to do is hold on to the one who does know. You’re probably going to be off the best path very frequently. It’s going to feel like the world is coming at you “rank on rank.”
What do you do? I can give you all the advice: pray more, listen for the Holy Spirit, use your God-given brain, seek and accept help from others, be willing to correct your program.
That’s good. I like to attempt those things. But most importantly, as the song says, “Put your hand in the hand of the man who stilled the waters.” He’s the one who can handle the problems that are coming at you rank-on-rank. Panic will get you nowhere. He will.
(Featured image generated by Adobe Firefly Image 5, from a prompt generated by Google Gemini.)
14 ‘My sins were bound like a yoke tied fast by his own hand; set upon my neck, it caused my strength to fail. The LORD abandoned me to my sins, and in their grip I could not stand.
I’ve actually been meditating on this verse over the last few weeks while I haven’t been posting. I think it’s rather important. I first thought about sin/sins in the way I’m going to speak of them here when I read Ezekiel 23:49 and several other passages that suggest that what the people suffer is simply their own sins brought back on them.
Now this is a more graphic passage, in that we have the imagery of a animal, such as an ox, pulling a load that is secured by a yoke. This is a lamentation, so it’s important to “hear” the poet telling us about living under the yoke.
Frequently we think of sins in the plural, and see them as a sort of list of infractions against ritual or formal rules. We could imagine a workplace where a series of annoying or even stupid rules occur. Since we’re thinking about God, we imagine that we have to check off the boxes because that’s how you get to heaven.
This is not just a mistaken, but an inadequate view in so many ways. When there are suboptimal rules in a workplace, freedom is to be found in finding a better job, thus working in a better environment. You can compare workplaces according to how rewarding they are as a work environment. So you can compare “better” and “worse” workers on a checklist, and “better” and “worse” workplaces in a similar way. Freedom comes by escape to a better place.
But when we talk about “sin” in the biblical place, this is the wrong view. Note here that the sins are bound to the person. The penalty is, in one sense, a complete lack of freedom. The ox cannot escape the yoke, and the lament is that the Israelites were unable to escape the yoke made by their own transgressions. Finally, we have the observation that the punishment here is God abandoning the people to their sins. This is what is causing their strength to fail. It is not some invented judgment or punishment. It is rather the result of their actions.
But this takes us back further to the specific nature of sin, again as displayed in the Bible story. We think generally of making a list of our faults and failings and trying to overcome them. I once had a terrible temper. In fact, I still do. If I overcome that temper, I’ll be that much closer to God, right?
Not so. It’s a good thing to tame one’s temper, but the problem is that that’s just an item checked off the list. It all goes back to the basic rebellion, the desire to be independent of God and of God’s commands. And the gap made by that is great.
We’re not in the workplace, deciding whether we like it, or perhaps that we should move on to a better employer. We’re in God’s universe. The rules are the rules of life. As it says in Deuteronomy 30:15, we’re offered a choice of a way of life and good or death and evil. We don’t have the option of choosing a whole other plan.
This is a great lamentation. We’re abandoned, not to some externally planned torment, but to the results of our own rebellion against the way of life, the way that is life.
The starting point to recovery is simple. It’s coming to the point of sincerely making this lamentation.
Fire is one of those ambiguous words when used in symbolism. For Elijah on Mt Carmel, the God who answered with fire was to be regarded as the true God. The fire, in one sense, showed an acceptance of the sacrifice as well as the power of the God to whom that sacrifice was offered. (1 Kings
Jeremiah spoke of a fire in his bones: “But if I say, “I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name,” his word is inmy heart like a fire, a fire shut up inmybones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot” (Jeremiah 20:9 NIV, emphasis added). It’s hard to tell if we are to see this fire as positive or negative. I’ve heard many speakers use the phrase “a fire in my bones,” with varied emphasis. It may be used to claim a divine source for the message.
Hebrews 12:29 describes God as a consuming fire. If you read this entire passage, you’ll find that it has a positive and a negative side. It’s a fire that removes impurities and even weaknesses, but what remains is what is pure and lasting. (Note the related use of “shaking” in the same chapter.
There are many references to fire in scripture, and they vary from the pillar of fire that guided the Israelites to the fires of hell that consume all evil.
Here, the fire is a subject of lament. It is part of the judgment that has come on Israel. This lamentation speaks of God’s actions. We often argue about whether God does one particular thing or another. If you feel that you are suffering a form of fire of God’s judgment, is this something God is doing, or that God is permitting and using?
I find it unhelpful to be concerned about what precisely is an intentional act of God. We like to place logical layers between us and God so as to absolve God of some portion of the responsibility for what happens in the universe. I see God as responsible, and on reading a verse like Isaiah 45:7, I don’t see God as unwilling to take that responsibility.
In fact, understanding that God is fundamentally sovereign, and by extension responsible, is a critical aspect of monotheism. Instead of pacifying demons or various forces, we look at God as the one in charge.
Does this always make us comfortable? Not even close! I don’t think it’s supposed to make us comfortable. In fact, I see very little evidence that God is working for comfort in this life. Rather God is working toward righteousness.
And that is an enormous goal. And thus we lament. As strangers and wanderers here, our jouney isn’t always easy.
God’s fire is refining (Malachi 3:2-3). Refining is rarely fun!
12 Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see
if there is any sorrow like my sorrow,
which was brought upon me,
which the LORD inflicted
on the day of his fierce anger.
There are several things I could discuss about this verse, but I’ve been thinking about the sorrow. When we are in trouble, many of us feel that we are suffering in ways nobody else can understand.
In one sense, your sorrow is your own. You experience sorrow in individual ways. Your feelings are your own feelings. But very often when we think this we are missing the suffering of others, suffering we don’t understand and that might even be suffering worse than we are.
The problem is that there is no real way to measure pain, suffering, and grief. Is what I have experienced more or less than what you have experienced? Neither of us really know. We can’t measure our suffering against our ability to endure.
Despite all that, I am often shamed when I’m complaining, even just in my own mind, and then find out someone else is experiencing something I perceive to be worse. But I still don’t know the weight of that suffering to another person even when I know it is great.
In lamentation, we long to have our suffering acknowledged. It is part of being seen and recognized. In scripture the hoped-for recognition is from God. That is the purpose of lamentation. We recognize and express the reality, and we look for the recognition of our pain.
I will confess that I really don’t like to talk about difficulties. I prefer to keep on a proper “faith face” that suggests everything is fine whether it is or not. That face is often what we put on to avoid lamentation.
11 All her people groan
as they search for bread;
they trade their treasures for food
to revive their strength.
Look, O LORD, and see
how worthless I have become.
I’m using the NRSV rendering of this verse, but I would use something like “contemptible” for “worthless” in the final line of the verse.
We often hear a line like this from a child: “Look at me!” It’s a call for attention, for affirmation, and for reassurance. In the child it doesn’t come from a place of lament, or even all that likely from a place of failure. It’s simply a desire to be acknowledged in whatever way.
As believers, we ultimately find our value in our creator. We want to be affirmed. We want God to notice. Job’s cry through his complaints is that God needs to respond to him, to notice him and react. In the end, Job gets no answers to his spoken questions. What he gets is the clear evidence that God is there and aware of him.
For Israel in the exile one of the greatest threats was the loss of identity. So many people lost their identity in that same time frame. Centuries later you couldn’t really identify Moabites, Ammonites, or Philistines, for example. But you can still identify the descendants of the people of Judah.
Surviving this is intimately tied to lament. Lament acknowledges that things have gone wrong. It is our realization of how bad things have become. I’m sure some readers, should they continue to read this series at all, will be impatient at the dismal tone of these verses. Surely I could summarize everything up to 3:22 in one or two posts and then we could get on to the positive.
But sometimes our problems aren’t solved in that short of a period of time. One of the things that prevents solving problems and growing from them is the failure to acknowledge them.
Are you ready to say, “Look, LORD!” and then be honest with yourself about what the Lord sees? When that is done, healing can begin.
10 Enemies have stretched out their hands over all her precious things; she has even seen the nations invade her sanctuary, those whom you forbade to enter your congregation.
The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1989), La 1:10.
Most of us have things that we consider our own, private, and often held closely. Sometimes, for example, this is our family. Sometimes it is our family home.
A few months ago Jody and I experienced an attempt to break into our house by someone who intended to do us violence. The individual was experiencing mental issues that made him feel we were a threat. The situation worked itself out, but we still have habits that were changed due to that experience. Somehow, we don’t feel quite as secure. Someone didn’t enter, but did seriously threaten our home, our sanctuary.
Often when we discuss safety, we emphasize the safety of our property and most importantly our home. In communities a century or so ago in the United States you might have just one church, and in times of trouble, that church might be regarded as a sanctuary.
Judah had a sanctuary, the temple in Jerusalem. They believed that many bad things might happen to them, but the temple was secure. As long as the temple was there, they could never be completely destroyed. Jeremiah (chapter 7) tells them that if they are far from the Lord, they can’t depend on the Lord’s temple to save them.
As Christians we speak of Christ being in us, and us in Christ. In 1 Peter 2:5 we’re called to be living stones, to be built into a spiritual house. For us, there is to be a sanctuary in us and around us that travels with us. It’s the presence of Jesus with us.
9 Her uncleanness was in her skirts;
she took no thought of her future;
her downfall was appalling,
with none to comfort her.
“O LORD, look at my affliction,
for the enemy has triumphed!”
The phrase that took my attention from the first time I looked at this verse in preparation for writing this reflection was this: “She took no thought of her future.”
How many times have any of us looked back at a decision we made when we were younger and thought, “You know, I really didn’t think of my future when I did that!”
Henry Hazlitt, in his book Economics in One Lesson says (and I summarize) that all economic fallacies result from one or both of two central fallacies: 1) looking only at the immediate consequences of an act or proposal, and 2) looking at the consequences only for a particular group to the neglect of others. (He discusses this issue in chapter 1 extensively.)
Now some may be wondering why I’m quoting an economist while doing a reflection on scripture. Stated briefly, I do this because I think all of God’s universe operates according to God’s laws (not that we all obey them!), and that this is an excellent example. The failure to look to the future is a good example of this. Whether your situation is spiritual or strictly temporal, the same principles will apply.
This one line is an important lament. Why didn’t I think of the consequences? If we learned this lesson from the book–to recognize when bad decisions have led to difficulties, it would be well worth it.
