Reading for today:  Lamentations 3:37-5  (rest of book)
Original post:  September 2, 2014


I started yesterday's post asking a question that I never addressed.   What if we heard sermons from Lamentations more often?    Would we be more careful to stay on the "straight and narrow path"?   Would we be less inclined to sin, and more understanding of God's punishment of sin?    Because we often hear from the passages talking about God's love for us, and his teachings about being kind and patient, loving and forgiving...we find encounters with his justice, and his anger disturbing.     "How could God act like this?"  we proclaim;  not realizing how ignorant and under-informed that very utterance is.   God is free to behave in any way He sees fit.   It is to our great benefit that He values justice, fairness and mercy.   Were He anything but that, we would disappear like a vapor.

Lamentations provides us with a shocking, graphic view of what happens to people who forget to serve the Lord wholly.    These people lived in a city that they believe to be unconquerable...just like we do today.  But I say to you, and to anyone who ever reads this blog.... that if as a nation the people reject God and behave like the Israelites did, then we will inherit the same punishment.   And for the same reason, as well.   So that God can be identified as the true and living God, and all other religions can be proved false.

No wonder the people of modern day Israel don't like the nations around them.  They have been persecuted, overrun, lied to and killed by those same nations for years.  The only difference today is that Israel is in better shape financially, and politically than any of them.  They have become the crown jewel of the middle east.   A nation that flourishes in spite of hardship.   The people who live in Israel are better off than in any other country around them.   I met with several Israelites a few years ago.  They told me that some of their countrymen came to the United States to live, and within a few years returned home...because it was better there!

Lamentations is hard to read, it brings despair and grief to the forefront of our minds.   No one wants to sit around grieving all day.   So, we tend to push it back in our libraries to a corner where it isn't often seen.  But that could present a problem for us.  Because it's in Lamentation that we see several stark revelations of God's faithfulness, and where we see the actual repentance of a nation begin to take place.   This is Israel at the bottom of the pit.  This is a nation who has sunk as low as they can go....but that's were you need to be in order to change.

PR