When Jerusalem Burns

Lamentations 3:1-23

It was a bright beautiful end of summer afternoon…the kind that makes you want stay out forever and run and play in the grass and just enjoy life.  You can imagine the kind of anticipation that we had while we waited painfully for that school bell to ring and we could escape the shackles of an societal prison, the school.  When it finally rang, we bolted out of the school faster than a streak of lightening, each to their individual homes to frolick the last vestiges of summer.

The school bus never saw Kevin…and Kevin never saw the school bus.

In the blink of a moment, a young boy’s life was ended and a family’s world was destroyed.  I remember sitting in our classroom, trying to absorb the news that our friend and our classmate was gone, never to see him again.  His desk sat as an empty reminder of this lost life and as an awareness that life was so much more fragile than it had appeared to be.  We all understood the rules of the game: old people die, not young ones.  10 year old boys are not supposed to die…EVER.  And if they did, there was always some miracle, some new drug or some new medical power that could bring him back to life and everything was going to be alright, all the time.

I remember going to the viewing and seeing Kevin’s family.  What do you say to a family that is mourning the loss not only of their loved one, but of their future, of the world they once knew, and their entrance into a new world where things no longer make sense, where ‘God’ no longer operates in the rules they are accustomed to.  Somehow the words, ‘sorry for your loss’ when I finally managed to utter them out of my lips didn’t seem to help or even begin to address the issues that were going on.

What do you think when death and destruction haunt our doors? What do you do when your world crumbles around you and becomes a devastating mockery of the life you once knew? Where do you go when Jerusalem burns to the ground, never to be restored again?

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This is much more than an academic question, and the answer has life and death consequences to it.

We live in the midst of suffering, sometimes more and sometimes less,  but the reality of suffering surrounds us and at times threatens to overwhelm us.  We see it in the death of children, the destruction of families, the scars of warfare, and the struggles of the sick.  We always don’t know what to do with it, and so at times in the Church we pretend that it doesn’t exist.  We put our church faces with our big smiles and we enter the door of the church and we pretend for a couple of hours that our suffering doesn’t exist, that we are happiest people on earth.  We are afraid, sometimes that the Church…or God…might see us in our weakness or in our struggles and we may be laid bare before it all.  We sing praise songs we don’t mean to ensure that nobody will discover the pain and the anger that all too close to the surface. 

Where do you go….when Jerusalem burns?

This is the reality that Jeremiah faced when his world ended.

Jeremiah is one the most fascinating people in Scripture, for me anyway.  He is the longest of the writing prophets and he is the prophet that we know the most about, emotionally.  He is not ashamed, as here in this passage to express the full rains of emotions.  It is interesting that when Jesus asked who the people said that he was, “Jeremiah” was one of the answers (Matthew 16:14), and that says a great deal about how people viewed Jeremiah…or Jesus for that matter.

But Jeremiah lived in a time of great suffering.  He lived at the end of the Southern Kingdom.  Jeremiah prophesies for over 40 years.  At the end of his ministry, Jeremiah suffered the most devastating loss one could imagine.  The Babylonian army came in and crushed Jerusalem.  They put Israel’s leaders to death, they exported the brightest, the best and the beautiful to Babylon, and they burned Jerusalem to the ground.  At first Jeremiah was put on the Exile train out to Babylon, but then he was given a choice and he chose to return to the ruins of Jerusalem, and to live minister among the people.  It is in this situation that Jeremiah writes the Lamentations.

We can begin to understand the devastation that Jeremiah must have felt as he looked at the ashes of his city and took in the horrific sights around him.  And as we look at this text, we can’t simply read it and explain it.  We must experience it.

‘I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath.” (3:1) This dark and ominous beginning should haunt us.  As we read on, he has driven me and brought me into darkness without any light; surely against me he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.” (3:2) There is a reason why Lamentations doesn’t make it into too many devotional books and this is it!

His entire world has turned to darkness.  Surely we know people for whom this is true…surely this has been true even for us at times. Later on he will say, “my soul is bereft of peace, I have forgotten what happiness is”(3:17)

Why? How could Jeremiah….I mean Jeremiah is a prophet, a righteous man…how could he say these things?

It goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem.  For us, Jerusalem may be just a city on a map, far away not only geographically but culturally.  We don’t think much about Jerusalem and we sure don’t think about the temple in any significant way (for right reasons). But for Jeremiah, Jerusalem was the very heart of the kingdom of God.  The death and suffering of people was horrible enough, but the destruction of Jerusalem was something else entirely!

Jerusalem was the place where God lived. It was his physical location among the people and it was the proof that God had indeed blessed His people with His presence.  Great things had happened there and greater things were yet to come.  Micah and Isaiah prophesied about a time when Mt. Zion will be exalted above all other mountains and the nations would swarm to the Temple and learn about God and the Word of God would go forth into all the world.  The people of Israel, it was claimed, would rule the nations of the world, from Jerusalem, which would be the center of the world.  Jerusalem would be the place where the divine and the human intersected and now it is burning to the ground, reduced to rubble and ashes.  How can that be? How could God do this?

God had crossed a boundary for Jeremiah…a self-established rule that God must not break.

We all have them, if we are honest with ourselves.   We impose rules on God and we expect them to be followed.  Rules such as, I will worship God as long as children do not die.  It’s perfectly fine for adults and old people to die, because after all, that’s how things work.  But not children! I will worship God as long as my marriage remains intact and everything is financially good.  I will worship God  as long as I don’t lose my job.

But the moment any of these things happened, God has crossed a line that we cannot bear and we will not tolerate and we will run away from him and take refuge in our despair.

Look at the source of Jeremiah’s despair:

            He has driven men and brought me into darkness

            HE has made my flesh and my skin waste away

            He has made me dwell in darkness like the dead of long ago

            He has walled me about so that I cannot escape

            He is a bear lying in wait for me

            He turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces

            He has made me desolate

Translate this: God has taken away my life and left me empty and bereft of happiness. “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord.”

Ever meet anybody like this? I know I have.

I remember going to visit a lady at one of the churches I’ve served who was stuck in the past.  Her husband and her daughter had died, only a few months apart from each other.  Her world was completely devastated and she could not recover.  Her heart broke every moment of every day and no matter how much she cried it was never enough.  There was no light, only darkness.

I’ve talked with fathers who have lost their children whose only words that I could distinguish between sobs were “my baby boy….” No light, only darkness.

I’ve seen marriages shattered on the altar of reality where a husband or a wife realizes the type of person they married and life will never be the same again.  No light, only darkness.

And sadly this is where so many people stay.  They can’t get out of these thoughts and they can’t go anywhere with them. 

I remember watching my mother die of Parkinson’s disease.  Parkinson’s is a cruel type of disease because it not only robs you of life, it takes away every ounce of dignity you possess as a person.  I was a relatively new Christian as my mom got sick.  I used to pray every day that God would ‘fix’ her.  That God would perform a miracle, that God would come down from heaven and cure her.  I used to make ‘deals’ with God, that if He would fix her, then I would be a missionary and go the ends of the earth, or that I would make sure that everybody would have a copy of the Bible and I would do my best  to make sure that everybody believed in God.

It didn’t work. 

Mom died, and I remember being broken.  God had broken the rules.  And I began to think, maybe if I had prayed harder or maybe if I had done more or maybe if I wasn’t just a screw up that maybe God would have healed her.  I remember the darkness creeping in, threatening to overtake my soul. I remember feeling like Jeremiah.  “My soul is bereft of peace.  I have forgotten what happiness is.”

Where do you go, when Jerusalem burns?

Jeremiah gives us an answer. “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope.  The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning.”

Now if he had said this to me, I would have responded with “ARE YOU KIDDING ME? GOD DOESN’T LOVE ME, GOD HATES ME! HOW COULD YOU EVEN THINK THIS?”

But the amazing thing is that Jeremiah doesn’t respond like this.  He has a very different reaction.  He is able to go through the pain of the first nineteen verses of the chapter and end with this absolute and wonderful declaration.

Notice that there is no theological discourse here.  There is no prolonged discussion of the nature of evil or any answers to the question of “If there is a good God, why do bad things happen?” This is because Jeremiah’s purpose is very different.  He is showing us two things: (1) when bad things happen, we need to be honest to God with all of our emotions and (2) we need to root our hope in God and His love.  The only thing that keeps us out of the darkness is knowing the reality that no matter what happens, God’s love is constant.

Jeremiah says, “But this I call to mind and therefore I have hope”(3:21).  “Hope” in Scripture is not an abstract term.  We often use the word “hope” as a “wish” or a “longing”.  If I say when I’m at work, that “I hope that Marilee will bake a pie today,” I am expressing a wish that there will be pie when I get home.  I have no basis on which to base this hope, unless Marilee said “I am making a pie” before I left for work. 

But in Scripture, the word ‘hope’ has a different connotation.  “Hope” refers to a definite knowledge that you have within you.   The Hebrew literally means ‘to wait’ because ‘hope’ is about seeing beyond our current circumstance and seeing beyond the present reality.  It looks to what we know God will do in the future.  It is this that shapes and frames the present, because we know that no matter how bad things are now, no matter how terrible or even how horrific, God wild deliver us from it.

            “But I will hope continually and will praise you more and more”-Psalm 71:4

 “But as for me, I will look to the LORD; I will wait for the God of my salvation; my God will hear me.” Micah 7:7

Even the New Testament understand this:

“According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead..” 1 Peter 1:3

And so Jeremiah reminds us that in the midst of all this terror, in the midst of this darkness, there is hope, because of who God is and what he has done.  We may be so captured by our reality that we don’t think there is any possibility that things could change.  But the gospel calls us to hope in God, to know, beyond the shadow of any doubt that things will get better.

But how do we know?  When we are faced  with suffering, with pain, with death, how can be sure that things will change?

Jeremiah again gives us the answer.

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.” (3:23)

There is no greater statement in the entire First Testament than this verse! And we are usually in such a rush to get to this verse when we get to this chapter that we ignore the preceding twenty verses.  Devotional books cutout the surrounding material in order to highlight this verse.  But if we do that, we actually miss the point of how great this verse truly is.  In light of great suffering, the ‘steadfast love’ of the Lord never ever ceases. 

The Hebrew word dsx is our anchor in this passage.  There is no one word in English that captures the meaning.  What it refers to is that deep, covenantal love of God that will never be shaken.

            “…His steadfast love endures forever.”-1 Chronicles 16:41

“O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keeps his commandment.” Nehemiah 1:5

“Your steadfast love, O Lord, extends to the heavens; your faithfulness to the clouds.” Psalm 36:5

The way that the Apostle John puts this statement is, “God is love” (1 John 4:8).  The idea is that God’s love is so closely attached to his character that there is no distinction between the two.

But how do we know this?

Because God proves this over and over again to us.  Scripture is one big story about how God’s constant love prevails.  God loves the people of Israel and proves himself again and again. Jesus reminds us of this love at the end of the gospel of Matthew by declaring that “I will never leave you nor forsake you..”

But most of all, we know God’s steadfast love never fails because of the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In fact, we could re-read this chapter in light of, and from the perspective of Jesus and God the Father.  We can hear the anguish of Jesus as he approaches the cross.  We can picture the anguish of God as he looks at His Son on the cross and looks at the true Jerusalem and the true Temple lying in ruins, shattered on the cross.

God is not far away, a dispassionate deity who is unconcerned with our suffering.  He is a God that knows what suffering is like, who understands our pain and who understands what is to see dreams shattered.  He is not a cruel God who throws us into a world of pain  haphazardly or with no concern.  He is a God who stands right with us in the midst of shattered dreams and broken worlds.  He is a God who hears our grief, and grieves with us.  

But he is also a God who pushes us beyond our grief and our current situation.  That is what is amazing about the Resurrection.   It is not just proof that there is life after death (there is that), it is that God’s faithfulness, God’s steadfast love, God’s hesed is faithful to us beyond all the darkest moments of our lives.  He proves that for every world that is broken and every dream  that is shattered, there is a hope to be had by all people.

So…where do you go when Jerusalem burns, when your hopes and dreams are shattered and the darkness threatens to overtake you? You run into the arms of the Savior, whose steadfast love never ceases and whose mercies are new every morning.