Biblestudy: Lamentations (Part Eight; 1989)

Lamentations 4:6 - 5:22, Conclusion
#BS-LA08
John W. Ritenbaugh (1932-2023)
Given 11-Jul-89; 78 minutes

listen:

playlist:
Go to the Lamentations (1989) (Bible study series) playlist

download:

This evening I am going to go right into the book of Lamentations and make sure that we get finished this evening and then go into something else after we have finished it. I am going to go back into chapter 4 once again and do just a little bit of review there, just a couple of the highlights. There is kind of a theme or a way in which chapter 4 is written and it will help you, I think, if you are ever reading it yourself, to at least see this, and it will help you to interpret the verses a little bit better.

But in chapter 4, the verses are written in a series of contrasts. One thing is compared to another and most of the time it is sort of a before-and-after contrast. This is the way it used to be, this is the way it is now. And once you begin to see that, you can make the comparisons. Usually they happen right within the verse, within a single verse.

The one that I was going to pick out to begin with is verse 6 where Jerusalem's punishment was compared to Sodom, where their sin and their punishment was compared to Sodom. In that case, it was not so much a contrast as it was a comparison. But that runs through the entirety of the chapter so that you can at least understand things a little bit better.

Verse 7, he talks about the Nazirites. Now, Nazirites to you and me would ordinarily mean someone who devoted himself to religious purposes. It was a regulation that was enacted in order to give those who were not part of the Levitical tribe to enable them to devote themselves to God and the service of Him in a more public and personal way. But Nazirite of and by itself simply means somebody who is separated and is even on occasions translated into the word prince. And so a Nazarite is somebody who is separated by rank, or in the case of the Nazirite vow, by devotion.

Well, these people here in verse 7 is a contrast. He is comparing their former appearance, that is, before the siege and the fall of the city, to what they are at the time that he was looking at. And apparently what he meant by Nazirites were those who were conspicuously different in public in the way that they appeared. That is, it seems to be people who can pay a lot of attention to the way that they dress and the way that they look. Nothing but the best of care in the taking care of their bodies and in the apparel that they were wearing.

Well, that is the way they looked before. Anybody could spot them by the way they looked. Now, see, it says in verse 8 that they are blacker than soot. Now that indicates that they were no longer able to take care of their skin and so their skin was either scorched as a result of being out in the sun all the time or it was black as a result of starvation. The skin had taken on a cast that certainly indicated very poor health. So a contrast there, so much so he says in verse 8 that they go unrecognized in the streets and their skin clings to their bones and has become dry as wood. Almost what we would call today alligators, like their skin looked like that of a lizard. So it certainly indicates either starvation or being scorched by the sun or a combination of both.

Another verse that I want to pick out here is verse 12. Now it says there that the kings of the earth and all the inhabitants of the world would not have believed that the adversary and the enemy would enter the gates of Jerusalem. I think that I mentioned to you at the last Bible study that Jerusalem had stood impregnable for hundreds of years. And to the best of my recollection, nobody had conquered the city from the time of David until this time, which was 587, 586 BC. So that is a period of over 400 years that the city had stood.

Somebody asked me after the Bible study whether or not Shishak, who was an Egyptian Pharaoh, had taken the city. Well, the answer to that is yes, he had. I want to go back to I Kings chapter 14. Shishak is first mentioned a few chapters earlier as the man to whom Jeroboam fled whenever Solomon perceived that he was a threat. And then when Solomon died, Jeroboam came back from Egypt and Israel became his.

Well, Shishak was still on the scene and he took advantage of the secession of Judah from Israel. And he came up to the city and we find,

I Kings 14:25-26 It happened in the fifth year of King Rehoboam that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem. And took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house; he took away everything. He also took away all the gold shields which Solomon had made.

Now let us go to II Chronicles 12 and we will fill in a few details. I think I mentioned to you one time that the books of Kings and Chronicles are complementary, and in Kings you generally have only the bare bones report, the historical account of what occurred. What Chronicles does is usually fills in the spiritual background, what was not evident on the surface. What was going on?

II Chronicles 12:2 And it happened in the fifth year of King Rehoboam that Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, because they had transgressed against the Lord.

Now that was not mentioned at all in Kings, "they had transgressed against the Lord." Incidentally, if you look in history books, you will never find Shishak mentioned. The reason is that is not what he is called in history books. His name in history is Shoshenq. It sounds almost Chinese. And the name actually ends phonetically with a Q. Rather unusual. Well, in the Bible he is called Shishak.

Judah had transgressed against the Lord.

II Chronicles 12:3-4 [Shishak came up] with twelve hundred chariots, sixty thousand horsemen, and people without number who came with him out of Egypt—the Libyans, the Sukkiim and the Ethiopians. And he took the fortified cities of Judah and came to Jerusalem.

Now what he did is that he moved into the south of Judea with his army and he began knocking off one small city after the other. He skirted Jerusalem and went north in the territory that had been held by Assyria and their vassals over there. And between what he conquered in Judah and what he conquered in Samaria, he conquered about 150 cities. Most of these were not very big places, mostly villages, but there were a few fortified cities in those that he conquered.

II Chronicles 12:5 Then Shemaiah the prophet came to Rehoboam and the leaders of Judah, who were gathered together in Jerusalem because of Shishak, and he said to them, "Thus says the Lord: 'You have forsaken Me, and therefore I also have left you in the hand of Shishak.'"

Mind you, he had not yet come into Jerusalem, but he had pretty effectively surrounded it. Now get the picture here. Judah had transgressed. Judah undoubtedly felt themselves in a precarious position. So when God's prophet came and told them that they were in dire straits spiritually and if they went out and fought against or, let us say, fortified themselves in the city of Jerusalem, why, He was not going to be with them.

II Chronicles 12:6 So the leaders of Israel and the king humbled themselves; and they said, "The Lord is righteous."

Well, that is interesting. They listened to God's prophet. Now, what did they do?

II Chronicles 12:7-10 Now when the Lord saw that they humbled themselves, the word of the Lord came to Shemaiah, saying, "They have humbled themselves; therefore I will not destroy them, but I will grant them some deliverance. My wrath shall not be poured out on Jerusalem by the hand of Shishak. Nevertheless they will be his servants, that they may distinguish My service from the service of the kingdoms of the nations. So Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem, and took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king's house; he took everything. He also carried away the gold shields which Solomon had made. King Rehoboam made bronze shields in their place, and committed them to the hands of the captains of the guard, who guarded the entrance of the king's house.

You ought to be able to figure out what happened. They decided that discretion is the better part of valor and that the best thing to do was just to open the city up and let the man and his army come in and take what they wanted and not risk the destruction of the city. I think that God undoubtedly put that into their heads in order that there not be some kind of a slaughter uselessly. And this was the way in which He made His point. They were made servants and they had a great deal of the wealth taken away. The city, Temple, things like that were not destroyed.

So did he conquer it? Well, I guess, yes, he did. But it was not conquered in the ordinary sense by war where a real siege was on, the battering rams and everything were up and the city walls broken down, and the Temple destroyed and burned. That did not occur. So they just gave in.

Now it is evident in reading through II Chronicles 12:14 that Judah very quickly threw off the yoke of Shishak. It was partly because Shishak had to go back to Egypt to defend his interests there. There is always revolutionaries and insurrectionists who are ready to take over when the king leaves the country, and so he had to go back there to defend his own throne. And when he pulled out, Judah recouped and very quickly under Abijah and Asa and Jehoshaphat after them, they became a pretty strong nation once again.

So I was wrong in telling you in Lamentations 4:12 that the city had never been conquered, but partly right in that it was not conquered in the ordinary sense, but rather they just handed the city over to him in order to avoid the destruction of the city.

Now back to Lamentations.

The lesson out of verse 12 is that no fortress, no matter how impregnable it may seem to men, is going to stand when God wills that it falls. And God willed that it fall, you can see very plainly, as a result of their disobedience to Him and their pride in the Temple, pride in the city, pride in their own material wealth and what they felt was their spiritual well-being. That was not what they thought it was, and so they fell.

Verses 13 through 16 make very clear where God placed the blame. He placed the blame, it says verse 13, because of the sins of her prophets. They simply were not teaching the people about sin, about righteousness, about where they stood with God, about keeping of the covenant, all those kinds of things. They were telling the people, "Peace, peace, everything's fine. You're good people, you have nothing to worry about, there's no need to get upset. You're just fine." I'm okay, you're okay, kind of thing. And everything was not so good, they had spiritual leprosy and cancer, and it soon showed up.

So verse 15 provides the contrast, before and after. Formerly they were among the admired and well fed. Now the people told them to go away from them like they were unclean, like as from a leper.

Verses 17 through 20 show them turning to other places for help. We are going to see a little bit more of that in chapter 5. Verse 17 says, "for a nation that could not save us." That nation was Egypt. That is detailed in the book of Jeremiah, how they went down there to try to get help. And Egypt pretended to give help, but all Nebuchadnezzar had to do was kind of threaten Egypt a little bit and they very quickly backed out of the picture and did not give Israel any help at all.

I mentioned to you in verses 21 and 22 that Edom was a term that the ancient writers used much in the same way that we would use the term Rome or Babylon. It stood for all that was evil. And so it does not necessarily mean Edom specifically, just all of those who the Jews would tend to categorize as enemies of God. So they just stood at the head because to the Jews at that time, Edom was the big enemy. So the warning is there that Edom was about to get theirs. Some of them did.

Now let us get to Lamentations chapter 5.

Lamentations 5 is on one page, as it is in my Bible. You can very quickly see that it again has 22 verses, one verse for each one of the letters of the alphabet. However, it is not an acrostic. That is, each verse does not begin with a succeeding letter of the Hebrew alphabet. So chapter 5 is set off from the others which are acrostics. And it is not an acrostic.

However, it has something else which is rather unusual and that is that every verse except one—you cannot see this in English—ends with a Hebrew letter that is similar to the English U. I should say a short U, or û. And it signifies a lamenting sound. However, of the five chapters in the book of Lamentations, it is the least lamenting. In fact, there are many scholars who feel that it is just an out-and-out prayer that has notes of sadness within it. But it is not a lament like the other four.

Now what the chapter emphasizes is confession before God of their sin.

Lamentations 5:1 Remember, O Lord, what has come upon us; look, and behold our reproach!

This is a fairly repeated beginning of a prayer that appears in the Bible. It appears a number of times in the book of Psalms, also in several of the prophets. They are obviously praying to God and it signifies more than just remember. If you say remember, you start thinking of a certain event or time that occurred in your life, but that is not all that is signified here. It is really an appeal for God not only to remember but also to act.

They are asking Him in this sense to remember the fact that He is the other partner in this covenant. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, remember all Your promises. You see, remember what You have told us that You are going to do with us, that You are going to redeem us from our problem. Remember, God, that You promised that You would hear us, you see, if we repented. Did Solomon not say that in his prayer? Yes. And so what is implied, though not stated directly, is remember all these things, God, and act upon them. That is, rescue us.

They are asking Him to recall what He has put them through, the disgrace that they have gone through, the terrible affliction that they have gone through, and begin to rescue them from it. In other words, they are asking for something that will give them hope to go on.

Lamentations 5:2 Our inheritance has been turned over to aliens, and our houses to foreigners.

In English for the word inheritance we would use the word possession. It is not the word that is normally used for the inheritance of the land of Canaan. This word is broader and would include the land, but it would also include their houses. It would include their furniture. It would include all of their wealth. So in this case, everything had been taken from them is what he is saying here.

There is something else that I wanted to get here. Turn back with me to Psalm 50. I had a thought when I was looking at this today that what I am going to do here is I am going to tie Lamentations 5:2 to Lamentations 4:12. That is, Jerusalem was an almost impregnable fortress as a city. And it says, who would have ever believed that the city could be taken? And what I mentioned there was that when God wills that so-called impregnable fortresses fall, they fall. Because God rules His creation.

In chapter 5, verse 2, one of the things that the Israelites had to learn was that God owns everything and He has the right to give it to whomsoever He will. And if He will, because of the disobedience, the failure to live up to the covenant of the people of Israel and Judah, if He willed that He was going to give that land to somebody else, He had every right to do so, and He did it.

Psalm 50:8-9 I will not reprove you for your sacrifices or your burnt offerings, which are continually before Me. I will not take a bull from your house, nor goats out of your folds.

If you read all of Psalm 50, you begin to understand these people had the wrong idea about sacrifice. That somehow or another whenever they did something for God, like make a sacrifice, God somehow owed them something in return. What they failed to understand was that God was more than willing to give them things. But what He wanted was their heart. He wanted willing submission and obedience, not people going through a ritual because they thought it was going to pay off. That is the wrong idea, the wrong approach, altogether.

So what religion became to those people was a mere going through the routines. They went to church on the Sabbath and they made the obligatory sacrifices. But during the rest of the week, it was kind of business as usual. They did not somehow or another translate the covenant and their relationship with God into everyday life.

Psalm 50:11-12 I know all the birds of the mountains [God has His finger on everything that is going on.], and the wild beasts in the field are Mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world is Mine and all of its fullness.

Everything belongs to Him.

So here is the prophet lamenting in prayer in Lamentations 5:2 that our inheritance has been turned over to aliens and our houses to foreigners. Now God is love. And what He does is in love. There is not a streak of meanness in Him at all. What He does is for our good, both individually and collectively as a body.

He had watched the Israelite people now from the time He brought them out of Egypt up to this time. That would be pretty close to about 800 years. He had watched these people that He had made a covenant with and finally He had had it up to here. Even the divine patience, I would say, runs out whenever He figures that no good can come from the way that this relationship is going, and He needed to do something.

Well, these people were so confident in these things: the strength of the city, the fact that God's dwelling place was there, the covenant, the great men and women of old. And God had to show them, "Hey, I can take that all away. Everything belongs to Me." And it took something like this.

Now, we of course have to learn the lesson from that as well. And you have to remember what Paul said in regards to the same kind of attitude that these people had gotten themselves into in I Corinthians 10, verse 12 where Paul said,

I Corinthians 10:12 Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he falls.

God wants our heart. He did not have these people's hearts, obviously. In Jeremiah 31, He said He was going to make a new covenant. In Ezekiel 36, He said that in this new covenant these people are going to have His Spirit and they are going to have a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone. But He allowed these things to be written so that we could be instructed from them.

Lamentations 5:3 We have become orphans and fatherless, our mothers are like widows.

Orphans and waifs and widows were considered to be the weakest part of society. And again, it is a veiled appeal to God to act. And God said that He would hear the cry of the widow. God made special mention to the people of Israel that they were to take care of the orphans. And so he is saying, "Look, we are a whole nation now of orphans and fatherless and widows. Take care of us."

Lamentations 5:4 We pay for the water we drink, and our wood comes at a price.

Well, life had just become very hard, very closely regulated. And it is likely what he is describing here would be kind of like a heavy form of taxation. It had to be paid if they were going to live.

Lamentations 5:5-6 They pursue at our heels; we labor and have no rest. We have given our hand to the Egyptians and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.

There is a little bit more here than meets the eye. At first glance, it appears as though they had gone to the Egyptians, gone to the Assyrians in order to get food to eat. But that hardly seems likely to have occurred.

The reason is, when Nebuchadnezzar devastated the country, he took out the leadership and took them back to Babylon as slaves. Thus that was where Ezekiel wrote from. That is where Daniel operated from and wrote from. The elite, the leadership was there. And what was left in the country were the poor who were expected by Nebuchadnezzar to take care of the land in order that it would not revert to the wild.

It seems very likely that Nebuchadnezzar planned on bringing people from other lands into the land of Judah to help repopulate it, and that these people would be lords over the Jews who remained there. That was something that was normally done during that period of history. You will recall whenever Assyria took over Israel, that is what they did. They cleaned the whole land out and they brought people from other nations in to resettle the area and these people became known as the Samaritans.

Now Nebuchadnezzar undoubtedly planned on doing the same thing. However, God overruled it. And He overruled it because He still had plans for Judah. Remember what happened? They came back 70 years later and reclaimed their land. There were some people there. Some of them were Jews and there were some others who were also there, Arabs, Edomites, and Samaritans. But very quickly, why, Nehemiah, Ezra established themselves there and began to rebuild things once again.

It is unlikely that in that period of time the poor people who certainly were not leaders had made a great deal of contact with either Assyria or Egypt. And one reason is because Assyria was under the thumb of Nebuchadnezzar. The other thing is that the Egyptians, though they were not under the thumb of Nebuchadnezzar in the same way that the Assyrians were, they had shown themselves to be quite [sound cut out] of Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon.

It is unlikely that the lack of food is all that is intended here. Undoubtedly, there had been some of this going on. But there is a little bit more here.

Lamentations 5:6-7 We have given our hand to the Egyptians and the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread. Our fathers sinned and are no more, but we bear their iniquities.

Now verse 7 indicates that what happened in verse 6 happened before the Babylonians ever came into the land. This is where the other prophetic books help. Let us go back to Ezekiel chapter 18. You will pick up this proverb. Now this proverb gives us a little bit of a clue what was going on here.

Ezekiel 18:2 "What do you mean when you use this proverb concerning the land of Israel, saying, 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge'?

Compare that with verse 7 of Lamentations. "Our fathers sinned and are no more, but we [survivors] bear their iniquities." Now when it says our "fathers have eaten sour grapes," we are talking about a cause-and-effect relationship that is delayed somewhat. The fathers eat sour grapes, but the children are the ones who taste them. So rather than the fathers' teeth being set on edge, it is the children's teeth who are set on edge.

Now what they are saying is this. Our fathers did evil, but we are the ones who paid the penalty. You see, there is a veiled accusation here for God that He was unfair. Why should we pay the penalty of what our fathers did? Now all of us have suffered from the effect of other people's sins. That is a fact of life. We do not live in a vacuum, and it is something that we just have to accept.

A man sins and the wife suffers. The children suffer. The wife may sin and the husband and the children suffer. You are very familiar with what is going on in society now. Mothers carrying a baby, she is pregnant. She drinks, she takes drugs. Baby is affected because of what mother does. It is that principle that is involved here.

Now what we have got to understand is, yes, this does occur, and God admits it occurs. However, He does not blame the ones who are affected by the sins of another. He only holds responsible those who sin. There is an aspect of this that we need to consider, and that is that if we really do love our family, our friends, our nation, our church, and on and on, we are not going to want them to be affected in a negative way by the way that we live. If we really have love, if we love our brother, if we love God, we do not want others to suffer from what we do. So we try to order our life aright so that they do not suffer from the things that we do.

Now if we do sin and they suffer, God holds us to blame, but they still will pay as a result of our sins in the sense that they are going to suffer there.

Let us go to the book of Hosea. Now that was the peoples' complaint. In a sense, they were saying, we are innocent. And to some degree they undoubtedly were innocent.

Hosea 2:5 For their mother has played the harlot; she who conceived them has done shamefully. For she said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water [remember the mention of bread there in Lamentations], my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink.'

Hosea 2:8-9 For she did not know that I gave her grain, new wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold—which they prepared for Baal. Therefore I will return and take away My grain, . . .

You know God is telling you what happened. What started out as alliances between nations, most likely economic alliances. "We will buy your wheat if you will buy our oil. We will buy your cloth if you will buy our automobiles" kind of thing. Now that is the way it started.

But Israel joined themselves and I do not think that God is saying that such a thing is wrong in itself. But what happened was that the alliances became more than something that was merely economic. And we find in verse 8 that they joined themselves to Baal. Now there it gets a great deal more serious because what started out as an economic alliance ends up to be economic, political, military, and spiritual.

What happened was that Israel was very prone to do this, adopted the lifestyle, religion, the way of the Assyrians and the Egyptians. We always seem to do this. Right in the wilderness, our ancestors did it with Moab. First thing you know they were involved in committing fornication and worshipping Baal.

Now here He says that "they were prepared for Baal." So what God is saying is that the Creator God is reduced to being nothing more than a God among gods, polytheism.

Hosea 5:13 When Ephraim [meaning Israel] saw his sickness, Judah saw his wound, then he went to Assyria and sent to King Jareb; yet he cannot cure you, or heal you of your wound.

You see, one thing led to another. In chapter 7, verse 11,

Hosea 7:11 Ephraim also is like a silly dove without sense—they call to Egypt, they go to Assyria.

Hosea 12:1 Ephraim feeds on the wind, and pursues the east wind [The east wind blows west. But what was to the east of Israel? Assyria was to the east of Israel.] He daily increases lies and desolation. Also they make a covenant with the Assyrians, and oil is carried to Egypt.

All of these alliances we can see by the time the book of Lamentations was written, somewhat later, were of no help against Babylon and the Jews reaped a bitter harvest. Their going there ended with them adopting Egyptian ways and pushing God off to the side.

Now back to Lamentations.

So what they are lamenting about here and praying about is that they feel that it is rather unjustified of God to be punishing them for what their ancestors did. This was something that had been building over the last 100, 150, 200 years.

Lamentations 5:8-9 Servants rule over us; there is none to deliver us from their hand. We get our bread at the risk of our lives, because of the sword in the wilderness.

Now so ignominious was their position that they were slaves of slaves. It is bad enough to be a slave. But to be a slave of a slave, I mean you are really at the bottom of the barrel. You are under the barrel, and you are down there. They were the servants of servants.

These servants were very low-level Babylonians, probably military in nature, and the worst thing about this was that there was no prospect of liberation. There were no court of appeals. Who they were going to appeal to? It is not like they could take it to small claims court and if that did not work, take it to a civil court, if that did not work, take it to a court of appeals and if that did not work, take it to the state Supreme Court and on up to the U.S. Supreme Court. They could not do any of that. There was no court system working. So they were subject to the whim of these low-level Babylonians who had been put in there by Nebuchadnezzar to rule over the low-level people who had been left out of Judah.

Verse 9 has to do with, apparently, marauding bands of Arab, Bedouins, who were roaming through the countryside. What little food was available was mostly out there and they went out at the risk of their own lives.

Lamentations 5:10-11 Our skin is hot as an oven, because of the fever of famine. They ravished the women in Zion, the maidens in the cities of Judah.

I am sure that the women, especially the young girls, suffered indignities which we can only imagine in our wildest imagination.

Lamentations 5:12 Princes were hung up by their hands, and elders were not respected.

There is very little evidence that Nebuchadnezzar used torture as a means of extracting information, even in the Bible, even with the ones that would normally be considered the worst enemy, the king, so forth. They apparently were executed fairly speedily and that was the end of it. They were not like the Assyrians who delighted in inflicting as much pain as possible on people before they died. So it is thought here where it says that the "princes were hung up by their hands and elders were not respected," it had to do with things that were done after they were dead, where the corpses were desecrated in some way.

Lamentations 5:13-16 Young men ground at the millstones; and boys staggered under loads of wood. The elders have ceased gathering at the gate, and the young men from their music. The joy of our heart has ceased; our dance has turned into mourning. The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned!

Finally, we get an admission of guilt. Now what he is saying here about the young men and boys staggering: The young boys were forced to do labor that was too heavy for them and the young men were reduced to doing the work that formerly would have been done by an animal. Like Samson grinding the corn, pushing the big millstone. Normally something that they would hook a horse or a mule to and they would walk around in a circle. But they had young men, trying to break their pride, get them to be submissive.

Verse 14 is telling you that the court system is no more because the elders were not gathering at the gate and that the young men from their music because there was nothing to sing about that was worthwhile. Nothing happened. The joy has ceased from our heart.

And verse 16 is very interesting, "The crown has fallen." Now a crown is a symbol of glory, of power, of dignity, of national pride. But notice that it fell. It fell from our head. Not that it was snatched away, but rather that it fell off, which is a tacit admission that it fell because Israel stumbled. You see, they tripped, they did something stupid on their own, and the crown fell off their head. Immediately following that is the statement, "Woe to us, for we have sinned!" It is an admission that their sin is what caused the crown to fall.

Lamentations 5:17-18 Because of this, our heart is faint; because of these things our eyes grow dim; because of Mount Zion which is desolate, with foxes walking about on it.

Perhaps this is the supreme sign of God's anger, of the desolation of Jerusalem, of the desperate straits that they were in, that the Temple mount, the place where God dwelt, the place of fellowship with God, was so deserted that wild animals were walking around. They were completely cut off. There was no access to God, no fellowship with Him at all, even in their own country. Just these animals who had no fear of human encounter.

Lamentations 5:19 You, O Lord, remain forever; Your throne from generation to generation.

This is the only verse without the û sound at the end of it. That is because it is a cry of praise, a cry of hope. God is alive! God is on His throne! Hey, there is hope! God is faithful. God keeps His covenant. God will forgive. God will rescue. God has made promises. That could not be a verse with a lamenting sound, so it was left off because it is hopeful.

Lamentations 5:20 Why do You forget us forever, and forsake us for so long a time?

See, this is contrasted with verse 1. Remember? God, why have You forsaken us? It is really less of a cry of anger, which it might be interpreted, but more of one of perplexity. See, if God is so constant, if He is so faithful and forgiving and merciful, why has He not intervened? That is surely something that all of us will ask some time in our life.

Lamentations 5:21 Turn us back to You, O Lord, and we will be restored; renew our days as of old [when they enjoyed His favor], . . .

So again, it is a recognition that repentance is possible. It is also interesting that he recognized that it was going to have to be something that God would do. That repentance was no longer something that was humanly possible. It was not something that they contained within themselves. They were so worn out, so frazzled, so frustrated, so bottomed out in their feelings, that God was going to have to somehow miraculously intervene and get their minds and hearts turned around.

Lamentations 5:22 Unless You have utterly rejected us, and are very angry with us!

The plain truth was here, it does end on a sad note. That sad note is that Israel and Judah had somehow or another utterly failed to grasp God's revelation in the Old Covenant and that it took something like what happened to Jerusalem to make enough of an impression to get them turned around. And it did make a lasting and powerful impression. When I say lasting, I mean it lasted for hundreds of years. Because when Ezra, Nehemiah brought those people back out of Babylon, they had a different mind to them. They changed their ways; not entirely to the good. But it was enough to enable them to last for another 400 or 500 years and keep them pretty much on track.

Then they went off the deep end in the other direction. Because it was during that period that the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees arose. They were super religious and guarded the Torah, built a wall around it so that it could not be damaged in any way and tried to make it impossible for people to sin. It had a deep, deep impression on them. It did get them turned around. Like I said, by the time Christ came about 500 years later, they had gone off the deep end in the other direction. They had not hit a happy medium. Well, they did not have God's Spirit.

Well, that is a very interesting book. And I am sure that God put it in there in order to make an impression on us. It has something to do with not letting ourselves get into the attitude where we can just relax and not let a sense of urgency be a part of our lives. It is a record that even people in the nation we love very dearly, He allowed to go through very terrible suffering in order to get them turned around and get their hearts at least in a condition where they were willing to obey Him to the best of their physical ability and understanding.

So if it happened to them, it can happen to us. As John the Baptist said, God can raise up sons to Abraham from the very stones in the ground. So we cannot allow ourselves to get into a condition where we think we have it made.

==============================================================

I am going to go into something that I think is rather interesting and is the result of a question that was asked of me by Mr. Snyder. He asked me to explain about where we get the idea, the understanding; how does one explain the church is the mother of us all. Now it is not all that easy so I am going to give you the pieces. And I will go into as much detail as I can in the time that remains. We will probably be able to finish it. But once you begin to get the pieces, then you begin to see that there certainly is plenty in the Bible to substantiate that claim.

Let us begin of all places in Song of Solomon, chapter 8, verse 1. Song of Solomon appears to be a play like one would put on stage. Most of it is either dialogue that takes place between what my Bible calls the beloved, playing the male lead, and the Shulamite, playing the female lead. Sometimes there are fairly long soliloquies whenever one of them is thinking, almost as if they are thinking out loud.

Now most scholars feel that it is a dialogue or a play about which the main character is Solomon and the Shulamite is a young woman that he wanted to marry and make a part of his harem. I will not say that I entirely agree with that. I think it is far more likely that the beloved here is Christ and the Shulamite is the church. Now in chapter 8 and in verse 1, the Shulamite is speaking. And she says,

Song of Solomon 8:1 Oh, that you were like my brother, who nursed at my mother's breasts!

Those commentators, scholars, who feel that this is a story about Christ and the church, feel that here in this verse, the mother is the church. Now this gets rather confusing because I thought I just told you that the Shulamite was the church. Yes, she is. And here we come across something that anybody who studies in the Bible is going to have to take into account. And that is, that the Bible, well, we would almost say flagrantly, mixes its metaphors. In other words, it will be rambling along (never, rarely rambles, but I am using that word) using one metaphor and all of a sudden right within the same verse, it will switch to another metaphor and mean exactly the same person it was talking about. We just saw one right there. Now this happens very frequently, but if you do not understand it, it can really get you confused.

Let us go back to the book of Galatians in chapter 4, verse 26.

Galatians 4:26 But the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all.

We are going to look a little bit more at this context in just a little bit. But I have to add here before we go into it that the Bible blends its types or metaphors together. We are going to see a number of them here. They are mixed together right in a very few brief verses and they are all either related or contrasted. We will stay right here.

Now why does God do this? I do not know fully, but I do believe that at least part of the reason is that for those who understand, those who are able to see some of the mysteries of the Bible, we can understand the different roles that the church is going to play in our life in practical situations. Because in one sense, sometimes the church is going to be our mother. Sometimes the church is going to be our brothers and sisters. We will look at some of these in just a bit.

Let us go back to verse 21.

Galatians 4:21-31 Tell me, you who desire to be under the law, do you not hear the law? [here means comprehend or understand] For it is written that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondwoman, the other by a free woman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and he of the free woman through promise, which things are symbolic. [They are types.] For these are the two covenants: the one from Mount Sinai which gives birth to bondage, which is Hagar—for this Hagar is Mount Sinai in Arabia, and corresponds to the Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children—but the Jerusalem above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, "Rejoice, O barren, you who do not bear! Break forth and shout, you who do not travail! For the desolate has many more children than she who has a husband."

In this context, Paul is comparing the two covenants. Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, Jerusalem above and Jerusalem below, Judaism and Christianity. The Old Covenant, Hagar, Ishmael, Jerusalem below and Judaism are one side of the equation. And they are all related in that they have a physical basis. On the other side of the equation is the New Covenant, Sarah, Isaac, Jerusalem above, Christianity. That is the other side of the equation, and they are all related in that they have a spiritual basis. There is a commonality that runs through all of them, even if there is a physical commonality that runs through the other way.

Now I am going to have to deviate here before I come back to the mother to first establish another metaphor that God used. That is, the church, Jerusalem as a city. Now these are all related in the city, church, Jerusalem. Let us go back to Isaiah 62, verse 1. Notice the relationship that is established through this chapter.

Isaiah 62:1 For Zion's sake, I will not hold My peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, . . .

Now he has already equated the common Hebraic way of writing. Zion and Jerusalem are the same thing in the thought here, although literally they are not. Zion was a part of Jerusalem. But the one equates with the other.

Isaiah 62:1 . . . until her righteousness goes forth as brightness, her salvation as a lamp that burns.

Now verse 5.

Isaiah 62:5 For as a young man marries a virgin, so shall your sons marry you [Now Zion, Jerusalem, is equated with something that can be married, a virgin. The metaphor is beginning to change.]; and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride [What in the Bible equates with a bride? It is symbolic of the church. Now we can begin to funnel that in there. Zion, Jerusalem. That is the city. Also, a virgin is a bride, a bridegroom rejoices over.], so shall your God rejoice over you.

Isaiah 62:7 Give Him no rest till He establishes and till He makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth.

Isaiah 62:11 Indeed the Lord has proclaimed to the end of the world: "Say to the daughter of Zion [There is another one. The daughter of Zion is the church. It is a woman, a woman who can be a bride, a woman who is a virgin, a woman who can marry a husband.], 'Surely your salvation is coming; behold, His reward is with Him, and His work before Him.'" And they shall call them [collectively, the daughter of Zion] The Holy People, the Redeemed of the Lord, and you shall be called Sought Out, a City Not Forsaken.

Everything ties together between verses 1 and 12. Who are the holy people? Who are the saints? Who is the daughter of Zion? Now Psalm 46. There are just oodles of verses like this through the Bible.

Psalm 46:4-5 There is a river whose streams shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacle of the Most High. [What city is that? That is Jerusalem. But the tabernacle of God, where is that?] God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved. God shall help her [you see, it is a woman], just at the break of dawn. [When is that? That is when Christ returns.]

All kinds of things here.

Let us go to another one back in Isaiah again.

Isaiah 33:20 Look upon Zion, the city of our appointed feasts [I thought the feasts were held in Jerusalem.]; your eyes will see Jerusalem [There is Jerusalem and Zion together again.], a tabernacle that will not be taken down [one that is eternal]; not one of its stakes will ever be removed, nor will any of its cords be broken.

Obviously talking about something that is eternal. The city of Jerusalem is not eternal. Let us go back to Hebrews 12, verse 22.

Hebrews 12:22 But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, . . .

Now what had they literally come to? They had come to the church. But here, Paul is taking a spiritual approach and he is equating Mount Zion and the city of Jerusalem with the church but he calls it the heavenly Jerusalem. Does that ring a bell with Galatians 4:26? Yes, it does.

Hebrews 12:22-24 . . . to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven, to God the Judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling that speaks better things than that of Abel.

A heavenly Jerusalem is the general assembly of the church and of the firstborn. Now where did this concept come from? This is interesting because almost everybody that I was able to look in a commentary about said that it was an outgrowth of Isaiah the 54th chapter, which we are not going to go into it this time because of a lack of time. But the concept of a heavenly Jerusalem grew out of the context of Isaiah the 54th chapter. Now when you read that, the city, the church, the nation is very earthly, but there are other verses when added to that that give you a different picture when you look at those verses.

Let us go to Isaiah 49.

Isaiah 49:14-16 But Zion said, "The Lord has forsaken me, and my Lord has forgotten me." [Now verse 15, God is still talking. And He is answering this prayer or whatever that Zion has lifted up this question, this lament. And God says] "Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget [It is almost impossible to even think of a woman forgetting about her baby. Well, if that is impossible to think of, God says it is even more impossible for Him to forget His church.], yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands; your walls are continually before Me."

I do not think the outline of the city of Jerusalem is really inscribed in God's hand. It is a figure of speech that God is using in order to illustrate His concern, His awareness of [?].

Now where is God located? God is located in heaven. Let us develop that because that is what they did. Hebrews 11, beginning in verse 13. I am still on the city thing, tying mother, church, all of it together with that.

Hebrews 11:13-16 These all died in faith [the heroes of the past], not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland. And truly if they had called to mind that country from which they had come out, they would have had opportunity to return. But now they desire a better [country], that is, a heavenly [country]. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared a city for them.

You see how all these metaphors, these types tie together: city, nation, church, kingdom, general assembly of the firstborn, the redeemed, the saints, Zion, Jerusalem. They are all talking metaphorically, symbolically, about one and the same thing. But each one of them put what it is talking about in a slightly different role. Now Jerusalem was to Israel what Washington, DC is to the United States, the capital city. The place from which the nation receives its direction. The place where the leaders dwelt. And so it is even a common thing today when a reporter reports on something that is going on in Russia, he says for Moscow. For the United States, Washington. That is the way that this is being used. There are patterns of this thing running throughout the Bible.

Now what they are saying is that this which we seek, that its location is not on earth, that it is not physical. But it is rather spiritual, and it is located in heaven. That is the seat, the capital, the location of what it is that we seek.

Let us try to tie these all together. Now the church, it is already here, is it not? It is established here on earth. I am trying to think of a better way to put it. I really do not know a better way.

Let us turn to Philippians 3, verse 20. I know the way to put. Even as Jerusalem, a physical city, was capital of a nation with whom God had made a covenant, and that nation was both church and state at one and the same time. And so it was the figurehead for the entire works of both church and state. Now in like manner, the heavenly Jerusalem is exactly the same thing. The church has already been established on earth. The state will be established whenever Christ returns.

Philippians 3:20 [Paul says] For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Church members, those then possessing the Spirit of God, are looked upon in the Bible as colonists from what is now a foreign nation whose capital city is in heaven. It is Jerusalem above, which is the mother of us all. Ever heard the term Mother Russia? I have. That is the way it is being used.

Now back to Galatians. As you can see, in a way you have to get at this in a convoluted way.

In Galatians, Paul was tracing our spiritual lineage. He was tracing the lineage of a new kind of free men. Now he was tracing it, not through Abraham, and there was a reason for that. Because Abraham was the father of many nations, all unconverted except one. And that is why our lineage had to be traced through Isaac from Sarah and not through Abraham. That is, in this context. Because even as Abraham is the father of the faithful, so is Sarah the mother of the faith. And so he used this illustration.

Abraham was the father of Ishmael through Hagar. And it was purely a physical union that produced a physical nation that was from Abraham. But Isaac was produced by a spiritual miracle through a woman who was supposedly barren—only because God intervened and performed a miracle in both Abraham and in Sarah's body. And what was produced was spirit. Not that Isaac was spiritual. But what caused Isaac to be produced was spirit.

So we have the line of Abraham deviating through Hagar and through Sarah. And so Sarah then becomes our spiritual mother. She is the type of the church on earth. See, the church is spiritual. And everybody in the church is there as the result of a miraculous spiritual intervention. And so we have a spiritual mother. She is not on earth. She is up in heaven. She is Jerusalem above. Where is our spiritual father? I mean our real spiritual Father. See, it is God the Father. And because He is there, so is our spiritual mother who is Jerusalem above, see, the church.

Verse 27 (of Galatians 4) is simply telling you that eventually the spiritual mother will have far more children than the physical. Because, you see, eventually virtually everybody ever born on earth is going to be a part of that Jerusalem above.

I will very quickly give you a series of verses that show this metaphor carries through.

Isaiah 54:5, where our mother is the wife of a husband. Well, we are not married yet to Christ, but Matthew 1:18-20 shows that under the Hebrew approach, that if you were betrothed, you were already considered a wife.

Psalm 87:5, our mother has children. Isaiah 66:8, where again it mentions the birth of children coming from the mother. I Peter 2:2, where the mother feeds her children. When they are young, it is milk. When they are grown up, it is meat. Proverbs 31:1; Proverbs 1:8 where a mother gives good counsel.

Matthew 5:43-45, mother prods her children to strive to do their best even in impossible situations. I Corinthians 5:5, which shows that the church is allowed to chastise sharply. Compare that to Titus 3:9-10. Proverbs 31:28, she also receives the praise of her children. Psalm 133:1-2 shows what is produced when her children submit to her.

Okay, I think that is enough for this evening. Thank you. You are dismissed.

JWR/aws/drm