September 1, 2010 :: :: Lamentations 1-2 & Psalm 33
Lamentations is made up of five poems. These laments were likely composed by Jeremiah, the prophet. We will read the first two today and the final three next time.
The first poem looks upon the destruction of Jerusalem, the city of God, and why it is that this destruction has come. The people have sinned and now the Lord has bound up their transgressions as a yoke that they must bear. And it is more than they can bear, such that that are crushed under it.
Jeremiah continues the confession on behalf of Jerusalem that “the LORD is right, for I have rebelled against his word.” God is not unjust to have brought His wrath upon the people. And Jeremiah is right to groan, and to be in distress, to become sick with grief.
I pray that I too will begin to understand the grief of seeing idolatry and wickedness among the people of God. God is just and worthy to be praised because He does not allow the wicked to go unpunished. But it ought to bring us grief to see the people who bear the name of God fall under the discipline of their own faithlessness. It is a sorrowful thing to see the LORD “become like an enemy” to His people.
Chapter 2 speaks of the prophets of the people. It is in large part because of their false visions and misplaced security that the people have become misled. There is ample blame to go around. But the people are not guiltless. It is their responsibility to know the law of the Lord. It is their responsibility to meditate upon it day and night. The prophets ought to have called them back to their covenant with God, but the people also ought to have known their own wickedness and turned in repentance. And as we have seen, God did send faithful prophets such as Jeremiah and Isaiah to speak the truth and warn of the impending destruction if they did not turn and repent.
Psalm 33 ::
In the middle of this psalm is a verse that is often partially quoted. It says, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD …” But the second half of the verse says, “… the people whom he has chosen as his heritage.” There are a few things that I would like to observe about this verse. First, the psalmist uses the covenant name for God. We know this in the English translation because the letters of LORD are all capitalized. This is the name Yahweh, the name that God revealed to Moses as the covenant name between God and the people He had chosen to bless.
Second, this nation which is blessed is not just any nation. It is the nation “chosen” by God. This psalm is speaking of the special blessing that the Israelite people received when God came to them, having called them out of Egypt, and made a covenant with them to be their God and that they would be His people. This is why the lament of Lamentations is so powerful. With the destruction of Jerusalem and the captivity of the people, it is as though the people had become an enemy of God.
Thus, there must be more to being a nation whose God is the LORD than simply being Israel. Israel, having forsaken the LORD came to know the curse of God as a nation. And yet, a nation can’t just take a vote or have a proclamation by a king or a president that thereby makes them God’s nation. It is not by the will of man, but by the will of the LORD that He choses whom He will bless. God, in Christ has chosen people from out of all the nations of the earth to be His people. These are the people whom, through Christ, know the steadfast love of the LORD. The eye of the LORD is upon these who fear Him.
Israel was foolish when filled with idolatry and surrounded by enemies to cry “peace, peace” simply because the temple was in their midst. And any nation today is equally foolish to believe that they are God’s people simply because they have received great blessing in the past. There is no nation other than Israel who are descendants of the promise to Abraham. But the promise of the LORD to Abraham was that through Him all the families of the earth would be blessed. It is in Christ, the promised descendant of Abraham that the blessing of Yahweh has come upon “all the inhabitants of the world” that we might “stand in awe of him!”
