GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LAMENTATIONS 1:2
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2 She weeps bitterly at night; tears are on her cheek.
Of all her lovers there is not one to comfort her.
All her friends have betrayed her. They are her enemies.
The city of Jerusalem is seen as a weeping woman with tears on her cheek. The Hebrew language is not rich in adverbs or descriptive terms. What we translated as “weep bitterly” is said with the same word twice in Hebrew; two verbs that say, essentially, “to weep, and weep.” While the grammar is different from the more definite “he wept bitterly” of the New Testament (Matthew 26:75), the mind easily sees that the acts of weeping bitterly or weeping and weeping are the same. The city, by which the prophet means those few people left in the city, weeps because there is no one to comfort them.
Like a lonely, deserted woman in the night, Jerusalem is wide awake, weeping bitterly. When the prophets talk about Israel’s lovers, they’re talking about the false gods of other nations. Where is Bel? Where is Nebo? Where are the gods of Philistines or the Egyptians? Perhaps the wind knocked them down again. Perhaps their makers should have nailed down their feet (Isaiah 41:7; Jeremiah 10:4). What about her friends? The nations themselves are no help. They coaxed her to bow down to their gods, but they won’t help now that trouble has come. “They have become her enemies.”
This is just like all the traps of the devil. The devil wears his “liar” hat and coaxes us, romances us, woos us, to commit this or that sin. Whatever sin it is, it will go hand-in-glove with a sin against the First Commandment, because that’s always the devil’s trap. But as soon as anyone falls into the sin, off goes the devil’s “liar” hat and on goes his “accuser” cap. “Accuser” is just what Satan means, and he uses this cap to accuse and belittle and taunt the fallen sinner: “How could you! How will God ever forgive you now? Didn’t you remember that God despises sin and condemns sinners like you to eternity in hell?”
The devil is never your friend. He brings nations like Israel down into loathsome ruin, the ruin of unbelief, rejecting Christ even though they had all the promises of the Messiah through Moses and the Prophets. What a joke for him! What a jerk he is! What a trap for us. What a Savior we need! But the joke is no joke, and the Savior is God himself. Israel, the true Israel, really did put their trust in Jesus, and they were saved. This is the same trust we have in Jesus our Lord, who gave his blood to rescue us from the guilt of all of our sins.
The first cross, the cross of Judah after the destruction of their land, is obvious here. We have also seen how this relates to the third cross, which is the cross that the Christian bears each day. But in the third line of the verse we most clearly witness the second cross; the cross of Christ. Here friends have betrayed; friends have become enemies.
Most of the disciples simply ran away when Jesus was arrested. Peter denied his Lord in the courtyard of the high priest (Mark 14:66-72). Confronted with being a friend of Jesus, he denied him. Confronted with associating with Jesus, he denied him. Confronted on account of his Galilean accent (Matthew 26:73), he denied him.
The other disciple, Judas, was seized with remorse when he saw that Jesus was condemned even though he was innocent. Greed, a lust for money, had tempted him, and when he stepped into that trap it snapped around his ankle and would not let him go. Begging the chief priests got him nothing. He tried to give back the money, but they didn’t care. They didn’t care about Judas, they didn’t care about the truth, and they didn’t care about the innocence of Jesus or the illegality of their kangaroo court. They only wanted to kill Jesus.
They got what they wanted. The devil got what he thought he wanted. But he had missed the meaning of the words that God had spoken to him when he hissed and slithered at Eve’s shoulder so long ago in the Garden. He could strike the Son of God, but the Son of God would crush his head at the same time and end his power, the power of sin, death, and temptation, forever. The devil thought that all of this was his own secret conniving and machinations. But it was really just God’s holy plan all along. He rescued us through that blood shed on the cross, and he ended the bitter weeping of death, forever.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Lamentations 1:2 To weep bitterly