GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LAMENTATIONS 1:5-6
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5 Her foes are on top now. Her enemies are at ease.
The LORD has brought her grief because of her many acts of rebellion.
Her children have walked into exile, captive before the foe.
“On top” is more literally the head, putting Judah on the bottom or at the tail. God had warned through Moses: “He will be the head, but you will be the tail” (Deuteronomy 28:44). Their actual march out of Judah is described more exactly at the end of the verse: “They have walked into exile, captive before the foe.” The Jews were not physically carried away, even though that term is used (2 King 20:17; Ezekiel 17:12), but they were forced to walk in chains (see Jeremiah 40:1).There would have been a guide of sorts, but for the most part, the captives went ahead of the captors.
It is here in the middle line of verse 5 that the reason for the exile is first spelled out: Judah’s many sins; her acts of rebellion. “You will be ashamed and humiliated because of all your evil” (Jeremiah 22:22). “Make yourself bald as a buzzard, because your children will be taken away from you into exile” (Micah 1:16). But even more specifically we are told: “King Zedekiah did evil in the eyes of the LORD, just as Jehoiakim had done. It was because of the LORD’s anger that all this happened to Jerusalem and Judah, and in the end he thrust them from his presence” (2 Kings 24:19-20).
The many acts of rebellion included a constant return to idolatry. “The detestable things that Jehoiakim did and all that was found against him” during Jehoiakim’s eleven years as king, (2 Chronicles 36:8), “the evil that Jehoiachin did” during his few months on the throne (2 Chronicles 36:9), and in the final years of Judah as a kingdom their last king Zedekiah “did not humble himself before Jeremiah the prophet,” “he rebelled against King Nebuchadnezzar, who had made him take an oath in God’s name,” and he finally “hardened his heart and would not turn to the LORD the God of Israel” (2 Chronicles 36:13).
6 All the splendor has departed from the Daughter of Zion.
Her princes are like deer that find no pasture;
they plod powerless before the pursuer.
The splendor of the city included the magnificent stone walls, broken by the Babylonians (2 Kings 25:10), the hundreds of bronze shields that were made to replace Solomon’s golden ones (2 Chronicles 12:10), the fluttering flags and banners on the high walls (Isaiah 49:22; Song of Solomon 6:4). The towers of the city were also impressive, as were the many pools of water, but best of all were the crowds of happy people, the nation of God delighted to live in the city of David.
The second and third lines depict the princes of Judah, the very last ones, worn out and with no rest anywhere. Like deer with nowhere to graze, they were wanderers. But they were tired, in need of rest, with none in sight. “The plod” is simply “they go” or “they walk” in Hebrew, but combined with “no pasture” and the word “powerless” suggested “plod” to this translator, and a nice poetic alliteration results: “Princes… no pasture… plod powerless before the pursuer.”
The cross of Judah is clear. The reason for that cross was revealed in verse 5: the many sins and transgressions of the Jews and their wicked kings. As Luther says: “The nearer the punishment, the worse the people become; and the more one preaches to them, the more they despise his preaching. Thus we understand that when it is God’s will to inflict punishment, he makes the people to become hardened so that they may be destroyed without any mercy” (“Prefaces to the Old Testament, LW 35:281).
Now that the end of the world is approaching more closely than it ever has before, people rant and rage more and more terribly against God and use the most awful blasphemies as they reject their Creator and Jesus our Lord. Even surrounded by many of the worst sinners that the world has ever known, we are still able to recognize that we, too, are sinners who deserve God’s wrath. No matter how wicked the world becomes, it will never be right to say, “At least I’m not as bad and this or that rotten sinner.” Instead, we learn to beat our breasts in the corner and whisper, “God have mercy on me, a sinner.”
But God is merciful, and he laid the cross of pain onto the shoulders of his own Son to be the sacrifice for the sins of the people, just as Caiaphas prophesied as high priest: “It is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish” (John 11:50). As John went on to explain: “He did not say this on his own, but as high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, and not only for that nation, but also for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one” (John 11:51-52).
The crosses that are laid on our shoulders today, crosses that are tests and trials of our faith, are small things, even when they threaten our lives. For God will carry us through such things to the resurrection and beyond, and we learn to love with a special delight the closing lines of the Creed:
“I believe in the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.”
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 1:5-6 powerless before the pursuer