GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LAMENTATIONS 4:4-5
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4 Because of thirst the baby’s tongue
sticks to the roof of its mouth.
Children ask for bread
but no one gives them any.
5 Those who once ate tasty treats
are deserted in the streets.
Those who were nurtured in purple
now embrace only ash heaps.
The cross of the exiles in Babylon was so very terrible! Remember that our prophet was not just imagining these things, he had seen them. He lived with people in these circumstances. He had lived it himself. Anyone who has held and kissed a newborn baby knows that they are nothing but slobber in the mouth, drooling and dribbling their saliva everywhere. If it weren’t for the cuteness and the delightful smell of a newborn, they wouldn’t be such a pleasure to hold. But the children, the babies and infants of the exile? There was no slobber. No drool. No smile. No giggle. They were parched with thirst. Their tongues were sticking to the roofs of their mouths, and their lips were cracked and bleeding. Older children asked (or begged) for bread, and while most of us would be happy to give a scrap of bread to a starving child, there was no bread to give. Nothing to eat. Although David said, “I have never seen a righteous person or his children begging for bread” (Psalm 37:25), that didn’t apply to the exiles, who had been sent into exile precisely because they were not righteous, but invited God’s wrath with their sin and unbelief.
The prophet even goes to the extreme to comment that the wealthy and the nobles, the kind of people who used to enjoy delicacies (or “tasty treats” as I’ve translated) had nothing but desolation. The starving man doesn’t care about fancy food or treats when he just craves a scrap of bread. It reminds me of the potato in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. There are a couple of appearances there of a simple, salted potato. When the main character (Pierre) is offered a potato by a peasant at a low-point in his life (he was captured by the French) he begins to learn to take joy in the simple pleasures in life and not in the silver-plated trimmings of French and Russian high society.
In the Babylonian exile, many of the nobles who used to delight in their delicacies and tasty treats now grasped at nothing but the ash heap. This might be a figure of speech (that is, the piel showing a figurative meaning for what would be literal in the qal stem), but the word-picture could also be of someone trying again and again to grasp something else, but coming up with nothing but ashes each and every time (the piel showing multiple occurrences). It was a miserable existence; a slow and hungry death, for many of the Jews.
As we turn our attention to the cross of Christ, we easily remember the words of David: “My strength is dried up like broken pottery, and my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. You lay me in the dust of death” (Psalm 22:15). Later in the same book, we are reminded of God’s power, mercy, and majesty: “Who is like the LORD our God, the One who sits enthroned on high, who stoops down… and lifts the needy from the ash heap?” (Psalm 113:5-7). But it was the Lord himself, the God who rescues, who went himself to the ash heap, whose tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he gasped out, “I am thirsty,” and who died his slow and thirsty death for us. He atoned for our sinfulness by becoming wretched, miserable, and by being damned by his Father. For us.
We who carry crosses ourselves often suffer under the mysterious burden of worry. We worry that our own children will have nothing to eat. We worry that we ourselves, who have grasped at a delicacy or a tasty treat from time to time, will come to a day when we are grasping at ashes instead of anything else. So we feel as if the burden is all on us. Me. I must provide, I must work harder, like the horse in Orwell’s Animal Farm, who was strong and brave and could do just about anything that needed to be done, except that he, too, turned out to be mortal. The temptation of this mysterious burden is to forget to ask God for help. Finally we need to be turned to put everything in God’s hands. It doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t feel like very good stewardship to leave everything up to God. But to go about my tasks, my work, and at the same time let God be in charge, is what our heavenly Father wants us to do. We want to labor and toil so that we will not be a burden to anyone (2 Thessalonians 3:8), but we don’t want all our labor and all our achievement to spring from envy of someone else (Ecclesiastes 4:4). Solomon reaches out to check out haste to run around doing, doing and doing more, and he says: “Better one handful with tranquility than two handfuls with toil and chasing after the wind” (Ecclesiastes 4:6). God will provide what we need; he only asks us to be good stewards of our time and his gifts, including the relationships we have, especially in our families. How are your children today? Your spouse? Your best friend? Your pet? Those temptations we have to get ahead at all costs are temptations to give up on our families and our health, forgetting that it was actually for the benefit of our families and even of our health that we were trying to work hard for. We become like a man who breaks up his cart and sells the pieces in order to afford a new wheel for his cart.
Our Lord Jesus died to pay for our sins, and even the mysterious sins that fall out of our worry. Contemplate, consider, ponder, and prayerfully learn just how marvelous a gospel message this is, that Christ died for us, and for all of it. We are forgiven. We are at peace with God. Trust him.
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 4:4-5 The roof of the mouth