Behold My Afflictions

Her foes have become the head. Her enemies prosper because the Lord has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions. Her children have gone away, captives before the foe. From the daughter of Zion, all her majesty has departed. Her princes have become like deer that find no pasture.

They fled without strength before the pursuer. Jerusalem remembers in the day of her affliction and wandering all the precious things that were hers from the days of old. When her people fell into the hand of the foe, and there was none to help her, her foes gloated over her. They mocked at her downfall. Jerusalem sinned grievously.

Therefore, she became filthy. All who honoured her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness. She herself groans and turns her face away. Her uncleanness was in her skirts. She took no thought of her future.

Therefore, her fall is terrible. She has no comforter. Oh Lord, behold my affliction for the enemy has triumphed. The enemy has stretched out his hands over all her precious things, for she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary, those whom you forbade, whom you forbade to enter your congregation.

All her people groan as they search for bread. They trade their treasures for food to revive their strength. Look, oh Lord, and see for I am despised. Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of His fierce anger.

From on high, He sent fire into my bones. He made it descend. He spread a net for my feet. He turned me back, and He has left me stunned, faint all day long. My transgressions were bound into a yoke.

By His hand, they were fastened together. They were set upon my neck. He caused my strength to fail. The Lord gave me into the hands of those whom I cannot withstand. The Lord rejected all my mighty men in my midst.

He summoned an assembly against me to crush my young men. The Lord has trodden as in a winepress the virgin daughter of Judah. For these things I weep, my eyes flow with tears, for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my spirit. My children are desolate for the enemy has prevailed.

Zion stretches out her hands, but there is no one to comfort her. The Lord has commanded against Jacob that his neighbours should be his foes. Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them. The Lord is in the right, for I have rebelled against His word. But hear, all you peoples, and see my suffering.

My young women and my young men have gone into captivity. I called to my lovers, but they deceived me. My priests and elders perished in the city while they sought food to revive their strength. Look, oh Lord, for I am in distress. My stomach churns.

My heart is wrung within me because I have been very rebellious. In the street, the sword bereaves. In the house, it is like death. They heard my groaning, yet there is no one to comfort me. All my enemies have heard of my trouble.

They are glad that you have done it. You have brought the day you announced. Now let them be as I am. Let all their evil doing come before you, and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my transgressions. For my groans are many and my heart is faint.

I know a woman who has followed Jesus as far as I know all of her life. She's a humble woman. I've never known her to cause anyone harm, a gracious woman. But about eight years ago, tragedy struck her life. She lost one of her two sons to cancer.

It was a blow to the family. About two years ago, she lost her husband as well and became a widow. And then last year, she lost her remaining son to cancer. She became a childless widow. And I was her pastor.

I went to her home to visit her and to pray with her, and after we exchanged words, there were times of long silence, just sitting there at the dining table. It wasn't awkward, it felt appropriate. Sometimes there are situations where there are just no words. There is just so much despair, so much suffering, so much sadness. It feels like words fail us.

And the book of Lamentations was written in the wake of such a devastating disaster that you'd think that there would be no words. Jerusalem was destroyed. It was put under siege for eighteen months. This is around about six hundred years before Jesus came, and during those eighteen months, the conditions inside the city were devastating. People began to starve.

You can imagine the weakest died first, the elderly and the young. The text even says that mothers who were tender in heart even boiled their children for food. And as the city reached the end of the siege, the king and his mighty men tried to leave. They departed, fled, left the people there for dead, but they were too weak to outrun the Babylonians. They were hunted down and captured.

The king's sons were slaughtered in front of his eyes before his eyes were gouged out. This is the background to the book of Lamentations. It's not a light thing. It was a devastating thing. And this is why this series is called Words When There Are None.

Because this is a situation where you'd think there would be no words, but God graciously provides words through a prophet who picks up a pen after the disaster and puts words to the people's sorrows, puts words to their grief, puts words to their shame and their guilt, gives them words to bring their hearts to God. You might be in a time right now where you are suffering deeply, and it feels appropriate to be looking at a book like this. Maybe comforting even to acknowledge the sorrow. But maybe you're here and you're like, woah, I didn't know I was coming to a funeral this morning. Let's lighten up a little bit.

But, you know, there's actually wisdom to be found in this space. In Ecclesiastes 7:4, it says, the heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. And I think we're more prone to that on the Gold Coast, prone to create a nice lifestyle and just to have fun and to enjoy the beach and to just keep it light, have fun, go out to a nice restaurant, or whatever it might be. We don't necessarily want to be in the house of mourning, the house of death, but it's there where wisdom is found, where perspective is gained, where illusions are shattered, and we can find out what really matters. So there's so many reasons why spending five weeks in a book like this is healthy and wise for us.

I hope that you'll join us for the whole journey. I've written a series guide for this book that hopefully you received this morning. If not, there's some at the back corner over there. And this is a guide, a resource for you throughout this series. There's a bit of background information in there about the book. There's some resources, some other books you can buy online if you want to go further, and there's a Bible reading guide inside.

So for five weeks, we've got daily Bible readings that you can choose to participate in with your church family, and just dive a little bit deeper into the context and into this theme that we'll be in for the next five weeks. So I commend that to you. Please make use of that in your Bible reading time. Now let me just share a little bit of background with you before we open up this first chapter. The author is probably the prophet Jeremiah.

The reason I say probably is because the book actually never states who the author is. Traditionally, most people think it's Jeremiah though. The reason being that there's a lot of parallelism between the language in Lamentations and the book of Jeremiah. We actually know that Jeremiah himself composed laments and that he was alive after this disaster happened. So it probably was Jeremiah.

I'm going to assume it was for this series. Secondly, it was written in the — around May is when the destruction occurred, so sometime after that was when Jeremiah wrote it. And then thirdly, its literary structure. This is something you won't see in your English translation, but in the original Hebrew, the first four chapters are actually acrostics, alphabetic acrostics. So that's why chapters one, three, and four are all 22 verses, because there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and each verse starts off with a Hebrew letter.

So if it was English, the first verse would start with A, and then the second verse would start with B, and so on and so forth. Now chapter three is an acrostic, but it's the heart of the book and it has 66 verses, three times the amount of the other chapters, because for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, there are three verses devoted to each letter. And so when we get to chapter three, we'll get right into the heart of the book itself. But then chapter five retains the 22 verses, the same number of letters, but it abandons the acrostic. It's almost like the first four chapters are giving us an A to Z of grief, an A to Z of suffering, but then chapter five finally breaks down, and grief cannot be ordered, it cannot be constrained to this nice little structure. The grieving breaks out in the final fifth chapter.

And so we'll see that as we get there, but just keep that in mind as you read your Bible, that those acrostics are in the background of chapters one to four, and then chapter five, there's no acrostic. Well, with all those things being said, we've got a lot to unpack in this book, and so let's get into the first chapter. We're going to explore what it means under three headings, and the first thing we see is a guilty city's lonely and bitter suffering. A guilty city's lonely and bitter suffering. In verse one, it says, how lonely sits the city that was full of people.

Now you might have noticed it in the Bible reading, but this whole chapter is about Lady Jerusalem. Jerusalem is personified. She's spoken about as a person who's lost her people and so on. Sometimes she's referred to as Judah, sometimes as Jacob, sometimes as Zion, which was a hill that the temple was built on inside Jerusalem. So interchangeably, names are used for this personified city, and it speaks about her loneliness.

This is a lament for the city and her people. And by the way, I forgot to explain what a lament is, but a lament is a form of prayer that suffering people have used for millennia to express their pain and their protest to God, and that's actually something we'll be learning a bit about through this series about how to lament, to give ourselves language for the times of suffering and sorrow and pain and shame as well. So the city is in view, and in this first section, verses one to 11, the city is being described, and then once we get past verse 11 primarily, the city herself speaks, it becomes more raw. But to start with, the city is being described, and there's this emphasis on loneliness or desolation or abandonment. So this phrase, no comforter, is repeated throughout the whole chapter, that there's no comforter for her.

In verse one, we see that Jerusalem has gone from being a wife to a widow. In verse two, her friends have become her enemies. See, Jerusalem had allied herself with other nations, trusting in other countries like Egypt rather than in God. Verse four, the roads are empty. The roads used to be filled with pilgrims who travel into Jerusalem for festivals, but no longer does that happen because the temple's been destroyed, the city's been razed to the ground, people have been taken into exile.

Verse five, her children have been taken from her. Verse six, her majesty has departed, the royalty have fled. There's this loneliness that's emphasised, this abandonment, this desolation that is emphasised in these first few verses. You see, Jerusalem had trusted in the wrong things. She'd allied herself to the wrong nations.

She trusted in false gods, and crises have a way of exposing us. When your normal way of coping is not working anymore, it has a way of revealing the futility of so many things that we look to for comfort and peace. When your city has been destroyed and your neighbours have been slaughtered and your people have been taken into exile, Netflix isn't going to cut it. Food becomes unappetising. So many things turn out to be meaningless.

What do you have left in those situations when there are no words? You have God. God remains, and you can bring your heart to Him and lament. You can bring your pain and your protests to Him. In this first section, there is an emphasis on Jerusalem's loneliness.

There's also an emphasis on her shame. The image of adultery is used here, and it was used in the Old Testament to confront God's people for running to other gods and nations instead of their divine husband. Jerusalem in this chapter is pictured as an unfaithful wife who has been sleeping around with other gods and nations. We see this in one of Jeremiah's warnings in the book of Jeremiah, which was written before this one, and there are phrases in Jeremiah that are exactly the same as what we find in the book of Lamentations, and this is another one of the reasons why I think Jeremiah did write Lamentations. But here's some background from the book of Jeremiah in chapter 13. He says, hear and give ear.

Be not proud, for the Lord has spoken. Give glory to the Lord your God before He brings darkness, before your feet stumble on the twilight mountains. And while you look for light, He turns it into gloom and makes it deep darkness. But if you will not listen, my soul will weep in secret for your pride. My eyes will weep bitterly and run down with tears.

This was not a hellfire and brimstone preacher. This was a man who was brutally and honestly warning the people of the coming judgment, but also saying, I'm going to weep if you don't repent. And you see lots of tears in chapter one, because the Lord's flock has been taken captive. He's already prophesying the exile.

Verse 19, all Judah is taken into exile, wholly taken into exile. This is your lot, the portion I have measured to you, declares the Lord, because you have forgotten me and trusted in lies. And then here comes the adultery imagery. I myself will lift up your skirts over your face, and your shame will be seen. I have seen your abominations, your adulteries and crimes, like a lusty stallion going from mare to mare, your lewd whorings on the hills in the field.

Woe to you, O Jerusalem. How long will it be before you are made clean? Confronting language. This isn't about literal adultery. Maybe the people were.

Maybe that was happening, but this passage is about spiritual adultery. It's about idolatry. God's people trusted in lies, in other nations and gods, over their faithful husband Yahweh, and God had been warning them. Jeremiah was warning them with tears, turn back to God or you will be exposed, and your people will be taken captive. This is the background behind Jeremiah's lament in verses eight to nine of our passage, where he says, Jerusalem sinned grievously.

Therefore, she became filthy. All who honoured her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness. She herself groans and turns her face away. Her uncleanness was in her skirts. She took no thought of her future.

Therefore, her fall is terrible. She has no comforter. Jerusalem is pictured like an adulterous harlot who's sitting in the ashes, doesn't care what she looks like, and she's utterly despised. Jerusalem's suffering was devastating, but her suffering was not that of an innocent victim. She's not like Job in the Bible, who was a righteous sufferer, and there's a theme of righteous suffering in the Bible.

Lamentations is the words of a guilty sufferer, a people who had been ignoring God's warnings for centuries, who didn't think judgment would come, and who were now groaning under its unbearable weight. One of the things this chapter is doing is warning those who think that God's judgment will never come, that it can be avoided and escaped. One scholar, F. B. Huey, writes about this chapter. He says, it serves as a solemn reminder of the ultimate misery and sorrow of all who think they can escape God's judgment. I would say it especially serves as a solemn reminder for those who call themselves Christian, who hear warnings about sin, but think they can escape God's judgment.

They think, you know, the Bible doesn't even take that seriously. It'll never happen. My drinking problem, yeah, it's not great, but it doesn't matter that much. My porn use, it's not good, but it doesn't matter that much. The Bible doesn't need to be taken that seriously.

That's the kind of attitude that led to the situation in Lamentations one, and it was utterly devastating when God's judgment finally fell. Now hear me. I'm not talking to you if you're wrestling and struggling with sin. We all do that. I'm talking to you if you've made peace with your sin, and you're excusing it and trying to hide your conscience from God's word.

Lamentations one is a bit like the final speech of a convicted criminal on death row who's telling you, don't do what I did. This is what's happened to me. It's devastating. I wish I'd learnt sooner. Jonathan Moore was an American man who was convicted of gunning down a police officer who interrupted Moore and two accomplices during the robbery of a house in January 1995.

Moore was executed in Texas, and in his final statement, he admitted the killing was driven by fear. He said it wasn't until he was locked up staring at a newspaper photo of the man he killed that he'd realised what he'd done. He'd realised he had killed an innocent man. The reality had hit him, but he didn't see the weight of it until it was too late to undo. Lamentations one is a little bit like that.

It's a solemn reminder. God's judgment will fall against sin one day. He will never pervert justice. If you have not repented of your sin, forsake it and receive the mercy that God freely offers today. God is a righteous judge.

Justice fell on Jesus' head for the sins of those who repent and trust in Him, and justice will fall again on all those who refuse to repent and heed God's warnings. Don't ignore God if He's pressing on your heart today. The suffering of Jerusalem was brutal, bitter, and lonely, but it wasn't out of the blue. It wasn't undeserved. It fell because a nation was not willing to repent and turn back to God.

But just because the judgment was just doesn't mean it was easy to stomach. Let's listen more closely to Lady Jerusalem as her own voice comes to the fore, and she wrestles both with her undeniable guilt and her unbearable pain. So this is the second section of our passage, verses 11b to 20. The city's cry for comfort and confession of guilt. Now in this section, Lady Jerusalem is looking for sympathy, for comfort, for companionship in a time of shell shock and suffering, and the emphasis is clear when you notice how much the Hebrew word look is repeated.

I'm going to put a graph on the screen that shows you how much this Hebrew word comes up, and you can see in chapter one, it just comes up again and again. She keeps crying out to God, look at me, look at my suffering. She cries out to those around, look at me, look at what's happened to me. She's looking for comfort, for sympathy, for companionship when she has none. Lamentations 1:11, we read her say, look, oh Lord, and see for I am despised.

Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which is brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of His fierce anger. Or verse 18, hear all you peoples and see my suffering. My young women and my young men have gone into captivity. I called to my lovers, the nations she trusted in wrongly, but they deceived me.

They didn't come to save her. My priests and elders perished in the city while they sought food to revive their strength. Look, oh Lord, for I am in distress. My stomach churns. My heart is wrung within me because I have been very rebellious.

In the street, the sword bereaves. In the house, it is like death. They heard my groaning, yet there is no one to comfort me. There's that repeat line again. No one to comfort.

Can you hear the loneliness of her suffering? This lament not only gives words to guilty sufferers, but it gives words to lonely sufferers. The person who feels like no one understands, that no one sees, and that even those who do see or hear do not really care. So many people suffer silently, afraid that if they do open up, it will be met with a cold shoulder or an unthoughtful comment that compounds the pain, or they suffer silently because they think tears should not be shown in public. As a church though, we want to obey the words of Romans 12:15, which say rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.

It doesn't say teach those who weep. Oh, you know, you'll learn better next time. Doesn't say cheer up those who weep. Oh, you'll be fine. It's okay.

It's, you know, it'll get better. Doesn't say avoid those who weep. Oh, no. They're crying again. They mustn't be getting over it.

It says weep with those who weep. As a church, we want to be comfortable with suffering people. We of all people know that we live in a broken world. We can acknowledge this, yet the only mourning practice in most churches are funerals. Sometimes it's the only space that we give people to mourn, to cry and to grieve.

But we know that there are many other heartbreaks we endure in this valley of tears. This is why the art of lament is so important to learn, because we want to be able to lament our own pains, but also to pray words of lament with one another in our sorrows. Lady Jerusalem cried out for comfort, but she had been abandoned by her fair-weather friends. This lament is full of complexity because while she's crying out for comfort and sympathy, she's also confessing her guilt. Read with me in verse 18.

She says, the Lord is in the right, for I have rebelled against His word. Verse 20, look, O Lord, for I am in distress. My stomach churns, my heart is wrung within me because I have been very rebellious. These words of the prophet that Jeremiah has written, they're spiritual medicine for a despairing people whose own sin is to blame for their woes. Not all suffering has its consequences in sins, so please don't hear me saying that.

But in the background of Lamentations was a rebellious nation constantly being warned by the prophets, constantly going their own way and rejecting God's counsel, a nation that didn't think the judge would ever come, but then it finally fell. So Jeremiah is doing something very wise and pastoral here. He's not just giving them words of lament to express and protest their pain. He's also giving them words of confession to own their guilt and turn back to God. And this is wise in this kind of situation where the suffering was clearly caused by sin.

That lady I mentioned at the beginning, if I went and sat with her in her house and lamented with her, but I also said, and let's look at what sins are behind this, like why has this happened in your life, that would be brutal, and that would be unpastoral, that would be unwise, because I don't think that that happened because of a direct consequence of her sin. I just think it's part of living in a broken world. But let's say that there's a man that comes to me, he's cheated on his wife for years, he gets found out, and he's my pastor, he wants to meet with me at my office, he's crying on the couch.

There's a couch in the office now if you want to go and check out the new office after the service. And I'm saying to him, man, I'm so sorry. This is terrible. I can't believe this has happened to you. Now something about that's compassionate, but something about that's really unhelpful as well. Jeremiah does both things.

He laments in their pain, like he's not heartless. He weeps with them. It's devastating what's happened to Jerusalem. It's devastating what happened to the theoretical man who's lost his wife and his children because he got found out. But he also wisely gives them words of confession, and that's something that the man who committed adultery would need as well.

This is terrible. Let's bring this to God together. Let's own this together. What can we learn from this as we cry together as well? That's what Jeremiah is doing, and remember, God has inspired His word here.

So God is wisely giving these people who are suffering for their sins words to express their pain to Him, and also to confess their guilt to Him. And in that kind of situation, this is helpful. This is wise. You can humbly own your situation in a situation like that while still crying out to God about how hard it is. That's a bit like what's happening here in Lamentations one.

Now the whole chapter has been a lament, but it finishes on a different note. It moves into a genre we call imprecation. It's a form of prayer in the Bible where the prayer asks God to judge their enemies. Now you might be thinking, I'm not sure if that sounds very like Jesus. Didn't He say, you know, pray for those who persecute you or something like that?

How are we meant to understand this? Well, let's explore under the final heading, the city's appeal against her spiteful enemies. The city's appeal against her spiteful enemies. Let me read verses 21 to 22 for us again. She says, all my enemies have heard of my trouble.

They are glad that you have done it. You have brought the day you announced. Now let them be as I am. Let all their evil doing come before you and deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my transgressions, for my groans are many and my heart is faint. Now is this a bloodthirsty cry for vengeance?

Let's try to understand what Jerusalem's enemies were actually doing first. There's a psalm that was written by some of the exiles that were in Babylon, and it sheds insight on how Jerusalem's neighbours, the Edomites, treated them. So in Psalm 137, these psalmists cry out to God. They say, remember, oh Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they said, lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations. How cruel was that?

Eighteen months of siege, people dying, cannibalism, the king fleeing, his eyes being gouged out, and the Edomites are outside going, yes. Lay it bare. That is utterly cruel. This is not the kind of situation where someone's cut you off in traffic. This is like the Nazis gathering outside a gas chamber and throwing a party to celebrate what's going on inside.

It's cruel. It's evil. This prayer of imprecation at the end of Lamentations one, it's not petty. Still, does that mean that God's people can seek revenge when it gets really bad? Well, notice that is exactly what they aren't doing.

They aren't doing anything to the Edomites. They're not hatching plans or thinking about how to make them hurt, make them pay. They are praying. Imprecation is in the Bible because it helps us let go of revenge and leave justice in God's hands. We see this dynamic at play in Romans 12 in the New Testament, where it says, beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.

So at the same time, Paul's saying don't avenge yourselves, but leave it to God. That's what imprecation does. It gives justice to God and actually enables you in the wake of devastations like the Holocaust to actually bring that cry for justice to God and enables you to forgive. You don't short-circuit the process and say, okay, well, forgive, forgive, forgive, quick, that's the Christian thing to do. Imprecation gives us words in the face of horrible injustice.

We have prayers of imprecation in the New Testament as well. You might think, oh, it's probably more of an Old Testament thing. We have one in Revelation. That comes from believers who were murdered for their faith in Jesus. It says in Revelation 6, they cried out with a loud voice, O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?

These are martyrs that were in heaven, and they were praying for God's justice. So can we pray imprecatory prayers, or would that be breaking the command of verses like 1 Peter 3, which say something like, when people revile you, do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless those sorts of people. So are we breaking commands like that? Let me just say four things. You can pray imprecatory prayers because they're in the Bible, and they're in the Psalms, and the Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible that we can pray to God.

The fact that they are there means we can pray them. But number two, imprecation is made for a particular context. These are not words for when someone cuts you off in traffic. These are not words for someone who gets the promotion instead of you. These are not words for the person who gets that last helping of dinner and you wanted to get another helping.

These are not prayers for personal vendettas and petty grudges. These are words to be used in the wake of profound injustice. They're asking God to be consistent with His justice, not mine or yours. They're used to seek justice, not to comfort a bruised ego. Number three, imprecatory prayers don't actually breed vengeance.

I think that's what worries us sometimes with words like these, and even worries me sometimes as a pastor, like, oh, if we pray these in a silly way, will we become vengeful people? But these prayers precisely leave vengeance to God, and they actually allow us to forgive our adversaries. We see this dynamic in Jesus' life as well. 1 Peter 2 says that when Jesus was reviled, He did not revile in return. When He suffered, He did not threaten.

Why? Because He continued entrusting Himself to Him who judges justly. He knew that justice was coming so He could withhold and forgive and love even those who were brutally torturing Him at the cross. And number four, I don't think it needs to be a choice between imprecation or loving your enemies. I think you can do both.

You can pray for justice like Jerusalem in this lament while still loving the enemies who have hurt you, which is exactly what Daniel did in Babylon. He was an exile taken to Babylon, and he sought the good of the city and the good of the king, but they were the people who destroyed Jerusalem. If you've experienced horrific cruelty or abuse, imprecatory prayers are a resource God has given you in the Bible. Use them. Let them help you name the cruelty and to cry out to God for justice.

You can pray these words without feeling guilty, and He will do perfect justice when the time is right. There's lots of hard stuff in this passage, lots of tears, lots of weeping, but did you know that the exiles eventually returned generations later? The city was rebuilt, the temple was rebuilt, desolate Jerusalem was filled again, parents with their children and lovers with their weddings. And just like Jeremiah, generations later, another Jewish prophet arose. His name was Jesus.

And He came to the city with words of woe, just like Jeremiah, even as He wept over it. We read about it in Luke 19. It says, and when Jesus drew near and saw the city, He wept over it, saying, would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children with you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you because you did not know the time of your visitation. Some things never change.

The city was once again rebelling, not just against the message of a prophet, but of the Messiah Himself, Jesus Christ. Jesus was crying because He knew the city would once again be judged and destroyed, which we know happened in AD 70, about forty years after Jesus' death. The Romans came, just like the Babylonians, surrounded the city and razed it to the ground. It was such a sad cycle. It's a cycle we see all throughout the Bible. The people of God would rebel, God would judge them.

They would repent. God would restore them. The people of God would rebel again, and God would judge them, and they would repent, and God would restore them. They needed divine intervention. They needed new hearts to change. And this is where Jesus came in.

He came to break the cycle by doing what Israel should have done, living a faithful life to God. He broke the cycle by paying the penalty for all their sins, by letting Himself be destroyed by the nations. Except this time, it wasn't the Babylonians, it was the Romans. Jesus let God's anger against sin fall on His head. The words of Lamentations 1:12 may have been written for Israelites after Jerusalem's destruction, but they fit so perfectly on Jesus' lips.

Can you not hear Him saying on the cross, verse 12, is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the Lord inflicted on the day of His fierce anger. Jesus went through hell to give us heaven. Jesus took the sorrows and sins of God's rebellious people upon Himself. He allowed Himself to be treated like Lady Jerusalem.

She was stripped bare, razed to the ground. He was stripped of His clothes. He was hung up there naked on the cross, a shame for all to see, like an unclean harlot. His enemies gloated over His death. They licked their lips with vengeance.

Why? Why did this happen? To stop the cycle of rebellion and judgment, to heal God's way with people and to make them beautiful again. See, God did hear the lament of Lamentations one. God had mercy on His believing people.

God gave up His own Son for their sake and yours. And you know, one day Jerusalem will be more beautiful than it ever has been. The city will be glorious and radiant like a bride on her wedding day. This is what we see at the end of the Bible in Revelation 21. John saw this vision, and he says in verse two, and I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

See, that Jerusalem, this is the bride. It's the people of God. Picture it as a city. Picture it as a bride. And then in verse 10, John says, and he carried me away in the Spirit to a great high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.

This is the new Jerusalem that is to come. This is your future, church. You will be the new Jerusalem. God's people will never be destroyed again because Jesus was punished in our place. Until that day, as we make our way through this valley of tears, you can cry out in anguish, and you can own your own guilt, because the God who judges is also your comforter and defender.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for graciously giving us words. Words to pray to you when we're devastated by our own sin. Words to pray to you when we're devastated by suffering. Father, we ask that your Spirit would be our companion in these coming days and weeks and that you would teach us how to lament, how to bring our pain, our sorrows, our suffering, our guilt, all those different things to you.

Father, I ask that you would deeply comfort those who are among us who are just carrying heartbreak, who are devastated by things done to them or things done by them, and I pray that you would be their wise shepherd, bringing them through this valley of tears. We commit ourselves to you, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.