We are back tonight in the book of Lamentations. Is everybody still with me? Are you ready for another round of lament? Maybe we are especially ready for another round of lament after a hard week. Whatever your week, your month may have looked like, we turn now to Lamentations chapter 4. It’s page 689 in the pew Bibles. This is our fourth of five poems or prayers of lament, prayers of grief, at the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BC. These are collected into this book of Lamentations. And there’s a good chance, there’s a good chance that you may never in your life hear another sermon on Lamentations chapter 4. Have you thought about that? This may be the only one you ever hear. I hope that’s not the case, but it may be. And I can sort of understand why looking at this chapter. This chapter doesn’t give us much in the way of good news. It’s pretty grim from start to finish. But at the same time, it should sound familiar to us. And in some way, you’ve heard this sermon before. In some ways, you will hear this sermon again one day. Not this exact sermon of course, but these images, these themes, this story, you know. And we need to be reminded again and again and again because things can be hard.
Lamentations chapter 4 feels like a setback. Chapter 3 was a breath of fresh air, but that’s about all it was – a breath, and it’s gone. Because the glimmer of hope that we found in chapter 3 is gone in chapter 4. Chapter 4 is back into the depths of sorrows. It seemed like the worst had passed. It seemed like things were beginning to make a turn for the better, but we are right back in the thick of it in Lamentations 4. This is a difficult chapter, but there are a couple of significant phrases that we find here in these verses, and really we find elsewhere in the Bible and we can use that as our outline tonight. And the first one is the phrase, “fugitives and wanderers.” We’ll see that in verse 15. And then we’ll come across another important phrase in verse 20. It is, “the Lord’s anointed.” So those two things we have to hold together when we’re going through not just hard things but everything in life. Hold together these two things – “fugitives and wanderers” and “the Lord’s anointed.” Let’s try to do that tonight before we read God’s Word. Let’s pray and ask His help and blessing. Let’s pray.
Father, we come before You with an eager expectation, with a prayer on our lips, that You would abide with us and that You would abide with us in Your Word, by Your Spirit. Open our ears. Give us hearts to receive the good seed that You cast out in Your Word, that we would hear the Gospel from Lamentations 4, that we would see Jesus from Lamentations 4, and that we would have hope and joy, even in the midst of grief and pain. We pray all this that You would do for Your own glory, and we pray it in Jesus’ name, amen.
Lamentations :
“How the gold has grown dim, how the pure gold is changed! The holy stones lie scattered at the head of every street.
The precious sons of Zion, worth their weight in fine gold, how they are regarded as earthen pots, the work of a potter’s hands!
Even jackals offer the breast; they nurse their young; but the daughter of my people has become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness.
The tongue of the nursing infant sticks to the roof of its mouth for thirst; the children beg for food, but no one gives to them.
Those who once feasted on delicacies perish in the streets; those who were brought up in purple embrace ash heaps.
For the chastisement of the daughter of my people has been greater than the punishment of Sodom, which was overthrown in a moment, and no hands were wrung for her.
Her princes were purer than snow, whiter than milk; their bodies were more ruddy than coral, the beauty of their form was like sapphire.
Now their face is blacker than soot; they are not recognized in the streets; their skin has shriveled on their bones; it has become as dry as wood.
Happier were the victims of the sword than the victims of hunger, who wasted away, pierced by lack of the fruits of the field.
The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food during the destruction of the daughter of my people.
The Lord gave full vent to his wrath; he poured out his hot anger, and he kindled a fire in Zion that consumed its foundations.
The kings of the earth did not believe, nor any of the inhabitants of the world, that foe or enemy could enter the gates of Jerusalem.
This was for the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests, who shed in the midst of her the blood of the righteous.
They wandered, blind, through the streets; they were so defiled with blood that no one was able to touch their garments.
‘Away! Unclean!’ people cried at them. ‘Away! Away! Do not touch!’ So they became fugitives and wanderers; people said among the nations, ‘They shall stay with us no longer.’
The Lord himself has scattered them; he will regard them no more; no honor was shown to the priests, no favor to the elders.
Our eyes failed, ever watching vainly for help; in our watching we watched for a nation which could not save.
They dogged our steps so that we could not walk in our streets; our end drew near; our days were numbered, for our end had come.
Our pursuers were swifter than the eagles in the heavens; they chased us on the mountains; they lay in wait for us in the wilderness.
The breath of our nostrils, the Lord’s anointed, was captured in their pits, of whom we said, ‘Under his shadow we shall live among the nations.’
Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom, you who dwell in the land of Uz; but to you also the cup shall pass; you shall become drunk and strip yourself bare.
The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter of Zion, is accomplished; he will keep you in exile no longer; but your iniquity, O daughter of Edom, he will punish; he will uncover your sins.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
First, “fugitives and wanderers.” If Lamentations chapter 3 was one step forward, then Lamentations 4 is two steps back. Chapter 3 was steadfast love and new morning mercies and great is Thy faithfulness. Chapter 3 had hope, but chapter 4?” Oh how the gold has grown dim. Happier were the victims of the sword than the victims of hunger who wasted away. Our eyes failed, watching vainly for help; our end drew near, our days were numbered.” Chapter 4 sounds a lot like chapters 1 and 2. In fact, there are several similarities between these three chapters. All three chapters begin with the very same word – “How?” How can this be? How bad can it get? And all three chapters deal with the problem of pain. They deal with the problem of God’s anger against sin. But this chapter is different in some ways. Chapter 4 is shorter than chapters 1 or 2. You see, chapters 1 and 2 were made up of twenty-two line verses, but chapter 4 is made up of twenty-two, two-line verses. In fact, some people think that chapter 4 is anticlimactic after the theological intensity of chapter 3. That this chapter, in some way, conveys a sense of exhaustion and remoteness.
And whatever the case, doesn’t that reflect something about the nature of grief? We read chapter 4 and we may be tempted to think, “We’ve been here before. This all sounds like ground that we’ve covered already.” Well in fact, people sometimes talk about that very same thing when they’re going through grief – taking one step forward and two steps back. Maybe they talk about getting stuck in grief. I was listening to a psychiatrist recently talking about many of the patients that he sees. He says they’re suffering, but that’s not why they are in his office. They’re suffering and they’re in his office because something has taken place that they have not been able to get over on their own. And he says that a common phrase that he oftentimes hears from sufferers in his psychiatrist’s office is, “I just feel like I’m stuck in this place where I cannot move on.” And he says a lot of it comes down to not so much making the pain, not so much making the grief go away, but it’s finding a way to trust God, finding a way to still have hope in the midst of the pain. It’s not straightforward, in other words. It’s not just a straight upward line of getting better. It’s not getting to this place where you just ride off into the sunset. No, instead, it’s chapter 3 followed by chapter 4. It’s faith and hope but still the memory of what we read in these verses, of children begging for food with no response, the horrific details of mothers in verse 10 boiling their own children to eat. There’s clothes, filthy and defiled with blood in verse 14. You don’t just get over these things. You don’t just move on. You cannot say, “This too shall pass.” No, this chapter, it acknowledges that it’s messy. It acknowledges that it’s complicated.
And that helps. That helps in its own sort of way. We don’t come to pain, to loss, to grief and we think, as we take a step back, we think, “Well maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s my problem.” But no, this is to be expected in some way. This is laid out for us on the pages of Scripture, and after all the hope of chapter 3, comes again into the despair of chapter 4. That helps in some way, doesn’t it?
But this chapter, it’s more than that. And it doesn’t just rehearse the details that are familiar to us from earlier in the book of Lamentations. It does something else. It actually tells us a story. It tells us a story that bears a striking familiarity with the whole history of the people of Israel. And if we were to just scan this chapter and find, really identify two big things from these verses, they would be hunger and homelessness. Hunger and homelessness. Verse 5, “Those who once feasted on delicacies perish in the streets.” Verse 8 says that “their skin has shriveled on their bones.” They were starving. And they were wandering. Look at verse 16. “The Lord himself has scattered them.” Verse 19, “They chased us on the mountains; they lay in wait for us in the wilderness.” Does that sound familiar to you at all? Because it should. It should be familiar to us because it sounds a whole lot like the story of the Old Testament. And people talk a lot of times about origin stories, don’t they? It’s a lot in the movies these days. There’s Darth Vader’s origin story or Spiderman’s origin story. Michael Jordan had an origin story and it was his being cut from his high school basketball team in the tenth grade. MJ did not make the team and Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina. And that was the moment, you see, that was the moment that ignited his inexhaustible competitive drive. That was the moment that was always, that is always the chip on his shoulder. Origin stories.
What was Israel’s origin story? Israel’s origin story, the beginning of the nation, the birth of a people, it was the Passover, and it was the exodus from Egypt. They were bound for the promised land, the land that God had promised to their ancestors, to the land of Canaan, but what was it like back then? What was it like back then at the very beginning? Well no sooner had it all begun than what did they start to experience? They began to experience hunger and homelessness and the harassment of the peoples around them. Isn’t that true? You know all about it. You know about their grumbling. You know about the manna. You know about the forty years of wandering in the wilderness. But just take Numbers chapter 20. Just take Numbers 20 as a snapshot of the whole experience. What do we find there? Listen to this in Numbers 20 in verses 3 and following. It says, “And the people quarreled with Moses and said, ‘Why have you brought the assembly of the Lord into this wilderness that we should die here, both we and our cattle?’” And then, there’s the wilderness, and then they say, “And why have you made us come up out of Egypt to bring us to this evil place? There is no place for grain or figs of vines or pomegranates and there is no water to drink.” Did you hear it? Wilderness and famine. Hunger and homelessness. And it was there in Numbers chapter 20 that Moses struck the rock and he was disqualified from entering into the land.
But get this, right after that, in Numbers chapter 20 verse 14, Moses makes this request to a king because he wants to pass through the land of Edom, a request to pass through the land of Edom. Does that sound familiar? Well look at the last two verses of Lamentations 4. “Rejoice and be glad, O daughter of Edom, you who dwell in the land of Uz.” And then the very last words, “But your iniquity, O daughter of Edom, he will punish, he will uncover your sins.” You see that? The last verses of Lamentations 4, the writer is rebuking Edom for adding insult to injury at the time of the exile. But way back in Numbers, in Numbers chapter 20 at the time of the exodus, we read that Edom said to Moses, “You shall not pass through. And Edom came out against them with a large army and a strong force.” Do you hear the parallels? The echoes that are there? In Numbers it’s hunger and homelessness and the harassment of Edom at the time of the exodus. Well here in Lamentations 4, it’s hunger and homelessness and the harassment of Edom at the time of the exile.
Here’s the point. Here in Lamentations 4, they are fugitives and wanderers, but in a very real sense they had always been fugitives and wanderers, going back to their very beginnings. In fact that’s what we read in Hebrews 11; that’s what it says about the patriarchs, that they all died in faith having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. You see, you can take this exile from Lamentations 4, read it all the way back not just to Numbers 20, read it all the way back to Genesis chapter 3. And this ties into an exile from the garden of Eden. Fugitives and wanderers. Strangers and exiles.
And do you know what? So are we. So are we. Peter writes to the Christians in the first century, he says, “To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion.” He says, “Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh.” What he’s saying is that we are to think of ourselves and the Christian life as being like fugitives and wanderers, sojourners and exiles. This suffering that we experience, it is not something new. It is not an aberration. No, this is part and parcel for living in a fallen and sinful world. It should not take us by surprise. But neither should it have the last word because this world is not our home. And being a stranger and a sojourner, an exile, it reminds us that we are merely passing through. And what it should do as we experience the brokenness, the fallenness, the pain of a fallen creation, but it should do is it should create in us, foster in us a deeper and greater longing for heaven because the flesh, “the outer man is wasting away, but the inner man is being renewed day by day, as we look to the things not that are seen but to the unseen things, because the things that are seen are temporary, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
And what Lamentations gives us is a guidebook. It gives us a guidebook of what life can be like as fugitives and wanderers in this world, as exiles on the earth. And as such, as such a guidebook, Lamentations prepares us for suffering. And if there’s anything this chapter should teach us, a lesson it should give to us, is that the Christian life is a life of perseverance. Don’t forget that. Don’t neglect to run the race with endurance, to fight the good fight, to compete as one seeking to win a crown. It’s teaching us perseverance, and as it teaches us perseverance, it’s preparing us for heaven. And our grief should do that as well, as we read our own grief into the grief of Lamentations 4. Fugitives and exiles. Fugitives and wanderers. That’s the first phrase.
The second phrase is in verse 20. It’s “the Lord’s anointed.” Look at verse 20. “The breath of our nostrils, the Lord’s anointed, was captured in their pits, of whom we said, ‘Under his shadow we shall live among the nations.’” Now you see, you could not have two categories more opposite from one another. On the one hand, there’s fugitives and wanderers. On the other hand, there’s the Lord’s anointed. This fugitives and wanderers, they’re rejects. But the Lord’s anointed is revered, set apart. And yet their experience is the exact same, isn’t it? One is unclean, untouchable. “Stay away from us!” And the other is cast into a pit like a slave or a prisoner or a wild animal. And this is not the first time these two ideas are found linked together. If we were to look in the Psalms, in Psalm 105, it says about Israel, it says, “When they were few in number and of little account and sojourners in it, wandering from nation to nation, he allowed no one to oppress them. He rebuked kings on their account saying, ‘Touch not my anointed ones. Do my prophets no harm.’” Their stories are the same. Do you see that?
I was recently listening to a story about Memphis landmarks, and there was this interview with a man who, he’s closely tied to Memphis. Listen to his resume. He used to be the historian of Shelby country. He worked for Mud Island River Park. He ran the Memphis Queen Line Riverboat Company. He was the operations coordinator for Beale Street. He directed the Memphis Rock and Soul Museum. He was the clock operator for basketball games at the FedEx Forum. And his last job was maybe the best of all. He was the official duckmaster at the Peabody Hotel! It’s like he is Memphis!
Now don’t press the illustration too far, but what do we find if we were to view the history of Israel, the history of the people through the life of one person? Hungry and homeless. A fugitive and a wanderer. And the anointed of the Lord. Well, He was forced to flee from His home as a refugee as just a baby. He went out into the wilderness and ate nothing for forty days and He was hungry. “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests” but He had nowhere to lay His head. He was rejected by His hometown and among His relatives and even in His own household. “He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, as one from whom men hid their faces, He was despised and we esteemed Him not.” They cried out, “Away with Him! Away with Him! Crucify Him!” and He was executed on the Jerusalem trash heaps of Golgotha. And some of His last words from the cross, “I thirst.” And He ended up cast into a grave that was not even His own.
Who is that? Who is that that describes with such striking similarity the things described in this chapter? It’s Jesus of course, isn’t it? It’s Jesus. The one of whom the angel said at His birth, the announcement of His birth, they said, “Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.” In other words, He is the Lord’s anointed. He is the Christ. He is the Messiah of the Lord. That’s Lamentations 2:20 – “Mashiach Yahweh” – “the Lord’s anointed.” “Anointed” is “Messiah” in Hebrew, which is “Christ” in Greek. Jesus is the Christ. And so the story of this chapter, it’s familiar. It’s familiar not just back to Lamentations 1 and 2; it’s familiar not just back to what we read in the history of Israel. But it’s also because of what we read with the coming of Jesus in the gospels. The life of Jesus is the embodiment of the story of Israel. He fully identified with everything that they went through as a people, including what we read in Lamentations 4. No one suffered like He has suffered. He is the true Israel. He is the true anointed of the Lord. He was made like us in every way, yet without sin.
And do you want to hear one more link? One more link between this lament and the life of Jesus. Again, who are those who harass the exiles and add to their grief in this chapter? It was Edom, remember? Well what about in the gospels? Who was it who sought to destroy Jesus’ life from the very beginning? Who was it who consented with Pilate in condemning Jesus to die? It was Herod. Herod the Great, at His birth, and Herod the Tetrarch at His death. Herod who was from Edomia or Edom. Herod was from Edom. That’s no accident. I’ve mentioned before the testimony that I saw online some years ago about a Jewish man who came to faith in Jesus. And in that video he says the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah is astonishing. He said if you were to read Isaiah 53 just by itself, if you didn’t have any of the Bible around it, you would say, “Oh, this is the Christian Bible. This is the New Testament. This is Jesus. It couldn’t be our Bible. It couldn’t be the Jewish Bible,” is what he said. But guess what? It is in the middle of the Hebrew Bible and it is Jesus.
Well can’t you say almost the exact same thing about Lamentations 4? This is Jesus. This is the Lord’s anointed. Even down to what we find in verse 11, “The Lord gave full vent to His wrath,” or verse 21, “But to you also the cup shall pass.” And verse 22, “The punishment of your iniquity, O daughter of Zion, is accomplished.” This is Jesus. Jesus took the cup of God’s wrath so that we never have to. “It was our sin that held Him there until it was accomplished.” I can’t imagine, I can’t imagine suffering like this in Lamentations 4. Can you? But Jesus can. And He went through it so that you never have to if you trust in Him. If you trust in His death and His resurrection as your death and resurrection, if you turn and follow Him, you will never experience the wrath of God. He went through it. Jesus went through it, and He can sympathize with you in whatever you are going through. You don’t have to do it on your own. No, you have one who will never leave you nor forsake you. You have one who is the same, yesterday, today and forever at your side. You have one who intercedes for you, even at the right hand of God to the very throne of grace that you may find grace to help in a time of need so that you can have comfort. There is a great, tremendous sympathy of Jesus in this chapter and “He ever lives to intercede.”
And even more than that, we also can say that Jesus ultimately puts an end to the suffering. You see, the only, the only slight bit of hope that we find in this chapter, it comes in verse 22. And it says, “He will keep you in exile no longer.” That’s all we get. But what is that saying? It’s saying that the worst had already happened. The exile, it is not forever. The end is in sight. What did Jeffrey remind us of in the mission report earlier? Ephesians chapter 2 – “So then, you are no longer strangers and exiles, aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone.” No longer strangers and aliens, but citizens, members of the family in Christ Jesus.
Did you know that we have a tendency to walk in circles? Back in the 1920s, a scientist named Esa Shaeffer, he asked a friend of his to put on a blindfold and he took him out to the edge of a field. And he asked him to walk straight across the field, as straight a line as he could. And this man walked out a little ways before he started to veer right. And before long, he had turned all the way and come back to the road where he started. And then he made a few more circles around in the field before he ran into a stump and stopped. And he thought that the whole time he had been walking in a straight line. And apparently that’s a common thing for us. If people are blindfolded, if we don’t have a landmark or a fixed point to look at, we’re going to end up walking in circles. Well, we may be strangers and exiles, we may be fugitives and wanderers, but we have a fixed point. It is the anointed of the Lord, Jesus the Messiah. He is the object of our faith and in Him we are citizens. We are members of the household of God. And like Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress, we are pilgrims but we are also headed to the city. And in our trials, in our disappointments, in our griefs and our sorrows, we must always hold those two things together. We must always keep our eyes there on Him, on the one who is the way, and the truth, and the life for us.
Let’s pray.
Our Father, we bow before You as You have brought us to these verses tonight in this time with many hearts that are heavy. And we read heavy things, and yet as we read them, we read words which point us to Your great plan of salvation, Your wisdom, a wisdom that is foolishness to the Greeks and yet it is the wisdom of God. And so we pray that You would help us to see, in the midst of whatever else is going on, that we would see the one who was raised victorious over the grave, that He will one day wipe away every tear, that there will be no more death forever. We pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.