Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - The Role of Lament | The Writings | Lamentations

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Are you comfortable with corporate lamenting? How do Christians deal with grief and sorrow? Is Christianity shallow? In today's episode, Keith shares important lessons about finding hope in the midst of grief in Lamentations. Read the Bible with us in 2024! This year, we’re tackling a group of Old Testament books traditionally known as “The Writings”— Psalms, Chronicles, Proverbs, Daniel, Ruth and more! Download your reading plan now. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that others can find it, too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Lamentations

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. We have one day at TMBT to focus on the Old Testament book of Lamentations, so let's get to it. The Book of Lamentations is five chapters full of laments over the destruction of Jerusalem. To lament means to express deep sorrow or grief. Lements bring the sadness of life before God. The Book of Lamentations is lamenting the sin that caused Jerusalem to be destroyed and the pain that resulted from it.

Whenever you see a lament in the Bible, it usually is asking a couple of questions. The first is, God, why have you allowed this to happen? Where are you in this? And the second question is, God, if you love me, then how can this possibly be happening to me? The book of lamentation ask hard questions because it directly deals with the pain we experience in our life. The Christian life is not Pollyanna, pie in the sky, everything is sunshine and rainbows. The Bible doesn't deny the hard realities of life. But for some reason, we aren't very good at lamenting the hard, painful, difficult things in our life.

That's especially true of church worship services. See, I've noticed that when Christians are one-on-one with you, they'll tell you their heartaches, their sad stories, their disappointments in life. But when Christians gather on Sunday, for some reason, they expect everything to be upbeat, upbeat songs, upbeat sermons. We don't tolerate grief and sadness well. We don't know how to lament. But when people who are grieving or hurting or downcast or overwhelmed or just asking hard questions, when those people come into our worship services, and all they hear is, well, leave your troubles at the door, smile if Jesus loves you, if you have enough faith, you're going to be okay. Well, when they hear all that, they just end up feeling more abandoned by

God. They end up feeling like no one understands them. They think Christianity is shallow. Paul Brand, who was a great surgeon and spent most of his life in India, ministering to the broken and the poorest of the poor in the world, said this, in the United States, I encounter a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs. Patients lived at a greater comfort level, than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle the suffering and far more traumatized by it. Why are we less equipped psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually to handle suffering? Why are we more traumatized by it? I think there's a connection between that and our unfamiliarity with lament. Let's get the big picture of what Lamentations

is about. We don't know who the author of the book is. Some say it's the prophet Jeremiah because he deals with Jerusalem's fall in his book. But the reality is that the Book of Lamentations never says who wrote it, so it's probably best to admit that we don't know. It's five chapters long. The first, second, and fourth chapter are funeral dirges, and they are acrostics. Acrostic means that each line begins with the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet. There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, therefore there are 22 verses, except for the third chapter. In the third chapter, there are 66 verses. It's like a triple acrostic.

The first three lines begin with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The second three lines with the second letter, so on and so on, until it's finished. The book of limitations is still read in Jerusalem today. It's read to commemorate the day that Jerusalem fell to the Romans in 70 AD, but it also remembers the previous fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BC. Lamentations is addressing the events surrounding that fall of Jerusalem to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. There was lots of bloodshed back in 587 BC when Jerusalem fell. The Babylonian armies lay siege against Jerusalem.

They didn't allow any food into the city. People were beginning to starve and even turned to cannibalism. The Book of Lamentations is trying to make sense of this tragic event and wrestle with how and why it could happen. The books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy back at the beginning of the Bible had warned Israel that if they turned away from God, there would be horrible consequences. Lamentations agrees that the destruction came about because of Israel's sin. Here's chapter 1 verse 5. Her foes have become her masters. Her enemies are at ease.

the Lord has brought her grief because of her many sins. Her children have gone into exile, captive before the foe. Here's chapter 1 verse 18. The Lord is righteous, yet I rebelled against his command. Listen all you peoples. Look on my suffering. My young men and young women have gone into exile. Chapter 4 verse 13 says that Jerusalem fell because of the sin of its leaders.

But it happened because of the sins of her prophets and the iniquities of her priests who shed within her the blood of the righteous. Because this tragedy came upon Israel because of their sin, Lamentations tells them they need to confess their sins. Here's chapter 1, verse 20. See, Lord, how distressed I am. I am in torment within, and in my heart I am disturbed, for I have been most rebellious.

Verse 22, let all their wickedness come before you, deal with them as you have dealt with me because of all my sins. My groans are many, and my heart is faint. I think it's super important to see that what you don't find in Lamentations is a confession of Babylon's sins. Babylon was the enemy who defeated them, and there were so many sins that Babylon committed. But Lamentations encourages God's people to look inside themselves and confess their sins, not other people's sins. In the middle of all this sadness and grief, there is hope. Here's Lamentations 3, verse 21.

might be the most well-known verses in the book. Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, the Lord is my portion, therefore I will wait for him. The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. Suffering and pain, come into everyone's life, we have to decide, are we going to deny God's hand in our suffering, or are we going to discern his purpose in it? God brought judgment on his people, but he also promised that he would bring forgiveness and restoration if they would repent and turn back to him.

His discipline was a sign that he loved them, not a sign that he had abandoned them. So what can we learn from the Book of Lamentations. Well, maybe the most important thing to learn is that it is right and good and biblical to practice lament in our worship services together. This is part of God's plan to help us handle the reality of living in a broken world. We should lament personal and corporate pain. It takes faith to lament because lament is rooted in our relationship with God. Let's say you're a parent of a young child and on a Saturday morning you want to sleep.

sleep in, but your little kids wake up hungry for breakfast. They don't run outside to the neighbor and beg for food. Instead, they boldly come to your room asking for what they need. They say, hey, well, you may me some waffles, please. Now, you might get frustrated, but you should be honored by their request because it's proof of your relationship with them. They take their needs to you because they know you love them. The opposite is shared by Russell Moore in his book on adoption. he and his wife adopted two little boys from Russia. He described going to a Russian orphanage and hearing this eerie silence in the nursery. The baby has never cried.

Not because they didn't need anything, but because they had learned that no one cared enough to answer. Children who are confident in the love of a parent cry out. For the Christian, our lament, are crying out, are wailing and weeping, are taking our sadness and grief before God is a proof of our relationship with him. crying out to God is a sign of our faith. Here's another thing we might think about. We know it's wrong to complain against God. Israel complained against him and was disciplined for it.

So how is lament different than complaining? I think the big difference between complaining and lament is the heart motive. When Israel complained that God hadn't provided food and water for them, they assumed the worst about God. They assumed that he didn't care about them. complaining puts God on trial. It doubts God's character. Lament is really different than that. Lament trusts God's God's God. Lament says, God, I know you're good, so that's why I'm confused and upset. I know you love me, but it doesn't feel like it right now. Let me close with a story. It's about a pastor who is new to a church. He was visiting people that attended the church for a while, and he walked into home of a

particular family and saw a picture of a glorious full moon. And underneath the moon were the words the moon is round. And he was just a little bit perplexed by it. The moon is round. Isn't that obvious? So he asked the family about it. And they told them that they had a 14-year-old who had died of terminal cancer. During their child's two-year struggle with cancer, she kept a notebook of comforting Bible verses. After she died, her parents went through her journal, and they found a note card in the middle of it, and the note card just said, the moon is round. And at first, they didn't quite understand, but the more they read, the more they thought about it, the more they talked to people, the more they figured out what she meant. Sometimes we just see a sliver of the moon,

but we know that even though we can't see it, that the moon is round. So this teenage Christian, She believed that though she could not see God's ways enough to understand everything that was happening to her, she knew that God was gracious. She knew that God was good. So her saying, the moon is round, is saying that even when I can't see, even when I don't know, even when I don't understand, I believe that God is good. Heartfelt cries of lament are messy. When you go through hard things that challenge your faith, the most important thing that you can do is keep talking with God.

Don't allow your fear or your despair to cut you off from God's grace. Your pain can be a path toward God. He will meet you in your darkest moment. If you don't know what to pray, if you don't know what to read, maybe read one of the Psalms of Lament out loud. But whatever you do, don't stop talking with God. keep wrestling, keep struggling, keep praying. Amen.