We're starting a new series in the book of Lamentations. As long as I've been going to church in my 25-something, 30 years, I've heard nothing about Lamentations. I've certainly had no Bible study on it. And it's unfortunate because I hope I can show you there's really a lot of stuff here in Lamentations that's worth our time. The first task of studying Lamentations is finding where it's at. In your Bible. In the Jewish Bible, it was in a different place. They organized it with some other books like Song of Solomon. There were five books that were part of the section of the Jewish Bible called the writings. But they were books that were read at certain feast days. And one of their feast days, it wasn't a Bible holiday in the sense that the Old Testament required it. But it was called the Ninth of Ab, and it was a holiday that had come up as a result of some of the background in history to Lamentations. And this whole book of Lamentations would be read at that time. And so they included these five books together. In our Bibles, it comes after Jeremiah, because Jeremiah traditionally is, and I'm not going to try to argue the point, but just there's lots of people that write on these things. Traditionally, everybody's understood that Jeremiah wrote Lamentations. And that was widely accepted until sometime in the 1700s. And now if you read modern scholars it's kind of a mixed bag. But people closer in time to the events, like the translators of the Old Testament into Hebrew, there were translators that brought it from Hebrew. I said that backwards. There were translators that brought it from Hebrew to Greek. And we call that the Septuagint. And they thought, you know, that Jeremiah wrote it. So just to say, it's been widely accepted that he had written it. I want to show you, let me say a little about the history, just a little. We covered this with the series on Zechariah, that the background for Zechariah, which is a book written a little later in time than Lamentations, but it's the same background for Lamentations, The Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem either in 586 or 587. The sources differ a little, but pretty much everybody puts it that time frame. This had not happened overnight. Nebuchadnezzar had come into Jerusalem the first time at about 605 BC. So that's 605 years before You start getting to the events in our Gospels, which tend to start with the birth of Jesus around 4, 5, 6 BC. So you're a long way back there. The Babylonians weren't the leading empire yet. It was the Assyrians, the people that we read about like in the Book of Jonah, was those folks. But their empire was on the way out. And in about 605, Nebuchadnezzar comes to Jerusalem, and he takes some people back with him, including Daniel and his three friends. And that gives us, you know, we read the Book of Daniel, and that opening chapter tells us about him and his friends there in Babylon. But there was a little revolt that had happened. So he had to come back. He brings his army back around 597. That's when Ezekiel gets kidnapped or taken away. And that we have a book, a big prophetic book called Ezekiel. And then there's a major rebellion. that happens later under a king named Zedekiah, with a Z. And I mentioned some of this in the margin notes on the left of the handout, but Zedekiah ends up losing, obviously. There's a long siege. We have a pretty good idea of the date range, and I think I've mentioned a couple of those dates in here that, you know, the siege started probably around 588 B.C. and it came to an end July 18, 586. That's pretty specific based on the best information. This thing lasted for a long time and eventually the siege, which means shutting off the city to food and all that, they were able to topple part of the walls, the troops entered the city, and just within a very short period of time, Babylon, the Babylonian army was able to take it. Zedekiah tried to run. All his children were executed and Nebuchadnezzar wanted to make sure the last thing he saw was his children being executed. And after that, gouged his eyes out. Zedekiah was told by God, if you'll just surrender, you'll live. But if you don't, you're gonna lose your children and all that stuff. And he decided that he didn't think God was right. So there's a lot of background. But you have to ask yourself, OK, what about after that destruction? The walls were destroyed. All the major buildings were destroyed. The king's palace, the temple was burned. You leave almost nothing. Most of the people either died or were kidnapped, taken away hostage. And then you've got some people left behind. Lamentations is about the people left behind going through a grieving or mourning process. That's the history. But let me show you something in your English translations. And if you have a King James, it's not going to show this, but most modern translations do. Just look at the text. And if you have access to something other than the King James, this will help. I don't think I've ever owned a King James that showed this. It's not part of the Bible text, but it's a help to us. When you look at Lamentations, the book right after Jeremiah, put there because it's assumed he wrote it, the first verse of the book, how she sits alone is the first line. And above that, my Bible has the word aleph. What's the word aleph? Yeah, for our purposes, it's like the letter A, okay, is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. 22 letters in the alphabet. How many verses are in Lamentations 1? If you look at it, 22 verses, right? 22 letters in the alphabet, 22 verses. It's there A to Z. And this is Hebrew poetry. So, and again, I'm not ragging on the King James, it's just I spent a lot of years teaching out of it, and this is something I know that you won't see there, and it's a help. When you get to poetry in most of the modern translations, it looks like poetry, just visibly. Because it shows Instead of everything just running together It looks like lines of a poem and you should you should see that when you look at Lamentations 1 in fact You see it in every chapter Right. It's all poetry all the way to chapter 5. Okay, five separate poems and Here's the thing. They all have 22 verses except for chapter 3 Chapter 3 has got something weird going on. I'll show you that but so so When I look in verse one of the whole book, I read six different lines. One, two, three, four, five, yeah, I'm counting correctly. Six lines, three couplets. We call that, and now we're putting on our English grammar hat, a stanza, right? A stanza of a poem. So there's one verse for each stanza of this ancient poem that's been written. And the first stanza is labeled Aleph, And the first word translated in our translation, mine says how. You may have something else. But the first letter of that word in Hebrew is aleph. That's why my Bible has put that word aleph above the first stanza. The second stanza, verse 2, In my English, it says she, first word. But in Hebrew, it starts with the second letter of the alphabet. For us, our B, for Hebrew, the letter bait. And it looks like Beth, B-E-T-H, when they write it out, and like my, again, my Christian Standard Bible writes Beth, and it's actually, it actually has a picture of the Hebrew letter. But it's Beit, Aleph, Beit, Gimel, Daleth, Hey, just going through the alphabet all the way to verse 22, where you get the last letter of their alphabet. For us, this would be a Z, but we've got 26 letters. They have 22. It's Tov. And it says, it looks like a W, T-A-W, but it's tav. And that first word in English is let, but in the Hebrew, the first letter of that whatever word is there is gonna be tav, okay? And the same pattern is in chapter two. It has 22 stanzas, 22 verses. But look at chapter three. Chapter three has 66 verses. You can just check it all the way at the end, But it only has 22 stanzas. And here's what's changed. And again, we lose this as the English reader, but this will help us understand. These books or these poems, they're highly organized. They're a unit that runs together, like something's going on here. And it has a purpose. And we want to get to that. Well, that's curious. They started every stanza with a different letter. There's more going on than that. So, in chapter 3, you've got 66 verses, even though the length is no different than chapter 1 and 2, 22 stanzas. Now what happens, if you look at chapter 3, verse 1, it starts with an olive, just in the heading of, you know, it's a note the translators have added. But now, my stanza of six lines, those first six lines, is divided into verses one, two, and three, because in the other two chapters, only the first word of the stanza would have started with an aleph. In chapter three, the first word of each line starts with an aleph. Now when I say line, I have six lines of text, but I should say the first word of each couplet. So I read in chapter three, verse one, I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath. That first word, I, in the Hebrew would use the word, the aleph. And then the next couplet, which we call verse 2, it starts with an olive. Verse 3 starts with an olive. Verses 4, 5, and 6 start with a bait. Does that make sense? So instead of doing just a letter on the first word of the whole stanza, it's on each couplet. Now, someone had to sit and think through this a long time. You know, the Hebrew reader just sees this right away, but I mean, Jeremiah spent a lot of time thinking through this. It also has meter. Hebrew poetry doesn't rhyme. You know, when we learn poetry, and poetry even in English doesn't have to rhyme, but when you learn older poetry, like you read Edgar Allan Poe, we're looking for a rhyming of words. Hebrew poetry rhymes ideas, concepts, and emotions. That's what it does. It doesn't try to rhyme the words. But there is a meter here where when you have a couplet, you kind of have three beats to the first line and two to the second. In the Hebrew, it's meant to kind of fall off, to kind of be wailing, because that's what these are. But that's what's happening. And so that's one thing about organization. Can you think of why? Assume with me that Jeremiah writes these poems to help people work through their grief. And these things are going to be read aloud, and maybe a community service, the people left behind when the city's been destroyed as they mourn. Why would you put an acrostic starting every stanza with a letter? It's the A to Z for Chapter 1, the A to Z for Chapter 2, the A to Z with emphasis in Chapter 3, because you get A-A-A, B-B-B, C-C-C. Say again? I don't know. I don't know if it was performed as a song. It could be, although I kind of doubt it. But you know, like when we read the Psalms, a lot of those were sung aloud, and they're Hebrew poetry as well. It could, it could be. They sing their prayers, the psalms especially, and especially there's a group of psalms called the Hillel, that they would, they would sing these psalms as they took a journey to Jerusalem to celebrate the holidays, called the Hillel. You know, he doesn't tell us, but I'll tell you what I think, and I think it's where most of the people that have spent time thinking about it have come down. Grief has to have an end. He's taking you on a journey to help you with grief, but there has to be a Z. You can't live in the middle of the poem. expressing your grief forever. And so it's kind of a completion. It doesn't mean that you get through the five lamentations and you're done. I think it's a process, and we'll talk a little more about that in a minute, but it's the A to Z. It's to bring the thought and this outpouring of the loss to a completion at the end of chapter one. Right, right, right. And Josiah was their last good king. He was really good. He died at the age of 39. And that really, his passing, really starts the events that lead to where we're at. but his death in battle with the Egyptians was lamented, right? I mean, laments are common. Acrostics, you see them in the scriptures. You see kinds of acrostics in the other ancient literature, but not highly formed like these. So there's something else going on here that, again, is gonna help us. By the way, chapter five, if you look, Chapter three, stanzas have six lines. Chapter four, stanzas have four lines. So you look at verse one or verse two, they're not as long. None of this is random, okay? We forget that sometimes. Little details get mentioned, and we think, oh, well, that doesn't matter. God never mentions things that don't matter, okay? What about chapter five? How long are the stanzas? Could be three on your translation. Mine's two. And some could be three, right? Because, again, when you're looking at the Hebrew, it doesn't give you a marker that says, here's where the stanza breaks. But yeah, it's shorter, though. From chapter three to chapter four to chapter five, the stanzas are getting shorter. We're moving. And what the scribes did to spellcheck back then was count. So it was all numeric. They wanted... Yes, certainly for copying purposes, right. They would copy these things and they would count the number of letters. go through a big process to make sure they had accurate, you know, what we call Masoretic text. So there's movement. There's movement between Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 and between Chapter 3 and Chapter 5. And here's the word. I've got a note on this, and I broke out the... I talk about acrostics in Number 2 here, and kind of wrote it down, so if you didn't quite follow it, maybe that will help. Chapter 3, or Note 3, I said, what's a chiasm? Jewish writers often wrote in a chiasm. An easy example of a chiasm just with a few lines of, you know, say you wrote five or six lines. The first and last line would correspond in concept or idea. The second line and the second to last line would correspond, and then you kind of work your way to the line in the middle, which is the most important. They use this a lot. There's lots of chiasm. When we were in the book of Zechariah I argued that those first six chapters are big chiasm where he sees eight visions in one night, but visions one and eight correspond in concept, I mean they are identical, but they are real close. You go back there and you look at those visions and both visions he is seeing nearly the same thing, the horses of different colors and all that stuff. Visions two and seven, three and six, and And then four and five, if I got that right. But, you know, right in the middle. The Old Testament, the first five books, we call it the Pentateuch or the Torah. Chiasm. It's organized chiastically with Leviticus in the middle, the book that's harder to get through. Why is Leviticus in the middle? Because Leviticus is the book about worship. It's dead center. It's just how it is. And so you see a lot of the writings that way. And here's what I'm suggesting. We have five poems. One and five are going to relate. We'll see that eventually and how they relate. 2 and 4 relate, and 3 is dead center. He's changed how it looks. His acrostic puts the letter at the beginning of every couplet. And it's the crescendo. The Hebrew reader understands when you have a chiasm that the piece in the middle is the climax, the crescendo, the part you're moving toward. How do we see that in Lamentations? Look in Lamentations 3 for a minute. I show you the middle of the middle, like this is where, this is, you know, I call this series at the top here, grieving with hope, because if you read a verse like 1 Thessalonians 4.13 that I make a reference to in the margin note, Paul says, not to grieve as those who have no hope. Everybody grieves, but you can grieve with or without hope. Lamentations teaches that. It's probably where Paul got the idea. Chapter 3, verse 22, because of the Lord's faithful love, his chesed, we do not perish, for his mercies never end. They are new every morning, great is your faithfulness. I say, and he's quoting some things from earlier in the Bible, the Lord is my portion, therefore I will put my hope in him. There it is. This is the centerpiece of the book of Lamentations. Because of God's faithful love, or some translations would say loving kindness, His covenantal love, we don't perish. Remember how they got here. They got in this situation because they did everything God told them not to do. And they lived under the law of Moses and back in the Old Testament parts like Deuteronomy 28, God spelled out very specifically the consequences of disobedience. Everything he said would happen, happened. And yet, They're the covenant people. Because of God's faithful love, we don't perish. They're talking about dying. His mercies never end. They're new every morning. So that's the centerpiece. So this mourning, this grieving process in the book is going to work its way up. to the crescendo, which is you have to rest in hope. You have to rest in the hope you have in God, even in a situation like this where the bad things were your own fault. But at the same time, Lamentations has to come to an end. There's sort of a descent up to chapter five. The stanzas get shorter, and chapter five is just a prayer. That's it, just a prayer. It ends where the grieving process would hopefully bring people. It doesn't start necessarily with prayer, but it needs to come to that. And so he's going to do that. Question or thought so far? It's a lot of background. It's going to help us kind of piece it together. Doesn't it kind of mirror the actuality of what's going on? It does, you know, you're right, does lamentations mirror reality? It should, it's the guide, right? There's some things that are just, and we're gonna now kind of move to this, it's a good segue to kind of what is grieving, but if the Bible didn't say anything about grieving, I mean, really deal with it. How could you say, as Peter does in his second epistle, that what God has given us is sufficient for life and godliness? Right? I mean, there's aspects of just the human experience, like romantic love. So we have the Song of Solomon. If those things weren't there, it's real difficult with a straight face to say, yeah, this Bible has sufficient content for life and godliness. So let's talk for a second about what is grief? Oh, go ahead. Sorry. What I see it doing is replacing judgment with restoration. It does. It does. You're right. Replacing judgment with restoration. And it teaches you about how that happens, right? Because I didn't read it from chapter 3, but he'll go on there to say, basically, we quietly wait for the Lord's salvation. He isn't talking about being saved in the sense of becoming a Christian. We can't fix this. We're going to wait for God to bring restoration, right, which is what they're looking forward to. And God does, which is that the book of Zechariah that we've studied. Yes, ma'am. it's kind of like an ocean at first the waves are just hitting you right after after after and gradually the waves get further apart and less so this sounds like kind of what they're talking about so it becomes You hit the nail on the head. You're speaking from experience. Until it becomes manageable, I hope you understand that. Let's back into some more about what grieving is. But people will say, well, time heals all wounds. Time helps. Some wounds don't go away. At least the scars don't. But they should become manageable. That's a different thing. And that's a good way of thinking about it. First of all, what's a loss? A loss is, and I put this, I think I put this down, just to have a short kind of definition, this note number five, we suffer a loss any time there's a removal from or separation from something meaningful to us. It can be a physical loss or an abstract loss. Obviously losing a loved one or a spouse, clearly, that's a loss. But and losses cause grief. They cause sorrow. And we don't choose that. But you choose to mourn. That's a separate thing. You could have grief or sorrow without going through a mourning or grieving process. And so I've got it in all capital letters. Everyone has grief. Mourning is a choice. We're going to talk about that because It's possible to have grief for a long time and never really fully go through the mourning process. That's why he wrote Lamentations. He wanted to guide the community through this mourning process to get them to a place where their grief was manageable. That's what he's all about. And so here's what I want to make sure we're clear on. Putting aside the death of a loved one, what are other losses that might cause grief or sorrow? I don't mean sorrow for 30 minutes because you got out of Walmart and your tire's flat. Right? Perfect, a health issue that impedes you from what you used to do. A lot of times people don't think of that in terms of something that might lead to a grieving process or need to. I knew someone just a couple years older than me when I was in high school and he had gotten a full scholarship playing football for university. He was a great player. Got in a motorcycle accident, loses his scholarship right away. They yanked that while he was still at the hospital. But maybe he would be an NFL contender. Who knows? There's going to be a loss associated with what might have been. Right? What else? What other things could be a loss that is the type that people would grieve? Yes. A house burning down is a good example, and I think it's a difficult one for us if you haven't gone through it, but there's going to be a lot of memories tied up with that place, plus the loss of stuff. Not because your laptop burned up, but your wedding pictures burned up. Those kinds of things. There can be a loss. What are other losses? Yeah, loss of relationship, a divorce, right? Or an estrangement from, say, children or parents, right? That kind of thing happens. That's a very real thing that people go through. And it's the type of loss that can, you know, where you really do need to go through sort of a grieving process. This grieving process isn't going to be the same for every kind of loss or for every person. Abstract losses. Yes, perfect. That's one on top of my list. The loss of a church through a split, right? And that causes a great grieving. For me personally, my mentor I had, and he's passed away now, but I remember logging onto the website for the church where he pastored so I could download some sermons and stuff on the front page, or it was. The Board of Elders terminated him, and it went into all the gory details of, and we've seen this recently in the news with kind of a nationally known pastor, and you've seen it, and there it was. And it wasn't just that he wasn't the pastor of the church anymore. I have this guy in extraordinarily high esteem. You know, he's had an affair for 10 years with a married woman in the church, that kind of thing. you know, sort of a loss of your hero in a sense, right? And people can have that. It could be toward a parent or someone else. And our church should be so important to us that if we lost it, it really would be a problem for us. What are some others? There's lots of them. Y'all have left a big one out. Yeah, a job could be it, right? You know, it wouldn't have hurt me much if I lost my job at the Dairy Queen. But you know, if you work at a company for 30 years and they say, look, frankly, you make a lot of money and we've got this dumb kid over here that'll work for half the pay. Now, he don't know what he's doing. I mean, I do a lot of work for corporations. They do this all the time. And it always hurts them in the end. But you've been there 30 years. You're eyeballing retirement in five years. And there's a tremendous loss with that. Well, maybe not, right? And you just don't know what will happen. But like, yeah, a loss of a job. And that will impact different people different ways. But men, especially, usually get impacted very hard by that. My dad died at the same time my house went down, and my struggle was with faith. Yeah. That's the issue in the background here, right? That's the struggle, right? Because of what you said about struggling with faith. That's where they're at. Do you come through the grieving process with it manageable and with your faith not only intact, but probably stronger? Or do you lose the faith? And a lot of people do. A lot of people, even people that you might view them as they're so mature and they know the Word of God and all that. And they do, but they've seen it as an observer. They haven't experienced it yet. And when they do, makes a big difference. Exactly. And they verbalize, they're going through a process of verbalizing what they think, even though you saying it out loud. And so we have, especially in this country, an idea that you would never kind of say, God, why'd you do this? But they do. They're very open and honest. And you have to be. My pastor at the church before we came here that I had Originally served under him as an associate pastor and he's just recently retired. But you know, he got called by the police department to go out to his son's house to find him hanging from a rope. How do you deal with that? And what always stuck with me, what he said about this, he said that someone had told him, you know, another pastor friend, God's grace is sufficient for you. And he said, barely, you know, this is a hard thing. Talk about questioning your faith and all that. So, I mean, this is real. We expect the Bible to talk about these issues. And one you've left out, and again, different kind of losses can affect different ways. Loss of possessions, depending what they are, could be a big deal. I've always had this nightmare, I've had it two or three times, where I have a vintage car I bought in the 90s, but my nightmare, it's not in the garage, and I ask my wife and other people, You never had that car. They don't even have an awareness that I had that car. It's worse than it not being there. Right? So you, you know, you get over a possession. What about, what about mourning the loss of a pet? Yeah. See, that's another one where, again, it depends on the pet. I struggle with the idea of mourning a cat. I guess it's happened. I guess it's happened. But, you know, I've had two dogs that stand out as the best dogs we ever had, and they were a rare breed called a Finnish Spitz. You can't even hardly find them to replace them. And, you know, and had them for a long time. I mean, people mourn dogs. And some people, and I think I especially see this with older folks who have some dogs, and the children are out of the house and gone, and those, you know, you've noticed this with really young people that don't have children yet, but they have a dog, and they treat that dog like a king or queen. Well, some older folks do the same thing. And they mourn, they go through a heavy dose of grief with the passing of the animals. And what we don't do, and we should never do, is be critical of people because they grieve a loss. People feel what they feel. How long does it take to complete the cycle, to grieve a loss? What do you think? It varies, right? Now, what we'll see is you can get stalled out in the process, and you may need a kick in the butt. But on the other hand, a lot of people think that, oh, it's been this amount of time. You should be over it. It doesn't work that way. Now, just think logically why it doesn't work that way when you lose a loved one. They pass in February. You get to November, several months have passed by, but it's their birthday. They're not there, right? Exactly. Not there for that first Christmas, right? It's because we don't fully contemplate the loss at the time that someone passes away. We contemplate some of it, but some of it comes to us in time as we realize here's yet another part of my life That's gone forever. It's completely changed now. This person is not a part of this activity. You think about it years later because that person is not at a child's wedding or graduation, that sort of thing. You don't see that all right away. And then there's things that are reminders, sounds, mementos, smells, all kinds of things can bring about a loss. Someone that, it was a professor I'd had, but he was really traumatized by, you know, the father abandoning the family at a young age and divorcing his mom, that kind of thing. And this is just someone being honest. Even at age 40, 50, there were things that would happen, and I won't get all the triggers, but that sadness, and as a young child, he blamed himself, that just would flood back to him. That's just reality. The difference was, now he could manage it. It would come back, but it was also manageable, not debilitating. So that's what we're trying to get to here. We're going to get to a little bit of Chapter 1. It's not my purpose to go through the whole thing. I want to go through a little bit of it. But here's what I want to say. What's the lesson of Chapter 1 at a high level for us? You have to fully contemplate the loss. How might you avoid contemplating the loss, going through what it really is? Find other ways to fix it, right? what's like one of the most common commercial you see on TV, a pill, right? And I'm not gonna tell you that it's never a good thing to have a pill. I'm not talking about that. I mean, that's between you and your doctor. But we want a way to fix it and not a way to grieve. We would rather stop the pain than go through the pain that is a necessary part of the grief process. And some people can do it with alcohol. You know, and I, just the nature of the work I do with life insurance, I can remember, you know, an incident where that's exactly what happened. A family of guys got a bunch of kids, young man, teenager, takes his life. Dad who had never drunk, drank before, you know, just deep into cocaine and alcohol. What's he doing? Is he got grief? No doubt. Is he mourning? In a healthy way, no. He's trying to stop the pain. And there's a lot of ways to do that. You know, someone's past, but if I never pack their stuff up and move it out of the room or the house, I just keep everything like it was. Sometimes we get stuck, and this is the last piece I want to mention. You're going to see in lamentations, they have to deal with the fact that part of it's their fault. Sometimes there's guilt that comes along with the grieving. Sometimes it's because you did have a role in it. Years ago, there was a famous singer, a Christian singer, where one of the older children driving a car ran over one of the little children that they had adopted from China. I mean, hard enough as the parent, but you're the one that drove the car. When I was young, one of my elementary school teachers had hit a little girl on a bike and killed her. The accident wasn't her fault, you know, but that's what happened. That stays with you a long time. You have to deal with that. If you lose a person and the last thing, the last conversation you had was you saying really hateful things to them, you can get stuck in that cycle where you think you're grieving because you're crying, but you're really reliving the last traumatic event. It's not about the event. You don't grieve an event, you grieve a loss, but you can get stuck in that cycle because the last words were hateful words and that kind of thing, and you've got to walk through this valley. Well, a miscarriage is another good example of a loss, that people will grieve in different ways. It probably a lot depends on when it happens in time, because you associate a lot of hopes and dreams with that. You're setting up a nursery, and you said it right. And I think it's true of almost any event. We often think, well, what could I have done different? And it doesn't matter if objectively you couldn't have done anything different. If you're having those feelings, they're a part of the mix. So let's look at it like, I just want to maybe we'll glance at the first four or five verses, but next time we'll do a deeper dive into chapter one. This will help us understand. Um, He's going to personify the city of Jerusalem, and let the city speak for its own feelings. How she sits alone. Now, I don't know, you may have a translation that starts off with a more interesting word than how. There's a Hebrew word, ikah, here, and it's the first word of chapter one, and it's the first word of chapter two, I think it's the first word of chapter 4, and it's not by accident. Yeah, first word of chapter 4. It is the word used in Hebrew to express extreme astonishment, sorrow, or indignation. We don't see it in the word how, but imagine it being sort of shouted out. You know, how she sits alone. He's not going to tell us who she is by name until later in it, in fact, it occurs in verse 7. He'll finally say the word Jerusalem. How she sits alone, the city once crowded with people. Now just that first couplet, what's being dealt with? And now it's gone. Right? And she sits alone. The feeling of loneliness. Watch this. I'm going to come back to verse 1, but in verse 2, the second couplet, there's no one to offer her comfort. Some translations just say there's no one to comfort her. Chapter 2, verse 9, there was no one to comfort her. Chapter two, verse 16. I'm saying chapter two, I'm sorry, I'm chapter one. Everything was chapter one. Chapter one, verse nine, no one to comfort her. Chapter one, verse 16, there's no one nearby to comfort her. Verse 17, no one to comfort her. Verse 21, you think there's a theme? See, that's what happens when we read these things. But grief isn't just a linear path, this process. It's a bit erratic. And it's a lot repetitive, and that's why Lamentations is. But no one to comfort her, that's what this chapter is. But I can tell you what, at the beginning of the loss, particularly of a loved one, and some of you just know this firsthand, there's no one to comfort you. It ain't happening. Some people will try. I've made it a habit to try to say as little as possible in those times for fear of saying really stupid things, because lots of people do. They want to get all spiritual, and they say really stupid things. But there's no one to comfort her. She sits alone. The city once crowded with the people. The people are gone. She who was great among the nations. I mean, this was the city of David, for crying out loud. This was a glorious city. She's become like a widow. This is the widow who, you know, and especially in the ancient world, she's lost everything. Not just that the husband's gone, but her means of staying alive, everything just is gone. The princess among the provinces, that's a metaphor for Jerusalem, has been put to forced labor. It's just a metaphor of going from a place of relative wealth to poverty. So what's happening here? Jeremiah writes something. He personifies the city and lets the city express all its losses. And if you don't do this and try to fully contemplate them, the thing about going through this, if you're the one living it, is it hurts. But if you don't do it, then you never get to that point where you can have a management, a healthy management of the issue, because you choose to not walk through it. Stanza two, or verse two, she weeps bitterly during the night. Outpour of emotion as Americans. We don't like to do that at least That much when you you see a funeral and in a lot of other countries people are just free-flowing There's a certain healthiness to that to letting to letting the emotions out I didn't go through all these verses I could but you read in the Bible that when they mourned like when Abraham mourned the loss of Sarah and He went to where he buried her and then had a period of mourning, like set aside this period to do it. It's very hard for us to do that. We're not geared to that, but that's what's happening. With tears on her cheeks, there's no one to offer her comfort, not from all her lovers. Who would her lovers be? It could be the other gods, but who else? Egypt and all these other countries there around them. God always told them not to form all these alliances, but they did. and infrequently formed alliances with Egypt of all places, thinking that Egypt would help them in their time of trouble. That's why it says her friends, her allies, had betrayed her. They've become her enemies, okay? Verse three, this is Gimel, so it starts with this Hebrew letter, but Judah, so now we've got Judah, he's moved from Jerusalem, although he didn't name it, to Judah. Then he'll move from Judah to the word Zion. Judah is the country, as it was at this time. It's the southern part of what we think of as Israel. And Judah has gone into exile because Nebuchadnezzar took the people, right? Judah as a country can't be taken to exile, but the people can, following affliction and harsh slavery. But finds no place to rest. This is another key verse. There's just no place to rest. This is pouring out the loss and the associated emotions that go with it. All her pursuers have overtaken her in narrow places. In other words, she's been caught. You imagine the people, and they did, they fled the city, they tried to get away, people chased after them, and they caught them, including Zedekiah, who tried to get away. The roads to Zion, now this takes us to more of a religious context. There's roads that go to Jerusalem, and Zion here is, could be, you know, the whole of the city, or it could just be, you know, a lot of times it's used to think in terms of the temple and the temple mount where it's at. For years, for centuries, they took these roads and they sang these songs of rejoicing as they came into the roads into Zion to worship at the temple. The temple's gone and the roads are empty. See that? The roads to Zion mourn. For no one comes to the appointed festivals. Those are the holidays, like the Passover, those sorts of things. There's no one left to come, and they're not going to. There's nothing to come to. All her gates, the gates of the city, are deserted, her priests groan, the young women grieve, and she herself is bitter. There's a loss of any happiness, and that's that emotion that ends up with just this bitterness. And then there's a loss of the prestige the city had in verse 5. Her adversaries have become her masters. That's a loss of prestige, of status. Her enemies are at ease. The Lord, this is the first time God, Yahweh, is mentioned right here in verse 5. The Lord has made her suffer. Now that's interesting because that won't always be how we would think of what's happened to us. But they knew God had warned them. God sent prophets like Jeremiah. They didn't listen. Everything Jeremiah said would happen happened. God caused this because of her many transgressions. Her children have gone away, that would be the people of the city, as captives before the adversary. Verse 6, all the splendor has vanished from daughter Zion. Her leaders are like stags. the final pasture. Lack of food, lack of sustenance, but the leadership have also run away. You know what happens to the deer as soon as you get close to them, they split. These guys had lots of courage before the army got there, but once they started overrunning the walls, Zedekiah fled. And him and his remaining soldiers tried to get away. They stumbled away exhausted before the hunter. These readers knew who he was talking about. It was the king who abandoned them. And verse 7 is the last one I wanted to read. 1-7 kind of form a bit of a section or a unit. And I think that the theme of it is loneliness. Like when you're working through the grief and you're working through, you contemplate and you have to think about and ultimately pray about all the things that you've lost. and the emotions you're going through, this one is loneliness. That's what it is. And there's several things in verses one to seven, but it comes down to this matter of loneliness. In verse seven, during the days of her affliction and homelessness, Jerusalem, that's the first time he mentions the city, remembers all her precious belongings, the things, what would have been the most precious belongings to the city of Jerusalem? Temple and the stuff in it, right? And we don't know what happened to the Ark of the Covenant, but it would seem astounding if they didn't take it. What would they want with the Ark of the Covenant? It was covered with gold. That's the answer, right? It was the architectural marvel of the world. It was it was many of the utensils were gold like everything was of great value. When you fast forward in time in the book of Daniel. Daniel Nebuchadnezzar's dead and gone and it may be his grandson, we're not sure who's running the show, but he's having a big party and outside the city of Babylon there's an army. It's a group of the Medes and the Persians and some others. And they're waiting to get in and he throws this big party for all his nobles to give them assurance. And then in the middle of that party, he says, you know, I remember a story about all that stuff we stole out of the temple in Jerusalem. Why don't we drink our wine out of those cups? And they bring all that in there. And then there's this hand writing on the wall, you've been measured and found wanting. And he doesn't understand what that says. He calls old Daniel, says, Daniel, if you can interpret that, I'll give you a third of the kingdom or whatever he says. And Daniel's like, it's probably not gonna last very long. So I'll pass on that. But God says you're a goner. That's his interpretation, basically. Right? And so this is what that's about. This is the precious belongings. And it was taken away and just put into the heaps of the treasure room with the Babylonians. When her people fell in the adversary's hand, she had no one to help. The adversaries looked at her, laughing at her downfall. So just the emotion, the raw loneliness of it, the idea that no one can comfort. This is the first place, this is where grieving starts. And it doesn't just like go to a cycle and end. But we'll see next time. He takes this kind of from the A to Z of this, the aleph to tav of this first step. Any last comments? Okay. You're absolutely right. Guilt has to be a factor, and they will deal with it. In a lot of our situations, guilt may not be there, but in a lot of them, it is. not because necessarily you caused it, but sometimes we do. I mean, it just, these things happen. But sometimes guilt over, like I said, those, those final communications, the, where the relationship was before this person died, guilt over, you know, you, you knew someone was, was ill and you just didn't make the time to go see them. And you just thought I'm going to, I'm going to get there next week. And then the opportunity is lost. There's a lot of ways guilt comes at us, and what Jeremiah would say is we've got to deal with that too.