Lamentations 1:1-11. Be sure to check out the “Intro to Lamentations”. In verse 1 the author observes the city after the destruction brought on by Nebuchadnezzar and his general, Nebuzaradan. For those who doubt that Jeremiah was the author, who better that the faithful prophet who stayed behind to minister to the remaining inhabitants, to write such words of sadness. Jeremiah spent over 40 years trying to get the inhabitants of Jerusalem and Judah to honor God and now this.

The city of Jerusalem is compared to a widow in verse one. It once was a great city. In the days of Solomon (the last king of the united nation of Israel) the city was so prosperous that silver was almost worthless, and Solomon was so famous for his wisdom that royalty would come great distances to give him lavish gifts and sit in his courtyard and listen to him speak. Jerusalem was like a princess among the nations. Now there were no more gifts and the people of Judah who were left were there to tend the neglected fields. They were alone like a widow and worked like slaves.

In verse 2 we see the idea of loneliness continue. The verse uses the idea of “lovers”. Judah had been abandoned by her “lovers”. It is interesting when you take the ideas of widows and lovers together. God designed humans to find the closest kind of love in the marriage relationship. A man and woman were to make a lifelong commitment to each other and live as a unit (Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:4-6). It was one man with one woman forever. In Genesis 2:25 Moses points out that the husband and wife were “naked and not ashamed”. The close physical relationship that God included as part of marriage reflected the absolute bond between the husband and wife. In the law of Moses being physically involved beyond your marriage (adultery) was condemned and had harsh penalties (like death) and a physical relationship before marriage required the couple to become married immediately. Human marriage is more that just a convenient way to have a close friend or lots of fun it was also created by God to serve as an example.

In Ephesians 5:22-32 Paul is instructing husbands and wives about their relationship to one another and then he tells us that that relationship is also an example of the relationship between Jesus and his followers. Now Paul wasn’t talking about the physical part of a marriage he was talking about the love, care and dedication parts. But maybe the physical part of a marriage, with it’s complete surrender to the other person (that’s the way God designed it anyway, 1 Corinthians 7:3-4) mirrors the complete sacrificial dedication Jesus has to us and the complete sacrificial dedication we shouldd have to him.   God told the Israelites that they were to have one God and one only, his name was Yahweh. Jesus is the human embodiment (literally “God in a Bod”, God incarnate) of Yahweh. John tells us in the “Beginning was the Word. The Word was with God and the Word was God. And the word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:1, 14). John goes on a few verses later to identify Jesus as that “Word”. Human marriage is a great and awesome thing here and now but it is also a way we can understand the possibilities of our relationship with God, that is why the exclusivity part is so important. And God built us so that we understand that. Ignoring God’s plan for marriage not only messes up the spiritual example it messes up our lives too.

That is why it is interesting that the first two verses use the idea of a widow and the idea of ‘lovers”. Just as “lovers” are false partners for us as people (we should have one “lover”, our husband of wife) the “lovers” that the people of Jerusalem had, their false gods, were false too and of no help or comfort. Her friend had also deserted her. In the history of Israel both the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom were warned not to trust in foreign allies, they were to rely on God for protection. Unfortunately they often turned to their neighbors for help. In fact Zedekiah looked to Egypt for help when he rebelled against Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar came and Egypt did not resulting in the fall of Jerusalem.

In verses 3-5 we see a lot of pain and suffering in Jerusalem. In verse 6 we see there is no longer any greatness to the city and that her “princes have fled”. That was literally what happened at the end of t siege. The army broke out of the city and fled with Zedekiah the king. But they were weak from the siege and caught 15 miles away near Jericho. In verse 7 we see the pain of remembering how great they had once been.

In verse 5 we are told that the pain and suffering that Jerusalem was experiencing was from the “LORD”, Yahweh. Their God was rejecting them, punishing them. God’s actions were not arbitrary though, the people had “transgressed”. That word means “rebelled, revolted, offended, or trespassed.” In verse 8-9 we are told more about how the people of Jerusalem had offended God, they had sinned greatly. The word “sin” means to miss the mark or bull’s-eye. The people of Jerusalem had missed the target by a lot. In these verses we return to the faithful marriage idea. Remember Jerusalem had had many lovers, false gods, and was now useless or dirty to God. Those who had such great things to say about Jerusalem now despised her. The word despised means to “pour out”, maybe we should think of this as “dumped”.  Jerusalem had been used and dumped by her sweet talking false gods. The picture goes from bad to worse in theses verses because the people of Jerusalem and Judah are being described like a prostitute from the streets.  Everyone had seen her nakedness, she was dirty, and only living for the moment.  She didn’t even have respect for herself. The middle of verse 9 tells us this was a huge step down, from princess to prostitute with no friend, no protector, a very sad decline.

At the end of verse 9 Jeremiah shares a little of his feeling about the situation. He cries out to Yahweh (LORD) and says, “Do you see what bothers me? The bad guy, the foreigner with his false gods, thinks he is “the man”, the king of the universe.” That really was the attitude of Nebuchadnezzar as you can see in Daniel 4:30. Jeremiah was bothered by the physical trouble in Jerusalem but he was more troubled by the bad name all of this was giving to God. In verse 10 Jeremiah is upset over what happened to the Temple. In the rules that God gave to Moses about the Tabernacle (the sort of portable church or temple that was used for centuries before the permanent Temple was built) there were strict rule about who could go where and who could touch what in the tabernacle. These rules were transferred to the Temple when it was built. Not even all Jews could go all places in the Temple and the part of the Temple that represented God personal presence was completely off limits except for once a year when the chief priest alone could enter and make a sacrifice showing a realization of the sins of all the Israelites. Jeremiah got to witness the unbelieving troops of the Babylonian army ripping the Temple apart and taking all of the stuff of value inside, breaking many of the items into pieces before taking them. Jeremiah is very very upset about God’s reputation in these verses.

Verse 11 returns to the people remaining in Jerusalem. These people are concerned about something completely different, lunch. All they care about is themselves and getting some food. Clearly they have missed the what is really important in life. They were trading eternity for another sucky day. Jeremiah now is the one who feels despised. This is a different word than the one translated “despised” in verse 8. This word means to be “insignificant, worthless, or light”. Jeremiah feels like his whole 40 years of messages have been for nothing.

It is important to understand that God has given us certain things in our lives to help us understand our relationship with him. Marriage is one of those things. Ideas like adultery, fornication, and prostitution lose their ability to help us understand the reality of our relationship with God when we destroy their meaning in our societies. God has gone a long way to make these ideas “stick” by hardwiring us for life the way he designed it, but he also has given us freedom and a will and we can override and perhaps even overwrite what he has told us. At the end of the day though, violating God’s design for our personal lives leaves us destroyed and empty whether we admit it or not. God is very serious about protecting the pictures he has given us to help us see and understand him. God made life the way it is not to limit us but to free us. Our lives, as they are, are headed for an eternity separated from God and all of his goodness. Because he loves us he wants us to understand and return to him. In the language of our day he wants us to see that we are cheaters and that we need to stop it. If we do he is willing to take us back and help us be faithful to him. God love is miraculous. We should all be as concerned as Jeremiah was with preserving a true picture of he one true God. Only when people truly see can the have that relationship with God fixed forever.

God help me be more concerned with your reputation that with my own rest. Let me live to help other see you not for my next meal. Let me remain faithful to you in all my life. Thank you for the lessons you have built into our existence. Help me learn from the life you have made for us about the forever life I can have with you. Thank you for your love and dedication.

Jeremiah 52:24-34.  Today we come to the end of the messages by the prophet Jeremiah. Jeremiah was chosen by God to be a prophet “to the nations” and he was. He warned Judah and several nations of the consequences of disobedience and disrespect toward him. Yesterday we read a brief history of the invasion and destruction of Jerusalem. It is very similar to the history contained in 2 Kings and some Bible experts think that Jeremiah wrote most of 1 and 2 Kings (except for the last paragraph or so of 2 Kings). The history is contained at the end of Jeremiah probably to show the certainty of the earlier prophecies. God said it and it happened. As we read the rest of chapter 52 I think there is another reason for the history we read yesterday.

Verses 24-27 contain the last little bit of the history of the siege and destruction of Babylon. In these verses Nebuchadnezzar’s general (I know it calls him a captain but the word being translated actually means “many” or “great”, he was a leader in charge of many men) takes certain people from Jerusalem to his king in Riblah where they are executed. Some of the people in the list sort of make sense, religious and political and military leaders, but what about the sixty? Although the sixty could have been other leaders you would think we would have been told that, of course Jeremiah might not have know who all sixty were. They could have been average citizens though, chosen at random and used as an example of the absolute power of Nebuchadnezzar. Remember in the book of Daniel 4 that Nebuchadnezzar had a very big opinion of himself, demanding worship and honor, claiming that it was his power alone that built the Babylonian empire, and God disciplined him for that attitude. He also threw Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego into a raging furnace for not worshipping him. He also threatened to have certain advisors literally ripped apart if they could not tell him the content and meaning of a dream he had that bothered him. Nebuchadnezzar had a very large ego, that is for sure and he ruled with an iron hand.

IN verses 28-30 we are told how many captives were take during different attacks on Jerusalem. The first one would have been in 597 BC, the second in 586 BC when Jerusalem was destroyed and the third was in 581 BC probably after Gedaliah the governor was assassinated, the time when many Jews took Jeremiah and fled to Egypt. The number is different from numbers in 2 kings and may reflect the fact that sometimes only men old enough to fight were counted in theses sorts of lists and other times women and children would be included.

Verses 31-34 pick up the history many years later. If you remember in 598 BC Jehoiakim was king of Judah. Judah was a state of the Babylonian Empire and expected to send money to Nebuchadnezzar. Jehoaikim rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar and looked to Egypt for help. Jeremaih had warned him that God did not want him to rebel or to look to other nations for help. Jehoaikim died a few months before Nebuchadnezzar arrived and his 18 year old son Jehoiachin took the throne and faced the invasion by Nebuchadnezzar. Nebuchadnezzar easily took control of the situation and took Jehoaichin and many others captive. Jehoiachin was placed in prison in Babylon. Verse 31 picks up the story 37 years later. Nebuchadnezzar had died and his son Amel-marduk (Jeremiah spells his name Evil-merodach, but remember he wouldn’t have used vowels, the consonants are very close). In the first year of his reign (probably the first full year 561 BC) we are told that Amel-marduk took Jehoiachin from prison and made him an advisor in his government. He also gave him a permanent allowance. Amel-marduk was only king for two years (562-560 BC) but edicts made by Babylonian kings were permanent so Jehoiachin’s allowance would have lasted until he died. Archaeologists excavated the ruins of Babylon and found records (stone tablets with writing inscribed on them) in one of the store houses in the wall of the city. One of these tablets actually contained the record of Amel-marduk releasing Jehoaichin from prison and taking care of him. This is real history not a fairy tale.

It may seem odd that Nebuchadnezzar’s son and successor would release a troubling little nobody king from prison give him a place in his government. After 37 years who even knew the guy was there, he was probably put in prison before Amel was even born. It is interesting that Jeremiah interrupts his history to include numbers of people taken captive right before this part of the story. Even more interesting is that the numbers here are smaller than the numbers in 2 Kings. Scholars think that the numbers here only include adult men while the numbers in 2 Kings include women and children. I have been married 32 years and have 5 children and 8 grand-children (so far), that makes 13 people beyond my generation that come from me (just looking at the man side of the equation here). If there were 4600 men and now it is 37 years later that would make around 60,000 descendants for those guys. And remember there would young boys in the larger number in 2 Kings who are now grown up with children too. Remember too that the Jewish people would have considered Jehoiachin there last real king. With such a large Jewish population in Babylon Abel may have needed someone to help him understand and rule these people. The Jewish people considered Jehoiachin their last real king. They may have petitioned the king to release him over the years, after all hadn’t he been a victim of his father’s actions? For whatever human reasons Amel released Jehoiach and cared for him. On the spiritual level it has been clear that it ia Yahweh who is in ultimate control. Although Jehoiachin never took the throne in Jerusalem again his release from prison would have been a sign of hope for all the Jews living in exile, they had not been abandoned. It would be another 22 years before their return to the land, they had a seventy year sentence to serve but God was faithful. In fact he would use the very person Isaiah had told them he would use, a guy named Cyrus. That prediction was given about 150 years before it happened. It would be like Abraham Lincoln adding to the Gettysburg Address that one day a guy named Barak Obama would be president of the United States.

God is astounding. God cares. God loves and acts but he is holy too and he will not let sin go unpunished (Jeremiah 30:11, 46:28; Exodus 34:7). Think about the contrast between Zedekiah and Jehoiachin. Zedekiah rebelled against Nebuchadnezzar and against God (who had repeatedly told the kings of Judah not to fight Nebuchadnezzar). Zedekiah’s family was executed and he was blinded and banished to prison for the rest of his life. In 2 Kings 24:12 we are told that Jehoiachin went out to the King of Babylon with his family and advisors, it sounds like he surrendered. In 2 Kings 24:9 we are told that Jehoiachin was an evil king but in this act of surrender he was obedient and faithful to God. In the end we see the mercy of God in the life of Jehoaichin and I’m sure the Jews in Babylon saw a ray of hope in the release of their king. Maybe one day the kingdom would be restored. Of course it would, God had promised it to their ancestors and it will one day come about. But first hearts need to return to God, a people need to be gathered for that kingdom. By the mercy of God it won’t be just Jewish people though, the message of Jeremiah was for the nations and in the end there will be people from every tribe, language, nation , and people group with God in his forever kingdom fulfilling the plan he has had since the creation of the world, the universe, and mankind. BE a part of his kingdom by surrendering to God today. Let Jesus fix your broken relationship with God, let the Holy Spirit fill you and guide you, and live with God now and forever.

God thank you for loving me. Thank you for dying for me. Thank you for sending your Holy Spirit to help me live for you. Thank you for having a forever place for me with you. Help me surrender each day and honor you and not myself. You are astounding.