Theological Commentary: Click Here
Sometimes
laments can be dangerous to read. As
human beings, we encounter sadness, sorrow, and disappointment all over the
place. I don’t mean to be a downer, but
you don’t have to look too far in life to find someone who does something to
disappoint – especially in the day and age of the internet.
We need to
be careful, then, to make sure we don’t read into the lament with our own
bias. For example, take today’s
lament. On the surface, it sounds like a
person lamenting over the fact that the leaders were raised up to be strong and
then taken away into captivity. It
sounds like a lament because things have gone poorly in Jerusalem. It is really easy to read that into the content
because that’s what makes logical sense to our brain.
It is
imperative that we remember whose hand it was that caused the exile. God is the source behind the exile. God raised up Assyria. God raised up Babylon. The exiles are in Babylon in order to pass
through God’s purification! Keep this in
mind as we go through the passage.
What is the
lament over, then? The lament is
actually about the disobedience of the people.
It was the disobedience of the people that made the lament necessary in
the first place. It is the continued
disobedience that raises up these princes to be disobedient to the regent
authority placed over them. It is the
disobedience of the people that keeps bringing Babylonian power back to quell
uprisings and tighten their grip over Israel.
The lament
is that the people don’t learn. Instead
of learning from their yoke, they simply seek to be free of it. Instead of submitting to God, they seek to
exercise their own desires.
Yes, the
exile is a sad moment in the history of the Hebrew people. But it is a moment that should have been
filled with purification and return to the Lord instead of continued
rebellion. This is why the lament is
lifted up. It is sad that because the
strong are rebellious that they have to be continually removed.
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