Prophecy
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In the Book of Lamentations the prophet Jeremiah uses the same sighing expression to open three of the five chapters: : the Hebrew word “Ekah” translated “Ah, how……” Each of these sighing laments are different but the three also seem inter-related, as you might expect.
In the first chapter the prophet cries in regard to Jerusalem, “Ah, how she sits alone, the city crowded with people!” Reminds one of the saying that sometimes we are never more alone than when we’re in a crowd, or than when we’re in a situation where fellowship and companionship would be hoped for and expected. And because the scene is optimum for that comradarie, it makes the resultant absence of it even more painful, because we know deep down that this ought not to be the case.
The second “sigh” comes in the following chapter where Jeremiah exclaims, “Ah, how the Lord has overshadowed (or overclouded) Daughter Zion with His anger! So, not only is there this pervasive sense of alienation from one another in the midst of the group where there ought to be connectedness, there is also an oppressive suspicion that the Lord is angry with His people, as if He is angry because they have wasted a wonderful opportunity to enjoy other’s company within the assurance of His favor upon them. They have wasted it by allowing their being together to become instead an empty and meaningless occasion. Holidays have a way of highlighting or accentuating family dysfunction. This is a big reason why there is so much depression and disappointment, and even suicide, during our holidays.
The third and final time this expression appears in Lamentations is in Chapter 4 which begins with this culminating declaration, “Ah, how the gold has become tarnished, (or dim) the fine gold become dull!” Gold in holy scripture often represents the pure agape love of God. Citizens of Heaven will walk streets of gold in the sense of constantly conducting themselves in love. Even Jesus about six hundred years later prophesied that because lawlessness or iniquity would abound the “love of many would grow cold” and he used the Greek word “agape” for love, the deliberate willing of and commitment to the highest good of the other. One translation even went so far as to say that the love of MOST would grow cold, which is a chilling thought.
So that fading, decaying process can happen even in the highest of loves while we are still journeying through this veil of tears we call earth. Later Jesus reproached the Ephesian church in Revelations chapter 2, verse 4, holding it against them that “you have abandoned the love you had at first.” This dying out of love seems to be the key of Jeremiah’s entire 5 chapter Lamentation. The poet Dylan Thomas wrote, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light!" Half a century later his words can still apply.
It’s because of the cooling of love for their Lord that the daughters and sons of Zion lost affection for each other, because one necessarily follows the other. And when they were failing to love they were feeling the fact that the Lord was no longer pleased with them, even angry with them, because love was and is His core Commandment to them. But some of us imagine that God is angry with us anyway because of the kinds of relationships we have known in our pasts, which make it so challenging for us to even fathom a God of such grace and fervent love toward us, as our God most surely is.
The prophet Ezekiel ministering around the same time (Chapter 9) was told by the Yahweh to “pass throughout the city of Jerusalem and put a mark on the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations committed” in Jerusalem. Those so marked were to be spared from the killing that followed. The mark on the forehead, like the imposition of the ashes on foreheads at the Lenten season, speaks of a mentality, a way of thinking, or a point of view. We can’t just ignore abominations occurring around us, we can’t just wink at them. We have to feel the full force of them, mourn them, and let them do their rectifying work of driving us to our knees for the sake of our Great Shepherd and His sheep, and His new Jerusalem.
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