039: Stephen Palmer - Another Look at Lamentations

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   Welcome to the Good Christadelphian Talks podcast. I'm Levi. And I'm Chris. Thank you so much for joining us this week. On this podcast, we select one talk a week to help each one of us get the Bible in our daily news feed. We post at the start of each week for you to listen with a short intro beforehand to kind of set the stage for the talk you're about to hear. And now let's hear more about this week's class is from our brother Stephen Palmer, given at the Watch End Bible School in 2017.

2. 0:42

   We've used a few of these classes, these bonus evening classes. So it's a one-off class on Lamentations. I really enjoyed looking at Lamentations as a whole, which is the point that Stephen makes right at the beginning, that this is a book that really suffers from when you read it, just a single chapter at a time, as we kind of do in the daily readings. So this is a really great class, very encouraging lessons that you can pull out from a study of the entire book of Lamentations in one sitting. We also have kind of a special announcement that we're going to have a guest presenter over the next two weeks, which will be brother Sam Taylor from Ohio. He's going to be presenting the next two classes, which are two that he suggested. We've listened to them and they are really enjoyed them. So I'm looking forward to that over the next two weeks. This will give Chris and I a little break here in the summer. We will still keep listening to classes and keep paying attention and really valuing your suggestions. We had so much great feedback from the class last week as well, which we really appreciate your feedback on Brother Davidson's class on depression. Please keep up the posting and sending us suggested classes. And we give thanks ahead of time to Sam for the two classes that he'll be sharing with us over the next two weeks. But yeah, for this week, here it is Lamentations by Brother Stephen Palmer.

3. 2:08

   This is Watch Ant Lake Bible School. This is the Monday night bonus class by our brother Stephen Palmer. And his topic is another look at Lamentations. And we'll ask our brother Stephen to come up and give that to us now.

4. 2:29

   Good evening, hearty folk. I do admire you. Well, I was asked to suggest a topic for an extra class. I choose Lamentations because I didn't know much about it, still don't really know much about it, but wanted to sort of rise to the challenge. I was giving an exhortation in a little ecclesia called Ammonford and the daily readings of Lamentations.

5. 3:00

   So I made some exhortational points from Lamentations. And the ecclesia said, but I come back and do a Bible class, two Bible classes on Lamentations at fairly short notice. So I took up the challenge and I looked at it. And I have to say, in the past, I've found it very difficult to read the book of Lamentations in the daily readings. You know, a chapter at a time of doom and gloom. And it's almost like, oh, another chapter. You know, I can't take any more of this. It's just so sad. It's so awful.

6. 3:35

   And I realized that it's not intended to be read chapter by chapter. It's intended to be looked at as a whole. And when you look at it as a whole, then you see something really interesting about it. But in trying to get to grips with it, I learned a few things that I'm going to share with you tonight.

7. 3:55

   By no means could anybody say this is a completed study. In fact, brethren, we never complete our studies, do we? We may have done something we think is sufficient for the evening. But surely that's not the measure of whether we are understanding something. We're continually wanting to understand better and more deeply. But when I was looking at Lamentations, it was impossible to separate the scene of Jerusalem then in BC 586 from Jerusalem as it has come down through the centuries. 1844, one of the first photographs ever. It's a photograph of the desolate city of Jerusalem.

8. 4:45

   And for centuries, Jerusalem was indeed a downtrodden and oppressed city, a city of squalor. cholera. Cholera was endemic. It was disease ridden. And in its history, a city of gross moral decay as part of a backwater of the Turkish Empire. So even though Lamentations are set in a specific time in a specific era, it speaks about Jerusalem's plight through many centuries as well. Another of the earliest photographs is of the Jews that lived in Jerusalem. Some of the poorest people around at the time were written about and they still sought to the wall of Jerusalem. And verses like Lamentations chapter 2 verse 18 come to mind. Their heart cried unto the Lord, a wall of the daughter of Zion.

9. 5:56

   Let tears run down like a river day and night. Give thyself no rest. Let not the apple of thine eye cease. It captures the tone, the pathos of those sorts of scenes. When Edward Robinson, famous archaeologist archaeologist from whose name Robinson's arch is taken. And this is Robinson's arch before the archaeologists dug down and down and down and down and down to the first century pavement. That was Robinson's arch. When Robinson went there, he wrote a long article about the plight of Jerusalem. And this is what he said. The glory of Jerusalem is indeed departed. Words from 2,600 years before come into the mind as he looks at that.

10. 7:00

    So, Jerusalem, described in its destruction by the Babylonians in an alphabetic acrostic book. Everybody know what an alphabetic acrostic is? Yeah? Well, I did and I didn't. So, I'm going to tell you what this says. If you look at your Bibles now, you've got to look at the verses, the versification. Where did versification come from? It did not come from the prophets themselves. Verses were introduced, imposed, imposed, put upon the text from the time of the printed word.

11. 7:50

    Chapter 1, how many verses? 22. Chapter 2, how many verses? Chapter 3, how many verses? Now, that's a bit odd, isn't it? Because those chapters are about equal in length.

12. 8:07

    It's about the same number of lines in each of those chapters, but the verses are set in differently. How many letters are there in the Hebrew alphabet? 22. So, what you've got in Chapter 1 is very straightforward. Each verse, as has been put in, captures that section of the lament, which begins with the letter of the alphabet.

13. 8:37

    So, verse 1 begins with Aleph, verse 2 with Beth, and so on, down to the last letter. The Hebrew scholars here can tell us about that. Chapter 2, similarly, follows the same pattern. Chapter 3 is different, because Chapter 3, if you put verses into Chapter 3 as they've been put into Chapter 1 and 2, then verse 1 would be, I am the man at the scene of affliction by the rod of his wrath.

14. 9:08

    He has led me and brought me into darkness, but not by light. Surely against me, as he turned, he turned his hand against me all the day. The first three verses would be the equivalent of one verse in Chapters 1 and 2. So, it's an artificial thing, those verse numbers. But why they've done it like that is because in Chapter 1 and 2,

15. 9:35

    the letter of the alphabet only appears, the acrostic letter only appears the once for three statements. In Chapter 3, it occurs three times for three statements. Have you been reading that? Can you follow what it says? So, in Chapters 1, 2, and 3, there are three lines in each stanza. In Chapter 4, two lines.

16. 10:00

    In Chapter 5, one line. In Lamentations 1, 2, and 4, only the first letter of the first line in each stanza is part of the acrostic sequence. So, in Chapter 1, it would be, let's put it into English, A. Right? Then you'd have three lines. B, three lines. C, three lines. But in Chapter 3, you'd have A, one line.

17. 10:29

    A, two line. A, three line. All right? That's the way it is. Now, why should that be? You can look at it there in that way. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet is the first letter of the first line of the first verse. There's a second line and a third line. But they are, in the verse, they don't follow the acrostic.

18. 10:58

    It's, it's, in Chapter 3, each of the three lines begins with the same letter. Now, why should that be? There's obviously a pattern. It's not an easy pattern to follow. It's quite a difficult pattern to follow. And you might think that an acrostic pattern, an alphabet poem, is an easy thing. But it's, something goes wrong with it.

19. 11:29

    Something, there's something peculiar about it. You know, it's hard to explain what's going on. And I think there's, there's a point there. It's suggested that acrostic poems were designed to be memorised more easily. But if that's the case, why aren't all psalms acrostic? Why are only a very few of them acrostic? If it's simply about memorisation, are we only to memorise some of the psalms?

20. 12:06

    It doesn't work for me to say that they're there to, to help memorisation. More than memorising, say, Deuteronomy 32, which we know every child in Israel had to learn. Deuteronomy 32 is the song. Every child had to learn. But it's not a crostic. So there's got to be something more to it than simply an aid to memorisation.

21. 12:31

    There's got to be something to do with the alphabet itself. So that first thing is, it's an acrostic psalm, using the alphabet to order the text. The second aspect about it, which is even more difficult to follow, is that it has a keener structure. Q-I-N-A-H. It has a keener structure. And it's a lament.

22. 13:04

    It has a certain rhythm. It would be read in a certain way. And the rhythm, the metre, is three stresses followed by two stresses. Three stresses followed by two stresses. Three stresses followed by two stresses. And it's been called the rhythm that always dies away. This isn't a rhythm which develops momentum or maintains a steady pace.

23. 13:31

    This is a rhythm which is always a disappointment, always an anticlimax. Always fading away. And in fact, the whole of the book is like that. In chapter 1, 2, and 3, the stanzas are triplets. Each stanza has three lines. Right? But in chapter 4, each stanza has only two lines. And in chapter 5, each stanza only has one line.

24. 14:07

    So the book dies away. The acrostic, alphabetic acrostic, applies in chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4. But it doesn't apply in chapter 5. Have a look at chapter 5. How many verses are there in chapter 5?

25. 14:39

    22. The same as the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter 5 is set up to be acrostic. But it's not. So we start off with the alphabet. We go through the alphabet, you know. Al of Beth and so on. We go through. We go through. Good. Follow that. Chapter 2, we go through.

26. 15:01

    Yeah. Chapter 3, go through. Chapter 4, yeah. Chapter 5. No. It's gone. Somebody's made a soup of the words. The letters, they're all jumbled up. Well, the children must have got a hold of it. They moved it all around. They've been on my computer. They pressed these buttons. What's going on? I can't do it now.

27. 15:23

    It's all spoiled. It's messed up. And I think that's probably part of it. That this is a book about the word of God being what it should have been for Israel, but they lost it. They didn't cling on to the word. They didn't obey the word. They didn't keep the word. And so the word, as it were, fades out.

28. 15:49

    But their alphabet, God-given alphabet, which had ordered the thoughts of chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4, now becomes a jumble, a chaotic scene of desolation. So there's something about the features of it which are leading us to this lament, this, oh dear, what a disappointment. Couldn't we even have kept the acrostic pattern till the end?

29. 16:25

    Couldn't we even have got that right? But there's another feature of that which I'll come back to. So if you just take the ESV, now I type the ESV because you've probably got all sorts of versions online. And you know the King James Version tends not to set, well, it's not printed to draw out the poetic structure of the verses, whereas the more modern versions are set out to try to capture the poetry.

30. 16:55

    So you can see, for example, in verse 1, that they put the first two lines. The second line is indented because they see it as a parallelism. How lonely sits the city that was full of people. How like a widow has she become? She who was great among the nations. She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave.

31. 17:24

    That's the meter of the poetry that is there. And verse 2, Beth. She weeps bitterly in the night with tears on her cheeks. Among all her lovers, she has none to comfort her. All her friends have dealt treacherously with her. They have become her enemies. There's a deep sadness about the tone and the meter and the rhythm.

32. 17:57

    In chapter 2, how the Lord in his anger has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud. He has cast down from heaven to earth the splendor of Israel. He has not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger. So that's each verse itself. Never mind the acrostic beginning. It's giving us, in sets of parallel thoughts, the awfulness of the scene.

33. 18:33

    In chapter 3, as I said, each of those three sets begins with the same letter. Aleph. Aleph. I am the man that has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath. Aleph. He hath driven and brought me into darkness without any light. Aleph. Surely against me, he turns his hand again and again the whole day long.

34. 19:01

    Aleph. Aleph. Chapter 3, the center of the lament, is more intense. The alphabet which forms the word of God is sort of concentrated in the center. Chapter 4, as I said, there are only two lines. Four lines. Only two long lines broken down into halves. How the gold has grown dim. How the pure gold has changed.

35. 19:36

    The holy stone lies scattered at the head of every street. So we've had three chapters where each stanza's got three statements. Now, it diminishes to two. And in chapter 5, it diminishes to the one. Remember, O Yahweh, what has befallen us. Look and see our disgrace. Well, that's the keener lament. And that's, if you just read a verse, and the English sort of covers all of this up.

36. 20:16

    It sort of puts a haze over the whole thing. It's really difficult in reading the English of the King James to see any of that structure. And if we only read a chapter at a time, we would be oblivious, really, to the way in which the whole book develops that pattern. I mentioned that chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 are alphabetic acrostic.

37. 20:45

    But they're not all pristine alphabets. So there's something very, very curious, which experts, so-called, can't explain. They make suggestions as to what's going on. But it's quite curious. And that is that two letters, number 16 and 17 on the list, iron and pay, are reversed in order in chapters 2, 3, and 4.

38. 21:16

    Though they're in the correct alphabetical order, inverse in chapter 1. So imagine, you know, you go to ABCDEFG and so on. I got that, yeah. Learned that as a child. ABCDEFNM. P.O.

39. 21:35

    Come on, kids. You said it wrong. You can't. It's basic, isn't it? The alphabet is absolutely basic. You can't get it wrong. But chapter 2 gets it wrong. And chapter 3 gets it wrong. And chapter 4 gets it wrong. We've been told something, you know, that Israel is not following that which God gave them.

40. 21:59

    And they have been changing the message somehow. The letters have been reversed. The scholars tell us that there were two alphabets at different times and different places in Israel. And so chapter 1 is the standard alphabet. But chapter 2, 3, and 4 must have been written, well, they would say, by somebody else in some other place using a different alphabet.

41. 22:26

    Well, that would be a strange thing for us, believing in verbal inspiration, to think that that could be the case. I think we'd have to find another reason why those inversions of the alphabet have taken place. Now, it's not a chiasm here, right? This is just inversion of the letters. And I would have known nothing about it had I not read it.

42. 22:53

    Do you know what the letter iron signifies? It's the word for eye. And do you know what the letter pay signifies? Mouth. It's the word for mouth. That's interesting. A letter can also be a word. So they go down. Eye, mouth. Let's focus on. Next chapter, mouth. Eye. Next chapter, mouth. Eye. Next chapter, mouth.

43. 23:21

    Eye. So I did a little bit of investigation. So if you look at chapter 1 and you look at the verse 16, which is the iron verse, that's number 16 in the alphabet, wow, it's got eye in it. For these things I weep. Mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water. So maybe the letter, which means eye, is representing a message about the eye in verse 16.

44. 24:05

    So I'm looking now at verse 17 and thinking, maybe the word mouth is in verse 17, but it's not there. It's not there in the first chapter. I was onto something there with eye is there. Letter 16. Okay, verse 16. And it's got eye twice. For these things I weep. And it's a very evocative thing.

45. 24:26

    Mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water. So how would you pursue this? I mean, there's no guidance here. How would you pursue finding out why scripture has done that? Yeah. People who don't believe in verbal inspiration will sort of say, oh, well, some scribal mistake. It's just a way that somebody's mistranscribed it.

46. 24:51

    Don't worry about it. It's not important. It's a detail. It's... Oh, we don't believe that, do we? We don't believe that the scriptures work like that or are written like that. So the only way I could think of investigating that is where do we find the most impressive acrostic, alphabet acrostic in scripture?

47. 25:14

    Psalm 119. So let's look at I in Psalm 119. Psalm 119. And verse 121, you can see there, it's iron. And there you have in verse 123, mine eyes fail for thy salvation and for the word of thy righteousness. Under that section which has to do with the eye, the eye of the prophet, the eye of the psalmist is failing, waiting for God's salvation and for the word of his righteousness.

48. 26:08

    I don't think his eyesight is failing. I think his eyes are failing. The tears are flowing so much. He's cried out. It's taken so long. God's salvation appears to be delaying. And that would fit very much with lamentations. For these things I weep, mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water. The eye in lamentations, the eye, the iron of Psalm 119 is an eye which is crying buckets of tears, flowing like a river.

49. 26:46

    What about pay, the mouth? Verse 129, that's the section. What's it say there? Verse 131, I opened my mouth and panted, for I longed for thy commandments. In the section beginning, mouth, the mouth of the psalmist is open, out of breath, out of breath, trying to keep up, as it were, trying to get to the word of God.

50. 27:21

    It's a picture of lamentations. It's a picture of eyes flowing with tears, of a mouth open, gasping for air, for the refreshment of God. But there's something I can't explain, and that's this. Verse 136, under the section beginning with pay, or mouth, the last verse, 136, rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they keep not thy law.

51. 27:58

    And that verse appears in lamentations. So it's like this. Rivers of waters run down mine eyes. Lamentations 1, verse 16, For these things I weep, mine eye, mine eye runneth down with water, because the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me. My children are desolate, because the enemy prevails. Lamentations 2, verse 18, Their heart cried unto the Lord, A wall of the daughter of Zion, Let tears run down like a river, day and night.

52. 28:41

    And then in chapter 3, Mine eye runneth down with rivers of waters. There's no doubt that that verse, at the end of the pay section of Psalm 119, appears three times, and it's most full form in 3, verse 48, in the book of lamentations. So there's a link here between the acrostic of Psalm 119 and the acrostic of lamentations.

53. 29:10

    The acrostic of Psalm 119 is pristine. You know, it's the perfect acrostic. It's the alphabet word of God. It's about salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, about the wayward sheep who's been brought back into the fold through the righteous one. This is the Lord Jesus Christ, the beginning and ending of the purpose of God, the word made flesh.

54. 29:34

    Psalm 119 is perfect in its construction. But lamentations, these cracks, inversions, and ultimately the loss of the alphabet pattern because Israel has turned away from the word of God and consequently they have fragmented and fallen apart themselves. What happens to the alphabet in lamentations is what's happened to them as a people and as a city.

55. 30:06

    The word mouth occurs in chapter 2, verse 16 under the pay letter. So that's interesting. In chapter 1, under the iron letter, the word I occurred. In chapter 2, under the pay letter, the word mouth occurs. But this time, it's the mouth of the enemy. It's not the mouth of the prophet gasping for God's word.

56. 30:51

    It's the mouth of the enemy opened against them. And in chapter 3, under the pay, under the mouth, we find the word mouth. All our enemies opened their mouths against us. But we also find it's followed by eyes. And under the iron, verse 49, mine eyes will flow without ceasing, without respite, until Yahweh from heaven looks down and sees.

57. 31:26

    My eyes cause me grief at the fate of all the daughters of my city. So what is happening, I think, and this is just a suggestion, that the eyes are flowing with tears in the psalm, and the mouth is open for God's word. But Israel haven't been interested in God's word. So now it's inverted.

58. 31:49

    What you have is the mouth of the enemy gaping against them, causing their eyes to flow down. There's a point being made in that inversion. In chapter 5, I said there's no acrostic. But where would you find iron, and where would you find pay?

59. 32:09

    You would find it in verses 16 and 17. And lo and behold, in verse 17, there's the word eyes. For this our heart has become sick. For these things our eyes have grown dim. So all I can say to you is that that's all I can find. I haven't been able to find anything in academic literature or in the Brotherhood's literature which seeks even to describe beyond what I've said what's going on here.

60. 32:38

    Something very deep and subtle is going on in terms of the use of the alphabet. Yeah. Yeah. And it has the inversion. Right. So I know what that means. Well, many of the so-called alphabet acrostic psalms are even complete and broken apart. So there's something much more about acrostic patterns than simply it's following the alphabet.

61. 33:06

    What she says is the strength of honor, that's iron, she opens her mouth at pay. So the iron and pay is the other way around. Yeah. The other way around. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting because if you look at the Proverbs 31, it's a female. Right. And lamentations is a female. Yeah.

62. 33:21

    Yeah. And you compare this with their crossings. Right. Yeah, she does open her mouth at person and strength. So it's kind of a... Right. A counter to it. A woman of wisdom compared to a woman who's gone wrong. So there's a mystery to be solved there, right? And I leave you with that.

63. 33:38

    So I tell you, that's as far as I've got now. You know, as I say, I've looked at the Christadelphian magazine from the year zero, the testing magazine. I've even Googled it.

64. 33:51

    I've looked at JSTOR, the academic database of academic articles on theological and other related subjects. I can't find anything beyond what I've told you. Right. So... But there's something deep about the word and the alphabets that spell the words, which is not following the pristine pattern. There's a twist there between eye and mouth.

65. 34:22

    Eye and mouth. And you think they are related, aren't they? You know? We should do more looking and less speaking, shouldn't we? When we get them the wrong way round. Yeah? I just wonder, Stephen, if you've looked at Bollinger on... I haven't looked at Bollinger. Not in that regard. But that might bring me on to chiastic structures.

66. 34:49

    Because... Because... I mean, that curiosity is noted in books, commentaries on lamentations, right? And they suggest that there were different alphabets, so there wasn't one alphabet. There were two alphabets. And in chapter one, they used one. In chapter two, somebody else used another alphabet. And that's all it is to it. Well, I think that's unlikely.

67. 35:16

    Now, this is from a book by David Dorsey called The Literary Structure of the Old Testament, published in 1999. And it's quite a remarkable book, a useful book. And he suggests that the book of lamentations is introverted Hebrew parallelism. And that's the structure that he puts out. Now, I don't think it works 100%.

68. 35:43

    The way in which he does it is to say, who is the predominant voice speaking in these chapters? So, in chapter one, verse one, it is... It's like a journalist or a news reporter going to see the destruction of Jerusalem. And he stands, or she stands, say, on the Mount of Olives, on Mount Scopus, and she's looking down at this desolation.

69. 36:13

    And the report comes back, how does that city sit solitary? You know, this city was one of the great cities of the region. But look at it now. It's in chaos. It's destroyed. The crying of the people, the poor people on the streets of that city. She weepeth sore in the night. Her tears are on her cheeks.

70. 36:36

    So, the first few verses of chapter one are about somebody describing what that third party over there, Jerusalem, is looking like and feeling like. It's an observer observing the suffering of Jerusalem.

71. 36:53

    But then the voice changes. In verse 12, Jerusalem herself turns around to this observer and says, is it nothing to you? Oh, you who pass by. Can you walk past what you're looking at? Have you ever watched a news report of destruction and mayhem while you're eating your tea?

72. 37:30

    Talking about something trivial? arguing over something silly? And there, bombs are going off. And that's what chapter, first part of chapter one is like. It's, don't you care? You walk by, you make these comments, you make these reports. You recognize the trouble we're in is does it matter anything to you at all?

73. 37:58

    And so the plea of Zion becomes apparent. Then into chapter two, the first eight verses. I said it doesn't work, it doesn't work exactly, but what it's saying is this is the predominant voice. He, Yahweh, has caused this. So the first voice is the observer. Have you seen Jerusalem? Look at her now.

74. 38:23

    Oh, I remember when she was a great city, but look, it's awful. Are you just going to comment, says Jerusalem? Does it mean anything to you? Do you feel as I'm feeling?

75. 38:37

    Why has it happened? And the voice comes, Yahweh has caused this in his anger. The Lord has swallowed up the inhabitations of Jacob. He has thrown down in his wrath the strongholds. He has brought them down to the ground. He has polluted the kingdom and the princes. He has cut off in his fierce anger all the horn of Israel.

76. 39:02

    He has drawn back his right hand. He has bent his bow like an enemy. The Lord was an enemy. He has swallowed up Israel. He has swallowed up all her palaces. So there's a different voice speaking. And those are mirrored in reverse order. So right at the end of chapter 5, chapter 5, it is the voice of, look what's happened to the people of Zion.

77. 39:32

    They're desolate and devastated. The end of chapter 4, they're betrayed and defeated. The middle of chapter 4, Yahweh has caused this in his anger. So you've got to feel like, you know, the objective view of what's gone on. Moving inwards, you've got to feel like the feelings of those who are suffering. Then you move in, you have the cause of that suffering, the judgments of Yahweh.

78. 40:07

    And as you move in further, chapter 2, verse 9 to 12, it's a description of the people, the groups in the city, her king, her princes, her prophets, the elders. They are clothed in sackcloth.

79. 40:32

    That's what has happened, the suffering of those groups. And that's mirrored in the beginning of chapter 4. They, the princes, maidens, nurslings, children and mothers are suffering.

80. 40:46

    You move in again, says Dorsey, chapter 2, verse 13, and you get a different voice speaking directly to you, to Zion. Your enemies, your suffering, your grief, your tears. And he says that's mirrored at the end of chapter 3.

81. 41:20

    Now, make what you will of that, right? I'm not suggesting that in any way that's definitive, but it is recognisable when you look at the Book of Lamentations as a whole. And what it does, and I think this is absolutely right, it focuses the lens on the very centre of the Book of Lamentations.

82. 41:46

    I guess what that centre is. The only real note of hope in the whole book. And if we were just to go chapter by chapter, we'd stumble over this in chapter 3, and then we'd move on to more destruction and more doom and more gloom. And that's the way we'd end up. But that's not the way to read it.

83. 42:09

    The way to read it is to see this scroll as a whole, and to see as you open the scroll, in the centre are actually a very wonderful and hopeful message, despite all the destruction and mayhem that's going on. So broadly speaking, chapters 1 and 5 describe the despair in Jerusalem in the aftermath of destruction.

84. 42:36

    Chapter 5 offers a little bit of hope, mine compared to chapter 1. Chapter 2 and 4, they describe the events of the destruction brought by God upon Jerusalem that has led to this despair. And in chapter 4, there's a little bit of hope compared to chapter 2. Chapter 3 is where we need to end up, as it were, which is the learning we are to take from that suffering.

85. 43:08

    Now you translate that to more modern times and see what it must have been like. You know, the newsreels, magazine, publishes photographs of people fleeing the old city of Jerusalem, Jews fleeing the destruction of Jerusalem. And I'm going to cheat a little bit by putting a picture not from Jerusalem, but you get Jerusalem herself in dust and ashes, a voice out of the destruction.

86. 43:43

    Is it nothing to you? O ye that pass by. You're sipping your cup of coffee, having your family argument, talking about trivial things as you watch my city being blown apart. Can we be so dissociated from the horror that is in the world? Can we be so immune to the suffering of fellow human beings that we can blot out the impact of what we see and hear?

87. 44:17

    Instead of groaning and yearning for the kingdom to come, instead of giving ourselves 100% to praying for that kingdom to come, we get on with our lives indifferent. I think that's one of the things that hit me anyway as I was just thinking about lamentations and the news was going on about the destruction.

88. 44:42

    See, what happened in Syria yesterday is going to be Jerusalem tomorrow, isn't it? And the lamentations talks about the women, the terrible plight of the virgins of Jerusalem. And we know what happens to young women in these scenarios. They're taken off as slaves. And the children are the ones whose limbs are blown apart, with parents carrying them to the hospital, but there is no hospital, because the hospital's just been destroyed.

89. 45:17

    And the parent just doesn't know what to do, because he got this little child. And that's what was happening in Jerusalem. The children, the little ones, the yearlings, and the young men, the young men who thought they were put up a fight, just been crushed. Is it nothing to you?

90. 45:40

    I am a man that has seen affliction by the God of his wrath. What are we to learn? What are we to contemplate? What are we to reflect? If we could imagine ourselves sitting, using our imaginations, as Brother Kenny suggests, you don't have to have much of an imagination to picture what lamentations is describing.

91. 46:01

    What are we to learn from that? My flesh and my skin hath he made old. He hath broken my bones. He hath built it against me, encompassed me with gall and travail. He hath set me in dark places, as they that be dead of old.

92. 46:20

    Also, when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer. prayer. So, there is a real emotion that we should feel as we go through the book of Lamentations. We're going to read it in a while, aren't we?

93. 46:37

    And that acrostic, that chiastic pattern can be documented more clearly. You know, you can see some of the key concepts in chapter one being echoed in chapter five. The concept of the destruction and those who have been destroyed and the desolation, they recur. You know, these are the boundaries of what we're looking at.

94. 47:05

    No rest, desolation because of transgressions. The second part of chapter five and chapter one and chapter four, you can see there is none to comfort her. I call for my lovers but they deceive me. Chapter four says, our vain help that could not save us. There was all those alliances they made with the surrounding nations to come to their aid should the Babylonians come, have evaporated.

95. 47:42

    They put their trust in princes in whom there's no help. love. And so you can, and anybody wants these of course can have them. There are these balances which you can pursue and I can see it's far too much to go through. But what I just draw your attention to is this, that the middle section of the whole of the book, verse of chapter three, verse 22 to 33, is itself a really lovely inverted parallelism.

96. 48:13

    And you can see that, can't you? If you looked at your own Bibles, you may have marked up recurring phrases. Chapter three, verse 22, it is of Yahweh's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. His compassions, verse 32, but though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies.

97. 48:38

    verse 25 to 27, Yahweh is good, it is good that a man should both hope, it is good for a man that he bear his yoke in his youth. He sitteth alone, he putteth his mouth in the dust, he giveth his cheeks to him that smiteth him. There's a pattern there where the threefold repetitions with the acrostic pattern, balance each other out.

98. 49:10

    So the centre portion, which is the one that we perhaps would naturally gravitate to anyway, the bit that gives us some encouragement, is actually the centre. So if that's all you take away, I think for me anyway that was a major point. Instead of thinking of lamentations as a string of sadness, it is a picture of sadness, sure it is.

99. 49:37

    A picture of sadness brought on because Israel refused to obey the word of God. But what we are to learn is that there is compassion. Jeremiah wasn't destroyed. Baruch wasn't destroyed.

100. 49:54

     People were taken out of that destruction. The poor of the land are left to glean that if we put our trust in Yahweh, he is compassionate. Knew every morning great is thy faithfulness. God was true to his word, but the Lord never wanted to destroy Jerusalem. We're told at the end of 2nd Chronicles that he rose up early, sending the prophets.

101. 50:28

     Again and again and again. He didn't want them. He told Zedekiah, get out of the city, go into captivity, spare the people, spare the city. Right up to the 11th hour, Jeremiah was pleading with him to listen to the word of Yahweh.

102. 50:48

     But he wouldn't. nevertheless, in that picture of destruction, there is this gorgeous center about the compassions of the Father. Yahweh is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope in him. Even the most desperate and bitterly depressing circumstances, we need to cling on to this central voice of lamentations. Therefore will I hope in him.

103. 51:24

     Yahweh is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of Yahweh. It is good that a man should bear his yoke in his youth.

104. 51:47

     He sitteth alone and keepeth silence because he hath borne it upon him. He putteth his mouth in the dust. If so be, there may be hope. He giveth his cheek to him that smiteth him. He is filled full with reproach. And we have to think of the Lord Jesus Christ there, do we not?

105. 52:07

     Who gave his cheek to those who smote him. He is the source of our hope. And in his own experience, bore the suffering of humankind, bore the condition that we all bear. And in bearing that for us shows us that there is hope. But sisters, isn't the Lord Jesus Christ the central hope of the book of Lamentations?

106. 52:34

     What are we to learn? We're to keep that word of God in its pristine condition. We're not going to change it, we're not going to tamper with it, we're going to listen to the word of God. We're not going to take some of it and leave others we don't like out, we're going to receive the whole of God's word as he has written it.

107. 52:54

     And in our times of real difficulty, when our tears run down like a river day and night, we're to put our thoughts upon the Lord Jesus Christ who gave his cheek to him that smiteth him, as an expression of the compassion of the Lord that faileth not, that we might say, Yahweh is my portion, saith my soul, therefore will I hope.

108. 53:32

     Thank you for listening to the Good Christ Delphine Talks podcast. Please subscribe for new episodes and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever service you are listening from to help people find the show when they search for it. If you enjoyed this talk, share it on social media so other people can find it too.

109. 53:49

     For show notes and links to the talk that you just listened to, visit our show page at anchor.fm slash gct. We want to encourage everyone to share their thoughts from the talk this week on Facebook or Instagram, where we are at Good Christadelphian Talks, or on Twitter, where we are at gct underscore podcast.

110. 54:07

     If you know of a great talk, we want to know about it too. Send a suggestion to goodchristadelphiantalks at gmail.com or message us on any of our social media platforms. Thank you for listening, God bless, and talk to you next week.