Lamentations - Sin Affects Far More Than You Think

God Centered Theology

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Welcome back to the Preaching Ministry of God -Centered Theology as we are looking through the

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Book of Lamentations together. Last time we went through verses 1 through 3, and we noticed the great reversal of fortune that Jerusalem went through when

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Babylon came in and took them over and killed many of them, took the rest off to slavery, destroyed the city, destroyed the temple.

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And now as we look at verses 4 through 6 today of chapter 1, we're going to see a development and an increase in detail as to just how devastating this

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Jerusalem is left. And we're going to see as this book moves along that just like many would today in today's world, you know, they always point to a natural disaster or some sort of bad thing that's happened and say, well, you know, how could

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God let this happen? It's all God's fault. And, you know, this shouldn't have happened. We didn't deserve this. And we're going to see through this book the turn that occurs and the recognition that judgment only comes due to one's sin.

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And this judgment of Babylon coming and destroying the city, destroying the temple, and taking out the people, and this judgment on them from where we looked at last time how they were great among the nations and are now forced laborers.

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All this change has only come about because of the people's sin. They have no one to blame but themselves.

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You have no one to blame for your sin but yourself. They were warned all throughout the book of Jeremiah and in other cases.

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They were warned repeatedly that this was going to happen. They needed to turn and repent in the same fashion

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God today through the preaching of His Word preaches the gospel to the nations and that they need to repent.

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They need to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. They need to be discipled. They need to turn to Him.

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And so any judgment that comes is only because of the person's sin. Verse 4, the roads of Zion or the roads to Zion are in mourning because no one comes to the appointed times.

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Everything shut down. What was a booming town, what was a booming place of business and interest and people moving about and living in their daily lives now is just simply shut down.

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There's nothing. It's a ghost town. There's no activity and there were many roads that led to the city so where things would come to and from the city, travelers, goods and services, people coming to the temple here for appointed times of worship and different things that went on with that and the

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Old Covenant. And now these streets are personified to say that they would be in mourning.

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And the reason the Word of God uses imagery and different things like this just like we would for any piece of literature that we would write is we want to use language that we can understand to demonstrate the severity of something.

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So if you just said, well, you know, the roads are not as good as they used to be. Well, okay.

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Maybe it's just a downturn. No, the roads are in mourning. Their death has occurred.

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This is grief. And the person that is truly repentant of their sin will, in like fashion, be in mourning like these streets were.

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Why are they mourning? No one's coming to the appointed times. No one's coming to the city. No one is engaging in what's going on anymore.

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Now, if you remember, I told you there's a lot of times here in this book where Jerusalem is used, the word she and her and things like that are used to describe

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Jerusalem. You use the female pronoun her. And so this is what's being referred to here.

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You're gonna see a lot of repetition here to make this to make the point. So it's all her gates are desolate.

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Her priests are sighing or groaning. Her virgins are grieving their suffering.

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She herself is bitter. Now, this is why we talk about biblical interpretation.

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We say we don't literally take the Bible literally in every single spot because obviously the

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Bible, just like all other human beings and every other generation, uses metaphors and imagery and different things to explain and bring out a point about something.

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So it'll take something like a literal land and city and these things, the gates, she herself,

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Jerusalem, is bitter. How could a city, how could a temple be bitter?

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Only people could be bitter. That's why there's personification here. It's wanting to relate it to us so we can understand.

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It's such tragedy, such a devastation, that it can be said that the literal city itself is almost in mourning and it's bitter because of what's happened.

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We'll say this a lot, you know, cities that we know of near us that aren't doing well or maybe were shut down or not what they used to be.

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You know, we'll talk about how they, you know, have been left to die. You know, a piece of wood can't literally, well,

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I guess wood can't be, you know, stones. And, you know, we don't, the city, we don't mean that literally, obviously, is the point I'm making.

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But she herself is bitter. Her adversaries have become her masters.

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The same repetition here from before where it talks about, in verse 1, she who was a princess among the provinces has become a forced laborer or is put into forced service.

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We get the repetition of that here. Think about this. The one that were the adversaries, the people groups and the different, you know, the

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Philistines and all these different people that all throughout the book of Joshua, when you're reading about these conquests and God giving victories to them, they would be victorious over all their adversaries.

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God would give them victory. Well, now the reversal to where they're not only have not gotten victory but they've been wiped out.

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The adversaries have become her masters. So the people of Jerusalem has gone from a place of prominence and being, you know, quote -unquote, in charge, to now they're under and in slavery to those that hate them.

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Babylon was raised up by God and used by God to come into the city, take them over, and force

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Jerusalem into slavery. Her enemies are complacent.

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This word complacent here means at ease, quiet. So think about the difference.

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Think about what's changed here. Jerusalem, God's people, who should be at peace, who should be at ease, who should be living quietly, going about their day, are now, their whole world is completely disrupted, completely overturned, completely upended.

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And their adversaries, the ones who should be fearful and upset and not living at ease, are now living at ease.

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They're living very complacently, very quietly. They're enjoying rest that's meant for the people of God.

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Because the people of God have sinned and God has removed that grace and mercy. He's brought judgment so that they are no longer experiencing the things that they should.

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And notice here, the enemies are complacent at ease and it explains why in the next phrase here.

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For Yahweh, for the Lord, has caused her grief.

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God is the cause. So all these that would say, well, you know, God really can't do nothing about anything.

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He may know what's gonna happen, but, you know, He really can't meddle. He doesn't meddle in free will of man, all this stuff, and God certainly wouldn't cause anything bad to happen to His people.

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People get so hung up on this and want to reconcile it in their finite minds, the idea that God could cause something to happen and still not be the author of that sin.

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God raised up Babylon to come in and do exactly what they did.

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He caused this grief on Jerusalem because of the greatness of her transgressions.

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God isn't sinning. When God causes judgment to fall upon a nation or fall upon a people,

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He's perfectly righteous and just in doing so. There is no sin in God. There is no transgression in God.

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He brought this grief, caused this grief, caused Babylon to come because of the transgressions of Jerusalem.

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So in these people of Babylon that came in and killed and murdered and plundered and took people off into slavery, we look towards the end of the book of Jeremiah and we see how they will be judged by the same

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God for the sin they've committed. You say, well, that's not fair. No.

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There's a mystery involved in this thing that could we learn on a much deeper level in eternity how this fits possibly?

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I tend to be more of the opinion that it's unlikely because I think there's something about us having a finite created existence with a finite mind that there's just some things about the infinite nature of God that our finite minds just simply are not able to understand and or reconcile.

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And the idea that God could be the cause of something and have His decree and use means, use human beings and nations, different means to accomplish

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His decree and purposes, but at the same time not be the author of that. It's still the people themselves that are willfully choosing and loving and doing this sin.

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How those two things can be true at the same time, a lot of people wrestle over and try to figure out.

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And anytime you have a reconciliation between the two or merge them, you're giving up some of the truth of one or the other.

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Some people will massage one to gain on the other side, but you cannot because our finite minds just, that doesn't mean that they're not in the mind of God.

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And what He does, these things are perfectly compatible, perfectly understandable. And He has revealed enough to us for us to understand these things.

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But what we have to do is let Scripture speak and stop there. And it is true that man alone is responsible for his own sin.

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God did not author it. God did not cause it or force him to sin like some type of pulling strings on a robot or on a puppet.

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At the same time, it's very true that God has a decree. God has purpose. God has everything.

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He is sovereign over all events. And certain things, it is said that He directly causes these things.

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I imagine in other ways, the way we would understand it, might He simply allow or not intervene and let these things just sort of play out.

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In other ways, it says here specifically, the Lord caused her grief.

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The Lord is responsible for this grief and this judgment that has come upon them.

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There's no other way to read that. But at the same time, not only has the Lord caused this grief, it's only because of the greatness of Jerusalem's sin, their own transgressions.

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Now, we have to let Scripture speak in both of those lines there in verse 5.

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Both are true. You say, well, I can't reconcile how that could be. Well, we're finite creatures.

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We have finite existences, finite minds. While we can be made in the image of God and certainly demonstrate the attributes of His that we can, you know, rational thought, logic, emotion, all these things, there remain certain things about God that we never will be.

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He's all -powerful, all places at all times. He's the Creator, different things. So there's certain things and certain attributes of God that we can't demonstrate.

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There's also a vast universal difference to a degree of knowledge and understanding.

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And there's a perspective God has that we can't have. And there's a way in which His mind is able to comprehend and think that we can't.

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And so we are reliant upon God revealing things to us. And we need to be careful that we do not go beyond what

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Scripture says or doesn't say to twist and mold to where it'll fit in our compact finite minds.

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And that's something that sometimes we deal with this on Adventures with Calvinist Man.

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You know, sometimes the Reformed folks and myself included, we can do that on our side.

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Sometimes the Arminian and anti -Reformed or non -Reformed will do that on their side in an attempt to reconcile these things.

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And so we all need to do a good better job of not doing that.

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And so it goes on it says, her infants have gone away as captives before the adversary.

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So notice not even the children are spared here. You say, well that's mean of God.

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No, it's sin. Sin caused this.

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Sin is the reason for this. Sin affects far more than you realize. Do you think a foreign enemy like Babylon coming in gives two rips about the children of Israel, of Jerusalem?

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No. It doesn't mean anything. I mean people would look at this and say well that's just not right.

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That's why I can't believe in God because He would allow all their children to be. It's no different in our day. In fact, we probably have sacrificed more children on the altar of abortion than was killed in this event.

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And we shake our fist at God anyway, don't we? The infants gone away. Then finally verse 6, so all her majesty has gone out from the daughter of Zion.

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Every bit of it. Everything that Jerusalem was, everything that Jerusalem represented, everything that she was and is and was meant to be, the glory, the majesty, the prestige, gone.

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Completely gone. Taken away. This majesty has gone out.

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Her princes have become like deer. They have found no pasture. There's nothing more sad than a herd of animals that can't find food.

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They would be in such a place where there's no grass. There's no food. And when you study and look at animals and the panic that they can go into.

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I mean you study animals and if they really start getting hungry and there's no food, they turn on each other pretty quickly.

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They start eating their own fairly quickly. And so now they're like that deer.

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They're like that animal. There's no pasture. So they have fled without strength before the pursuer.

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Yahweh the Lord has brought this affliction because of the sins of the people which were in abundance.

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And notice here that sin leaves the sinner helpless, alone, grieving, afflicted, without comfort, restless, bitter, and much more.

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If you remember when we covered Isaiah 54, 4 through 8, we who belong to Christ don't have to be enslaved.

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We are redeemed. Now God is going to redeem his people here.

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He's going to bring them out of Babylon. He's gonna bring them back to the city. They're gonna rebuild the temple.

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And in fact in the book of Haggai we read how the older ones you know wept because the glory of this new temple was nothing like this one that got destroyed.

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It just wasn't the same. But he would redeem them. But even that isn't even close to the full eternal redemption that's found in Jesus Christ spiritually for his people.

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So my friend if you are in sin, if there's sin in your life, if you've never been saved by the grace of God, I encourage you to repent of your sin.

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Put your full faith and trust in Jesus Christ. If you're a Christian watching this and you have sin in your life,

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I can assure you by the authority of God and his word, looking at what happened to these people, your sin will have an expiration date.

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You'll have a day when God will no longer be graceful and merciful and patient. He will send judgment.

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It may not be in this life. It may be in the next. Your sin always has a way of finding you out.

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We need to be accountable to one another. We need to have things in place to protect us from those sins that beset us.

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You don't want to end up in a place where someone's looking at your life and saying, man, do you remember who they used to be?

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Do you remember what they used to be? Do you remember how prominent they were?

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We've had a recent example of this. A well -known pastor had a sin that came to light, and it's devastating.

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It's sad. We all need to be careful with our sin because our sins will find us out.

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We need to protect ourselves from ourselves sometimes. And we shouldn't pile on.

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We shouldn't shake our fists or say, hey, all this mockery stuff that we love to do.

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It should make us mourn. But the sin of others should not cause you as much grief as the mourning you should have over your own sin.

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Your own sin, which would deserve judgment and the wrath of God, should cause you to mourn that you would sin in such a way against your

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Creator. But at the same time, we rejoice that we've been redeemed.

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We rejoice that we've been saved. We rejoice that we've been made righteous in the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

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Amen. Well, thank you for joining me, and we will pick back up in Lamentations chapter 1 next time.