How Lonely Sits the City

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. In the name of Jesus. Golden eras.

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The golden era of jazz or swing. The golden era of the United States.

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The golden era of the medieval period. We talk about golden eras, high watermarks if you would, in human history where something has kind of hit its pinnacle and it just doesn't get any better than that.

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Of course I remember the 1981 Dodgers. It just doesn't get any better than that.

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And so the idea here is what we're going to look at in the book of Lamentations, which many believe was written by the

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Prophet Jeremiah himself. If you've ever read Jeremiah, he is considered to be the weeping prophet.

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And this is the fellow who had the unenviable job of prophesying to obstinate

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Israel, particularly Judah, calling her to repent of her idolatry and her sin.

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And the Lord promised Jeremiah they weren't gonna listen.

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Now I don't know how many of you have ever had an awful job or worked for a difficult employer, but I don't think it's a winning proposition when you tell somebody at the outset of a new career you're going to be really working super hard and everything you're going to do is going to result in nothing.

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Because the people of Israel are heading off into captivity. Not a very good job.

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But you're going to note that what we're going to do is we're going to catch now Israel at the tail end of Jeremiah's work as a prophet and Nebuchadnezzar has already attacked.

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And we know from the historical narratives that 90 % of the

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Jews living in Israel at that time were killed.

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Only a remnant survived. So this is, if you would, post -apocalyptic

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Israel. And the apocalypse was brought on by their sin.

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Which is what sin does. It destroys people.

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It absolutely obliterates them. What was once magnificent, powerful, and beautiful,

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Israel under King David was known by all the nations of the earth. Israel under King Solomon, high watermark, the building of the temple itself, this ultimate man of wisdom like nobody has ever had before.

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The people from around the world came to hear his wisdom and they marveled because, well,

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Israel was so wealthy under this man that silver was treated like it was tin.

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And gold practically flowed through the streets. It was so wealthy. But the picture we see here in post -apocalyptic

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Israel after the sacking of Jerusalem is the exact opposite.

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A city that once was beautiful, filled with people, is now been brought to complete ruin and desolation.

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The wall has been destroyed. The people are gone into captivity.

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And this is a picture of the fall. This is a picture of our sin.

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This is a picture of the consequences of sin. Fall after fall after fall since the great fall in the

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Garden of Eden. So if you would, follow along with me. Lamentations chapter 1 is what we will be looking at today.

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Post -apocalyptic Israel. How lonely sits the city that was full of people.

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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.

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A little bit of a pause here. This is what happens to us in our sin. And notice we're using feminine pronouns, feminine imagery, if you would.

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The Bride of Christ, which is the church, is described in feminine imagery.

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And so this is, if you would, a precursor to the concept of the Bride of Christ. Here, Israel, she who was a princess, who was the apple of God's eye, persisted in sin and unbelief and idolatry.

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And now she who was so beautiful, at all of the balls with her tiara and the wonderful dresses, is now wearing a slave shackle.

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She weeps bitterly in the night, with tears on her cheeks. Among all her lovers, she has none to comfort her.

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All her friends, they have dealt treacherously with her. They have become her enemies. Judah has gone into exile because of affliction and hard servitude.

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She dwells now among the nations, but finds no resting place. Her pursuers have all overtaken her in the midst of her distress.

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The roads to Zion mourn, for none come to the festival. All her gates are desolate, her priests groan, her virgins have been afflicted, and she herself suffers bitterly.

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Her foes have become the head, her enemies prosper, because Yahweh has afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions."

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Yeah, you read that right. You read that right. And when God afflicts us and disciplines us and causes us to drink a bitter draught, oftentimes that may be a result because of our transgressions.

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Sometimes God has to give us a strong drink of his discipline in order that we would lose our taste for sin.

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And so God has afflicted her because of her transgressions, her impenitence, giving her what she deserves.

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But ultimately the goal here is to preserve a remnant. And keep in mind, in preserving that remnant, we're preserving the line of the

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Messiah so that all of us can be forgiven. Her children have gone away, captives before the foe.

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From the daughter of Zion all her majesty has departed. Her princes have become like deer that find no pasture.

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They fled without strength before the pursuer. Jerusalem remembers in the days of her affliction and wandering all the precious things that were hers from days of old.

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When her people fell into the hand of the foe, there was none to help her.

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Her foes gloated over her. They mocked at her downfall. Jerusalem sinned grievously.

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Therefore she became filthy. All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness.

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She herself groans and turns her face away. Here in discussing

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Jerusalem's nakedness, it harkens back to the Garden of Eden. Prior to the fall,

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Adam and Eve, they were walking naked and they had no shame. But after their sin, they realized that they were naked and they felt nothing but shame.

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And so the imagery is consistent. This is the type of nakedness that is brought about as a result of shame and guilt because of sin.

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Her uncleanness was in her skirts. She took no thought of her future. Therefore her fall is terrible.

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And isn't that the way of sin? Isn't that the way of sin? So many times sin tempts you or the devil tempts you with sin and the only thing you can think about is what you're going to experience in the present with no regard for the consequences of the long -term impact that that sin may have on you.

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Same with Israel. She took no thought of her future. Therefore her fall is terrible.

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She has no comforter. A little bit of a prayer here. O Lord, behold my affliction, for the enemy has triumphed.

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I would say the enemy here spoken of is none other than Satan himself. Again, this is a picture of what it's like to be under the dominion of darkness.

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To fall into grief is sin. The enemy himself, Satan, has triumphed and has won and has enslaved over and again.

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Scripture makes it clear. Sin is slavery. It is not freedom. The enemy has stretched out his hands over all of her precious things for she has seen the nations enter her sanctuary, those whom you forbade to enter your congregation.

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Those are the idolaters, the goyim, the Gentiles who brought their false idolatry into the temple itself.

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All her people groan as they search for bread. They trade their treasures for food to revive their strength.

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And here's another little mini prayer. Look, O Lord, and see, for I am despised.

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So you'll note that even in the midst of this distress and the sure consequences of sin, there are pleas for mercy, pleas for God to hear, pleas for God to act, pleas for God to rescue.

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The enemy has triumphed. Lord, look and see, I am despised. Lord, do you hear me? It is nothing to you, all you who pass by.

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Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me, which the

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Lord inflicted on the days of his fierce anger. There are consequences for sin.

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From on high, God sent fire into my bones, and he made it descend.

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He spread a net from my feet. He turned me back. He has left me stunned, faint all the day long.

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My transgressions were bound into a yoke. By his hand they were fastened together.

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They were set upon my neck. He caused my strength to fail. The Lord gave me into the hands of those whom

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I cannot withstand. Fascinating picture there, verse 14 is, because you can almost read it like a double entendre.

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Let me explain. Here we see the consequences of sin, where our sin is made into a yoke and thrown upon our neck, and the

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Lord gives you into the hands of those whom you cannot withstand. But this is exactly the picture that we see of Christ, who

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God made our sins into a yoke, and that yoke is the cross, and put that on his back and fastened him to it, and caused his strength to fail, and the

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Lord gave Christ into the hands of those whom he could not withstand. Isn't it fascinating that this picture here harkens to the cross itself, and it's in this picture of God's wrath against sin that we begin to see a little bit of a picture of the cross itself, because God's solution for this type of discipline is to not just dismiss it and say, oh,

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I didn't mean it anyway, or it's no big deal. Instead, God never saves us from his wrath by just making it disappear.

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He saves us from his wrath by satisfying it. And so we see the logical, moral implications of sin.

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It is slavery of us being bound up under it like a yoke, and not being able to withstand those to whom we have been enslaved to, and that's exactly what

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Christ does for us in coming to earth and taking our sins upon himself.

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And he goes to the cross and does not withstand them, but dies. The text continues, the

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Lord rejected all my mighty men in my midst. He summoned an assembly against me to crush my young men.

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The Lord is trodden as in a winepress, the virgin daughter of Judah. Yeah, the winepress of God, big biblical imagery here.

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Over and again, God's wrath is likened to a winepress. You take humanity into the winepress, and God cranks that thing down.

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For these things I weep, my eyes flow with tears, for a comforter is far from me, one to revive my spirit.

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My children are desolate, for the enemy has prevailed. Zion stretches out her hands, but there is none to comfort her.

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The Lord has commanded against Jacob that his neighbors should be his foes. Jerusalem has become a filthy thing among them.

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How's the saying go? Oh, how the mighty have fallen. And this is what sin does.

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This is what it does to us. But listen to this next part. Verse 18 is a wonderful depiction of what a prayer of repentance sounds like.

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Repent, by the way, the word metanoia means to change your mind. And oftentimes that's a really great way to kind of think about it.

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You're heading this way, down the path of destruction. People are saying, don't do that.

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That's wrong. That's sinful. You're heading the wrong way. Remember the movie

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Planes, Trains, and Automobiles? There's Del Griffith driving down the highway the wrong way after being spun around, after singing that song, doing the mess around.

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He's driving down the highway, and somebody comes up on the other side of the highway. They're driving the right way.

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He's driving the wrong way. They roll down the road. You're going the wrong way. See, our sin gets us turned around like that, so that we're heading the wrong way.

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And people try to speak to us. This is what Jeremiah did to Israel. Repent. Return to the

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Lord your God. He's gracious. He's merciful. He will forgive you. Turn from your sin. And they wouldn't turn.

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Repent. Change your mind. Changing your mind says,

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Lord God, I was foolish. I was selfish. I was wrong. You were right.

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I was wrong. That's a good prayer of repentance. And listen to this prayer then, verse 18.

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The Lord is in the right. This is repentance. God, you're right. You were in the right.

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I've rebelled against your word. And is that not always how it goes?

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But hear all you peoples and see my suffering. My young women and my young men have gone into captivity.

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I called to my lovers, but they deceived me. My priests and the elders, they perished in the city while they sought food to revive their strength.

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Look, oh Lord, for I am in distress. My stomach churns.

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My heart is wrung within me because I have been very rebellious.

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In the street, the sword bereaves. In the house, it is like death.

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What a can think about times when our heart has been wrung within us or we have been so stressed out that our stomach has churned inside of us.

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Or we've seen the consequences of our sin come full circle and we are in one of those situations where you just know you're caught.

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There's no way out. What are you going to do? Sleep even flees from you in moments like that.

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They heard my groaning, yet there's no one to comfort me. All my enemies have heard of my trouble. They are glad that you have done it.

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You have brought the day you announced. Now let them be as I am. Let all their evil doing come before you and deal with them as you have dealt with me because all of my transgressions.

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For my groans are many and my heart is faint. It's a terrible picture to paint, is it not?

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And yet each and every one of us knows that as terrible as that picture is of the consequences and the result of sin, that it is absolutely accurate.

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We see it in our own lives. We see it when people foolishly chase after their own sinful desires and their lives come to ruin.

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We understand that this picture is not something that's abstract.

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This is a picture that is something that is raw in its accuracy, sobering in its description.

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Turn with me to Nehemiah chapter 1. I want you to consider Nehemiah's assessment regarding Jerusalem at this time.

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This is a vacant, destroyed, desolate, post -apocalyptic for 70 years, just as the prophet

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Jeremiah had prophesied according to the word of the Lord. Nehemiah chapter 1 reads thus.

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The words of Nehemiah, the son of Hachaliah. Now it happened in the month of Chislev in the 20th year.

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I was in the citadel, and Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah.

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And I asked them concerning the Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem. And they said to me, the remnant there in the province who have survived the exile is in great trouble and shame.

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The wall of Jerusalem is broken down. Its gates are destroyed by fire.

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This is 70 years later. Almost a century has gone by. And as soon as I heard these words,

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I sat down, and I wept, and I mourned for days, and I continued fasting and prayer before the

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God of heaven. And this is a good prayer. And I said, O Yahweh Elohim of heaven, the great and awesome

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God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, please let your ear be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your servant that I now pray before you day and night for the people of Israel, your servants, confessing the sins of the people of Israel which we have sinned against you, even as I and my father's house have sinned.

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We have acted very corruptly against you and have not kept the commandments, the statutes, and the rules that you commanded your servant

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Moses. Remember the word that you commanded your servant Moses saying, if you are unfaithful,

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I will scatter you among the peoples. But if you return to me and keep my commandments and do them, though your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of the heaven, from there

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I will gather them and bring them to the place that I have chosen to make my name to dwell there.

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They are your servants and your people whom you have redeemed by your great power and by your strong hand.

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O Lord, let your ear be attentive to the prayer of your servant and to the prayer of your servants who delight to fear your name and give success to your servant today and grant him mercy in the sight of this man.

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That's a good prayer. So then following what our texts teach us, our texts teach us that sin is nothing to be trifled with, that truly the wages of sin is death, and that even flirting a little bit with sin could get you in all kinds of distress that you had never bargained for.

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Sin is slavery. Sin is to be under the dominion of that terrible tyrant himself, the devil.

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And the reason why we die, the reason why we suffer, the reason why there's so much misery in this planet, the reason why this planet,

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I don't know if you've noticed, is going crazy. From school shooting after school shooting after school shooting to terrorist attack, politicians who can't even seem to treat each other like basic human beings, to the rhetoric that we see, the gossip that we hear, our dealings with each other locally and internationally are abysmal, and it's only getting worse.

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We're seeing, if you would, the undoing of creation, the undoing of society, and this world is on a collision course with itself, and it's about to boil over.

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Take photographs now so that you could remember what this world was like before what's coming.

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But what's coming is the consequence of our collective sin, and in order to not get what we all deserve, what is called for is for us to acknowledge our sin, to recognize that all of this is our doing, and that God is the one who brings calamity on those who persist in sin and unbelief, and that we all deserve this.

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The solution then is forgiveness, for us to repent, to call upon the

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God whose glory it is to forgive sinners, to pardon them, to have mercy on them.

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And don't think for a second that the problems in this world are out there. Everything that is wrong in this world is in your own heart, because you do the same things.

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I do the same things. The things that you see and you gawk at and think, that's terrible, you've thought all those thoughts already inside of your heart, and that's where sin begins.

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So pray like Nehemiah, that God would have mercy. Pray that prayer that Jeremiah put in there in our first chapter of Lamentations, Lord, you are in the right.

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Repent, change your mind about your sins, even the ones you think are no big deal, because they are.

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It only took one bite of one fruit to plunge us into the that we are all in.

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Eating something that you were forbidden from eating, seems like chump change compared to the egregiousness that we see happening in our lifetime and in human history.

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But all the sins that we see in this world, even the ones in your own life, flow from that one small little sin.

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This teaches us that there are no small sins. Trust His Word. Repent.

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God is in the right. You and I are in the wrong. And God has taken our sins and woven them into the yoke of the cross and put them on Christ, so that we can be forgiven.

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All of those cries for mercy that we heard in Lamentations, please for God to see that we are in despair, that our enemy has triumphed over us, that those who hate us are gloating.

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Those are our prayers, and God hears, and He has heard, and He has acted, and He has sent for us a

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Savior who has borne our sins, bled and died, and suffered in our place, instead of you, instead of me, so that we can again see, if you would, the real golden age that is coming.

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You haven't seen anything yet. The golden age that is coming is a world without end, existence without sin, and a city whose streets are literally made of gold, so that we can be restored to the glory that we once had, reflecting perfectly the image of God in whose image we were originally made.

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You see, the princess who becomes the slave is you, is me.

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We'll pray that the story doesn't end with the princess dying in slavery.

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For that, you have to come back next week. In the name of Jesus. Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 And again, that address is...

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 We thank you for your support.

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