READ: Lamentations 1:2
“Bitterly she weeps at night, tears are on her cheeks.”
People often think of the Bible as the encouraging verses found on inspirational posters and coffee mugs from Christian bookstores. While Scripture is certainly packed full of hope-filled promises, it also covers a much wider spectrum of human emotion. The Bible speaks to sorrow, stress, grief, loss, pain, and even depression. Sometimes the Word reads like an encouraging bumper sticker. Sometimes it reads like a eulogy written by a mourning mother. Simply put, scripture can be sad. This is especially evident in the Old Testament book of Lamentations.
Lamentations is a very difficult book to read. It is a collection of five Hebrew poems that were written during Jerusalem’s traumatic destruction in 586 BC. This was the biggest catastrophe in the nation’s history. The armies of Babylon were on a warpath and Jerusalem’s walls stood in their way. So what did they do? The Babylonians burned the whole city of Jerusalem to the ground. They didn’t just destroy the city; they tortured the people in the process. They torched homes to the ground, demolished the Holy Temple, murdered families in cold blood, and transformed a thriving community into ruins.
Jeremiah, the author of Lamentations, is known as the weeping prophet. Can you blame him? He was called to pastor Israel through unthinkable tragedy and calamity. As he pens these poems, you can feel the agony in his words. Each passage was designed to help his people process their collective trauma.
Jeremiah doesn’t try to make sense of the suffering. Instead, he simply writes his petitions to God like a depressing term paper (that also rhymes). The weeping prophet shows us something important. Our life will never be free of grieving, so we must learn how to grieve with God.
This means that we should practice presenting our anger, pain, confusion, and agony to God. Lamenting is all about laying it out there. Please enter this study with blunt honesty. Take a long, hard look at your life to identify what is broken around you or within you.
- It may be in your country.
- It may be in your community.
- It may be in your home.
- It may even be in your own heart.
Once you have noticed and identified your particular pain point, reflect on how awful it is. You heard me right. Think about it long and hard. Don’t start giving answers,
denying its validity, or attempting to justify it. Just embrace the discomfort and stay there longer than you usually do. Lamenting invites us to linger.
After your reflection, it’s time for petition. In prayer, tell God why you think this shouldn’t be happening. Lamenting encourages us to approach prayer like a therapy session. Good counselors don’t try to fix your problem; they just help you contextualize them.
The same thing often happens when we approach God with our hard-to-change pain. When we bring life’s hard questions to God, He won’t necessarily give us clear and concise answers. He will give us comfort and clarity in the process, though. That’s the power of lamenting. It’s not about explanation; it’s about transformation.