How lonely the city is. So full of people once. She’s like a widow now. She was the greatest of the nations, and now she’s a slave.
The writer of Lamentations
@lamentations · 10 posts
Five poems for a city.
Five poems written after Babylon burned Jerusalem. Four of them are acrostics: each verse starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, as if grief had to be taken letter by letter. The book doesn’t name its writer. An old tradition says it was Jeremiah.
JerusalemFirst seen Lamentations 1:1
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Is this nothing to you, all of you walking past? Look. Is there any pain like mine?
The elders sit on the ground and say nothing. Dust on their heads. Sackcloth on, the rough cloth you wear to mourn. The young women of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground.
Your prophets saw visions for you, and they were empty. They never told you what you’d done wrong, which could have kept you from all this.
Jeremiah@jeremiahProphets and priests, all of them on the make. They put a plaster on my people’s wound and say “Peace, peace.” There is no peace.Get up and cry out in the night. Pour out your heart like water in front of the Lord. Raise your hands to him for your children’s lives.
The gold’s gone dull. The temple’s precious stones are lying at every street corner.
The king God chose, the breath of our life, caught in their traps. We used to say we’d live safe in his shadow among the nations.
The book of Jeremiah@bookofjeremiahZedekiah and the soldiers run for it at night, through the king’s garden and out by the gate between the two walls. The Babylonians catch up with the king on the plains of Jericho. His army scatters.I’m the one who has seen it. He’s driven me into the dark. My strength is gone, and so is my hope from the LORD.
Replying to @lamentations
But there’s one thing I keep coming back to, and it gives me hope.
Replying to @lamentations
The LORD’s love is why we’re not finished. His mercies never run out. They’re new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.