How Deserted Lies the City
There is a lament over a city in the Old Testament. It is quite famous.
The book itself is called “Lamentations” and it is a poem crying over the destruction of Jerusalem.
Here is how the book starts: (NIV)
1 How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!
How like a widow is she, who once was great among the nations!
She who was queen among the provinces has now become a slave.
“How deserted lies the city”. I have read this passage many times before, but now I read it and see something like it in our city. The city has become deserted, once so full of people.
We ought to be careful about making direct parallels between biblical history and our own time, but we can be awakened to some of the larger truths of life that we often fail to see. We can think that our society, our culture, our city is invincible, that it goes on no matter what.
We know now, that it doesn’t. It can be laid waste by an enemy.
In the book of Lamentations, the enemy was another nation and the destruction was military in nature, and violent. The book is a poem constructed near the beginning of the disaster in order to give the people something to cry out. It names the loss in stark and hard terms.
There is talk of people’s faces being dragged to the ground, like into gravel.
There are images of people wandering aimlessly, and of the leaders sitting on the ground with dust on their heads having no idea what to do.
It’s rough; rougher than now.
However, if you look at the book, you will notice something about it.
There are 5 chapters.
Chapters 1,2 and 4 and 5 have 22 verses each.
There are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
Each of the verses corresponds to one of the letters, (like, A,B,C,D …). So chapters 1,2, 4 and 5 are acrostic like this.
Look at chapter 3.
It has 66 verses. Now a little math is helpful. Three times 22.
(AAA, BBB, CCC …)
All of this construction is so that people could remember it. The lament is perhaps the first matter that is ordered in an entirely disordered circumstance.
It is in the middle of all of this (just about) that suddenly these verses appear;
Chapter 3
21 Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:22 Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
23 They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
24 I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.”25 The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him;
Many of us have heard these verses before. We may not have heard about the deserted city or the terrible pain and loss, but we have heard these verses.
It is one thing to quote these verses when times are good and things feel secure. That is not what the time was like when they were written, not at all.
Now, in our deserted city, we can recite the words being a little closer to the time in which they were written.
Dear God,
How deserted lies the city!
I never thought I’d live in a time like this, but here we are.
So this I call to mind and therefore I have hope;
Because of your great love, we are not consumed. Your compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. Even now.
