As the Prophet Laments, We Reflect, Part 1

Bible scholars often refer to Jeremiah as the weeping prophet.

His nickname comes from his tearful response when the Babylonians ransacked Jerusalem. Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll introduces us to a brand new eight-part series in the book that tells his story, Lamentations. Many of us have felt the gamut of emotions as we've seen our cities erupt in violence.

Rioting in the streets makes us feel confused, sad, and afraid. Over the next several weeks, Chuck will help us understand the relevance of this ancient book for our times. Chuck titled his study Jeremiah's Journal of Woes. Please turn in your Bibles to the first chapter of Jeremiah. Jeremiah chapter 1. A few excerpts from this chapter in preparation for the beginning of a new series I want to bring on the unusual and rarely mentioned book of Lamentations. You'll understand why as we get into this message today and in the others to follow.

The tie-in is rather amazing with the times in which we live. But because Jeremiah was the man who recorded the events of Lamentations, it's good that we get a glimpse of his life to begin with as recorded in Jeremiah chapter 1. So you have a ribbon in your Bible. You may wish to reach that ribbon over in marked Lamentations so we can turn to it later, but for now we'll do the first several verses of Jeremiah 1. Jeremiah 1.

As you find your place, please stand together for the reading of the Word of God. These are the words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah, one of the priests from the town of Anathoth in the land of Benjamin. The Lord first gave messages to Jeremiah during the thirteenth year of the reign of Josiah, son of Ammon, king of Judah. The Lord's messages continued throughout the reign of King Jehoiakim, Josiah's son, until the eleventh year of the reign of King Zedekiah, another of Josiah's sons.

In August of that eleventh year, the people of Jerusalem were taken away as captives. The Lord gave me this message. I knew you before I formed you in your mother's womb. Before you were born, I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet to the nations. Oh sovereign Lord, I said, I can't speak for you.

I'm too young. The Lord replied, don't say I'm too young, for you must go wherever I send you and say whatever I tell you. And don't be afraid of the people, for I will be with you and will be with you and will protect you. I, the Lord, have spoken.

Then the Lord reached out and touched my mouth and said, look, I put my words in your mouth. Today I appoint you to stand up against nations and kingdoms. Some you must uproot and tear down, destroy and overthrow.

Others you must build up and plant. Drop down if you will please to verse 17, same chapter. The Lord continues to speak, get up and prepare for action.

Go out and tell them everything I tell you to say. Do not be afraid of them or I will make you look foolish in front of them. For see, today I have made you strong like a fortified city that cannot be captured, like an iron pillar of a bronze wall. You will stand against the whole land, the kings, officials, priests and people of Judah.

They will fight you, but they will fail. For I am with you and I will take care of you, I, the Lord, have spoken. What a magnificent statement made to this young man, not yet in the midst of God's will, but soon to be in God's plan. You're listening to Insight for Living.

To search the scriptures with Chuck Swindoll, be sure to download his Searching the Scriptures Studies by going to insightworld.org slash studies. And now the message titled, As the Prophet Laments, We Reflect. I want to escort you into an unusual journey, unusual in every way, but I need to warn you ahead of time, it will not be along beautiful paths where there are stately structures and meaningful memorials to stop and enjoy and admire. As a matter of fact, we will visit a city that is in ruins. It has been destroyed that is in ruins. It has been destroyed by a brutal enemy. The buildings have been burned and the temple of the city has been desecrated. The stones are everywhere and the ruins are enough to make you weep.

The marketplaces that were once swarming with people and chatty merchants are now empty, silent, and cold as a tomb. It's a sad scene. Is it any wonder that the man who shuffles his way through the ruins of the city would give this title to his entry in his journal, Lamentations? It's a term we don't use today, unfortunately. To lament is to express grief, to mourn, to regret deeply. The Bible book with that title, Lamentations, gets its name from the Greek verb that means to cry aloud. The Hebrew equivalent is eka, which could be rendered alas.

What a title for a book. Alas. Jeremiah is the one writing the journal known today as Lamentations. He is viewing the devastation of a city he loved after the Babylonians came in, in all their brutal, intimidating force, and sacked the city.

They chose among the most encouraging men and women to take with them the majority of the people from the city. The rest they left, which says something to you and to me today about what they thought of Jeremiah. He remains. The rest are gone. They're no longer around. They're on their way to Babylon, 700 miles to the east.

They would walk. The ruins appear unsightly and terribly strange. For a city that was once a busy metropolis, like any of our cities, I catch my breath when I say that because it is that which attracted me to the thought of bringing a series on Lamentations. Our cities are not now as they once were, are they? Matter of fact, I got my first glimpse of New York City back in mid-March when the television camera made its way to Fifth Avenue, and little by little we watched the city empty.

And our own president, who was reared in that metropolis, said it's the first time he remembered seeing the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue. It had always been filled with lines of people in a city known for international affairs and the arts and entertainment and banking and commerce, and now it's all ground to a halt. How strange it is, how unusual to think of our cities, not just that one, but you name them. They all have changed and we're spending our days trying our best to get used to them, which we simply cannot do.

Because it isn't the nation as we've always known it. These are not the cities as we've been familiar with them. The same for Jeremiah. But there's one major difference between Jeremiah's day and ours. There's still a bit of a mystery surrounding the cause of where we find ourselves.

I know, I know, there are those who swear it came from this or it started there, but the argument is even among scientists, bright men and women, who've studied the scene and gone back to what they call the origin of the virus. There's still a bit of a mystery about that, but there was no mystery in the days of Jeremiah. He lamented knowing that it was worth the lament. The backstory of the condition of Jerusalem is sad and tragic.

To save time, I'll cut to the chase. The Jewish people have always been God's special people. He cultivated them.

He called them his own. He has spent centuries protecting them, setting them apart. When they fell into the bondage of Egypt, he promised them deliverance. And 400 years later, along came Moses, who delivered them from Egyptian bondage. And they moved into the wilderness and it was there they, no other nation, were given the first written copy of the word of God, drilled by the finger of God into stone for the Jewish people called the law of Moses for the Jews. He promised to bless those who would bless the Jews, he warned that he would discipline those who would mistreat the Jews. But most importantly, he communicated again and again that these people, his people, were to guard against falling down before any other god. In a world of many gods, the people of the Jews were to be a monotheistic, one-god nation. Anything else would be called what it was, idolatry. They kept falling into it and he repeatedly rescued them and forgave them and they would fall again and fail and he would repeatedly come and rescue them.

The stories repeat themselves through the Old Testament accounts. He gave them great leaders that he called judges and sometimes priests and sometimes kings and toward the end of that era he gave them prophets. The kings would watch over the country, the nations, the business affairs. The priests would lead the people in worship ideally and the prophets would be there to warn the people, do not fall as you fell before or there will be a terrible price to pay. Prophets became hated by the people who loved to disobey. They were mistreated. They were martyred. Nevertheless, they stood fast, many of them.

And so the Lord continued to fill the ranks of those strong-hearted prophets who would speak for him and give them the right kind of determination to stand fast, not give in. Ultimately, they came to their land. He gave them their land.

They cultivated their land. They built their city which has come to be known as the city of David or Zion. And in that city that special marvelous temple of Solomon would be erected.

No other temple like it. But even that did not hold him fast. The time came for the Lord to raise up a man who would truly stand in the gap toward the end of those days when his patience would wear down and finally, ultimately, the death knell would sound and the city would fall and the people would be taken into exile. Throughout your Christian life, you've heard at least in the back of your mind of the Babylonian captivity, Jeremiah lived in the latter era of the history of the Jews just before and then during the invasion and a year or so after he continued to minister. We know that because of his writing of lamentations.

He lamented as he walked through a city that had once been such a magnificent place but now lay in ruins. There are lessons to learn from that. We'll get to them. We're ready now for Jeremiah himself. You will notice the book that bears his name shortly after opening mentions his name. These are the words of Jeremiah. Names meant something in biblical days, always.

This is no exception. Eugene Peterson writes of the name Jeremiah. I quote, the exact meaning of Jeremiah is not certain. It may mean the Lord exalts.

It may mean the Lord hurls, h-u-r-l, throws, the Lord hurls. What is certain is that the Lord, the personal name of God, is in his name. On the day their son was born, Hilkiah the priest and his wife named him of the way that God would act in his life. In hope, they saw the years unfolding and their son is one in whom the Lord would be lifted up. Jeremiah, the Lord is exalted. Or in hope, they saw into the future and anticipated their son as a person whom God would hurl into the community as a javelin representative. I like those words, as a javelin representative of God penetrating, penetrating into the defenses of selfishness with divine judgment and mercy. Jeremiah, the Lord hurls.

Either way, it is clear that God is in his name. So writes Eugene Peterson in his work, Run with the Horses, taken from Jeremiah 12-5. If you have run with the footmen and they have wevered you, how will you contend with horses? And if in the land of peace they were you, what will you do in the judgment or the jungle of the Jordan?

Run with the horses. We're told that he was the son of a priest named Hilkiah. You see that here in the first verse. Son of Hilkiah, one of the priests from the town of Anathoth, a little village just about three miles east-northeast of Jerusalem. So he was not raised in the busy city but in a in a suburb, we would call it, a priestly suburb. We'd say he was reared in a preacher's home and he grew up in that context. Dr. Kyle Yates, the late great baptist scholar, writes this of Jeremiah, the young lad was brought up in the quiet company of scholars, priests, prophets, and students of God's teachings.

The coming of the boy king Josiah to the throne was a momentous change in the life of the nation. It is conceivable that Jeremiah and Josiah were friends from earliest boyhood days. Jeremiah was weak, timid, and shy, but he was prepared to hear God's voice. He was listening when the divine voice came to him.

A little history will help. You will read of it in the early part of Jeremiah's account. The Lord began giving Jeremiah his messages during the 13th year of Josiah's reign. Now what you may not remember is that Josiah, called the boy king by Kyle Yates, began his reign, hold on, at age eight.

I'll give you a moment to smile when you think of your eight-year-old wearing a crown, being the king of a land. But if you knew his background, you'd know that anything was better than Manasseh and Ammon. Manasseh had reigned for 55 years, all of them wicked, none of them worse, in the history of Israel, in Judah, I should say, than Manasseh. And that his son Ammon, the people hoped that there would be a change, he was as wicked as his father.

And the people had had enough. Shortly after he had been appointed king, he was assassinated. That's Josiah's daddy. So Josiah, at eight years of age, heard of his father's assassination and before he knew it, was wearing the crown. So when he turned 21, we read here, the 13th year of Josiah's reign, the Lord's messages continued throughout the reign of King Jehoiakim, Josiah's son.

Josiah's son. And on and on we read. So we could do the math here and determine that Jeremiah's ministry lasted about 41, 42 years.

Not sure of the exact number, but it was over 40 years. He lived from 627 BC until 586 BC, when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians and then a few years following. So he lived during the tumultuous time when the people of Jerusalem, when the Jews in general, had reached the lowest ebb of life. And God said, in effect, that is enough. Just a taste of the fascinating story to be told. You're listening to Insight for Living in a brand new study from Chuck Swindoll based on the book of Lamentations called Jeremiah's Journal of Woes. To learn more about this ministry, be sure to visit us online at insightworld.org. There's much more to learn from this fascinating portion of the Old Testament and we invite you to listen every day as we watch Jeremiah's story unfold. As a compliment to listening, let me encourage you to take advantage of the online Searching the Scriptures study notes. Some of the cultural references in Lamentations feel unfamiliar and Chuck and his team of seminary-trained writers have prepared these outlines to help you understand what you might otherwise miss.

You'll find all the details at insight.org slash studies. A few of us expected the coronavirus crisis to languish into the summer months, but here we are. Along with learning new disciplines of social distancing, many of us have become painfully aware of relationships that need extra attention inside our homes and we've been heartbroken by the civil unrest taking place in cities all across the world. In light of these unsettling times, we're pleased to offer at no cost or obligation a two-message set that brings a measure of hope amidst the darkness. It's a miniseries from Chuck called Finding Healing Through Forgiveness and we'd like to invite you to download the MP3 audio files. In the second message, Chuck invites his wife Cynthia to tell her emotional story about her battle with depression, broken relationships, and the way God brought redemption and healing. To download the MP3 of Finding Healing Through Forgiveness, go to insight.org slash find healing and then if you have any questions or if you'd like to connect with one of our friendly team members, call us. If you're listening in the United States, dial 1-800-772-8888. That's 1-800-772-8888. Join us again tomorrow when Chuck Swindoll continues to describe Jeremiah's Journal of Woes right here on Insight for Living.