EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
(י) Lamentations 2:10. Two classes, who were exponents of the intelligence and joy of the people, prostrated like the rest, are no longer capable of acting their parts. They sit on the ground, are silent, the elders of the daughter of Zion; they exhibit other profound tokens of overwhelming sufferings. “Small griefs are eloquent—great ones are dumb.” Also among the ruins they hang down their heads to the ground, the virgins of Jerusalem; the song, the timbrel, the dance, have all been abandoned as vain things.
The retrospect of the poet, which had brought before him one sad scene after another in the destruction of the Jewish state, and the desperate lot of various classes of its people, produced a turmoil of emotions in himself, and appeals to men and God to join in his lamentations.
HOMILETICS
VOICELESS WOE
I. Too deep for words. “The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground and keep silence.” A graphic description of sympathy and sorrow. The judges and magistrates, accustomed to occupy with dignity the judgment-seats, the thrones of the house of David, and to discourse eloquently on important points of law, now sit dejectedly upon the ground, without uttering a word. It was thus that the friends of the afflicted Job silently expressed their sympathy (Job 2:13). There is a moment in the swing of a great sorrow when speech seems impossible—when words, if spoken, would grate upon the ear as a harsh intrusion. We prefer to be left alone and undisturbed till the pressure of the trial is relieved. We are distraught, stunned, and want time to come to ourselves. The most delicate and effectual way in which our kindest friends can help us is to be silent. No words can express our sorrow. Small griefs are eloquent enough, but great ones are dumb.
II. Expressed in abject humiliation. “They have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth.” They are stripped of their robes of state, and all their judicial dignities and prestige. They have lost their offices and their wealth. Greatness and prosperity are exchanged for sackcloth and ashes. The loss of worldly goods brings sorrow to many. An old Latin proverb says, “Genuine are the tears shed over lost property.” Those who have boasted most about their possessions, and carried their heads high in times of plenty, feel most keenly the humiliating straits of poverty. But how crushing is the humiliation when we realise we have lost all—our wealth, our friends, our national status, our religion, our God! Such a woe is voiceless indeed.
III. Overwhelms the soul with conscious shame. “The virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.” Time was when the haughty daughters of Zion courted public admiration as they tripped mincingly along the streets of Jerusalem, decked in richest apparel, and their every movement musical with tinkling ornaments (Isaiah 3:16); but now their pride is humbled, and they are bowed to the earth with conscious shame. And yet it is from this broken and dejected condition we trace the beginning of better things. It is on crushed grain that man is fed; it is by bruised plants that he is restored to health. It was by broken pitchers that Gideon triumphed; on broken pieces of the ship that Paul and his companions were saved. It was by the bruised and torn bodies of the saints that the truth was made to triumph. When we examine the process of moral reform in nations and individuals, we observe how effectually God has used many broken things in the rebuilding of a shattered character—broken earthly hopes, broken bodily health, broken fortunes, broken hearts. “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Psalms 51:17; Psalms 34:18).
LESSONS.—
1. The greatest sorrow is speechless.
2. A sense of sin is a sense of personal helplessness.
3. The grace of God can change the greatest woe into hope and gladness.
ILLUSTRATIONS. The loneliness of woe. You are tried alone, alone you must pass into the desert, alone you must be sifted by the world; there are moments, known only to a man’s own self, when he sits by the poisoned springs of existence, “yearning for a morrow which shall free him from the strife.” Let life be a life of faith; do not go timorously about inquiring what others think, what others believe, and what others say. God is near you. Throw yourself fearlessly on Him. Trembling mortal! there is an unknown might within your soul which will wake when you command it. Every son of man who would attain the true end of his being must be baptized with fire.—F. W. Robertson.
Dejection and despair. The more sin and corruption grow, and the man becomes fully conscious of it, the more does dejection grow also, and this changes at last into despair, which is a state of entire hopelessness, where all possibilities have vanished, all gates and ways are closed to a man. There is a despair for a hard fate, and it not seldom happens that a man, in consequence of a single severe stroke, makes a sudden leap from his natural state of security into a state of despair, be it that he has lost a beloved human being or his means, or in any other misfortune. Against this form of despair even heathenism had a remedy—resignation, submission to the inevitable. But the deepest despair is when a man gives up hope, not merely for this or that which he called his own, but for himself as a moral being. There is one sustaining and saving power—faith in God. Despair may and should become the transition to salvation, if the man only despairs of himself, but does not give up his God. In the expression of entire inability, of deepest helplessness—“O wretched man that I am”—there is latent a hope of redemption, the hope that what is impossible with man is possible with God.—Martensen.
The ravages of suffering. After the relief of the city of Paris, the strain and fatigue through which M.—had gone told seriously upon his health. He could not forget the horrors he had witnessed. His face began to look worn. His hair became greyer. He looked depressed. His usual cheerful and buoyant energy disappeared, and he became listless, self-absorbed, and melancholy.
Depression. Just before George Moore’s entrance into his palatial house in Cumberland, his wife died. This brought an almost intolerable sense of loneliness. One day, going to see an intimate friend, he said, “How blessed is he amidst his lovely family! I wonder whether he has a coffin in any cupboard.”
Solitude oppressive. When Thomas, the missionary to India, reached Calcutta, he was oppressed with a sense of loneliness. He put an advertisement in the newspapers asking if there was another Christian in the country, and begging for an interview. But there was no answer!