EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
(מ) Lamentations 2:13. He is ready, as a servant of the All-merciful and All-wise, to speak on His behalf, so as to alleviate the clamant wretchedness; but he feels unable. What shall I testify to thee? No message is given to him from the Most High, and no resemblance to her condition is perceptible on the broad surface of past or present human life. What liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? The case is unparalleled, and there are no lessons applicable. What shall I compare to thee and comfort thee [with], O virgin daughter of Zion? For great is thy breach like the sea. Who will heal thee? Ruin had extended as far as to the horizon of the people’s existence, and to the deep springs of thought. True, there had not been wanting men who professed to be commissioned by Jehovah to declare that all would be well. They healed the hurt—the word here translated breach—of the daughter of my people lightly, saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace.
HOMILETICS
INEXPRESSIBLE RUIN
I. Is incomparable with any ordinary calamity. “What thing shall I take to witness for thee? What thing shall I liken to thee? What shall I equal to thee?” Great as may be our distress, it is some comfort, slight though it be, to know there are others more or less unfortunate. But in this case, the prophet has no message from Jehovah to afflicted Judah, nor can he offer the ordinary human consolation of saying that others have had equal or worse sorrow to bear. The lamentable condition of Jerusalem was unparalleled; there had been nothing like it. No city had been so highly privileged with Divine honours: no city had been so signally punished. “Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow” (chap. Lamentations 1:12). Jeremiah had exhausted all his powers of description. Desperate indeed must be the state of Judah when such a master of similes had to confess his inability to coin an adequate comparison.
II. Is measureless as the illimitable ocean. “For thy breach is great like the sea.” In his extremity to find some comparison, the prophet mentions the sea, which, on account of its vast dimensions, its illimitable depth and breadth, could alone furnish a fitting emblem of the magnitude of the devastation effected by the Chaldeans. The indefiniteness of the figure thus used reveals at once the straits to which the writer was reduced, and the utter ruin in which Judah was overwhelmed. Thou hast a flood of afflictions, a sea of troubles, an ocean of miseries.
III. Is beyond the power of human consolation and repair. “What shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? who can heal thee?” Human words fail; human help is powerless. There is no comfort in man, or in any number of men. If there is to be any relief or restoration, it must come from God. He alone can change ruin into prosperity, misery into joy, darkness into light. A traveller in Madeira set off one morning to climb the summit of a lofty mountain to gaze upon the distant scene and enjoy the balmy air. He had a guide, and they had with difficulty ascended some two thousand feet, when a thick mist was seen descending upon them, obscuring the heavens. The traveller thought there was no hope left but to retrace their steps or be lost. But as the cloud came nearer and darkness enveloped them, the guide stepped on before, penetrating the mist, calling out every now and then, “Press on, master, press on; there’s light beyond!” They did press on, and in a few minutes, emerging from the thick mist, found themselves gazing upon a scene of transcendent beauty. Above, the sky was bright and cloudless; below, the almost level cloud through which they had passed was silvered with the rays of the sun, like a field of untrodden snow. In the darkest experiences, if we will but listen, we may hear the voice of our Divine Guide exclaiming, “Press on, press on; there is light beyond!”
LESSONS.—
1. Great indeed is the calamity that baffles human ingenuity to describe.
2. The nation is utterly undone when smitten by the hand of God.
3. God alone can repair the damage His righteous anger has inflicted.
ILLUSTRATIONS.—Drifting to ruin. Two or three miles above the falls of Niagara an Indian canoe was one day observed floating quietly along, with its paddle on its side. At first it was supposed to be empty. No one could imagine a man would expose himself to such well-known danger; but a turn of the current revealed an Indian lying asleep at the bottom. The spectators were shocked, and shouted to rouse him, but in vain. It seemed more like death than sleep which held him. All hope of rescue was gone, and they hurried along the shore in alarm to see the end. It soon came, for the torrent was now rolling so rapidly that they could scarcely keep pace with the object of their interest. At length the roar of the water, which had been hitherto almost buried within the high banks below, by a sudden change of the wind broke upon them with double violence. This dreadful noise, with which the Indian ear was so familiar, did at last arouse him. He was seen to start up and snatch his paddle. But it was too late. The same dinning sound which had roused him from insensibility told him at the same time that it was in vain to seek safety now by paddling, nor indeed had he time to try. Upright as he stood he was swept over the awful precipice, and the boat and its occupant were seen no more.
Ruin and responsibility. Julian the Apostate had for his coat of arms on his escutcheon an eagle struck through the heart with a shaft feathered from her own wing, with the motto, “Our death flies to us with our own feathers, and our wings pierce us to the very heart.” The moral is, that if a man receives injury, he alone has caused it, and is alone to blame.
Unutterable ruin. Every man feels, and not strangely, that there never were such experiences of life as his own. No joy was ever like our joy, no sorrow ever like our sorrow. Indeed, there is a kind of indignation excited in us when one likens our grief to his own. The soul is jealous of its experiences, and does not like pride to be humbled by the thought that they are common. For though we know that the world groans and travails in pain, and has done so for ages, yet a groan heard by our ear is a very different thing from a groan uttered by our mouth. The sorrows of other men seem to us like clouds of rain that empty themselves in the distance, and whose long-travelling thunder comes to us mellowed and subdued; but our own troubles are like a storm bursting right overhead and sending down its bolts upon us with direct plunge.—Beecher.
Ruin the punishment for sin. Fearful it is to consider that sin does not only drive us into calamity, but it makes us also impatient, and embitters our spirit in the sufferance: it cries aloud for vengeance, and so torments men before the time with such fearful outcries and horrid alarms, that their hell begins before the fire is kindled. It hinders our prayers, and consequently makes us hopeless and helpless. It perpetually affrights the conscience, unless by its frequent stripes it brings a callousness and an insensible damnation upon it. It makes us lose all that Christ purchased for us—all the blessings of His providence, the comforts of His Spirit, the aids of His grace, the light of His countenance, the hopes of His glory.—Jeremy Taylor.
—The pain, the disappointment, the dissatisfaction that wait on an evil course, show that the soul was not made to be the instrument of sin, but its lofty avenger. The desolated affections, the haggard countenance, the pallid and sunken cheek, the sighings of grief, proclaim that these are ruins indeed; but they proclaim that something noble has fallen into ruin, proclaim it by signs mournful yet venerable, like the desolation of an ancient temple, like its broken walls and fallen columns, and the hollow sounds of decay that sink down heavily among its deserted recesses.—Dewey.
Helpless ruin appeals to our sympathy. Helplessness appealing to our pity begets affection. In one of the cottages of my country parish dwelt a poor idiot child, horrible to all eyes but her parents, and so helpless that, though older than sisters just blooming into womanhood, she lay, unable either to walk or speak, a burden on her mother’s lap almost the whole day long—a heavy handful to one who had the cares of a family, and was the wife of a hard-working man, and a most painful contrast to the very roses that flung their bright clusters over the cottage window, as well as to the lark that, pleased with a grassy turf, carolled within its cage. Death, in most instances an unwelcome visitor, came at length—to her and to their relief. Relief! so I thought; and when the father came with an invitation to the funeral, so I said. Though not roughly, but inadvertently spoken, the word jarred on a tender chord; and I was more than ever taught how helplessness begets affection in the very measure and proportion of itself, when he burst into a fit of sorrow, and, speaking of his beautiful boys and blooming girls, said, “If it had been God’s will, I would have parted with any of them rather than her.”—Guthrie.
No hope but in God. The ninth capital in the Ducal Palace at Venice is decorated with figures of the eight virtues—Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Temperance, Prudence, Humility, and Fortitude. The virtues of the fourteenth century are somewhat hard-featured, with vivid and living expression, and plain everyday clothes of the time. Charity has her lap full of apples, and is giving one to a little child, who stretches his arm for it across a gap in the leafage of the capital. Fortitude tears open a lion’s jaws; Faith lays her hand on her breast as she beholds the cross; and Hope is praying, while above is a hand seen emerging from sunbeams—the hand of God, and the inscription above is Spes optima in Deo. This design is rudely imitated by the fifteenth century workmen: the virtues have lost their hard features and living expression; they have now all got Roman noses, and have had their hair curled. Their actions and emblems are, however, preserved until we come to Hope—she is still praising, but she is praising to the sun only: the hand of God is gone!—Ruskin.