EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
(ד) Lamentations 3:10. Difficulties had been embarrassing, but dangers were also added. In the crooked paths the bear and the lion lurked, and he is there, like them, lying in wait for me.
Lamentations 3:11. I wandered aimlessly. He has led me astray and then he has torn me in pieces, has made me desolate, left me mangled and alone.
Lamentations 3:12. Not only such rending as that by beasts of prey has distressed me, but also maltreatment by men. I have been treated as the quarry of a hunter. He set me as a mark for the arrow.
(ה) Lamentations 3:13. There is no miss when God aims at a mark. He has made the sons of his quiver to enter into my reins; the central points of vital action were sore wounded.
HOMILETICS
JEHOVAH AS A FOE
I. Is aware of every effort to escape out of His power. “He was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places” (Lamentations 3:10). The afflicted one compares himself to a fugitive striving to escape from his miseries, but baffled at every turn. Finding his way blocked up by a solid wall, he plunges into the uncertain paths of the forest, only to find himself exposed to the rapacity of beasts of prey. In every direction he is menaced with enemies; to turn back is as dangerous as to press forward. Exhausted and bewildered, he is ready to sink with terror and despair. Woe to the man who has made an enemy of Jehovah! His most frantic efforts to escape are in vain. He is everywhere threatened by the law he has violated, and its penalties lie about his path like wild beasts, ready to seize him as their victim.
II. Alarms by the suddenness and violence of His attack. “He hath turned aside my ways, and pulled me in pieces. He hath made me desolate” (Lamentations 3:11). The figure of the lion is still maintained. Aware of its presence, the startled fugitive turns aside, only to find himself suddenly pounced upon and torn in pieces, so that, stupified with terror and pain, he is powerless to flee. “He hath made me desolate,” a favourite word with Jeremiah, occurring more than forty times in his Prophecy, and five times in Lamentations (ch. Lamentations 1:4; Lamentations 1:13; Lamentations 1:16; Lamentations 4:5; Lamentations 5:18). The root meaning of the word is appalled, astonied, stupified, struck dumb with terror. The impenitent wicked are every moment in imminent peril. The doom of destruction is already declared against the workers of iniquity, and that destruction shall come “unawares, as a whirlwind, suddenly and swiftly” (cf. Psalms 35:8; Proverbs 1:27; Proverbs 10:29; Proverbs 21:15; 1 Thessalonians 5:3; 2 Peter 2:1). Christ is the refuge of the sinner, immediately accessible, and in Him there is invulnerable security.
III. Is an unerring marksman. “He hath bent His bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow” (Lamentations 3:12). The simile of the lion naturally suggests that of the hunter. When the smitten fugitive is under the paw of the lion, the hunter comes, but not to deliver him. It is not the beast of prey, but the poor mangled victim which is the mark for his arrows. The Mohammedan Caliph Aaly was once asked, “If the heavens were a bow and the earth the cord thereof, if calamities were arrows, man the butt for those arrows, and the holy blessed God the unerring marksman, where could the sons of Adam flee for succour?” The Caliph replied, “The children of Adam must flee unto the Lord.” This was the state of unhappy Judah; this is the state of the man who wickedly defies God. There is no escape but by a penitent return to Him whose bow is already bent to punish, and whose arrow reaches its mark with unerring precision.
IV. Can inflict acutest pain. “He hath caused the arrows of His quiver to enter into my reins”—my heart (Lamentations 3:13). God has many arrows; they are swift in their passage, unerring in their aim, and pierce deep. None can wound as God can. In the region where the greatest sin against Him has been committed—in the heart—there the arrows of His judgment penetrate and produce the keenest anguish. “These immediate blows of God upon the soul seem to be those things called in Psalms 38:2 God’s arrows; they are strange, sudden, invincible amazements upon the spirit, leaving such a damp upon it as defies the faint and weak cordials of all creature enjoyments. The wounds which God Himself makes none but God Himself can cure.”
LESSONS.—
1. It is vain for the sinner to defy Jehovah.
2. Sin cannot evade either detection or punishment.
3. The only hope of the sinner is to penitently implore the mercy of Jehovah.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 3:10-11. The dangers of a sinful life. I. The agents of punishment are always at hand. “He was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places” (Lamentations 3:10). II. There is no escape from punishment for sin. “He hath turned aside my ways and pulled me in pieces” (Lamentations 3:11). III. The punishment for sin is sudden and appalling. “He hath made me desolate” (Lamentations 3:11).
Lamentations 3:12-13. The certainty of punishment. I. Because God is just. II. Because God is unerring in His treatment of sin. “He hath bent His bow and set me as a mark for the arrow” (Lamentations 3:12). III. The punishment will be painfully realised. “He hath caused the arrows of His quiver to enter into my reins” (Lamentations 3:13).
ILLUSTRATIONS.—Jehovah a foe to all sin. God Himself, we have always understood, hates sin with a most authentic, celestial, and eternal hatred—a hatred, a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel, and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and disappearance from the sum of things. The path of it is the path of a flaming sword. He that has eyes may see it walking, inexorable, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through the chaotic gulf of human history, and everywhere burning, as with unquenchable fire, the false and the deadworthy from the true and life-worthy, making all human history and the biography of every man a God’s cosmos in place of a devil’s chaos. So it is in the end; even so to every man who is a man, and not a mutinous beast, and has eyes to see.—Carlyle.
The dangers of sin. The favourite sport of Canada in winter is toboganning. Some of the slides are very steep and look very dangerous, and the sensation of rushing down the hill on the thin strips of basswood is one never to be forgotten. “How do you like it?” asked a Canadian girl of an American visitor, whom she had steered down the steepest slide. “Oh, I would not have missed it for a hundred dollars!” “You’ll try it again, won’t you?” “Not for a thousand dollars!”
—Mr. Ruskin speaks in his “Love’s Meinie” of the little crake, a bird which lays her eggs on an inartificially constructed platform of decayed leaves or stalks of marsh plants, slightly elevated above the water. “How elevated I cannot find proper account; that is to say, whether it is hung to the stems of growing reeds or built on hillocks of soil; but the bird is always liable to have its nest overflown by floods.”
The degradation of sin. When the followers of Ulysses degraded themselves by the misuse of pleasures until they fell to the level of the brutes, it is said that Circe, touching them with her wand, turned them into swine. She brought to the surface the inner ugliness, revealed the animal that ruled within.
The bitterness of sin. There is more bitterness following upon sin’s ending than ever there was sweetness flowing from sin’s acting. You that see nothing but well in its commission will suffer nothing but woe in its conclusion. You that sin for your profits will never profit by your sins.—Dyer.
Divine judgment a painful reality. That which comes immediately from God has most of God in it. As the sun when he darts his beams in a direct perpendicular line does it most forcibly because most immediately, there are terrors upon the mind which flow immediately from God, and are not weakened or refracted by passing through the instrumental conveyance of a second cause, for that which passes through a thing is contracted according to the narrowness of its passage. The terrors here spoken of, not being inflicted by the intermediate help of anything, but being darted forth from God Himself, are by this incomparably more strong and piercing. When God wounds a man by the loss of an estate, of his health, of a relation, the smart is but commensurate to the thing which is lost, poor and finite. But when He Himself employs His whole omnipotence, and is Himself both the archer and the arrow, there is as much difference between this and the former as when a house lets fall a cobweb and when it falls itself upon a man.—South.