EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
Lamentations 3:14. The figure is hardly changed. Perhaps a laughing-stock to all my people, their song all the day, may be regarded as the shaft which went to the quick. Jeremiah calls a deceiving tongue a deadly arrow (Jeremiah 9:8). They who should have stood by him, as partaking of the same afflictions, hurled at him bolts of ridicule in jaunty songs. Another reading ascribes the mocking to all peoples, not to his fellow-countrymen.
Lamentations 3:15. The nutriment and comfort which I needed were replaced by adversities which I endured to the utmost extent bearable. He has filled me with bitternesses—different kinds of sufferings—and sated me with wormwood.
(ו) Lamentations 3:16. In respect to means of nourishment, I have been still further exasperated. Also he has broken my teeth with gravel; either that which was chewed was full of gritty sand, or for bread he had stones given him. A strange work for the Father! He has covered me with ashes, I am one who mourneth in bitterness.
Lamentations 3:17. Notwithstanding all my afflictions, I might have been calm and hopeful, but the culminating point of all I have to sustain is the conviction that I am put far from God. Is it not a piteous condition which may extort complaint of Thyself? Thou hast cast off my soul from peace. So dense is this outer darkness, that any recollection of ever being in comfort has faded away, I forget good.
HOMILETICS
COMPLEX PHASES OF DISTRESS
I. The sufferer is the subject of ridicule. “I was a derision to all my people, and their song all the day” (Lamentations 3:14). Dropping the use of metaphor for the nonce, the prophet plainly indicates in these words what the arrows were that pierced him to the quick. They were the darts of ridicule, sharpened with envy and poisoned with rancour—a ridicule all the keener as coming from his own people, and revealing the base treachery that had been all along cherished under the mask of professed friendship. It is a deep wound to a sensitive heart to discover the fickleness of perverse human nature. The very people who smile upon and flatter us in our prosperity are the first to curl the lip of scorn and to join those who make sport over our misfortunes. The idol of the crowd to-day may be the execration of the crowd to-morrow. It is a part of the suffering of the unfaithful to have to endure the contempt of God and man, and the sting of the distress is the consciousness that it is self-induced and richly deserved. Where shall he look for sympathy and help? Not from man. His only refuge is in God.
II. The sufferer is satiated with pain and sunk in abject humiliation. “He hath filled me with bitterness, He hath made me drunken with wormwood. He hath also broken my teeth with gravel stones, He hath covered me with ashes” (Lamentations 3:15-16). He is as one glutted with bitter food and stupified with nauseous drinks. An Arabic poet describes a man grievously afflicted as “a pounder of wormwood”. His food is so mingled with the grit of the ashes in which it is baked that his teeth are broken in eating it, and he is himself smothered with the ashes into the midst of which he has been thrown down. To the Oriental mind this is a graphic description of acute suffering and shame. Vanity, pride, and disobedience end in humiliation and trouble. “It seems appointed,” says Lange, “that much of the highest instruction should come to us, even in the Bible, through the sufferings and struggles of individual men.” The anguish of the prophet was a type of the sufferings of a rebellious nation.
III. The sufferer is robbed of happiness. “Thou hast removed my soul far off from peace” (Lamentations 3:17). Peace in Hebrew has the wider signification of welfare, happiness. Hence it was their salutation in life, “Peace be to thee,” and in death was engraved upon their sepulchres, “In peace.” Peace with God is the source of permanent and overflowing happiness, and its possession is conditioned on the obedience of faith, for “being justified by faith, we have peace with God, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.” How great is the loss when our peace is gone and our happiness takes wing! It is the loss of that we most highly prize and diligently seek after, for happiness is the object of universal search. Rob a man of his peace, and what is there left to live for? The soul, unloosed from her old moorings, is tossed about like a helpless ship in the troubled sea which cannot rest. Life is an intolerable burden, and, swung in a whirl of black despair, the soul cries out with the distracted patriarch, “Oh, that I might have my request,” &c. (Job 6:8-10).
IV. The sufferer loses the very idea of good. “I forgot prosperity” (Lamentations 3:17). I forgot what good is, lost the very idea of what it means. There is no enjoyment in the present; there is no hope in the future. It is impossible to conceive a more pitiable and forlorn condition. The prophet has surely reached the bottom of his despair; there is no lower depth. This is the fate of the man who tries to live without God. His views of right and wrong, of liberty and bondage, of prosperity and adversity, are utterly confounded. It is a dangerous experiment for any man to try. Christ is the Hope of humanity. To be without Him is to be without God, and to be in the condition of the Ephesians of a former age, “Having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12).
LESSONS.—
1. It is a painful experience to meet with scorn where we expected sympathy.
2. There is always something to modify the happiness of life.
3. It is one of the saddest results of suffering when the soul loses faith in goodness.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 3:14-15. Ridicule:
1. Is hard to bear when coming from our enemies. II. Has a special aggravation when it is exultingly employed against us by those we had loved and trusted. III. Overwhelms its victim by its bitterness and ceaseless outflow.
Lamentations 3:17. The loss of happiness: I. Is the loss of peace. II. Is the loss of true notions of goodness. III. Is the fate of the obstinately unbelieving.
ILLUSTRATIONS—Triumph over ridicule. A pious poor man was much ridiculed on account of his religion. Being asked if these daily persecutions did not make him ready to give up his profession, he replied, “No! Our minister once said in his sermon that if we were so foolish as to permit such people to laugh us out of religion till at last we dropped into hell, they could not laugh us out again.”
—What would the nightingale care if the toad despised her singing? She would still sing on, and leave the cold toad to his dank shadows. And what care I for the sneers of men who grovel upon earth? I will still sing on in the ear and bosom of God.—Beecher.
Treachery has no pity. Sir Anthony Kingston, the provost-marshal of the Protector, the Earl of Hertford, sent word to the mayor of Bodmin that he would dine with him. He had a man to hang too, he said, and a stout gallows must be ready. The dinner was duly eaten and the gallows prepared. “Think you,” said Kingston as they stood looking at it, “think you is it strong enough?” “Yea, sir,” quoth the mayor, “it is.” “Well, then,” said Sir Anthony, “get up; it is for you.” The mayor, greatly abashed, exclaimed and protested. “Sir,” said Kingston, “there is no remedy; ye have been a busy rebel, and this is appointed for your reward;” and so, without respite or stay, the mayor was hanged.
Suffering and its compensations. Should the Empress determine to banish me, let her banish me; “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.” If she will cast me into the sea, let her cast me into the sea; I will remember Jonah. If she will throw me into a burning fiery furnace, the three children were there before me. If she will throw me to the wild beasts, I will remember that Daniel was in the den of lions. If she will condemn me to be stoned, I shall be an associate of Stephen, the proto-martyr. If she will have me beheaded, the Baptist has submitted to the same punishment. If she will take away my substance, “naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return to it.”—Chrysostom.
The best work comes out of distress. The people of Verona, when they saw Dante in the streets, used to say, “See, there is the man that was in hell!” Ah yes! he had been in hell—in hell enough, in long severe sorrow and struggle, as the like of him is pretty sure to have been. Commedias that come out divine are not accomplished otherwise. Thought, true labour of any kind, highest virtue itself, is it not the daughter of pain? Born as out of the black whirlwind; true effort, in fact, as of a captive struggling to free himself: that is thought. In all ways we are to become perfect through suffering.—Carlyle.
Happiness depends on God. Solon said, “No man ought to be called happy till he dies, because he knows not what his life is to be.” But the Christian may always call himself happy here because wherever his tent is carried, he need never pitch it where the cloud does not move and where he is not surrounded by a wall of fire. “I will be a wall of fire round about them, and their glory in the midst.” They cannot dwell where God is not householder, warder, and bulwark of salvation.