Imagine being Jeremiah and watching the very thing you said come to pass in the destruction of the city you love and the Holy Temple. How would you feel? Well, you are going to find out how Jeremiah felt at that time as Lamentations is the writings of grief and sorrow that Jeremiah felt when the city of Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. This is an incredible read of a broken-hearted prophet and his prayers for restoration.
Many people don’t like reading Lamentations. They find it confusing and normally come away thinking that God is a vengeful, horrible God, happy to destroy His own people. But you have to remember when this book was written in the timeline of history – this is a prophet with a broken heart. He is devastated that after all the warnings, all the scriptures that said this would happen, after the hundreds of years of cycles of sin in Judges, the sin and rebellion of God’s representatives here on earth, God rescuing them over and over again and the Israelites falling back into sin, idolatry and corruption, that what He promised has finally happened. Judah had been taken into exile and the city of Jerusalem is destroyed.
Lamenting is one of the incredible emotions that the Bible portrays. The Bible allows the reader to run through an array of emotions without God having to cover his ears and leave the room. Passion is celebrated in Song of Songs, suffering and injustice is explored in Job and in Lamentations: mourning, grief, complaining is put on full display.