Lament Your Sin

Lamentations 1:5

Israel's "foes have become the head;
her enemies prosper,
because Yahweh has afflicted her 
for the multitude of her transgressions;
her children have gone away,
captives before the foe."

Jeremiah laments the fall of Jerusalem here, and says God did it because of Israel’s many sins.  

Imagine the horror this conquest must have been.  

The city besieged.  

Famine, disease, starvation.  

The temple ransacked and leveled.  

Murder and rape on a wide scale.  

The whole nation conquered politically and subjugated to foreign rule.

The point here isn’t to gawk at the sensational, uniquely awful event.  Like a traffic accident you see and think, “Glad that wasn’t me.”  The point is, this IS you: your sins deserve this, too.  God would be perfectly just in the light of our national sins, to have China invade, conquer and rule us for years, like happened to Israel.  What bothers you more, really, when you think about that: having to live under communist rule, or that you have sinned against the holy God you love?  Our sins do not bother us nearly enough.  God has many ways to train us to consider them more deeply, to hate our sin more thoroughly.  One tool He used was national conquest and exile, and that was not out of proportion with the magnitude of their sins.

Let us confess our sins to God.

10/21/18