THE CONFESSION

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“The Lord is righteous, yet I rebelled against His command. Listen, all you peoples; look on my suffering.
My young men and young women have gone into exile.”

Lamentations 1:18

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

In the Book of Jeremiah, we read of God’s judgment as it fell on nations who chose to disregard and dishonor Him, nations that included His own people in the land of Judah and the beloved city of Jerusalem. In the Book of Lamentations, we hear the voices of God’s people crying out, grieving and mourning the consequences they were suffering following the destruction of their homeland and their subsequent seventy year exile to Babylon.

In our first two devotions from this book, we looked at the state of affairs following the attack of the Babylonians on Judah and Jerusalem, the aftermath that highlighted not only the destruction but the lamenting of God’s people in the midst of their captivity.

Today, we continue to hear listen to the words of the people, this time providing admission of their sins which had placed them in their dire circumstances. Look again at this single verse of confession:

“The Lord is righteous, yet I rebelled against His command. Listen, all you peoples; look on my suffering. My young men and young women have gone into exile.” Lamentations 1:18

There are two major takeaways we need to glean from this proclamation of guilt unto the Lord.

First, the opening words:

“The Lord is righteous.”

The definition of the word righteous yields this meaning:

Morally upright; without guilt or sin.

Now think about that for a moment and ask yourself if anyone else in the world, past or present, can make the claim to being without sin. There has been only one person and that was Jesus Himself who was in His very nature, God. He and His Father were one and since God was perfect in every way, so too was Jesus, His Son. And since both were perfect in every way, then we know they were perfectly right and never did wrong. Ever.

Now, we go back to the confession of the Israelites. The Lord is righteous, yes, but He is not just righteous some of the time, He is the only one who is righteous ALL of the time. He has no equal in this or anything else for that matter.

Why is this important?

Because when God chooses to bring His judgment on someone, He is never wrong in doing so. In other words, no one can call God unfair when His punishment comes because He is perfectly right. Nothing He does is a mistake. Nothing.

So with this as a precursor, now look at the second part of the confession:

“I rebelled against His command. Listen, all you peoples; look on my suffering. My young men and young women have gone into exile.”

The Lord wasn’t wrong in bringing His punishment on His people. Rather, the people were wrong because they chose to rebel against God by turning their devotion and worship to false gods and idols. He had commanded them to have no other gods before Him and yet the people disobeyed and dishonored Him by turning away from His will and way, exchanging it for pagan practices. And despite His best efforts to warn them through His prophets and get them to reverse course, the people ignored those warnings and did whatever they wanted to. It was almost as if they didn’t believe God would do anything but that train of thought was misguided for it lost sight of the times God had brought His punishment on their ancestors.

For God’s judgment had happened before and now the Israelites were seeing it happening again.

What was the common tie between the judgments across different generations?

The Israelites had rebelled against God and thus they deserved His consequences.

Question: In how many instances are people rebelling against the Lord today?

Now ask yourself if God’s judgment might not be on the cusp of returning and when it does, we, like the Israelites, will have to confess that we only have ourselves to blame.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark
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