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This verse 11 is frequently just kind of quoted out of context by people as kind of a generic

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promise of God to prosper one's future.

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But the context is for those who have just experienced the severe judgment of God and

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have been taken away captive.

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And it's to them specifically that God offers up this promise of future, blessing, and hope.

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But the thing that you should remember is that Jeremiah foretells the exile will last

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longer than the people expect 70 years.

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Okay?

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The next book we consider here is the book of Lamentations.

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And this follows immediately upon Jeremiah because tradition has that Jeremiah is the

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author.

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Although the text itself does not say this, the Hebrew title for the book is the very

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first word of the book, hau, or the Hebrew is akah.

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Okay?

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So remember that for the Hebrew titles it was always the first word in the written document.

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In this case it's akah, hau.

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And so Lamentations begins, how lonely sits the city that was full of people, how like

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a widow she has become, she who was great among the nations, she who was a princess

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among the provinces has become a slave.

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So the Greek title given to this then in the Septuagint was trenoi, and so that's translated

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into our English as Lamentations.

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So the title really, for our English title, describes the content.

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The Hebrew title expresses the anguish itself.

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How lonely sits the city.

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This particular book of the Bible is still used today by Jews.

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They read it on a special day in July typically, according to their lunar calendar, the traditional

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lunar calendar, to remember or commemorate the fall of Jerusalem in 586, also the destruction

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of Jerusalem another time in 70 A.D. by the Romans, and then also to remember the Holocaust

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of World War II.

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We as Christians use the book of Lamentations.

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Which season do you think that we would use the book of Lamentations?

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Lent, appropriate for a penitential season, and most specifically during Holy Week, the

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last three days of Holy Week is when Lamentations is read.

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The Hebrew does not identify the author.

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The Latin Vulgate does, however.

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The title says, The Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet.

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So although the Hebrew is anonymous, all the evidence does seem to point to Jeremiah as

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the author.

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The very, very ancient tradition holds him as the author, not just the Vulgate, but even

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the Jewish Targums do.

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It's very clear that whoever wrote Lamentations was an eyewitness to the destruction of the

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city, the deportation of the people.

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Very, very dramatic imagery used here of what took place.

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Mothers eating their children during the siege and so forth.

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So it's obviously been burned into the memory of whoever wrote this.

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And there are similarities in the style of writing and certainly the tone of Jeremiah

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who was the weeping prophet and then those theological themes.

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Add to this, 2 Chronicles 35 verse 25 says that Jeremiah was the composer of laments.

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It doesn't necessarily say he was the composer of this book, which has laments, but that

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he was a composer of laments.

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And so everything seems to point to him.

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Okay, what is the purpose of this?

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Well, just as Jeremiah's earlier prophecies had been used to prepare Judah for judgment,

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prepare them to expect tragedy, now after the tragedy has befallen them, he helps Judah

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to deal with it, to grieve the loss and expresses words on behalf of the Jews here of their

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loss.

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Okay, essentially what this is then stylistically is a funeral dirge.

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It's a funeral dirge for the city of God.

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How lonely sits the city that was full of people.

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And so you've got a lot of short, almost sobbing lines.

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It's like someone who is sobbing and crying.

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You can just say so much and then you have to gasp and sob.

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It's expressed that way stylistically.

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And there's a lot of what we call dramatic contrast in lamentations.

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That you contrast and compare the previous state of the people and the city with what she has now become.

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And just it's kind of like, you know, what could have been if we would have just been faithful,

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what could have been, but now what is as a result of this tragedy and this judgment.

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Also, something that's important for you to note is that the Book of Lamentations is organized as acrostic poetry.

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Acrostic poetry means that the lines correspond to letters of the alphabet.

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So in this case, even the first line, the title, aca, there starts with an aleph.

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So you've got each line corresponding to the alphabet.

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Aleph, beith, gimel, daleth, so forth of the Hebrew alphabet.

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And there are five books, and those five books then each have four of the books, I should say, 22 lines.

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And then the fifth book has several cycles through the acrostic.

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So what is this saying? What's the reason behind the acrostic?

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Well, it's a poetic device. This is poetry.

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Sometimes this was used for dirges and so forth, but it's also demonstrating that this was thought through.

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So it just didn't come out spontaneously.

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This is a well-prepared, meditated piece.

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So it's not just the impulsive grief expressed by the author, but it's been composed in a thoughtful way as well as he reflects upon the fall of Jerusalem.

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So that's about all that I have for Lamentations here.

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Well, let's take a look then at the exile and then the prophets who are in exile.

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Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel were contemporaries, although Daniel's ministry and what is covered in Daniel goes much later than Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

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Jeremiah carried out his ministry, though, in Jerusalem, speaking to the people.

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Ezekiel and Daniel carry out their prophetic ministries in Babylon.

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So they're already in Babylon. They're part of the exile, part of those who are exiles.

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With Ezekiel, his ministry is about 593 to 571.

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He was part of the deportation of 597, but he doesn't begin his ministry until later.

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So he doesn't begin right away once he gets to Babylon.

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But you see that his ministry here covers over both before the fall and after the fall, before 586 and after 586.

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So you've got Ezekiel here down there at the very end.

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Ezekiel, as we've seen with the other prophets, carries out that classic traditional message of addressing the broken covenant,

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how God's people have broken the covenant, and thus the judgment upon that.

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The difference is, though, that he is speaking that word from Babylon.

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And you have the book of Ezekiel here divided up into two main sections.

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The pivot point is chapter 33.

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And everything before chapter 33 is before 586.

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And what follows chapter 33 is after 586.

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And thus, the bulk of material here before chapter 33 will be in our Lutheran understanding what we'd call law, condemnation, judgment.

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Similar to what we saw with Isaiah in chapters 1 to 39, afflicting the comfortable.

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That's what we have before chapter 33.

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And then you have this hinge in this transition after 586, and this will be primarily what we would call Gospel,

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oracles of hope, oracles of comfort, oracles of restoration, so comforting the afflicted.

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So it's similar to Isaiah in that regard.

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Again, we've seen the different ways in which some of these prophets of God have been called directly by God.

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The last one we look at here is Ezekiel and his call.

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And the call of Ezekiel is given in chapter 2.

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So if you want to turn to Ezekiel chapter 2.

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And he said to me, Son of man, stand on your feet and I will speak to you.

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This is characteristic of Ezekiel's writings where the Lord addresses him as son of man.

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So if you see that, you'll be able to recognize this is coming from Ezekiel when the prophet is addressed as son of man.

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And in this call then, God actually delivers to Ezekiel a scroll and has him eat it.

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Okay, so if you move down to verse 8, chapter 2.

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But you son of man, hear what I say to you. Do not be rebellious like that rebellious house.

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Open your mouth and eat what I give you.

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And when I looked, behold, a hand was stretched out to me, and behold, a scroll of a book was in it.

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And he spread it before me, and it had writing on the front and on the back.

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And on it, words of lamentation and mourning and woe.

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And he said to me, chapter 3, verse 1, Son of man, eat whatever you find here.

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Eat this scroll and go speak to the house of Israel.

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So I opened my mouth and he gave me this scroll to eat.

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And he said to me, Son of man, feed your belly with this scroll that I feed you and fill your stomach with it.

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Then I ate, and it was in my mouth as sweet as honey.

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And he said to me, Son of man, go to the house of Israel and speak with my words to them.

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So here you have a calling of the prophet, and it's clear once again he is to be the mouthpiece.

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But as earlier with Isaiah, you had the lips touched with the cold purified.

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With Jeremiah, the Lord Himself touching the mouth of Jeremiah, saying, now you speak my words.

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So here with Ezekiel, the Lord gives him his word, this scroll, and has him eat it.

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So he, in a sense, ingests the word of God so that he might speak it forth.

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That's the imagery here of Ezekiel's call.

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So it's important for you to distinguish between these different characters and the way in which God calls them for prophetic ministry.

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Even before that call, though, in chapter 1, you have a vision of the Lord and the Lord's glory.

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And this is the vision that's been made popular through the Negro spiritual.

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Ezekiel saw the wheel, you know, way up in the middle of the year.

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Well, this is the vision here. What's that speaking of?

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It is, first of all, a theophany, a vision of God.

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So just as we saw Isaiah receiving this vision of God upon his throne, so Ezekiel has a similar vision of Yahweh upon his throne.

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The throne seated upon the curve of the firmament.

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So God as Lord and Creator of creation here.

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He sees the Creator, the awesome God.

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And attending to Yahweh here are four attendants.

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We would call them cherubim.

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And that's, in fact, what Ezekiel later calls them when they reappear in like chapter 10.

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But they are living beings.

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They're just simply called living beings.

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And they are kind of an assemblage of different creatures.

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So you've got a face of a man, a face of an ox, and of a lion, and also of an eagle, okay?

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And wings and so forth.

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I think that this is just his way of expressing the vision of the throne room of God and these four living creatures.

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That are not human.

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They are specially created beings.

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And these are the attendants to the throne.

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These reappear then, among other places, but especially in the book of Revelation.

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Revelation chapter 6, where John is transported up into the heavenly temple, the throne room of God.

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And they're always attending to the throne of God, the four living creatures.

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And then you also have the 24 elders and so forth, that the four living creatures here.

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If you remember, in Solomon's temple, in the Holy of Holies, there were images of four creatures.

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The four cherubim, because there were two cherubim on the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant there.

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And two that then were attendants, actually statues, on the ground.

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And so this again is the image of the throne of God.

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He's attended by these four living creatures.

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So what about the wheels?

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What are the wheels? The wheels that are turning wheels within wheels.

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This is the fiery chariot of God.

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So he's coming in his royal chariot.

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So this is the image of God coming to call Ezekiel.

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And it's God in all of his glory, coming in his royal chariot now, to speak to Ezekiel.

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And to call him to be his prophet.

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Now, just as Isaiah was a priest, so also Ezekiel is a priest.

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And just as the priests had access then into the temple, so now even though he is in Babylon,

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Ezekiel is brought, in a sense, into the true temple, the throne room of God, as a priest.

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But he is called not only to be a priest, but also to be a prophet.

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And it's significant in the early verses of chapter 1, it says that Ezekiel was 30 years old.

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And that's when the priests would be in their ministry at age 30.

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So he's far from the Jerusalem temple, but he's being brought into the true temple

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to carry out a priestly ministry and now a prophetic ministry as well.

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Okay, so this is just kind of the depiction, artist's depiction from the crossways series of this vision.

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Now, Ezekiel is speaking to the people here in Babylon.

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And he's going to address the judgment and the deportation of the masses to Babylon,

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especially with the fall of Jerusalem, the fire there, the captivity.

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And remember, he's part of the second deportation of 597.

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So he will speak of the coming deportation in 587 or 586 here, which will occur in chapter 33.

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So before 586, you have his prophecies of the people being deported to Babylon.

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After chapter 33, after 586 here, he will begin giving them oracles of hope for restoration

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from their spiritual death, if you will, here, and the return back to the land.

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Let's take a look at that according to the graphics here.

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Again, Ezekiel speaks in Babylon along the Kibar River or irrigation canal.

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It's one of the settlement communities of the deported Jews.

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And one other thing that I should say here, I've just been assuming it, but it should be explicit.

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The thing that is different with this deportation that will come of the Jews compared to the deportation of the ten tribes of Israel

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is that the Jews stay together. They remain a community in Babylon.

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They retain their cultural and ethnic identity and community.

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Whereas with the deportation of the ten tribes, they were dispersed and forced to intermarry

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and lose their distinctive ethnic, cultural, and religious identity.

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That's not the case here. So you've got these immigrant communities,

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these exile communities in Babylon, where they can continue to carry out their community life as Jews.

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So Ezekiel here is pointing to the community that will take place there,

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and he's saying that God will bring judgment by deporting the people.

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Ezekiel is another one of these guys who does a lot of the object lessons to get the point across.

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And one of them is a little clay model of Jerusalem.

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And that's what this is depicting here.

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They didn't have satellite TV, obviously, and CNN and so forth.

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So the Lord used Ezekiel to, in a sense, give a play-by-play blow to the people here in Babylon,

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the Jews who were already deported there, of what is going on in Jerusalem.

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So this clay brick, which he kind of carved into a little city, a little Jerusalem, that's what's depicted there,

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he had in front of the people in Babylon as kind of the satellite broadcasting of what's going on in Jerusalem.

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And so he puts little army figures around it, the siege is taking place,

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ladders up to it indicating that the siege, they're breaching the walls, they're going over the walls and so forth.

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And so he's depicting for the people in Babylon, the Jews, not the Babylonians, for the Jews, what's happening while it's taking place here.

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And of course the people in Babylon, who are Jews, don't accept it.

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They think, this guy's just nuts, he's just crazy.

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But the message here is the judgment's going to fall in the holy city, upon the holy city.

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He also has a vision, in chapters 10 and 11, of this chariot of God, the glory of the Lord,

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which first appears in chapter 1, departing from the temple and coming to Babylon.

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So even before the destruction of the temple and the destruction of Jerusalem, before the mass deportation of people in 587-6,

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Yahweh himself comes to Babylon in his glory.

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And it's a powerful scene that you see there in those chapters.

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Ezekiel is transported into the Jerusalem temple and he sees there the Shekinah glory of God, the glory of the Lord,

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coming out of the Holy of Holies, into the holy place.

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And it stops there.

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And the priests are kind of busy doing their thing in the holy place.

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And it's Ezekiel saying, doesn't anyone notice?

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The Lord is leaving.

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They're also busy doing their priestly rites.

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No one's even paying attention. God is leaving the temple.

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And the glory just kind of halts there and hovers.

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And then it moves out of the temple building into the courtyard of the temple.

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And everybody's going about their business.

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Nobody's even paying attention.

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Nobody even notices. God is departing, departing from his temple.

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And then Ezekiel sees the glory of the Lord go east from the temple.

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It just leaves the temple, leaves Jerusalem, heads east.

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And the message is God is now going to dwell among his people.

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Not in Jerusalem, not where Solomon's temple is.

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He has departed the temple.

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It has become so corrupt that he's left Jerusalem.

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And now he will dwell among his people in Babylon.

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That's the message there.

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Okay?

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Now, Ezekiel has a number of different pantomimes.

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Again, these kind of object lessons, action lessons,

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to communicate his message just as we saw with Jeremiah.

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And some of them are pretty odd.

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I mean, sometimes as you read some of the things that Ezekiel does,

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you think, you know, what was he taking?

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What was he smoking?

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But these are reasonable, you know, understandable revelations from the Lord.

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It's just in a very, very unconventional way that Ezekiel communicates this.

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First of all, we have up here,

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Ezekiel is told by the Lord to wrap himself up in ropes, to be bound like a captive.

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And he is to lie for 390 days on his left side and 40 days on his right side.

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So over, well over a year, he lies bound on one side and then the other.

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As people are just kind of going around doing their thing,

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remember this is in Babylon,

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and the message here is that God has a bondage for his people that will last a long time.

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It's similar to what we saw with Jeremiah.

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It's not going to be a short duration, but it's going to be a long time.

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Lying for over a year on one side and then the other willingly,

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not because you have to, but just willingly, is a long time.

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It's a long time even if you're unwilling to do that.

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So the point here is the bondage will take a long time.

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And the point for the people there in Babylon, and this is before the 586,

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they are just thinking, oh this is going to pass here, you know, we'll be heading home soon,

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back to Jerusalem, the city with the temple and so forth.

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And the message here is, no, it's going to be a long captivity.

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While he was doing that as well, he still had to eat and so forth,

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but he also demonstrated to the people what the captivity would be like

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in that he only fed himself rations.

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So just what the most minimal of food, rations, that's the bowl here,

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cooked and the fuel used was dung.

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So this is what poor people, what refugees survive on.

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This is what prisoners survive on.

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This is what they're going to live on.

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So again, it's speaking of the future judgment.

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In another instance, he cuts his hair and divides it up into three different sections equally.

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And one of the sections represents the people who will die from starvation in the siege

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Another section represents those who will die in the actual attack upon Jerusalem when the walls are breached.

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And the third represents those who will be taken captive.

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And they are kind of, that hair is dispersed.

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And so the message here is the judgment is going to be significant.

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Two-thirds of the people of Jerusalem are going to die.

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Historically that's what happened.

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One-third from the starvation and disease of the siege,

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one-third from being slaughtered, one-third are deported.

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Again, this is all before 586.

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And then he does another little drama.

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Okay?

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He acts out someone who's in the siege in Jerusalem,

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who is packing up, taking just the bare necessities,

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the staples, the essentials for life, packed a bag,

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and finds along the wall a little hole to crawl through

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and to try to escape to get through the siege of the enemy.

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So again, depicting the judgment.