Lamentations 5
McGeeCHAPTER 5THEME: Elegy 5This fifth and final lamentation is a prayer of Jeremiah.
Lamentations 5:1
Judah had lost the honor and respect which she had had among the nations.
Lamentations 5:11
Their women were ravished, and their princes hanged; they had lost everything. The young men who survived were put into slavery to work for Nebuchadnezzar.
Lamentations 5:15
The joy of their hearts had ceased.
Lamentations 5:19
This is the prayer of Jeremiah for his people. We could learn a lesson from this: before it is too late, we had better turn to the Lord. Daniel Webster made this statement many years ago, and it sounds like a prophecy: “If religious books are not circulated among the masses and the people do not turn to God, I do not know what is to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, error will be. If God and His Word are not received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency. If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will. If the power of the gospel is not felt through the length and the breadth of the land, anarchy, misrule, degradation, misery, corruption, and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.” What a picture! We are living in a day when you cannot read the Bible in the schools, but pornography is permitted because we must be free to do what we want to do! Well, can’t some of us have the Bible in our schools, especially when it is desired by the majority? When our great nation was founded during the period from 1775 to 1787, the following statement by Benjamin Franklin was still widely accepted: “The longer I live the more convincing proofs I see of the truth that God governs in the affairs of men.” Unless a marked change takes place in the United States of America, it’s doomed just as sure as was ancient Babylon. Dr. Machen said, “America is coasting downhill on a godly ancestry.” Now we have reached the bottom of the hill. What a message Lamentations would have for us today, but it will not be selected as the Book of the Month or the Book of the Year. It is unfortunate that we will not listen.