"THEY JUST DID NOT BELIEVE"
The book of Lamentations arises from the events of a defeated people. The third chapter speaks about those who had given the prophet a hard time when he spoke about the coming of Babylon. God inspires the words as the prophet says, "...I am their musick" (Lamentations 3:63). What made them so happy was the suffering of the prophet, Jeremiah. The sadness which set in was realized when Jerusalem was sacked and burned the third time by the forces of Babylon. All the words of Jeremiah, given to him by God, had come to pass.
The events of Sodom and its destruction was now used to compare what Judah was going through. The punishment of Sodom and the cities of the plains took place in a "moment" (Lamentations 4:6). No one could save the people in those cities because of the wickedness that had taken over their hearts. The case of Judah is likewise, true, in as much as there was not enough righteousness among the people to stay the judgment of God. The prophet declares that the punishment of Judah was greater than the punishment of Sodom. Greater in the sense that it was not over in a "moment" but rather would last for some seventy years.
Some during the siege would die by the sword. Others who did not die so quickly, would die from hunger wanting the "fruits of the field" (Lamentation 4:9). Due to the increasee hunger because the city was under siege, some went so far as to eat their own children (verse 10). It is one thing to see the people of the world with no idea about God going through such horror but to see it happening to God's children was, for them, unthinkable. It just could not happen, not to God's children. The warnings by Jeremiah and other prophets fell on deaf ears for the most part. The thing which stilled the voice of the prophets was that Judah could not believe that God would allow this to happen to them. As Jeremiah writes, they would not have believed that the "...adversary and the enemy should have entered the gates of Jerusalem" (verse 12). The kings of the earth had fought many battles against the people of God and no one thought that Jerusalem would ever fall. If, then, the pagans did not believe that Jerusalem would ever fall, then how much more that belief among the children of God? The sister nation of Israel had already been taken in to Assyrian captivity but Jerusalem still stood. This was in their minds the location of the presence of God. No pagan could ever take Jerusalem, knowing that the presence of God was there in the temple.
What they failed to see was that God's presence was no longer among them due to their sins (Isaiah 59:1,2). God had reached a point of no longer accepting their sacrifices and oblations (Isaiah 1:12,13). Since only the high priest could go into the holy of holies, once a year with the blood of animals they depended on things around them to assure them of God's presence. If their crops and their money situations continued to improve, then they "assumed" that God was with them. Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others kept pointing to the spiritual demise in the heart of their religion.
As an election year begins to heat up, many are hopeful that the right candidate being elected to office will cure the ills of our country. Likewise, the fear exists if the wrong candidate gets elected then America is in serious trouble. The serious trouble is not about which candidate will be elected, but rather the problem of righteousness in our nation. If the leaders of our country are moral people guided by principles of right and wrong, then God's people will always fare better. Here, though, is what we must come to know and understand. Each day that we live, we must be the righteous people God means for us to be (Romans 6:16-18). Enough righteousness could have saved Sodom. Had the conduct of God's children toward righteousness been great enough then the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities would not have taken place.
Let us be careful and learn the lessons from the past (I Corinthians 10:11). Should we ever think that the demise of our nation could never happen, then we have not learned the lessons from Lamentations. Those who seek office to lead this nation must be called back to moral conduct and the arising of principles of right and wrong to govern their own lives. It is, however, the righteousness of God's children that will make the difference. Let us all live for Jesus, for our sake and the sake of our beloved nation (Romans 6:11).