“In this information-rich age, many of us have learned to be as
brief as possible. That was one of the areas in which my own doctoral
supervisor helped me a great deal: though my prose style is still too rambling,
whatever leanness and precision it has owes itself to his thorough correcting
of my work a quarter of a century ago. Efficient managers learn to be brief;
computer programmers are rated on how briefly they can write precise code to do
what needs to be done. Only a few contemporary authors (e.g. Tom Clancy and
James Michener) get away with long, rambling books-and even the editors have
drastically trimmed them.
Yet here we are, reading through Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations,
with Ezekiel to go, and we find ourselves circling around the same handful of
themes again and again: sin in the covenant community, threatened judgment, the
enacted judgment, first for the northern tribes, then for Judah. We recognize
the subtle differences, of course: history, apocalyptic, oracle, lament,
prayers. Here in lamentations 5, the fifth dirge is cast as a long prayer:
“Remember, O Lord, what has happened to us; look, and see our disgrace” (5:1).
But haven’t you caught yourself saying to yourself more than once, “I know this
is the Word of God, and I know it is important, but I think I understand now
something of the history and the theology of the exile. Couldn’t we get on to
something else?” We live in an age burgeoning with information, we cry for
brevity, and the Bible at times seems terribly discursive. So we scan another
chapter as rapidly as possible because we already “know” this.
But that is part of the problem, isn’t it? Read through this
chapter again, slowly, thoughtfully. Of course, it is tied to Israel six
centuries before Christ, of the destruction of her cities and land and temple,
to the onset of the exile. But listen to the depth and persistence of the
pleas, the repentance, the personal engagement with God, the cultural awareness,
the acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty and justice, the profound recognition
that the people must be restored to God himself if return to the land be
possible, let alone meaningful (5:21). Then compare this with the brands of
Christian confessionalism with which you are most familiar. In days of cultural
declension, moral degradation, and large scale ecclesiastical frittering, is
our praying like that of Lamentations 5? Have the themes of the major prophets
so burned into our minds and hearts that our passion is to be restored to the
living God? Or have we ourselves become so caught up in the spirit of this age
that we are content to be rich in information and impoverished in wisdom and
godliness?”
- D.A. Carson
Theologian and Professor 1946-
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