Rest and restoration

Lamentations 5 gives us a harrowing description of Israel’s condition following God’s judgment for her transgression of the covenant. She suffers great hardship. There is famine (v. 10). The inheritance (the land of Canaan) has been taken away and given to strangers and foreigners (v. 2) and Israel is in exile. Verse 9 speaks of grave danger ‘in the wilderness’. There is wearisome labour. Verse 13 reads:

Young men are compelled to grind at the mill,
and boys stagger under loads of wood.

This is, in essence, a reversal of the Exodus. The goal of salvation was to bring the children of Israel out from terrible slavery in Egypt, where they had no rest, to the Promised Land, where they would have rest. Now, once again, they are given no rest (v. 5).

The people mourn their situation and thus mourn their sin (vv. 7, 17) and pray to Yahweh who is on the throne and reigns for ever for restoration (v. 21).

Yahweh brings about this restoration and a return to the rest which is his goal for his people by coming into this world in the person of his Son. He took on our nature and died on the cross to make full atonement for the sin that brought about the exile and the deeper spiritual reality of estrangement from God to which the physical exile pointed, a spiritual exile from God experienced by all humanity by nature (Genesis 3.23-24). Israel’s physical exile is a horrible picture of the slavery we are all in by nature to sin and the devil, hard task-masters whose service only brings about ruin, in this world (as we see in our own lives and in the wider world) and in the next, as it brings us under the awful judgment of God.

To all of us, Jesus says:

Come to me, all who are labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

Matthew 11.28-30

If we, like Jerusalem in Lamentations, mourn our sins and ask God for forgiveness, if we come to Jesus, we receive rest: we are included in Christ now and enjoy all the spiritual blessings that brings, and we will enter the Promised Land, not merely a return to Palestine, but a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.