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The Message of Lamentations QUOTES

The Message of Lamentations QUOTES

1 " Lament is missional because it keeps the world before God, and it draws God into the world – with the longing that God should act, and the faith that he ultimately will. "

― Christopher J.H. Wright , The Message of Lamentations

2 " It is well known that great art, great music and great literature can emerge out of great pain. This does not lessen the reality of the suffering of the artist, composer or writer, but it points to something creative and redemptive in the human person, made in the image of God, which can bring forth a thing of beauty in the midst of surrounding ugliness, brutality and evil. Nowhere is this more true than in the book of Lamentations. "

― Christopher J.H. Wright , The Message of Lamentations

3 " There is one voice we never hear. God does not speak in the whole book of Lamentations.11 Heaven is silent. Which does not necessarily mean that heaven is deaf or blind. We shall consider later what Kathleen O’Connor calls ‘the power of the missing voice’. "

― Christopher J.H. Wright , The Message of Lamentations

4 " relationship between God and Old Testament Israel. In fact, as Jeremiah and other prophets pointed out, the catastrophe of 587 BC was not a denial of that covenant relationship, but the proof of it. It demonstrated that God meant what he said, that YHWH was as faithful to his threats as to his promises. At its inception the covenant had included sanctions – the notorious curses that would come on the people for persistent disloyalty to their covenant Lord (Lev. 26; Deut. 28).16 In 587 BC, they came. "

― Christopher J.H. Wright , The Message of Lamentations

5 " Since we seem to have lost the willingness, the vocabulary, or even the capacity, to engage in authentic biblical lament (at least in public worship and certainly in the West), what use have we for a book with such a name? We hardly know how to use the numerous psalms of lament, let alone a whole bookful of (almost but not quite) unrelieved grief and protest. Ironically, by giving no attention to the book of Lamentations, we join those within the book itself who passed by Lady Zion, shaking their heads but offering no comfort to the desolate suffering city and people. "

― Christopher J.H. Wright , The Message of Lamentations

6 " So then, we must not read Lamentations without the rest of the Bible. But equally, we should not read the rest of the Bible without Lamentations (as Christians have habitually tended to do). "

― Christopher J.H. Wright , The Message of Lamentations

7 " When we connect the death of Christ to the Old Testament, as Paul tells us we should,45 we can see the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC as a portent of the cross (both of them acts of human wickedness that were simultaneously the outpouring of God’s judgment), and the return from exile as a portent of the resurrection (and ultimately, in longer prophetic vision, of the new creation). And as we read Lamentations again in the light of that connection, the experiences of Lady Zion (especially in Lam. 1), and the Man (in 3:1–18) find multiple echoes in the passion of Christ. "

― Christopher J.H. Wright , The Message of Lamentations