Lamentations 1:4

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn feasts: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness." Lam 1:4

This is the description of a religious desolation. Once the roads leading to Zion were thronged with ardent pilgrims, urging onward in a spirit of worship and homage and rapturous love; now not a pilgrim is to be seen near the gates which open upon the holy place. Virgins and priests are alike left without official occupation; no broken heart seeks ease in Zion, no tormented spirit brings its sorrow to be healed. All men have turned in other directions for light and hope and safety. A pathetic picture indeed is this, that the feast is spread and no man comes to the banqueting-table; every gate is open in token of welcome and hospitality, yet no wandering soul asks for admittance; the priests once so noble in the service of song, the virgins once so beautiful as images of innocence, now stand with hands thrown down, with eyes full of tears, with hearts sighing in expressive silence their bitterness and disappointment. All this can God do even to his chosen place, and to altars on which he has written his name. Officialism is no guarantee of spiritual perpetuity. Pomp and ceremony, with all their mechanical and external decorations and attractions, are no pledge of the presence of the Spirit of the Living God. On many temples we may write Ichabod. The temples are as large as ever, and yet they are full of emptiness: every ceremony may be gone through with punctilious care, but the Lord himself has withdrawn, and service is turned into mockery. Here is a lesson for all persons who care for the sanctuary and for the extension of its redeeming influence. The sanctuary is nothing but for the Lord's presence. Eloquent preaching is but eloquent noise if the Spirit of the Lord be not in it, giving it intellectual value, spiritual dignity, and practical usefulness. Not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit, saith the Lord; because men have forgotten this doctrine they have trusted to themselves and have seen their hopes perishing in complete and bitter disappointment. One wonders how all this has come to pass in Judah, and how this sorrow has befallen sacred and beautiful Zion. We need not wonder long, for the answer is given in these words "For the Lord hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions." That is the reason. When did we ever find other explanation of human suffering? When did God ever willingly chastise the children of men? When did the Lord say that merely to display his power he would shake his rod over the nations and torment them with great pain? Never. Whenever judgment has gone forth it has been in the cause of righteousness, it has been to avenge some offence against the laws of heaven, which are not arbitrary laws, established for the mere glory of the Potentate, but they are what may be called laws of health, laws of sanity, laws of progress, laws of pureness, laws of equity, to sin against these laws is to go to the bottomless pit. Why disguise the result when all history has made it so plain? Why spoil by mocking euphemism what is so direct and patent even to the judgment of reason itself, to say nothing of that nobler imagination which bears the distinctive name of faith? Always transgression is the high-road to the grave. Men say this and acknowledge it, and. yet they repeat the offence as if no intimation of consequences had been given to them. What can remain for such people but increasing hardness of heart, until their sense of God's existence has faded out of the mind?