Lamentations 1:1 How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!
No one wants to die before their time, yet there are a lot of people who are the proverbial “walking dead.” Their heart is beating, their lungs are pumping, yet they are cut off from their life source, God. The New Testament says that Jesus Christ is our life, yet there is an example of God‘s people who were cut off from their God in the book of Lamentations.
Lamentations is just that; it is a lament. It is a funeral dirge. Lamentations 1:1 says, “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She that was great among the nations and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!” So, a princess became a widow, and the chief among the nations was now just a province giving tribute to a foreign power. How did that happen? “How” is the first word in chapter 1, and “How” is a working title for this book. How? How did this happen?
Desolation is the absence of God. Trouble only reveals that desolation. A man may be rich and become poor, but the desolation is based upon his absence from God and not his absence from other people or from the things we think of as comforts.
At this point in Jerusalem’s life and in Israel’s life, the priests had starved, the prophets had been found to be empty and unprofitable, their lovers were gone, and their friends had turned on them, but it was not these rejections that made them desolate. They were desolate because of the absence of God. There was no one to comfort them. “The comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me,” said Jerusalem.
Now, this is in contrast to Jeremiah, the one whom God used to pen the book of Lamentations and to warn these people that trouble was coming. You see, desolation was not that they had been taken from their land. Desolation was not that their priests had starved and their prophets had died. Desolation was the fact that they were separated from God and had been for many a year.
On the other hand, Jeremiah was a man who had been solitary. He had been rejected by God’s people just as God Himself had been. Yet, in the first chapter of Jeremiah God says, “Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the LORD.” In the last verse of Jeremiah 1, God repeats the same promise, “I am with thee.” You see, desolation is the absence of God, not the absence of other comforts. We learn here that we should find our comfort in God and not in the majority.
These people were in a crowd, yet they were desolate because they had cut themselves off from God and God’s truth. Sometimes the truth may put you by yourself. It may put you in the minority. It may put you in a place that is excluded from all the people you think are your friends and allies. But, the truth is, what reveals whether a person is truly desolate or not is often trouble. It is not that trouble is desolation. It is that the absence of God is. Christ is our life, and we are reminded that He is our comfort when no one else is around. In contrast, these people were an entire nation, yet they were desolate, not because their friends and allies had turned on them, but because they had turned from God.