Lamentations 5:16 The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!
God Cares Enough to Help Us Care
All of us face times in life when we are apathetic, when we just don’t find it in ourselves to care. I wonder, when you are apathetic, does it bother you? It is kind of a “catch 22,” because being apathetic means that things don’t bother you; you don’t care.
There is a sense in which calamity is better than apathy. Apathy means I care nothing about the things that matter, but pain sometimes brings us back to a point of caring. That is exactly where the people of God were in Lamentations 5.
God cares enough to help us care. In Lamentation 5:16 the people of Israel say, “The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!” Sin was the reason for their calamity, and the calamity was essentially like a crown falling from their heads. The things that they cherished, loved, and took pride in the most had been knocked from their lives.
For instance, “The princes are hanged up by their hand,” verse 12 tells us. Those who passed judgment were now being judged. “The faces of elders were not honoured,” it also says in verse 12. Those who were elders were not honored, and the very things that would have been the crown on their head had been knocked from it.
Young men were grinding the grain for the enemy as slaves. Children were doing menial tasks, not as children helping parents, but as slaves responding to a tyrant. So, young men had no hope, and children had no future. Whatever the crown was for each of these groups, as a nation, the crown had fallen from their heads because of their sin.
When you look at Jeremiah 1, Israel didn’t care. They were apathetic. Now they did care. Verse 21 says, “Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.”
God deals with us in such a way that we ask for the things that He wants to give. That is exactly where God’s people were at this point. In Jeremiah, God kept saying, “You have turned your back and not your face to Me,” which is the very epitome of backsliding or apathy. Now they were asking, “God, turn us back to You, and return us to the old days.” This was the prayer that God wanted to hear and to answer.
My dad and mom had a way of helping me care. As a child, if I ever complained to my mother about being bored, Mom would always reply, “Oh, you are bored? Well, I’ve got some things you can do.” Then she would give me a list of jobs! I learned not to be bored. My dad similarly helped me to care. I never would have replied to my dad’s instructions by saying, “I don’t care!” My dad had a way of helping me care about the things that mattered.
Now, we have an even greater Father, and that is God. God cares enough to help us care. I don’t know what difficulty you may be going through, but God’s dealings with His people were not because He was indifferent or because He hated them. God’s chastening of them, as with us, was precisely because He did care, He does care, and He wants you to care.