The Anatomy of Desolation
Introduction: The Wages of Sin are Paid in Full
We live in an age that has forgotten that actions have consequences. More than this, our generation has forgotten that covenantal actions have covenantal consequences. We want to live as though our rebellion against God is a private affair, a small matter between ourselves and our conscience, with no public fallout. We imagine that we can sow the wind of apostasy in our homes, in our churches, and in our public square, and not reap the whirlwind of judgment. We are like children playing with matches in a munitions factory, surprised and offended when the whole thing goes up in smoke.
The book of Lamentations is God's inspired corrective to this suicidal foolishness. It is a funeral dirge for a city, a post-mortem on a culture that died of sin. Jerusalem, the city of the great King, has been laid waste. The Temple is a pile of rubble, and the people of God are either dead or deported. This did not happen by accident. It was not a geopolitical tragedy. It was the righteous, covenantal judgment of a holy God against a stiff-necked and adulterous people. God had promised them blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience in the plainest possible terms (Deuteronomy 28). They chose disobedience, and God, who is not a liar, kept His word.
This book is not just an expression of grief, though the grief is palpable and raw. It is a highly structured, disciplined grief. The first four chapters are acrostics, following the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This tells us that this is a thoughtful, reflective sorrow. It is a godly sorrow that leads to repentance, not a worldly sorrow that leads to death. It is the kind of grief that looks the consequences of sin squarely in the face and says, "The Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled against His commandment" (Lam. 1:18). This is not despair; it is the necessary prelude to hope. You cannot be healed until you agree with the doctor's diagnosis.
In our text today, the prophet paints a picture of this desolation in four stark, parallel strokes. He shows us how sin empties out a culture, silencing its worship, its leadership, and its joy, leaving only a profound and personal bitterness. This is a portrait of what happens when God gives a people over to the desires of their own hearts.
The Text
Daleth
The roads of Zion are in mourning
Because no one comes to the appointed times.
All her gates are desolate;
Her priests are sighing,
Her virgins are grieving,
And she herself is bitter.
(Lamentations 1:4 LSB)
The Silent Roads and Empty Feasts
The first image is one of profound emptiness where there was once joyful traffic.
"The roads of Zion are in mourning Because no one comes to the appointed times."
The lifeblood of a nation is its public life, and the heart of Israel's public life was its worship. Three times a year, all the men of Israel were to appear before the Lord in Jerusalem for the great feasts: Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. Imagine the roads, packed with families, pilgrims from every tribe, singing the Psalms of Ascent as they made their way to the house of the Lord. These roads were arteries of fellowship, faith, and national identity. They were channels of grace.
Now, they are silent. The prophet personifies them; the roads themselves are mourning. Why? Because their very purpose has been nullified. A road with no travelers is a monument to a failed destination. The reason for their existence, the "appointed times" or feasts of the Lord, have ceased. The central act of their covenant life, corporate worship, has been extinguished. This is the first thing to go when a nation falls under judgment. The public worship of God is either corrupted or it is shut down entirely.
Sin isolates. Sin atomizes. It breaks down fellowship. When a people forsake God, they forsake one another. The roads that once carried worshippers to the Temple now carry no one. The very infrastructure of their common life mourns its own uselessness. This is a picture of a society whose center has not held, because they abandoned the only true Center. When you remove God from the public square, you do not get neutrality; you get desolation. The roads that will not lead to Zion will ultimately lead nowhere at all.
The Desolate Gates and Sighing Priests
The camera then zooms in from the roads to the gates of the city, and from the general populace to its spiritual leaders.
"All her gates are desolate; Her priests are sighing,"
The gates of an ancient city were the center of its civic and social life. This is where business was conducted, where courts were held, and where elders sat to render judgment. Desolate gates mean that the civil life of the nation has collapsed. There is no commerce, no justice, no wisdom. The public square is a wasteland. The structures of a godly society have been hollowed out and abandoned.
And what of the spiritual leadership? "Her priests are sighing." This is not the sigh of repentance, not yet. It is the sigh of loss, of impotence, of ruin. The priests were the mediators of the covenant, the teachers of the law, the ones who offered the sacrifices. But the Temple is destroyed, the law is ignored, and there are no sacrifices to offer. Their entire vocation has been rendered meaningless by the nation's sin, a sin in which they themselves were chief participants (Jer. 5:31). Their sighing is the sound of a failed ministry. They were the spiritual gatekeepers, and they let the wolves in. Now they sit in the rubble of their own making, breathing out the empty air of their failure.
When the priests, the pastors, the elders of a people abandon the plain teaching of God's Word, when they trade the hard truths of righteousness for the soft platitudes of cultural acceptance, their gates will become desolate and their sighs will fill the air. They will have nothing to offer a dying culture but their own grief over their own irrelevance.
The Grieving Virgins and Corporate Bitterness
The prophet then turns to the youth and concludes with a summary statement about the city's soul.
"Her virgins are grieving, And she herself is bitter."
Why are the virgins grieving? Because there is no future. In the ancient world, the joy of young women was bound up in the prospect of marriage and children, of building a household and seeing the covenant promises extend to the next generation. But the young men have been killed in battle or hauled off to exile. There are no songs, no weddings, no hope for the future. The promise of a godly seed has been cut off. The grief of the virgins is the grief of a dead end. Sin has stolen their future.
And the final clause sums up the emotional state of the whole entity. "And she herself is bitter." All this mourning, desolation, sighing, and grieving culminates in a deep, pervasive bitterness. Jerusalem, personified as a woman, is filled with the poison of her own consequences. Bitterness is the emotional residue of sin. It is the taste of judgment in the soul. It is what you get when you demand your own way and God finally gives it to you, good and hard. It is the soul-sickness that comes from fighting against God and losing.
This bitterness is not yet repentance. It is the sorrow of the world. It is the anguish of having your idols taken away. It is the misery of a hangover after a long, drunken rebellion. True repentance will come later in this book, when the lament turns to "The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases" (Lam. 3:22). But first, the people must be made to drink the cup of their own sin to the dregs. They must be made to feel the full weight of their covenantal failure.
From Zion's Bitterness to Golgotha's Grace
This anatomy of desolation is a terrifying photograph of life under the curse. It is a picture of what we all deserve. Our roads should be in mourning, for we have neglected the worship of the true God. Our gates should be desolate, for we have perverted justice. Our priests should be sighing, for we have failed in our callings. Our youth should be grieving, for we have sold their future for a pot of message. And we ourselves should be bitter, for we are rebels to the core.
This is the state of every man outside of Christ. He is a desolate city. His heart is a ruined temple. But the good news of the gospel is that God has not left us in this state. The reason our roads do not have to remain in mourning is that a new and living way has been opened for us, the road to a heavenly Zion. Jesus Christ is the Way, and He is the destination.
The reason our gates do not have to remain desolate is that Christ, our King, has passed through the gates of death and hell on our behalf, and has established a kingdom where true justice reigns. The reason our priests do not have to sigh in failure is that we have a great High Priest, Jesus, the Son of God, who offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, and whose ministry can never fail.
And the reason we do not have to remain in bitterness is because on the cross, Jesus drank the cup of God's wrath down to the dregs for us. He took all the bitterness of our sin into Himself. When the soldiers offered him wine mingled with gall, a bitter anesthetic, He refused it. He was determined to taste the full, unmitigated bitterness of the curse we deserved. He took our desolation upon Himself so that we might receive His fullness. He became sin for us, He who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21).
Therefore, we are not to be a bitter people. We are a forgiven people. And because we are forgiven, the roads to our churches should be filled with joyful pilgrims. Our gates should be places of righteous counsel. Our pastors should be men of joyful confidence, not perpetual sighing. And our young people should be filled with hope, ready to marry and build and have children for a thousand generations. The desolation of Lamentations is what sin does. The gospel is what God does about it.