The Glory Has Departed Text: Lamentations 1:6
Introduction: When the Shekinah Leaves
We live in a time that is allergic to the concept of corporate responsibility. We think of sin as a private, individual affair, a secret transaction between a man and his conscience. But the Bible knows nothing of this. The Scriptures teach us that nations, cities, and peoples can sin corporately, and when they do, they are judged corporately. The book of Lamentations is a funeral dirge for a city, a post-mortem on a national catastrophe. It is what happens when a people who were once the apple of God's eye become the object of His wrath. And it is a necessary lesson for us, because we are not immune. We who live in the midst of Western civilization, a civilization that was once Christendom, are watching the glory depart. We are surrounded by the ruins of what was once a great house.
Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, is not simply venting his emotions here. This book is a highly structured, meticulously crafted work of art. The grief is real, but it is a disciplined grief. This is not the shrieking of a man who has lost all hope; it is the measured sorrow of a man who knows exactly why this disaster has befallen his people. He is not surprised by the judgment, because he is the one who warned them it was coming. But knowing it is coming does not remove the sting of its arrival.
In this verse, we see the consequences of apostasy in two distinct areas: the loss of divine presence and the collapse of human leadership. When God's majesty departs from a people, the majesty of their leaders goes with it. When the fountain of all strength is forsaken, the arms of the mighty become weak. This is a spiritual law, as fixed and certain as the law of gravity. What happened to Jerusalem is a case study for any nation, any church, any family that forgets God. The glory departs, and the leaders become a laughingstock.
The Text
"So all her majesty
Has gone out from the daughter of Zion;
Her princes have become like deer
That have found no pasture;
So they have fled without strength
Before the pursuer." (Lamentations 1:6 LSB)
The Departure of Majesty
The first clause gets to the heart of the matter:
"So all her majesty Has gone out from the daughter of Zion;" (Lamentations 1:6a)
The "daughter of Zion" is a poetic term for Jerusalem, for the covenant people of God. She was once beautiful, the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth (Psalm 50:2). Her majesty was not her own. It was a reflected glory. Her splendor was the presence of God in her midst. The Temple was the heart of the city, and the Holy of Holies was the heart of the Temple, and the Shekinah glory of God dwelling above the mercy seat was the heart of it all. The majesty of Jerusalem was the manifest presence of the Holy One of Israel.
But now, that majesty "has gone out." This is the central tragedy. The Babylonians were a secondary cause. The real cause of the destruction was that God had packed up and left. Ezekiel saw it in a vision: the glory of the Lord departing from the temple, step by step, reluctantly, but resolutely (Ezekiel 10-11). God does not abandon His people lightly. He sends prophets, He warns, He pleads, He brings lesser judgments to get their attention. But when a people is stiff-necked and hard-hearted in their rebellion, when they defile His worship and embrace the idols of the surrounding culture, there comes a point when He withdraws His hand of protection. He hands them over.
This is the great fear that should haunt the church in every age. It is the warning Christ gave to the church at Ephesus: "Repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lampstand from its place" (Revelation 2:5). The lampstand is the church's light, its witness, its glory. And it can be removed. When a church or a nation begins to treat sin as a triviality, when it makes peace with the world's priorities, when its worship becomes hollow and its leaders become corrupt, the majesty begins to seep out. The building might still be there, the programs might still be running, but the glory is gone. It becomes Ichabod: "The glory has departed" (1 Samuel 4:21).
The Collapse of Leadership
The departure of God's glory has an immediate and visible effect on the human leadership.
"Her princes have become like deer That have found no pasture; So they have fled without strength Before the pursuer." (Lamentations 1:6b)
The princes, the rulers, the men who were supposed to be the shepherds of the people, are now compared to panicked deer. This is a picture of utter degradation. The deer is a noble creature, but here it is stripped of all its dignity. First, they are "like deer that have found no pasture." They are starving. This is a spiritual starvation. They forsook the green pastures of God's law and the still waters of His covenant, and so they have no wisdom, no nourishment, no substance to offer the people. A leadership that is not feeding on the Word of God is a leadership that will have nothing to give when the crisis comes. They are spiritually emaciated.
Because they are starving, they are weak. "So they have fled without strength." The strength of a leader comes from the Lord. When the connection to the source of all strength is severed, the result is cowardice and impotence. These were the men who were supposed to stand in the breach, to lead the armies, to govern with wisdom. But when the pursuer, the Babylonian army, arrived, they were the first to run. They fled like frightened animals, with no strength to resist. Think of King Zedekiah, trying to escape through a breach in the wall at night, only to be captured in the plains of Jericho and have his eyes gouged out (Jeremiah 52:7-11). This is the inevitable end of godless leadership. It is all bluster and bravado until the real enemy shows up, and then it collapses into a pathetic, strengthless heap.
This is a permanent warning. When a nation's leaders, whether in the church or in the state, abandon the fear of the Lord, they become like these princes. They may maintain the outward trappings of power for a time. They may have titles and motorcades and impressive resumes. But inwardly, they are weak, starving, and ready to bolt at the first sign of real trouble. They have no pasture, and therefore they have no strength. They cannot lead because they are not being led by the Good Shepherd.
Application for Today
It is easy for us to read this and cluck our tongues at the failures of ancient Israel. It is much harder, and much more necessary, to apply it to ourselves. The West is the daughter of Zion in a manner of speaking. For centuries, our laws, our culture, our institutions were shaped by the majesty of the Christian faith. The glory of God was, at least formally, acknowledged as the foundation of our society.
But that majesty has been systematically shown the door. We have told God that we do not want His law in our courts, His prayers in our schools, His morality in our public square. We have embraced every form of idolatry and sexual confusion. And should we be surprised that our leaders have become like deer without pasture? Should we be surprised that they are weak, vacillating, cowardly, and bereft of wisdom? We are reaping what we have sown. We have forsaken the fountain of living waters, and our leaders are starving for truth. We have rejected the source of all strength, and our leaders flee without strength before the pursuers of cultural Marxism, secularism, and chaos.
The solution is not first and foremost political. The solution is repentance. The way back for Jerusalem was not through a better foreign policy, but through the broken-hearted confession we find in this very book. "The Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled against His commandment" (Lamentations 1:18). The glory will not return to our land until the church, the new Jerusalem, repents of her worldliness, her compromise, and her fear of man. We must return to the green pastures of the Word. We must drink again from the still waters of true worship.
Only when the church recovers her majesty, the reflected glory of Christ, will she be able to produce leaders of strength and substance. Only when we are nourished by God will our princes be able to stand against the pursuer. The lesson of Lamentations is a hard one, but it is a gracious one. God is showing us the end of the road of apostasy so that we might turn back before we arrive there. The glory has departed from our culture. The task before us is to be the people through whom it returns.