The Divine Wine Press Text: Lamentations 1:15
Introduction: The Terrible Sovereignty of God
We moderns, particularly we modern Christians in the West, have a peculiar talent for domesticating God. We want a God who is manageable, a God who fits neatly into our therapeutic categories, a God who is always affirming and never, ever severe. We want a divine butler, not a sovereign Lord. We are comfortable with the God of the green pastures and still waters, but we squirm and blush at the God who commands armies, who judges nations, and who treads the wine press of His wrath.
The book of Lamentations is a bucket of ice water thrown on our sentimental pieties. It is a book of raw, structured, godly grief over a national catastrophe. But it is not a book about a random tragedy. It is not a book about bad luck or unfortunate circumstances. From beginning to end, the prophet Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, is crystal clear about the ultimate cause of Jerusalem's destruction. It was the Lord. God did it. And if that sentence makes you uncomfortable, it is because you have not yet come to terms with the God of the Bible.
Our text today is a particularly potent dose of this strong medicine. It is a verse that strips away all our evasions and forces us to confront the terrible, righteous, and absolute sovereignty of God in judgment. We want to blame the Babylonians, and they were certainly not without guilt. But Jeremiah, speaking for the desolate daughter of Zion, looks past the secondary causes, past the battering rams and the bronze shields of Nebuchadnezzar's army, and sees the hand of God orchestrating the entire affair. This is not fatalism; it is faith. It is the bedrock conviction that history is not a slipshod affair, but a story being told by a sovereign author. And in this chapter of the story, the author is writing a paragraph of pure judgment.
The Text
The Lord has rejected all my mighty men
In my midst;
He has called an appointed time against me
To break my young men;
The Lord has trodden as in a wine press
The virgin daughter of Judah.
(Lamentations 1:15 LSB)
The Lord Rejects (v. 15a)
The verse begins with an unequivocal statement of divine action:
"The Lord has rejected all my mighty men In my midst;" (Lamentations 1:15a)
Notice the subject of the sentence. It is "the Lord." Adonai. The sovereign Master. And what has He done? He has "rejected" all of Zion's mighty men. The Hebrew word here means to spurn, to cast aside as worthless. These were the gibborim, the elite warriors, the pride of the nation. These were the men in whom Judah placed her trust. They were the muscle, the defense plan, the national security strategy. And God says He has tossed them aside. He has made nothing of them.
And where did this happen? "In my midst." This was not a defeat on some distant battlefield. This was a humiliation at the very heart of the city. God dismantled their strength from the inside out. This is a profound spiritual lesson. When a nation or a church begins to trust in its own strength, in its mighty men, its impressive programs, its big budgets, or its political savvy, God takes that as a direct affront. He is jealous for His own glory. And one of the ways He demonstrates His sovereignty is by showing how utterly useless our idols of strength are. He simply rejects them. He pushes them over. Our mighty men become as chaff before the wind when God decides to blow.
This is a corporate confession. Zion is speaking. She is acknowledging that her confidence was misplaced. She trusted in the arm of flesh, and the Lord broke that arm. This is the first step of all true repentance: to stop blaming circumstances and to start acknowledging God's righteous opposition to our pride.
The Lord Appoints (v. 15b)
The divine initiative continues in the next clause. The destruction was not an accident; it was an appointment.
"He has called an appointed time against me To break my young men;" (Lamentations 1:15b LSB)
God is the master of the calendar. He "called an appointed time." The word for appointed time is moed, the same word used for the sacred festivals and feasts of Israel. This is a staggering, bitter irony. The God who had previously set appointed times for worship, for sacrifice, for celebration, has now set an appointed time for destruction. The invasion of the Babylonians was, in a very real sense, a holy convocation of judgment. God summoned them. He sent out the invitations. The siege of Jerusalem was on God's liturgical calendar.
And what was the purpose of this appointed time? "To break my young men." To crush them. This is the flower of the nation, the next generation, the future hope. And God's purpose was to shatter them. This is hard language, and it is meant to be. We cannot soften it. The covenant curses promised in Deuteronomy were not idle threats. God had warned for centuries, through Moses and through the prophets, that if His people persisted in covenant rebellion, He would bring precisely this kind of devastation upon them. This is not God being arbitrary or cruel; this is God being faithful to His own warnings. His justice is as much a part of His character as His mercy. To deny this is to worship a god of our own making.
The Lord Treads (v. 15c)
The final image is perhaps the most visceral and shocking of all. It is the picture of God as the wine-treader.
"The Lord has trodden as in a wine press The virgin daughter of Judah." (Lamentations 1:15c LSB)
The "virgin daughter of Judah" is a poetic term for the covenant people, for the city of Jerusalem. It speaks of her preciousness, her intended purity, her special status before God. And what does God do to this virgin daughter? He treads upon her as grapes in a wine press. Think of the imagery. A wine press was a place of immense pressure, of violent crushing, where juice, pulp, and seeds were squeezed and trampled underfoot. It is an image of utter, bloody destruction.
This is the same imagery the prophets use for the final day of God's wrath, the Day of the Lord. Isaiah asks, "Who is this who comes from Edom... treading the wine press alone?" (Isaiah 63:1-3). John the Revelator sees the Son of Man, and "He Himself treads the wine press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God" (Revelation 19:15). What Jeremiah is telling us is that the fall of Jerusalem was a historical foretaste of that final judgment. It was a localized, historical enactment of the wrath of God against sin.
And again, who is doing the treading? "The Lord." Adonai. It is His feet that are crushing the grapes. The Babylonians are merely the instruments. God is the vintner of this bitter wine. This is the heart of true lament. It is not just crying over the pain; it is crying out to the God who sent the pain, acknowledging His justice in it.
The Cross as the Ultimate Wine Press
This verse is almost unbearable in its severity. If we stop here, we are left with a God of sheer, terrifying wrath. But we are Christians, and we must read all of Scripture in the light of its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Where do we see this imagery brought to its ultimate fulfillment? We see it at the cross.
At Calvary, God the Father took the true "virgin daughter," His own spotless Son, who was precious and pure, and He placed Him in the wine press of His wrath. All the judgment that Judah deserved, all the judgment that we deserve for our pride, our idolatry, and our covenant-breaking, was gathered up and poured out onto Christ. God "called an appointed time" at Golgotha. He rejected the mighty Son of God, causing Him to cry out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
On the cross, the Lord trod out the fierce wine of His wrath, but He did so upon His own Son. Jesus was broken, crushed, and trampled so that the "virgin daughter," the Church, His bride, might be spared. He drank the cup of that bitter wine so that we might drink the cup of salvation. The judgment described in Lamentations is terrifyingly real. But the good news of the gospel is that this very judgment has been fully and completely absorbed by our substitute.
Therefore, when we face discipline from the Lord, and we will, we must remember that it is the discipline of a Father, not the wrath of a judge. The wrath has been exhausted at the cross. For the unbeliever, the wine press of God's final judgment still awaits. But for those who are in Christ, the wine press is behind us. We can look at a text like this, not with cowering fear, but with sober gratitude. We can see the terrible price of our sin, and we can marvel at the even more terrible price that our Savior was willing to pay to rescue us from it. This is the God of the Bible: sovereign in His wrath, and sovereign in His grace.