What the Bible says about Funeral Song against House of Israel
(From Forerunner Commentary)
The book of Lamentations details the prophet's grief because of its desolation. Jeremiah is known as "the Weeping Prophet" because all five chapters of Lamentations are a funeral dirge, mourning the bitter death of a once great city. In Lamentations 3:17-18, Jeremiah cries to God, "You have moved my soul far from peace; I have forgotten prosperity. My strength and my hope have perished from the LORD." The disaster that was Jerusalem overwhelmed him and nearly broke his heart. He felt that his reason for living and anticipation for the future had died.
Then Jeremiah remembered the God whom he knew and loved: "Through the LORD's mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. 'The LORD is my portion,' says my soul, 'Therefore I hope in Him!'" (Lamentations 3:22-24). The word portion implies "award" or "inheritance." Hope is "a confident, enduring expectation," and in this instance, it is a verb, a positive action.
Jeremiah realized that things could have gone a lot worse, but God had been merciful. He had spared him and others, and it was their duty to wait patiently in hope for God to work out their salvation. The faithful God Himself was what would sustain him and give him hope for good.
Paul writes in Romans 8:24-25: "For we were saved in this hope [the resurrection], but hope that is seen is not hope; for why does one hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance." Faith is belief that what God has said will come to pass, but sometimes we have to wait for a long time and exercise a lot of perseverance or endurance. The motivation to do this is hope.
Our Christian hope, our expectation of future good, is the redemption of our bodies in the resurrection and beyond that, a glorious, eternal reign with Him as kings and priests! This hope is a motivator, an impetus to strengthen and encourage us to endure and persevere.
Godly hope is an absolute assurance that what God has said will happen because He is alive. He will ensure the positive outcome of His Word. Yet, hope is not just an expectation of a wonderful outcome. A friend once said, "Godly hope is not just believing what God says and waiting for it to happen; it is also what you are doing while you are waiting for it to happen."
Through our trials, God is building spiritual muscle in us. He is watching out for us as He manages our spiritual exercise regimen. Romans 8:28 asserts that all things will work out for good for those the called, those who love Him. He will make sure that we receive the proper training to put us in spiritual shape for the position He has in store for us.
Paul says in Romans 5:3-4, "And not only that, we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope." We persevere, we endure, because of hope, an expectation of future good, and this endurance aids in bringing about the realization of what we have hoped for. Our endurance is vital, as Jesus warns in Matthew 24:13, because only those who endure to the end will be saved.
We can hope because we have a loving and patient God, One who does not punish us according to our many sins. If we put our hope in this world, the result will always be disappointing or even disastrous. This is true because nothing physical lasts forever, but God, as our portion, endures forever.
We can take great solace and assurance in God's counsel to His people in Jeremiah 29:11: "I know the thoughts that I think towards you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope." If we put our hope in the living God, our hope will always be there for us!
John Reiss
'The LORD Is My Portion'
The prophet is explicit: The Day of the Lord is totally dark. There is nothing at all light about it!
It is important that we recognize the context of this passage. In verse 1, Amos terms his words “a funeral song—that I am lifting up against you, house of Israel” (Common English Bible). The Modern English Version and The Voice actually refer to it as a “dirge.” The King James Version uses the noun “lamentation.” With that definition in mind, notice the verb tenses in verse 2: “She has fallen; virgin Israel will never rise again. She lies abandoned on her land, with no one to raise her up” (Holman Christian Standard Bible).
Amos' vision is so clear that he is actually treating his subject, the nation of Israel, as though she were already dead—gone. Yet, he wrote these words some forty years before ten-tribed Israel (that is, the Northern Kingdom) had actually fallen to the Assyrian Empire. Furthermore, we know that Israel will rise again, when God restores her, joining her again with Judah (Ezekiel 37:15-28). Indeed, Amos himself speaks of this restoration in Amos 9:11-15. Notice just verses 14-15:
“I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them on their land, and they shall never again be uprooted out of the land that I have given them,” says the LORD your God. (English Standard Version)
Both Old and New Testaments speak of this restoration. Clearly, the language of Amos 5:2 is hyperbolic (that is, overstatement), highly apropos rhetoric for a dirge, the rhetoric of which is about as dark as it can be. With that context in mind, Amos' meaning in verses 18-20 becomes clearer. The prophet is in fact saying that the people of Israel thought the Day of the Lord was one of total light. They misunderstood.
If we were to transport a representative cross-section of Amos' audience to the twenty-first-century America, we might, after interviewing them, discover a lot of common ground between these self-righteous and hypocritical Israelites and the post-Millennialist members of today's liberal churches. Post-Millennialists believe that “things” are improving all the time, the result of the effective work of the church. They believe that, eventually, things will be so good that Christ will return. It is almost as though these people listen to different newscasts than the ones to which we listen!
So, too, the Israelites of Amos' day, focusing myopically on their current wealth and false sense of wellbeing, perceived nothing but “good times rolling.” Times were great, getting greater, with no end to prosperity in sight. They imagined themselves to be at the gate of Paradise, what they thought the Day of the Lord would be.
Amos corrects that errant perception. The time is coming, he avers in Amos 5:16, “In all the squares there shall be wailing, and in all the streets they shall say, 'Alas! Alas!'” This is a far cry from “good times”! From their distress, he says in verse 19, they will find no viable path of escape—running from a lion, they meet a bear! Their doom is sealed.
In reality, for those doomed, the Day of the Lord will have no good in it at all. It will be totally dark, exactly the opposite of what Amos' audience dimwittedly envisioned. We know, however, that those not doomed during the Lord's Day will see God promptly take restorative action, extending “great compassion” to them.
Charles Whitaker
The Goodness and Severity of God (Part Two)