Lamentations 4:11-16 :
Yahweh has accomplished his wrath.
He has poured out his fierce anger.
He has kindled a fire in Zion,
which has devoured its foundations.
The kings of the earth didn’t believe,
neither did all the inhabitants of the world,
that the adversary and the enemy would enter into the gates of Jerusalem.
It is because of the sins of her prophets
and the iniquities of her priests,
that have shed the blood of the just in the middle of her.
They wander as blind men in the streets.
They are polluted with blood,
So that men can’t touch their garments.
“Go away!” they cried to them.
“Unclean! Go away! Go away! Don’t touch!
When they fled away and wandered, men said among the nations,
“They can’t live here any more.”
Yahweh’s anger has scattered them.
He will not pay attention to them any more.
They didn’t respect the persons of the priests.
They didn’t favor the elders.
Here I see another reason why God had to punish Israel for their rebellion. We are reminded, here, that the nations were watching. The nations, whether they were willing to be honest about it or not, knew that Israel’s God was different. The Bible tells us that everyone knows Israel’s God because He has put the knowledge of Himself inside of every one of us. These nations could see that Israel was rebelling against their own God and that God hadn’t done anything about it. It says in this passage that “The kings of the earth didn’t believe… that the adversary and the enemy would enter into the gates of Jerusalem,” but He did.
The world then reacted and rejected Israel too, but this exposes an enormous inconsistency in their behavior. If Israel’s God rejects people for their rebellion, what will Israel’s God do to them? Do they really think that by distancing themselves from Israel that Israel’s God won’t find them?
In our world, people attempt to make the God of the Bible into a god that is more like what they want. They hear what the Bible says about God but they choose to not accept it because they don’t think that god would really be like that. When people do this they are rejecting the God of Israel too. Whether we want to believe that God is like this or not is quite irrelevant. We can’t choose our creator. When we act like we can, are we not being ridiculous? The worse problem is that what the Bible does show us, is that when we reject the real God, He will reject us. God has given us a man-sized responsibility to choose, not to make up our own gods, but whether or not we will accept the real one. If we refuse, we can see, by observing Israel here, what will happen to us.