Today is the 29th day of October. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it is great to be here with you as we take the next step forward together.

All around the global campfire here. We have totally new territory to move into today, both in the old and the new testaments, so we have some ground to cover.

This is one of the rare days on our journey through the scriptures we come to. Brand new books or letters, and old and new testaments on the same day.

So as we move into the Old Testament portion of our reading today, we will remember that we concluded the book of Jeremiah yesterday, which leads us now into the book of Lamentations.

And to kind of get ourselves into the right mindset here. Let's just consider that whatever nation that we live in, one of the majors that, like think about your capital city or a major city in the land that you live in.

So here in the United States, there are a bunch of big cities that have millions of people in them, think of any one of them, and think that it is destroyed.

Like not some buildings, but like the city is destroyed. And the survivors are fleeing and confused, and nobody knows what to do.

Imagine that. Or we can bring it more immediate and just consider wars that are occurring on the earth today and people whose homes have been destroyed and lives have been torn apart.

And like we can see on the news what it looks like for blocks and blocks of a city to just be leveled.

Think about the aftermath of that, the years on down the line, and the way that what happened is processed through the eyes of a historian, but also processed through the eyes of the artist.

I can remember when I was a kid, there was this song, I cannot remember how I think probably in elementary school we studied it or something.

Because it was like an oldie when I was a kid. But it was a song about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

And that this was a boat, a big ship, that sank in Lake Superior up in Michigan waters.

And that was a tragedy and the crew was lost, but as things reverberated into history, right, then there's this song, like the artist community then speaks forth.

And so there's this song that holds this whole story together of tragedy and loss.

The book of lamentations that we are moving into now is a book composed of five poems and there's sad poems of lament.

They're lamenting over the fall and destruction of Jerusalem, a city, a city that was the icon of a people, a representative of a people and their identity, a capital city destroyed.

And we have read about that destruction. In fact, even as we concluded the book of Jeremiah, we're reading about that destruction, the Babylonian invasion, and the capture and destruction of the city of Jerusalem and the carrying off of the people into exile.

And the more you think about it and put yourself in the position of the Jewish people, then you realize just how deep of a thing this is, this isn't a destruction of a suburb, this is the destruction of the capital city.

This is the destruction of the temple of the most high god. The city is on fire.

Everything seems gray and overcast because of the ash in the air. Dead bodies are strewn everywhere.

Blood is on the walls and running down the streets. In Hebrew, this book, lamentations, is called Ika.

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