Welcome to a year in the Bible with daily grace. The Bible tells one big story of

redemption and we want to spend five minutes every day journeying through the Bible from start to finish, and exploring how all of it

points to Jesus. Hey everybody welcome back to a year in the Bible with daily grace. My name is

Jenny and today we are getting into the book of Lamentations. First I'm going to give you a little background for Lamentations. First, I'm going to give you a little background for

Lamentations. Lamentations is a book of poetry believed to be written by

Jeremiah. He wrote Lamentations after the destruction of Jerusalem in the temple when the people of Judah were exiled to Babylon.

As you may remember from other books in the Old Testament,

prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah had warned Judah for years that if they did not

turn from their sinful ways and go back to God, then they would be destroyed.

Unfortunately, they did not take heed of the Prophet's warnings,

and they were eventually exiled into Babylon.

As for the structure of lamentation,

there are five poems in acoustic form, which means that certain

letters in each line form a word. In this case, each verse begins with the letter of the Hebrew alphabet in successive order.

This pattern is broken in the fifth poem.

However, there are still 22 verses, each verse representing a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This shows us that the author

of Lamentations is covering the topic of suffering as much as he can. Now to get in today's reading, Chapter 1 opens by explaining how

complete Judah's suffering is. However, their suffering was not undeserved. They

had chased after other gods. Some of these gods even required atrocities such as child sacrifice.

And God had given them chance after chance to turn back, but they refused.

This is why the first poem describes the now fallen Jerusalem as a woman in mourning, who

has no one to comfort her. However, it is important to note that the author of

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