“Your prophets have seen for you false and deceptive visions. They have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes, but have seen for you oracles that are false and misleading.”
– Lamentations 2:14
Oh, this is such a sobering chapter. You read Lamentations 2, it is filled with sorrow and suffering with the effects of sin on all kinds of people, including infants and babies crying out in misery and at the center of the chapter, we read Lamentations 2:14.
Your prophets, the people who are supposed to be proclaiming, God’s word to you, have seen for you false and deceptive visions. They have not exposed your iniquity to restore your fortunes, but have seen for you oracles that are false and misleading. In other words, the people who were supposed to be proclaiming the word of God to keep the people from this, to expose inequity, to say this is wrong, we should turn and repent and trust in God, those people were giving false and misleading pronouncements and visions to the people.
Lamentations 2:14 Calls Us to Faithfully Spread the Gospel
Oh, what a reminder, certainly for anyone who has any responsibility to teach the word, which in a sense, is all of us a, responsibility to pass on the word to others, a mom or a dad or, well, just any of us. We have the word of God given to us to spread it to others.
So let’s be faithful to spread it, to communicate God’s word, and then those who have a gift of teaching in the church to make sure that we are proclaiming the word, that we’re not proclaiming our own thoughts or our own ideas, but God’s word alone and fully, the whole counsel of God, that were exposing iniquity through the proclamation of the word, that were not just sharing what people’s itching ears want to hear, which is what was happening in Jeremiah’s day and as a result, it led to all sorts of sorrow and suffering.
Share the Truth of God’s Word
Oh God, we need Your word clearly and accurately taught in each of our lives and we want to be faithful proclaimers, teachers, and spreaders of Your word. So God help us to understand Your word rightly we pray in our own time in Your word.
God, help us to share with others truth from Your word, not our own thoughts, truths from Your word that lead others to life. I pray for every pastor and leader in the church who You’ve given gifts of teaching to or responsibilities of teaching to and You’ve put them in positions of teaching. God help them. Help me. Help us to faithfully proclaim Your word. God, expose inequity in all of our lives through the proclamation of Your word.
Lamentations 2:14 Helps Us Expose Our Sin
Help us not to hold back from exposing iniquity, that fortune may be restored, that people might live. God, help us to see that it’s good to expose inequities according to Your word in order that grace and restoration and repentance might happen. Oh God, please help us to faithfully steward Your word in our lives and spread Your word in the world. God, we pray today for the people of Mali, almost 200,000 of them, no known followers of Jesus in this Muslim people group.
God we pray for the spread of Your word to the people and we pray that You would help us to be obedient to Your word in making disciples of the nations however You lead us and we pray all of this in light of this sober picture in Lamentations 2:14 in Jesus’ name. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
