Anguish

“My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent, for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war. Crash follows hard on crash; the whole land is laid waste. Suddenly my tents are laid waste, my curtains in a moment. How long must I see the standard and hear the sound of the trumpet?”
(Jeremiah 4:19–21, ESV)

I like sport fishing. This began as a passion in my teen years as I would go fishing with my dad on the surf in New Jersey. At that time, we fished for striped bass. In all my years of fishing, I have never landed that lunker, the trophy fish of a lifetime. I have seen others do it, but not me. Yet I have come close.

While fishing in the Cape Cod Canal, I was casting a lure one morning and I had a striper hit my plug. The fish came up out of the water and pounced on the lure. The rapport of the fish taking the lure was so loud that people came down from the parking lot about fifty feet up to see what happened. Well, that fish was huge. It pealed off line from the real, sounding to the bottom. I guess it was there that the line rubbed on something that cut it and I lost the fish. Honestly, losing that fish was emotionally discouraging. It was my one big chance.

It is sad that we can get so emotionally distraught over something so minor as catching a fish when you consider the tragedy that goes on in the world that never seems to affect us one iota.

In this Passage of Jeremiah, we see the heart of the prophet upon hearing of the disaster that is to come upon Judah and Jerusalem. Look at his words, “My anguish, my anguish! I writhe in pain! Oh the walls of my heart! My heart is beating wildly.” He was in anguish. The word “anguish,” meah, refers to the internal organs, the place considered to be the seat of emotion and distress. What Jeremiah saw coming upon his homeland and his people emotionally hit him in the gut. He was in severe distress. Jeremiah is called the weeping prophet for a reason. It broke his heart to know what would come upon the nation he loved.

Today we consider some of the most trivial things as heartbreaking. When we lose a job opportunity, a relationship goes south, a tree falls on a prized car, and so on, we often can be emotionally crushed. How miniscule are these things in comparison to the tragedy that Jeremiah saw on the horizon for Israel, because of the nation’s apostasy. Yet should we not be broken just as Jeremiah was today?

Today, multitudes in our country and around the world are perishing without Christ. He is the only hope for people. Without Him they are doomed to eternal punishment. In church we used to sing a song titled, “A Missionary Cry,” that went like this, “A hundred thousand souls a day Are passing one by one away In Christless guilt and gloom.” The latest figure that I have heard is that today about one-hundred and seventy thousand people die every day. Still, the majority of these are without Christ. This is the thing that ought to bring us to tears like the prophet Jeremiah. Yet unfortunately, most of us, myself included, are heartbroken over the most relatively trivial things. Oh, we will be heartbroken over the possibility of our loved ones never coming to saving faith in Jesus. But if we are to have the heart of Jesus, should we not be heartbroken over the lostness of humanity?