What is it about?
Technically, this is talking about the fact that no one helped Judah when she was attacked. When the attack came, no nations rallied to defend her. In fact, when she fell everyone just kind of laughed.
What did it mean to the original readers?
You can sense the nationalism in this whole passage. As the Jewish people were in what seemed to them to be an endless exile, they needed stuff like this to remind them who they are. God wanted his people to stay seperate from the nations around them and in order to do that while in exile, they needed strong national pride. You can see passages like this and imagine a father telling his kids, “Remember who we are, these people here aren’t like us, they laughed when they conquered our people into exile.”
What does this mean to me?
If Christians were called to separate, these are the type of passages we would use to boost national Christian pride. We would tell our kids, “When we fail, our enemies laugh.” But Christianity is a message that isn’t about separation or enemies, it’s about the restoration, forgiveness, and hope. Do we have enemies? Besides an enemy in Satan, Christianity doesn’t have enemies since we aren’t a nation. Only people who refuse the message of Christ serve as antagonists of what they don’t comprehend. Even where there is severe persecution you read of stories of martyrs who forgive their captures and murderers because they recognize that these aren’t enemies… only people who don’t understand who Jesus is and what he can do.
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