Trusting God’s Word in a Troubled Land

People that know me know that one of my all-time favorite paintings is the painting that hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, painted by Rembrandt van Rijn, entitled Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, where it’s one of those typical Rembrandt paintings of a very dark background with light coming out suddenly from an unknown source. But if one is to see what is going on in this painting, you have to stand almost right up so close to it that your face is only inches away from the canvas so that you can perceive the holocaust that Rembrandt painted into the background of a city in flames.

When a painter is going to paint a scene from history or a sculptor is going to make a piece of sculpture in these frozen material arts, they seek what the German philosopher Herder described as the fruchtbarer augenblick. That is the “fruitful moment” that they were trying to capture in one freeze-frame of action from history—the whole dynamic of a man’s life or of a dramatic incident in world history, a series of events, or so on.

And so what artists would do customarily would be make thirty, forty, fifty sketches of various moments in a person’s life and try to find that one moment where the crystallization of the essence of the person, the pregnant significance of that person or that event, could be captured. Like Michelangelo’s David, when he’s picking up the stone, and he has the stone, and he’s poised there for that moment of action that is decisive for his entire life.

And so we know that Rembrandt sketched forty or fifty episodes from the life of Jeremiah until he finally settled on this one, where you see the elderly prophet with his shoulders hunched over. He’s resting upon the Bible, and he’s trying to hold this Word of God tightly to his bosom, while behind him, Jerusalem is in flames. And that’s what I love about that painting is that I think in it, Rembrandt captured the man Jeremiah, who lived on the basis of the Word of God in the midst of the moment where his own land was being destroyed. He turned to God.