Truth #159 - Only God can restore - Lamentations

Lamentations 5:21
Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored!
Renew our days as of old—

Truth:  Only God can restore the days of old.  The nation of Israel has been taken captive.   The city walls are destroyed.  The people have come to ruin.  Their enemies and foes are laughing at them, pillaging them, punishing them.  They are being treated as poorly as any captor could treat their booty.   But, perhaps the worse pain they suffer is stated in the early part of Jeremiah's lament:

Lamentations 1:7
Jerusalem remembers
in the days of her affliction and wandering
all the precious things
that were hers from days of old.

Is there anything more cruel than remembering the past and the beauty it contained and to no longer experience it?  This is the plight of the people of God who so reject Him that He must punish them with this cruel discipline.   God has brought them low.   However, in what is the second to the last verse in the entire lament the prophet gives the solution:  Cry out to God for His restoration.  Jeremiah knows that the only way for things to be restored is for God to restore it.   Jeremiah wants the restoration of God to be so mighty that God restores them "our days as of old."   He is thinking back to when the miracles were done in their midst, no doubt.  He is recalling when the cloud led them day and the pillar of fire by night.   He is asking for God to restore them to a time when they conquered their enemies and had peace all around ... the time of Solomon, no doubt.   When we ask God to restore is we have an image in our mind of what that looks like.   God is in the process of making our lives restored in Christ.   Through Christ, though we were hostile to God, we have been restored to what God intended in the beginning of creation.  Note what Paul tells us about the gospel message and his mission to the believers in the early church:

Colossians 1:21-22
And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,

God is in the process of restoring us.  Jeremiah knew this and cried out to God in prayer at the very end of his lament.  When we lament we must eventually get to the part where we cry out to God to restore things like they used to be ... Like God intended them to be.