Here, in Lamentations 4:9, Prophet Jeremiah talks about two different kinds of people. He goes on to compare them with one another. He says that there are one group of people who go to the battlefield, who go to the battle front, who take the risk to expose and defend their lives and then, there are another group of people who don’t want to take the risk and go to the battle front to defend themselves but instead remain hiding. They do not have food to eat and their fields don’t produce any kind of fruit or harvest.

These kind of people face a death that is very slow, a death that takes a long time and they land up in a place where they lose their senses because of starvation. But Prophet Jeremiah says it is better to die by the sword than by dying out of hunger.

The Word of the Lord has been many times compared to a sword. The Bible says the Word of the Lord is the sword of the Spirit and in another place it says the Word of the Lord is alive and active like a double edged sword. If we allow ourselves to be exposed to the Word, then we are allowing some portion of our flesh to be cut off, we are allowing ourselves to be refined and moreover we are allowing the Spirit to birth something new in us.

This is exactly what the first category of people do, they expose themselves to the Sword which is nothing but the Word of God. But the second category of people are too afraid to face the Sword. They do not prefer to go out and expose themselves to the Sword.

The Bible also says that man shall not live by bread alone but by every Word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. As much as the Word is our Sword, it also our food and nourishment. When we say no to the Sword, when we don’t want to be cut and we don’t to be pruned but we remain in hiding, then we die out of hunger.

Today, can we pray that none of us will remain in hiding but instead get out of our homes and expose ourselves to the Sword of the Lord. We can do this by reading the Word.

The more we read and meditate on the Word, the more we are pruned. The more we feed our spirit man, the more we are nourished inside and out.

We hope that this word has encouraged you to take the risk and go to the battlefield for not only defending yourself but also for Christ to be formed in you.