The Book of Lamentations

Hebrew Study

Explanation

The chapter opens in unrelieved darkness. The poet speaks not now of the city in general but as one representative man crushed under judgment: "I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath." Verse after verse piles up the images of a God who seems wholly against him, He has led him "into darkness, but not into light," "broken my bones," "hedged me about, that I cannot get out," and even "shutteth out my prayer." God appears to him "as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places," and has made him "a mark for the arrow."

This is brutally honest suffering, and Scripture does not censor it. The section bottoms out in verse 18: "My strength and my hope is perished from the LORD." Here is a believer who feels that even hope is gone. It is important that the Bible records such words, they tell every crushed saint that the depth of their darkness does not put them outside the pages of God's Book. But verse 18 is not the end of the sentence; it is the turning point. The very next verses will show what faith does when hope feels dead.

Gospel Focus

"I am the man that hath seen affliction." Every suffering believer can borrow these words, but they reach their fullest depth in Jesus Christ, the true Man of Sorrows who was "acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). He was led into the darkness of Gethsemane and Calvary "not into light"; He was made "a derision" and mocking song; He drank the cup of wormwood and gall, and cried, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). The difference is decisive: the poet suffered "the rod of his wrath" for his own nation's sin, but Christ, the sinless one, "hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows" (Isaiah 53:4). Because the true Man of affliction went down into the deepest darkness for us, no darkness we pass through is beyond His understanding or His reach. When you can only say, "My hope is perished," He has been lower still, and He rose.

Hebrew Study

Explanation

How does a man move from "my hope is perished" (v18) to "therefore have I hope" (v21)? Not by a change in his circumstances, nothing outward has improved, but by a deliberate act of memory: "This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope." Faith preaches truth to itself. He turns his thoughts from his affliction to the unchanging character of God, and hope revives.

The truth he recalls is the summit of the whole book: "It is of the LORD'S mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness." The wonder is not merely that God spares, but the reason: His covenant love (chesed) simply does not run out. Every dawn brings a fresh supply, as reliable as the sunrise. On that ground the sufferer makes his great confession, "The LORD is my portion," and draws three "good" conclusions: the LORD is good to those who wait and seek Him; it is good to "hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD"; and it is even good to "bear the yoke," for hardship borne with God shapes the soul.

Gospel Focus

These verses shine with the gospel. That "we are not consumed" is pure mercy, and the New Testament shows how: the wrath that would consume us fell on Christ, so that "there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:1). His mercies are "new every morning" because they flow from a love that "many waters cannot quench" (Song of Solomon 8:7), sealed in a new covenant in which He remembers our sins no more (Jeremiah 31:34; Hebrews 8:12). And "the LORD is my portion" finds its fullness in Christ, who is Himself our inheritance: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). When a believer has lost everything but still has the Lord Jesus, he can say with the poet, and with Paul, "as having nothing, and yet possessing all things" (2 Corinthians 6:10). Great is His faithfulness, and it is enough for every morning yet to come.

Hebrew Study

Explanation

Having found hope, the poet now teaches how to endure. There is a place for sitting "alone" in silence, for putting "his mouth in the dust" in humility, "if so be there may be hope," for even bearing insult with a submitted spirit. This is not passive despair but active trust: the sufferer bows low before God rather than shaking his fist at Him.

Verses 31-33 give the reasons, and they are among the most comforting in Scripture. First, "the Lord will not cast off for ever", the discipline has an end. Second, "though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies", grief and compassion both come from Him, and the compassion is greater. Third, and most tenderly, "he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men", He takes no delight in their pain. The section closes by affirming God's absolute sovereignty (nothing "cometh to pass" unless "the Lord commandeth it") and drawing the honest conclusion: since our own sins brought this, "wherefore doth a living man complain?" A man still alive, still spared, has cause for humility, not accusation.

Gospel Focus

"He doth not afflict willingly." This is the heart of God laid bare, and it shines brightest at the cross. There the one true God, manifest in flesh in Jesus Christ, took the smiter's blows on His own cheek and "reviled not again," bearing our reproach so that God's chastening love toward us might be satisfied in mercy. Because "the Lord will not cast off for ever," the darkest night of the believer has a morning; because His compassion outweighs His grieving, even His discipline is love (Hebrews 12:10-11). And because "he doth not afflict willingly," we can trust Him in pain we do not understand, knowing His heart is not against us. The God who does not grieve His children "from his heart" is the same God who so loved that He gave His only begotten (John 3:16), the Word made flesh who bore the affliction we deserved.

Hebrew Study

Explanation

The proper response to God's discipline is not merely to endure it but to repent under it: "Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD." The poet calls the whole people to honest self-examination and a genuine turning back, lifting up heart as well as hands. And the confession is unsparing: "We have transgressed and have rebelled." They do not blame God; they own their sin, even while feeling the weight of His anger, "thou hast not pardoned... thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through." Faith can feel unanswered and still keep praying.

Then the poet returns to tears, his eye running down "with rivers of water," refusing to cease "till the LORD look down, and behold from heaven." He describes his own extremity in vivid terms: hunted "like a bird," his life cut off "in the dungeon," a stone cast on him, waters closing over his head, until he says, "I am cut off." Once again he reaches the very bottom, echoing the despair of verse 18, but this time he has already learned where the bottom leads. The next verses will answer this cry.

Gospel Focus

"Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD." This is the gospel's own summons to repentance, "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out" (Acts 3:19). But notice the order in this chapter: the call to turn again (v40) comes only after the great vision of God's mercy (vv22-23). We repent not to earn God's love but because we have glimpsed it; "the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance" (Romans 2:4). And the true turning is inward, lifting up "our heart" and not just our hands, for God "desirest truth in the inward parts" (Psalm 51:6). The sinking man crying "I am cut off" from the dungeon pictures every soul that feels beyond rescue, and it is precisely such a cry that heaven bends down to hear, as the very next verses will show.

Hebrew Study

Explanation

The cry from the dungeon is answered. "I called upon thy name, O LORD, out of the low dungeon. Thou hast heard my voice." God did not despise the breathing and crying of a man at the bottom of a pit. Best of all, "Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not." Before any change in circumstance, God came near and spoke peace. On the basis of that nearness the prophet testifies in faith, "thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; thou hast redeemed my life", God took up his case as his defender and redeemer.

The chapter ends with a series of appeals against the poet's persecutors: "Render unto them a recompence, O LORD... Persecute and destroy them." These imprecatory lines can trouble the reader, but notice what they are and are not. They are not the poet taking revenge; they are him handing the whole matter over to God, "judge thou my cause", refusing personal vengeance and trusting the righteous Judge to repay. This is the same trust Scripture commends: "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord" (Romans 12:19). He asks God to do justice, and leaves it entirely in God's hands.

Gospel Focus

"Thou drewest near... thou saidst, Fear not." This is the gospel in miniature. The whole story of redemption is God drawing near to sinners in their pit, and the incarnation is its climax: "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14), Immanuel, "God with us" (Matthew 1:23). In Jesus Christ the LORD Himself drew near, and His most characteristic word to the fearful was "Fear not" (Luke 12:32). And He is the true Goel: "thou hast redeemed my life" is fulfilled in the One who "gave himself for us, that he might redeem us" (Titus 2:14), for we were "not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold... but with the precious blood of Christ" (1 Peter 1:18-19). Even the closing cry for justice is answered at the cross, where God's justice and mercy meet: every wrong will be recompensed, either borne by Christ for those who repent, or repaid to those who will not. The man at the bottom of the pit who called on the name of the LORD was heard, and so is every sinner who calls on that saving name (Romans 10:13).