Lamentations 2

18. The Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled. Righteousness in God is conformity with truth, justice and honor. It means that God has no subtle double-dealing, but acts in perfect integrity. He moves in straight lines. Further, it means that God is fair to all, doing, if not the same thing to each, which would often be unjust, that which is fitting for every one. It also includes God’s regard for the standard of right in His government, His care to make His creatures righteous, and His determination to check all unrighteousness. Why we are to believe in it. It is declared most forcibly by those who know God best. Sceptical strangers may doubt it; but they who have entered into the presence of God, whether in holiness or in inspiration, alike agree in testifying to the righteousness of God. The deeper our Christian experience the more shall we be brought to admit this great truth. Adeney.

The spirit of our life determines, by a most fixed law, the way in which God will treat us. It is perfectly impossible for the disobedient to escape suffering. But it is equally impossible for the obedient to lose their reward. Joy and blessedness, the exquisite peace and rapture of holiness, must come to them by the very nature of things. Y.

20. The cry of the contrite. Trouble, when it leads to an inquiry into its cause, when it prompts to submission and to repentance, proves a means of grace. The cry of suffering and distress may have no moral significance; the cry of contrition and of supplication is a sign of spiritual impression, and is a step toward spiritual recovery. T.

2:1 How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger!

He hath cast down from heaven unto the earth the beauty of Israel,

And hath not remembered his footstool in the day of his anger.

2. The Lord hath swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob, and hath not pitied;

He hath thrown down in his wrath the strong holds of the daughter of Judah;

He hath brought them down to the ground:

He hath profaned the kingdom and the princes thereof.

3. He hath cut off in fierce anger all the horn of Israel;

He hath drawn back his right hand from before the enemy:

And he hath burned up Jacob like a flaming fire, which devoureth round about.

4. He hath bent his bow like an enemy, he hath stood with his right hand as an adversary,

And hath slain all that were pleasant to the eye:

In the tent of the daughter of Zion he hath poured out his fury like fire.

5. The Lord is become as an enemy, he hath swallowed up Israel;

He hath swallowed up all her palaces, he hath destroyed his strong holds:

And he hath multiplied in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation.

6. And he hath violently taken away his tabernacle, as if it were of a garden;

He hath destroyed his place of assembly:

The LORD hath caused solemn assembly and sabbath to be forgotten in Zion,

And hath despised in the indignation of his anger the king and the priest.

7. The Lord hath cast off his altar, he hath abhorred his sanctuary,

He hath given up into the hand of the enemy the walls of her palaces:

They have made a noise in the house of the LORD, as in the day of a solemn assembly.

8. The LORD hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion;

He hath stretched out the line, he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying:

But he hath made the rampart and wall to lament; they languish together.

9. Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: Her king and her princes are among the nations where the law is not; Yea, her prophets find no vision from the LORD.10 The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, they keep silence; They have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sack-cloth; The virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.11 Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, My liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; Because the young children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.12 They say to their mothers, Where is corn and wine? When they swoon as the wounded in the streets of the city, When their soul is poured out into their mothers’ bosom.13 What shall I testify unto thee? what shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? What shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? For thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee?14 Thy prophets have seen visions for thee of vanity and foolishness; And they have not discovered thine iniquity, to bring again thy captivity: But have seen for thee burdens of vanity and causes of banishment.15 All that pass by clap their hands at thee; They hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying: Is this the city that men called The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth?16 All thine enemies have opened their mouth wide against thee;

They hiss and gnash the teeth; they say, We have swallowed her up; Certainly this is the day that we looked for; we have found, we have seen it.17 The LORD hath done that which he devised; He hath fulfilled his word that he commanded in the days of old; He hath thrown down, and hath not pitied: And he hath caused the enemy to rejoice over thee, He hath exalted the horn of thine adversaries.18 Their heart cried unto the Lord: O wall of the daughter of Zion, let tears run down like a river day and night; Give thyself no respite; let not the apple of thine eye cease.19 Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches; Pour out thine heart like water before the face of the Lord: Lift up thy hands toward him for the life of thy young children, That faint for hunger at the top of every street.20 See, O LORD, and behold, to whom thou hast done thus! Shall the women eat their fruit, the children that are dandled in the hands? Shall the priest and the prophet be slain in the sanctuary of the Lord?21 The youth and the old man lie on the ground in the streets; My virgins and my young men are fallen by the sword: Thou hast slain them in the day of thine anger; thou hast slaughtered, and not pitied.22 Thou hast called, as in the day of a solemn assembly, my terrors on every side, And there was none that escaped or remained in the day of the LORD’s anger: Those that I have dandled and brought up hath mine enemy consumed.

Chap. 2. The strain of this chapter goes first to show that God has brought on Zion these fearful calamities for her great sins; and then to spread before the Lord the details of her sufferings as an appeal to His compassion. H. C.

I-9. It is a very sad representation which is here made of the state of God’s Church, of Jacob and Israel, of Zion and Jerusalem; but the emphasis in these verses seems to be laid all along upon the hand of God in the calamities which they were groaning under. The grief is not so much that such and such things are done, as that God has done them, that He appears angry with them; it is He that chastens them, and chastens them in wrath and in His hot displeasure; He is become their enemy, and fights against them; and this is the wormwood and the gall in the affliction and the misery. H.

I. The anger of the Lord. Men have fallen into two opposite extremes of opinion and of feeling with regard to the anger of the Lord. There have been times when they have been wont to attribute to the Eternal the passions of imperfect men, when they have represented the holy God as moved by the storms of indignation, as subject to the impulses of caprice and the instigations of cruelty. But in our own days the tendency is the contrary to this; men picture God as all amiability and forbearance, as regarding the sinful and guilty with indifference, or at all events without any emotion of displeasure. Scripture warrants neither of these extremes. T.

God not remembering His footstool. The ark was regarded as God’s footstool; and the Temple in which the ark was kept was also sometimes called the footstool of God. When the Temple was destroyed and the ark stolen, or broken, or lost, it looked as though God had forgotten His footstool. The symbolism of the ark and the ritual connected with it give a peculiar significance to this fact. Adeney.

3,4. The “horn,” as usual, is an emblem of power. The Lord had broken down all the military strength of the Jews. In the next clause, the Hebrew might mean either that God had withdrawn His right hand as one who would help His people no more, or that He had caused the right hand of His people to turn back before their enemy. The ultimate sense is substantially the same. H. C.

4,5. The Lord may become to us as an enemy. We must not suppose the relations of God to those who forsake Him to be purely negative. He cannot simply leave them to their own devices. He is a King who must needs maintain order and restrain and punish rebellion, a Judge who cannot permit law to be trampled underfoot with impunity, a Father who cannot abandon His children, but must chastise them in their wrong-doing just because He is so closely related to them. Let it be well understood, then, that in opposing ourselves to God, we run counter to a power, a will, an active authority. We provoke the anger of God. We do not simply strike ourselves against the stone, we cause the stone to fall upon us and grind us to powder. Adeney.

If Israel had to say, “Jehovah acts as an enemy toward us,” Jehovah had to say, “My people act as an enemy toward Me.” These people had now for a long time been travelling in the wrong way, and it was in the very nature of things that the more they advanced the more opposition should multiply and become intensified. God not only appeared to be an enemy, but in certain respects He really was an enemy. He hated the evil that had risen to such a height among those whom He had taken for His own. Our love for evil is ever the measure of His hate of it; and the more determined we are to cling to it, the more His hostility will appear. God Himself always keeps in the same path of law and righteousness and order. When we, according to our measure, follow in His footsteps, then real opposition there cannot be; but the moment we think fit to become a law to ourselves and do what is right in our own eyes, then inevitably He must oppose us. Y.

6,7. The rejected altar. In the first elegy we read how the feasts are neglected by the people (chap. 1:4). Now we see that God Himself has broken them up and cast off His altar. Thus we advance a stage in understanding the deplorable condition of Jerusalem. At first the human side only is seen and the visible facts are lamented over. Then the Divine side is discerned and the terrible cause of the cessation of the solemn festivals revealed. It is not simply that the people cease to present themselves before the altar. God has abandoned and rejected all the Temple services. Adeney.

There are occasions when it is well to ponder seriously the calamities which befall a nation, to lay them to heart, to inquire into their causes, and to seek earnestly and prayerfully the way of deliverance, the means of remedy. “They that lack time to mourn lack time to mend.” T.

The solemn feasts and the sabbaths had been carefully remembered, and the people constantly put in mind of them; but now the Lord has caused those to be forgotten, not only in the country among those that lived at a distance, but even in Zion itself; for there were none left to remember them, nor were there the places left where they used to be observed. Now that Zion was in ruins, no difference was made between sabbath times and other times; every day was a day of mourning, so that all the solemn feasts were forgotten. It is just with God to deprive those of the benefit and comfort of sabbaths and solemn feasts who have not duly valued them nor conscientiously observed them, but have profaned them, which was one of the sins that the Jews were often charged with. H.

9,10. Beautifully this elegy groups together those elements which made Jerusalem the joy of the whole land; not her gates and bars alone, but her kings and princes, her administration of law, and her prophets receiving visions from the Lord. All these had gone. H. C.

9. The prophetic office suspended. There is something of a climax about this statement that the prophets find no vision from Jehovah. Jeremiah has already spoken of God destroying the outward resources and defences of Jerusalem. Next, he mentions the exile of the king and the chief men, and then, as if to hint that it was a still greater calamity, he tells us how the prophet had no longer anything to see or to say. He did well to magnify his own office; for no office could be more important than that of the man whom God chose to communicate needed messages to his fellow-men. Y.

The writer laments the loss of teaching and vision as abnormal and disastrous. The vision of the prophets was not simply nor chiefly concerned with the distant future and recondite counsels of providence. It dealt with present facts and unveiled their true character. It guided in the present and with regard to the uncertainties of the very near future. The humbler office of teaching was associated with it. The prophet, a seer of visions in private and on special occasions, was a teacher among his fellow-men and under ordinary circumstances. It is important to see how essential the knowledge of truth is to a healthy spiritual life. Without it devotion becomes superstition. Religion is based on revelation. The school precedes the workshop. Teaching must prepare the way for service. Adeney.

The eternal law of righteousness, the ever-living witness of spiritual prophecy, can never cease. The words, the commandments and prohibitions, the outward ordinances, might pass away for a season of Divine displeasure, might be absorbed in the fuller revelation of the Gospel. But the principles of the moral law, the obligations of unchanging righteousness, can never cease; for they are the expression of the mind and will of Him whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. The vision may no longer be granted to the seer of Jerusalem; the city may stone her prophets or the Lord Himself remove them. But every purified eye shall through all time behold God’s glory, and the ear that is open to truth and love shall not cease to recognize the voice of God. T.

11. Jeremiah speaks here in his own behalf, giving utterance to the grief of his heart. Yet any Jew who should read or chant this plaintive song might use these words of himself as expressing his own bitterness of soul. H.C. 12. The suffering of the children. It must be noticed how the mention of the children follows on the mention of the elders. There is suffering at each extreme of life, and hence we are to infer that there is suffering all between. The elders suffer in their way and the children suffer in theirs. The elders are bowed down with confusion, shame and disappointment. The children know nothing of this, but they are tormented with the pangs of hunger; and what a pathetic touch is that which represents them as breathing out their little lives into the bosom of their mothers! The sins of the parents are being visited upon the children. It has often been represented as a monstrous iniquity that things should be put in such a light, but is it not an undeniable fact that the little ones suffer what they would not suffer if progenitors always did what was right? These children were not clamoring for dainties and luxuries. Corn and wine, the common food, the pleasant grape-juice, what they had been used to and what all at once they began to miss. What is here said is a strong admonition to us to consider how the innocent and unsuspecting may be affected by our unrighteousness. All our conduct must affect others, and it may affect those who cannot lift a hand to avert ill consequences. The sufferings of children and infants, the immense mortality among them—these are things awful to contemplate; and yet nothing can be more certain than that the clearing away of prejudice and ignorance and hurtful habits founded on bare tradition would bring into child-life that abundance of joy which a loving Creator of human nature meant children to attain. But even with all the suffering there are compensations. These hunger-stricken children cried for bread, and getting none they poured out their lives into their mothers’ bosoms; but they had no self-reproach. Remorse did not add another degree of agony to starvation. Y.

13. The captive city is a picture of the desolation and misery to which (sooner or later) sin will surely bring all those who submit themselves to it. The commiseration shown by the prophet is an example of the state of mind with which the pious should contemplate the ravages of sin and the wretchedness of sinful men. The Gospel forbids despondency over even the most utter debasement and humiliation of man. “There is balm in Gilead; there is a Physician there.” T. 14. Very pertinently the prophet refers to this active and prolific cause of her ruin, the influence of the false prophets. The reader will recall the frequent allusions to the false prophets in the other Book of Jeremiah (chaps. 2:8; 5:30, 31; 14:13-16; 23:9-40; 27:14-18; 29:8, 9). The visions which they saw for the people were vain and foolish, false and without good sense. They did not remove the cloak which concealed the sins of the people—so the original implies; but had suffered those sins to remain hidden from view, and indeed had done what they could to keep them out of sight. If they had honestly exposed those sins, they might have forestalled the captivity and saved the nation. H. C.

There are the deep things of God to be penetrated and explored by those willing to receive the insight. The Holy Spirit of God, offered so abundantly through Christ, is a Spirit of prophecy to all who have it. They need no formal prophet, inasmuch as they have a word, living and piercing, to all who take a right relation toward it. God means us to be occupied with serious, substantial matters, so large and deep and fruitful that we shall never outgrow our interest in them. The heart of man in its meditating power was made for great themes. The heart can never be filled with mere trifles. That is good advice given to preachers of the Gospel to speak most on the greatest themes, such as are set forth again and again in the Scriptures, and whether these things be preached about or not, every individual Christian should think about them. For while we cannot secure the topics of preachers, the topics of our own thoughts depend upon ourselves. It is just those who concern themselves a great deal about dogmas who are also most interested in the details of life and conduct.

These prophets felt bound to magnify their office and say something. They ought to have spoken the truth; but for this they lacked inclination and perhaps courage. The next best thing would have been to remain silent; but then where would the prophet-reputation have been? and, more serious question still with some, what would have become of the prophet emoluments? Hence we have here the double iniquity that the false was spoken and the true concealed. The prophets could only get credit for their falsehoods by a careful concealment of the truth. They had, as it were, to paste on truth a conspicuous label, proclaiming far and wide, “This is a lie.” This verse suggests how they had the common experience of one lie leading on to another. The true prophet said that the burden Israel had to bear and the exile into which it had to go arose from its iniquities. Whereas the false, or rather the unfaithful prophet, having set iniquity as the cause of trouble altogether on one side, could only go on inventing explanations which explained nothing. Ezek. 13 is a chapter which may very profitably be read in connection with this verse. The great lesson is to search for truth no matter with what toil, and keep it no matter at what cost. Y.

15. The glory and the shame of Jerusalem. Contrast with misery escaped heightens the joy of the rescued and the happy; and, on the other hand, contrast with bygone prosperity adds to the wretchedness of those who are fallen from high estate. There is a day of visitation which it behoves every child of privilege and mercy to use aright. To neglect that day is surely to entail a bitter overtaking by the night of calamity and destruction. T.

16. The triumph of the foe over the Church. The fall of Jerusalem was the fall of the Church. The enemies of the Eternal rejoiced in the destruction of His Temple and the scattering of His people. There are always adversaries on the lookout for disaster in the Church of Christ. The evil spirit of the world is vexed and shamed by the standing rebuke of a pure Church. Corrupt men see in her an example contrasting with their own conduct and thereby condemning it. Thus there arise dislike and enmity. The shame of the Church is a relief to this worldly opposition. There have been times when the name of God has been insulted through this evil pleasure of the wicked in the shame that the sin and failure of His people have brought upon His cause. Here is a motive for preserving the sanctity of the Christian Church. The loss of it will not merely involve suffering to the Church herself; it will encourage the foes of Christ by giving them the elation of victory, and it will dishonor His name by making His work appear unworthy of Him. Adency.

17. True to his mission as a prophet, and to his sense of the great sins of the people, Jeremiah returns continually to this vital truth, The Lord has brought this calamity on the people for their sins.** He had threatened it long centuries ago. (See De. 28: 15-67; Lev. 26: 14-39.) Now that the day of vengeance can be delayed no longer, He hath thrown down His Zion without pity; hath lifted her adversaries to power, and let them rejoice over her fall. H. C.

Rain from God. In the fifteenth and sixteenth verses we find strangers and enemies indulging in unseemly jubilation over the fall of Jerusalem. Now, we see—what they do not see—that the cause of that fall was the direct action of God. This fact aggravates the dismay and wretchedness of the suffering city, for it signifies that her own King and Friend has brought about her ruin—not outsiders and antagonists. God Himself has handed her over to the contempt and derision of the world. At the same time, the sight of God’s hand in the calamity reveals the folly of the world’s triumph. How shallow and ignorant that appears to be directly the veil which covers the awful action of God is lifted! Man’s spite and malice sink into insignificance before the awful wrath of God, as the growling of beasts of the forest is drowned in the dread roar of thunder. The triumph of man is also shown to be misplaced. Man has not done the deed. He is but a spectator. This is a dread work of God. Let human passion be hushed before the solemn sight. Adeney.

18, 19. The entreaty of anguish. This surely is one of those passages which justify the tile of this book; these utterances are “lamentations” indeed; never did human sorrow make of language anything more resembling a wail than this. T.

19. The citizens have sunk down in sullen despair. Night has come like a cloak to cover the scenes of misery and death. Then a voice rings through the darkness, “Arise, cry out.” This voice bids all hearers pour out their hearts in prayer to God. Adeney.

20. It is a sad picture, and the Lord would surely have felt the most tender compassion over it, and indeed would never have either done or permitted it but for the presence of awful sin which He “could not pardon.” Those mothers had burned some of their own children in the fire to Baal and Moloch. Those prophets and priests had utterly apostatized from God, and with their prodigious influence had drawn the whole people away from even common morality, and from the worship of the true God to the mad worship of idols.

22. As in the solemn assemblies on the national Jewish festivals, the people came in crowds and thronged the courts of the Temple, so the Lord had now summoned the awful terrors of war and carnage to throng thick around, so omnipresent indeed that none could escape. Even those who were yet in helpless infancy the cruel enemy had utterly destroyed. H. C.

My terrors on every side . . . none escaped. The selfish, sinful man may get the evil day put off; he may find gate after gate opening, as he thinks, to let him away from trouble and pain; but in truth he is only going deeper and deeper into the corner where he will be completely shut up. God can surround us with providences and protections if we are willing to trust Him. No other power can surround us with causes of terror. Our own hearts may imagine a menacing circle, but it only exists in imagination. If we seek the Lord He will hear us and deliver us from all our fears (Ps. 34:4). Y.