Lamentations 3:47

Lamentations mourns the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BC, when the city was taken, Solomon’s temple was burned, the kings of David’s line lost their throne and many of the people were carried into exile (2 Kings 25, Jeremiah 52). The book has long been given to Jeremiah, who had warned of this judgment for years (Jeremiah 7, Jeremiah 25:8–11), and Judah’s rebellion had already sent the first captives away (2 Kings 24). The covenant had set blessing before Israel for obedience and curses for disobedience (Deuteronomy 28), and these verses speak as people who know those curses have now fallen on them.

Lamentations 1 and Lamentations 2 grieve over the ruined city, which “doth... sit solitary” in the book’s opening line (Lamentations 1:1), and Lamentations 4 and Lamentations 5 carry the mourning on to a closing prayer for restoration. Lamentations 3, the longest chapter and the heart of the book, is an acrostic of 66 verses, with three verses for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It opens with one man’s voice: “I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath” (Lamentations 3:1). His suffering mirrors the nation’s, and he speaks for them.

In the middle of that darkness the man remembers God’s mercy and takes hope (Lamentations 3:21–23): “They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.” He says that God does not afflict willingly, that everything comes to pass at the Lord’s command, and that a man punished for his sins should bear it without complaint: “Wherefore doth a living man complain, a man for the punishment of his sins?” (Lamentations 3:37–39). Verse 40 follows from all of this. Since God is merciful and also just, the right answer to his judgment is to look at our own ways and come back to him. Here the “I” of the chapter becomes “we”, and the man who suffered for the people now leads them in repentance and confession. From verse 42 the prayer turns to lament again, and its grief over enemies and ruin runs on to verse 51.

“Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD” is a call to the whole people, and the speaker counts himself among them. Both verbs speak of a careful, honest look. Châphas, “search”, means to seek or search out, and châqar, “try”, means to examine closely and find out. Together they ask the people to look into their own conduct, find what went wrong, and own their part in the ruin, laying the blame where it belongs. The word for “ways” is derek, a road that has been walked, and so a person’s course of life and manner of acting.

David asks God to do this searching for him: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23–24). Another psalm asks, “Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults” (Psalm 19:12), because some of our faults are hidden even from ourselves. Searching our ways, in Scripture, is done before God and with his help.

The search leads somewhere. “Turn again” is shûwb, to turn back or return, the Old Testament’s great word for repentance, and the Jewish name for repentance, teshuvah, carries the same idea of turning back. Here it means leaving the ways that brought judgment and coming back to Yᵉhôvâh, the LORD, the eternal covenant God of Israel. Moses had promised that if Israel, scattered among the nations, returned to the LORD, he would turn their captivity and gather them again (Deuteronomy 30:1–3). The prophets kept up the same call: “turn ye even to me with all your heart” (Joel 2:12–13), “let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (Isaiah 55:7), and “Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us” (Hosea 6:1). Peter preached it after Pentecost: “Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out” (Acts 3:19).

The call itself carries hope. A people sitting in ruins are told they may still come back, and the God who calls them to return is a God who will receive them. That fits everything the chapter has just said about his mercies.

“Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens.” Raising the hands, kaph, the open palm, was the common posture of prayer in Israel, used in asking, in worship and in surrender. David prays, “Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle” (Psalm 28:2), and Paul wants men to “pray every where, lifting up holy hands” (1 Timothy 2:8). The verb nâsâʼ, “lift up”, is used for lifting of every kind, and here it is a deliberate raising of the whole person toward God.

The heart goes up with the hands. Lêbâb, the heart, is the inmost part of a person, the seat of thought, will and feeling, so lifting the heart means bringing what we really think and intend before God. Raised hands with the heart left behind make an empty gesture, and the prophets said so. Isaiah tells the people, “when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you... your hands are full of blood,” and calls them to wash, make themselves clean and learn to do well (Isaiah 1:15–17). Joel says, “rend your heart, and not your garments” (Joel 2:13). God grieves over a people who “draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me” (Isaiah 29:13), and Jesus applies those words to the religious leaders of his own day (Matthew 15:8). This verse asks for prayer that is whole, with the inner life and the outward act joined together.

“Unto God in the heavens” names the one they pray to. The word for God here is ʼêl, the Mighty One, and shâmayim is the heavens, the sky high above. The temple in Jerusalem lay in ashes, yet God’s throne stood where it had always stood: “But our God is in the heavens: he hath done whatsoever he hath pleased” (Psalm 115:3). From the ruins the people could pray to a God beyond the reach of any army, who hears from above.

Here the call becomes confession: “We have transgressed and have rebelled.” The two verbs are close in meaning, and together they leave the people’s sin fully owned. Pâshaʻ, “transgressed”, means to break away from rightful authority, to trespass. Mârâh, “rebelled”, means to rebel or disobey, and Strong’s gives “to be bitter” as its root sense, with “to rebel” as its figurative use. Judah’s sin was deliberate, committed after the prophets’ repeated warnings, and now the people say so plainly.

Daniel prays for his people in exile in the same words: “We have sinned, and have committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and have rebelled, even by departing from thy precepts” (Daniel 9:5–11). David confesses that his sin was first of all against God: “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned” (Psalm 51:4). Paul says the same of every one of us: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

The “we” matters. The prophet who had warned the nation counts himself among the guilty and confesses its sin as his own. Jerusalem fell for the rebellion of a whole people over many years, and the way back begins with the whole people owning it.

Then the confession turns to God: “thou hast not pardoned.” Çâlach, “pardoned”, means to forgive or spare, and in the Old Testament it is used almost only of God’s forgiving. The people own that his judgment still lies on them, and that he has let the consequences of their rebellion run their full course. His holiness answers sin, and “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).

Now the prayer tells God, without softening it, what his judgment has been. “Thou hast covered with anger, and persecuted us: thou hast slain, thou hast not pitied.” The verb “covered”, çâkak, properly means to weave together as a screen, and so to fence in or cover over. God’s anger has closed around his people like a covering, shutting them in on every side. The word for anger, ʼaph, first means the nose or nostril, and from the hard breathing of someone in a rage it came to mean anger. “Persecuted”, râdaph, is to run after someone, usually with hostile intent, to chase and pursue. “Slain”, hârag, is to strike with deadly intent, to kill, and it speaks of the slaughter of the siege and the fall of the city. “Pitied”, châmal, means to have compassion, and so to spare. The verse names God as the one acting in every clause, because the people know that Babylon’s sword was in his hand.

Verse 44 uses the same verb for God himself: “Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through.” First his anger covered them, and now he covers himself. The cloud, ʻânân, is the thick cloud that covers the sky, the thundercloud. Elsewhere a cloud is the sign of God’s presence and guidance, as when “the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud” (Exodus 13:21). Here a cloud hides him from his people. Their prayer, tᵉphillâh, their pleading and supplication, rises and is stopped. “Pass through” is ʻâbar, to cross over, and the cloud stands where the prayer would cross.

This is the bitterest part of their trouble, because prayer was the heart of Israel’s life with God, and with the temple gone it was nearly all they had left. The prophets had told them that sin builds such a wall: “your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:2). Hosea warned of a people who would go with their flocks and herds to seek the LORD and find that “he hath withdrawn himself from them” (Hosea 5:6). The book traces it all to the city’s sin: “Jerusalem hath grievously sinned” (Lamentations 1:8).

“Thou hast made us as the offscouring and refuse in the midst of the people.” Again the prayer names God as the one who did it. “Made” is sûwm, to put or set, and the people confess that God himself set them in this place. Çᵉchîy, “offscouring”, is refuse swept off, the sweepings of a floor, and mâʼôwç is refuse, what is thrown out. Put together, the two words picture a people treated as rubbish, in full view of everyone. “In the midst of the people” most likely means among the surrounding nations, and it may include their own scattered countrymen. Either way the disgrace was public.

The covenant had warned of exactly this: “thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword, among all nations whither the LORD shall lead thee” (Deuteronomy 28:37). A psalm makes the same complaint: “Thou makest us a reproach to our neighbours, a scorn and a derision to them that are round about us” (Psalm 44:13). In those days a nation’s defeat was often taken as the defeat or desertion of its god, as the Rabshakeh boasted before Jerusalem in Hezekiah’s day, so the nations would look on Judah as a people their God had cast off.

Paul takes up the same picture for the apostles: “we are made as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all things unto this day” (1 Corinthians 4:13). God often works through what the world despises, and the shame of this verse finds its answer in Christ, who was despised for us.

“All our enemies have opened their mouths against us.” The word for enemies, ʼôyêb, is a participle of a verb meaning to be hostile, and it is the ordinary word for a foe. “Opened”, pâtsâh, means to open wide, especially the mouth, to gape, and with peh, “mouth”, it pictures the jeering of the victors, like a beast with its jaws open to devour. Conquerors of that day paraded captives and taunted the defeated to break their spirit, and the words of Judah’s enemies added insult to the wounds of war. “All” gathers every foe into one, as though the whole world stood against them.

Mockery is a real form of suffering, and God’s people meet it often in Scripture. David’s enemies “opened their mouth wide against me, and said, Aha, aha, our eye hath seen it” (Psalm 35:21). The sufferer of Psalm 22:7–8 is laughed to scorn by all who see him, with his trust in the LORD thrown back at him. Sanballat mocked the Jews who rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall (Nehemiah 4:1). God holds the mockers to account, for he says, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay” (Romans 12:19), and so the lament leaves the answer with him.

“Fear and a snare is come upon us, desolation and destruction.” The verse falls into two pairs. Pachad, “fear”, is dread or terror. Pachath, “snare”, is a pit, especially one dug to catch animals, so the people are like hunted creatures fallen into a trap. Shêʼth, “desolation”, is devastation, and sheber, “destruction”, is a breaking or breach, ruin. The first pair tells what they felt and how they were caught, and the second tells what was left of their city. Moses had warned that “all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee” (Deuteronomy 28:15), and Jeremiah had cried, “Destruction upon destruction is cried” (Jeremiah 4:20). The same word for breaking stands in Isaiah’s promise of the day “that the LORD bindeth up the breach of his people” (Isaiah 30:26), so the ruin of verse 47 is a wound God is able to heal.

The call to turn again to the LORD leads us to Jesus, who is “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Honest searching of our ways shows how deeply we need a Saviour, and he is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). Turning to God now means turning to Christ, and as we do, we are “transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2), because “Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20).

Jesus offered God the whole heart and the whole life that verse 41 asks for. He “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:8), and now in the heavens “he ever liveth to make intercession” for those who come to God by him (Hebrews 7:25). Through him “we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (Ephesians 2:18), and the Spirit gives us the cry, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15).

The pardon Judah waited for is given in Christ. He bore the judgment for sin so that God might be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:26), and “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). Being “justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him” (Romans 5:9). God “made him to be sin for us”, and in him a person becomes a new creature, reconciled to God (2 Corinthians 5:17–21).

The anger, the cloud and the slaughter of verses 43 and 44 meet us again at the cross. Jesus cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), and “he was wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5). At his death “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom” (Matthew 27:51), and now we have “boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus” (Hebrews 10:19), with his promise, “whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do” (John 14:13–14). The prayer that could find no way through in verse 44 has a way through in him.

He also bore the scorn of verses 45 and 46. He was “despised and rejected of men” (Isaiah 53:3). Those who passed by, the chief priests and the men crucified beside him all reviled him (Matthew 27:39–44, Mark 15:29–32, Luke 23:39). Where Judah cried out under the mockery, he “opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). He was rejected so that we might be accepted, and in this “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

The fear and the snare of verse 47 he knew as well. In Gethsemane “being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood” (Luke 22:44), and he went down into death. He was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so that we too should walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4), and God has begotten us again “unto a lively hope” and an inheritance “that fadeth not away” (1 Peter 1:3–4).

These eight verses hold together two kinds of honesty: an honest look at our own sin and an honest cry to God about our pain. The people search their ways before they say a word about their suffering, and then they bring every part of it to God, even his silence. The God they speak to judges sin truly, and his mercies are new every morning. He reigns in the heavens above every ruin on earth, and he gives his people words to confess with and leave to tell him when heaven feels shut. Through Christ, who bore the anger and the scorn of these verses, the turning they call for leads home to a Father who abundantly pardons.