Lamentations 3:56

Lamentations is five poems of grief over the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 BC. The temple was burned, the kings of David’s line lost their throne, famine and slaughter filled the city, and the people were carried into exile. The first two poems mourn the city itself (Lamentations 1, Lamentations 2). The third speaks in the voice of one man, long identified with the prophet Jeremiah, who lived through those years. It is an acrostic of 66 verses in 22 groups of three, and each group begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, so the grief is set out from the first letter to the last.

The man begins with God’s heavy hand on him (Lamentations 3:1–18). Then he calls to mind a reason for hope: “It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not”, and they are new every morning (Lamentations 3:21–26). “For the Lord will not cast off for ever” (Lamentations 3:31–32). Later he returns to the enemies who have hunted him, and this prayer brings the poem to its close. God’s mercy and his justice run together all through Lamentations 3, and its last word is a plea for justice from a man who has already rested his hope on God’s faithfulness.

The “I” of the chapter speaks for his people as well as himself. Jeremiah’s own sufferings stand behind these verses, and the grief of the whole nation is gathered into his voice. So “me” in this prayer is the prophet, persecuted by his own people for the word he brought, and it is also Judah, mocked by the nations around her. God sees the pain of the one and of the many. Israel knew lament as a way to pour out grief before God and appeal to him, as the exiles did by the rivers of Babylon (Psalm 137).

“I called upon thy name, O LORD, out of the low dungeon.” The verb qârâʼ means to call out to someone, to cry to him or to address him by name. To call on a person’s name is to appeal to who he is, because the shêm, the name, stands for the person himself, his character and his authority. The name here is Yᵉhôvâh, the LORD, God’s own covenant name, which he made known to Moses at the bush as “I AM” (Exodus 3:14). The prophet calls on the God who bound himself to Israel by covenant, and that bond held even while the people lay under his judgment.

The dungeon, bôwr, is a pit hole, the word for a cistern dug to hold water. Dry cisterns were used as prisons, some had mud at the bottom, and a man let down into one could not climb out. They meant isolation, filth and the nearness of death. Tachtîy, “low”, means the lowest part, the very bottom. Jeremiah knew such a place himself, for he was let down into a cistern with mire at the bottom (Jeremiah 38:6). The verse may recall that day. Whether it speaks of that cistern or of grief as deep as one, the low dungeon is the bottom of human misery, and the prophet called on God from there.

Others in Scripture prayed from the same depth and were heard. The psalmist says, “In my distress I called upon the LORD, and cried unto my God: he heard my voice out of his temple” (Psalm 18:6). Jonah prayed from the belly of the fish: “out of the belly of hell cried I, and thou heardest my voice” (Jonah 2:2). And a psalm promises, “The righteous cry, and the LORD heareth, and delivereth them out of all their troubles” (Psalm 34:17–18).

“O Lord, thou hast pleaded the causes of my soul; thou hast redeemed my life.” The name changes here. “Lord” is ʼĂdônây, an emphatic form of the word for master, used as a title of God that stresses his authority and his right to act. The KJV prints this title as “Lord” and keeps “LORD” in capitals for Yᵉhôvâh.

Two pictures from Israel’s life describe what God did. The first is a lawsuit. The verb rîyb means to quarrel, contend or accuse, and in another sense to plead someone else’s cause, which is its sense here. The “causes of my soul” are everything brought against the prophet, the grievances, the accusations and the injustices, and God took them up as his advocate and defended him against his adversaries. The psalmist prays for this: “Plead my cause, O LORD, with them that strive with me” (Psalm 35:1–3). God promises it to his people: “I will contend with him that contendeth with thee” (Isaiah 49:25).

The second picture is the kinsman. Gâʼal means to redeem by the law of kinship. The redeemer, the go’el, was the nearest male relative, with the sacred duty to protect his family. He bought back land that had been sold, avenged a relative’s blood, and saw that a dead kinsman’s line went on (Leviticus 25). The book of Ruth shows a kinsman taking up that duty for a widow and her family (Ruth 1–4). To call God the redeemer is to say that he treats his servant as his own kin and pays what it costs to set him free. “Redeemed my life” means rescued from danger and from the edge of death. A psalm blesses the LORD “Who redeemeth thy life from destruction” (Psalm 103:4).

Verses 55–58 are a testimony of what God has done, told as past events around the one plea that he keep listening. They are Jeremiah’s own story, and the God who pleaded his cause and redeemed his life is the same unchanging God for all his people, who may call him their advocate and redeemer as Jeremiah did.

“The lips of those that rose up against me, and their device against me all the day.” The verse goes on from verse 61, naming more of what the LORD has heard. Sâphâh, lip, stands for speech and language, and it can also mean the edge or brim of a thing. Here it is the words of the enemies: slander, false accusation and mockery. Qûwm means to rise or stand, and here to rise up in opposition. Higgâyôwn comes from a root meaning to murmur or meditate. It can mean a murmuring sound or a meditation, and by implication a plot, a scheme turned over in the mind. Yôwm, day, can also mean a span of time, and “all the day” means continually. The attacks went on from morning till night.

Jeremiah knew this from his own people, who rejected his warnings and plotted against his life. He complained, “I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me”, and he heard many whispering against him (Jeremiah 20:7–10). The psalms cry out against enemies who speak deceitfully (Psalm 35:20–21), against a friend whose words “were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart” (Psalm 55:21), and against adversaries who seek a man’s harm all day long (Psalm 38:12). “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21).

“Behold their sitting down, and their rising up; I am their musick.” The prophet asks God to look. Nâbaṭ means to look, to gaze or to consider. Yâshab means to sit down, and also to dwell or remain. Sitting down and rising up together cover the whole of a day, its rest and its work, so the prophet is saying that whatever his enemies are doing, he is the subject of their song. A psalm speaks of God knowing a man’s sitting down and rising up in the same way (Psalm 139:2).

Mangîynâh means a mocking or derisive song, a satire, and “musick” is the KJV’s word for it here. To be their music is to be the butt of their taunts and jokes, the song they sing about their enemy’s ruin. Job says the same: “And now am I their song, yea, I am their byword” (Job 30:9). Conquerors used public mockery to break the spirit of a defeated people, and the Babylonians, and perhaps neighbours such as the Edomites, gloated over Judah’s fall. The enemies’ taunts over the ruined city are recorded in Lamentations 2:15–16.

The last three verses ask God to act against the enemies. A prayer of this kind is called an imprecation, a prayer that God bring judgment on the wicked, and it is the part of the passage people find hardest.

Christ went down into the deepest pit of all. He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross (Philippians 2:8). He offered up prayers “with strong crying and tears” (Hebrews 5:7), and in Gethsemane his sweat was “as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). On the cross, bearing the sin of the world, he cried, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). God answered from the lowest depth when he raised him from the dead (Romans 6:4). Because he suffered as we do, he is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities”, and we may “come boldly unto the throne of grace” (Hebrews 4:15–16).

In Christ God came nearer than the prophet knew to ask. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29). He drew near to the sick, the grieving and the outcast, and after his resurrection he said to the women, “Be not afraid” (Matthew 28:10). He sent the Comforter, the Holy Ghost (John 14:26), who still draws near to believers and speaks peace.

Christ is also the advocate and redeemer of verse 58. “If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1), and he makes intercession for us at the right hand of God (Romans 8:34), pleading our case on the ground of his own sacrifice. He took our flesh and became our near kinsman, and he paid the price of our redemption. “Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). By his own blood he obtained eternal redemption (Hebrews 9:12), and in him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins (Ephesians 1:7, Colossians 1:13–14).

Every wrong in verses 59–63 was done to Jesus. The chief priests and elders plotted to take him and kill him (Matthew 26:3–4), the council took counsel to put him to death (John 11:53), the Pharisees tried to entangle him in his words (Matthew 22:15), and Judas betrayed him (John 13:2). He was slandered as a glutton and a drunkard (Matthew 11:19), accused of blasphemy (Mark 2:7), and condemned at an unjust trial on the word of false witnesses (Mark 14:53–65, Matthew 26:59–60). He was “despised and rejected of men” (Isaiah 53:3). The soldiers dressed him in purple, crowned him with thorns and knelt before him in mockery (Mark 15:17–19), and at the cross the chief priests, scribes and elders made him their song: “He saved others; himself he cannot save” (Matthew 27:41–42). He “opened not his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7). When he suffered “he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously” (1 Peter 2:23), and he prayed, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). God vindicated him by raising him from the dead, and God is for all who are in him (Romans 8:31–39).

The prayer for recompense meets the cross as well. Jesus was delivered up by God’s set purpose and crucified and slain by wicked hands (Acts 2:23). There he bore the recompense for our own deeds, and God set him forth as a propitiation, so that God is just and the justifier of the one who believes in Jesus (Romans 3:25–26). Where the prophet asked for God’s curse on his enemies, Christ became a curse for his. He bore God’s wrath against sin, and so opened a way for sinners to escape the destruction verse 66 asks for. He is also the Judge. The Father has committed all judgment to the Son (John 5:22) and has appointed a day when he will judge the world by him (Acts 17:31). At his return the King will separate the nations (Matthew 25:31–46), the rider on the white horse will judge and make war in righteousness (Revelation 19:11–16), and the dead will be judged according to their works (Revelation 20:11–15). Those who refuse his grace to the end will meet the curse and the sorrow this prayer asks for. The longing for justice in Lamentations is fulfilled in Christ, who first bore the curse and will one day judge the world in righteousness.

This prayer traces the whole path of a believer who has been wronged. It begins at the bottom of a pit with a cry, and the LORD hears it, comes near and says “Fear not”. It goes on to a God who stands beside his servant as his advocate and buys back his life as a kinsman would. Then it lays every wrong open before him, the revenge, the plotting, the insults and the songs, and leaves the sentence in his hands.

The God of this passage hears the sigh that has no words as well as the loud cry. He has seen what was done and what was planned, and every word spoken in secret is known to him. He is angry at cruelty, and he will repay it. In Christ we know him as our advocate, our redeemer and the Judge of all the earth, and also as the one who bore the curse himself and prayed for those who crucified him. So the wronged may be honest with God about their pain, wait for his justice, and pray for their enemies, as their Lord did.