Christ in Lamentations

Lamentations 1 is a funeral song over a fallen city, and the New Testament hears in it a voice that reaches past Jerusalem to the Man of Sorrows Himself. The dirge cries How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! (v. 1), and tolls again and again a single refrain - she hath none to comfort her (vv. 2, 9, 16, 17, 21). Out of that desolation the city lifts the question that Christian readers have long heard on the lips of the suffe…

Lamentations 2 is the hardest chapter to read in the book, because it names the LORD Himself as the one who brought Jerusalem down - How hath the Lord covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger (v. 1); The Lord was as an enemy: he hath swallowed up Israel (v. 5). The poet does not soften it, and neither can we. Yet the chapter’s own center keeps it from being mere despair: this is not caprice but the covenant’s warned-of word come true - The LORD hath done that…

Lamentations 3 stands at the dead center of the book, and at its center stands the line the whole Bible leans on in the dark: 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 (vv. 22-23). The book’s deepest grief and its highest hope share one chapter, and the same voice speaks both. It opens with a man overwhelmed - I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath (v…

Lamentations 4 begins with a treasure ruined - How is the gold become dim! how is the most fine gold changed! (v. 1) - and the gold turns out to be people: The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold, how are they esteemed as earthen pitchers, the work of the hands of the potter! (v. 2). Glory has been marred; the costly thing lies broken like cheap clay. The apostle takes up that very picture and turns it toward hope: we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that…

Lamentations closes not with a tidy resolution but with an honest, hoping prayer. The chapter lays the whole ruin before God - Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach (v. 1) - and at its lowest it confesses the cause: The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned! (v. 16). Then, with every earthly thing fallen, the prayer reaches for the one reality that has not: Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from gener…