Baruch 2

The prayer opens by handing God the verdict. Everything He had warned, through Moses, against this people and its leaders has come true, including horrors the narrator names and then will not linger over (vv. 2-3). The exile is not bad luck or imperial cruelty in a vacuum; it is, the people insist, the keeping of a promise, according to the things that were written in the law of Moses. And then comes the sentence that anchors the whole chapter: To the LORD our God appertaineth righteousness: but unto us and to our fathers open shame, as appeareth this day (v. 6).

The righteousness is God's; the shame is theirs. There is no hedging in it, no “but surely we did not deserve this,” no attempt to split the blame with Babylon. They place God in the right and themselves in the wrong, openly, “as appeareth this day” - in front of everyone, with the ruin all around them as evidence. It is one of the cleanest confessions in any prayer of Scripture, and everything that follows rests on it.

The confession sharpens as it goes, because the people name not only the sin that brought the exile but the sin they kept committing inside it. Yet have we not prayed before the LORD, that we might turn every one from the imaginations of his wicked heart (v. 8). Even under judgment - even with the lesson written in fire all around them - they had not turned. The phrase the imaginations of his wicked heart is striking: they do not locate the problem only in their actions but in the heart that devises them, the inner factory of crooked desire.

Twice more the indictment lands - we have not hearkened unto his voice, to walk in the commandments (v. 10); we have sinned, we have done ungodly, we have dealt unrighteously in all thine ordinances (v. 12). Notice that the prayer pauses, in verse 11, to remember who this God is: the One who brought thy people out of the land of Egypt with a mighty hand. The confession is not made to a stranger or a tyrant but to the God who has already proven Himself a deliverer.

They are not bargaining with a power that might be persuaded; they are coming home, ashamed, to a God they know has rescued before.

Having confessed, the people now ask - and the ground they ask on is the heart of this section. The appeal falls entirely on God's name and reputation: deliver us for thine own sake (v. 14), so that all the earth may know that thou art the LORD our God (v. 15). And then they make it explicit in a sentence easy to miss: we do not make our humble supplication before thee... for the righteousness of our fathers, and of our kings (v. 19).

They have just named those fathers and kings as part of the problem (v. 1); there is no righteousness there to lean on. So the whole weight of the request is shifted off themselves and onto God - His mercy, His name, His covenant. This is the second great move of mature prayer, and it follows naturally from the first: once you have honestly admitted you have no case, you stop pleading your case and start pleading His character.

It is a kind of freedom. The prayer has nothing left to protect and nothing left to prove.

Verses 17-18 make an unusual and moving argument. The dead that are in the graves, whose souls are taken from their bodies, will give unto the LORD neither praise nor righteousness - but the soul that is greatly vexed, which goeth stooping and feeble, and the eyes that fail, and the hungry soul, will give thee praise and righteousness. The logic is almost tender: spare us, because it is the living who can still worship You. The point is a plea grounded in the value of a life that can still turn back, with the grave mentioned only to press the case for mercy rather than to settle any doctrine of what happens beyond death.

The exiles describe themselves with painful precision: bent over, weak, eyes failing, hungry. They are not pretending to be strong supplicants; they are the “greatly vexed,” and they offer that very weakness as the reason God should keep them - a worn-down soul is still a soul that can lift praise, and that is worth something to God. Verses 20-26 then circle back to the confession one more time, rehearsing how the prophets' warnings about serving Babylon went unheeded until the land was laid desolate and even the temple, the house which is called by thy name, was laid waste (v. 26).

The plea is sandwiched in honesty: a cry for mercy, framed on both sides by the admission that the disaster was deserved.

The prayer now turns from the people's words to God's, and the tone changes entirely. Up to here the exiles have been speaking to God; now they recall what God spoke to them, through Moses (v. 28). And God's words contain a startling honesty of their own: I knew that they would not hear me, because it is a stiffnecked people (v. 30). The failure did not catch God off guard. He saw the rebellion coming and made a promise that reaches past it - that in the land of their captivities they shall remember themselves (v. 30).

That phrase, “remember themselves,” is the hinge. Exile, in this telling, is not only punishment; it is the place where a stiff-necked people finally comes to its senses. Stripped of the land, the temple, the wealth they had chased instead of God, they at last remember - who they are, whose they are, what they abandoned. The judgment, severe as it is, turns out to be bent toward restoration. God scatters them not to be rid of them but so that, in the far country, they will come awake.

The promises stack up quickly in verses 31-35, and they are all God's doing, not the people's. Watch the verbs: I will give them an heart; I will bring them again into the land; I will increase them; I will make an everlasting covenant; I will no more drive my people... out. The people's part is described too - they shall know, praise, think upon my name, return from their stiff neck (vv. 31-33) - but notice the order.

The turning of the people in verse 33 follows the gift of verse 31. They return from their stubbornness because God has given them a heart and ears to hear. The new obedience is the fruit of the new heart, growing from it rather than earning it. This is the deepest answer the chapter gives to the problem it opened with. In verse 8 the trouble was located in the imaginations of his wicked heart - the inner factory of crookedness that even exile had not fixed.

Here is the cure: a heart God Himself supplies, something deeper than a sterner law or a harder lesson. The people who could not hear are given ears to hear; the people who could not turn are given the heart that turns.