Lamentations 3:45 Meaning and Explanation

The sense of degradation is total: 'Thou hast made us as the offscouring and refuse in the midst of the people.' Offscouring and refuse are what is scraped off and thrown away, the garbage of the world. Among the nations, God's once-honored people now feel regarded as worthless rubbish, fit only to be discarded.

This is the bitter humiliation of a people brought low before the watching world. Yet there is a foreshadowing here too; the apostle Paul would one day use this very language of himself and his fellow servants, made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things, for Christ's sake. To be counted as refuse by the world has sometimes been the lot of those most precious to God. The world's estimate is not God's, and his mercy reaches even to what others throw away.