Lamentations 5

The whole book has wept; now it turns and speaks directly to God, and its first word is a plea to be seen: Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach (v. 1). Three verbs stack on top of one another - remember… consider… behold - and they are not asking God for information He lacks. To remember, in the language of Scripture, is to turn attention toward someone and to act on their behalf.

When God “remembered” Noah in the flood, or Hannah in her barrenness, the word marked the moment He moved to help. So this is a prayer that God would not merely register the ruin but lean toward it - that He would behold our reproach, the shame heaped on a people stripped of everything. There is something quietly bold in beginning here. The people in the dust do not start by defending themselves or by demanding an explanation.

They ask, first, to be regarded by the One whose regard is their only hope.

Then the prayer lays out the loss, and its specificity is part of its honesty: Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens. We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows (vv. 2-3). Each line names a particular grief rather than a vague sadness. The inheritance was no mere property; it was the land tied to covenant and family, handed down through generations as the visible sign of belonging - and now it is held by foreigners.

The household has collapsed into the very categories Israel's law singled out for special protection: the orphan, the fatherless, the widow. A people who were meant to care for the vulnerable have themselves become the vulnerable. The prayer does not rush past these losses or spiritualize them into lessons. It states them plainly, one after another, because they are real and they deserve to be mourned by name. Grief honestly named before God is the form love takes when what it loved has been taken away.

The catalogue presses on into the body and the daily grind of survival: We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us. Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest (vv. 4-5). The indignity is total. Even water - the freest gift of the land - must now be bought; even firewood, once gathered without a thought, is sold back to them at a price. The image of necks under persecution is the image of a yoke laid on an animal, of a people driven and worked with no Sabbath rest left to them - the rest that had been woven into the very rhythm of their covenant life.

And the prayer is candid about how they came to this pass: We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread (v. 6). They had reached to the old powers for help and security when they should have reached to the LORD, and the reaching had not saved them. Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand (v. 8).

The social order is upended, and - the hardest line of all - there is none to deliver. They are out of human options. That emptiness is exactly where the prayer is driving.

One verse in this opening movement has troubled readers for centuries: Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities (v. 7). On the surface it sounds like a complaint - the previous generation sinned and died, and now the children are paying for it. The cry is real and the Scriptures take it seriously; the people genuinely feel the weight of a disaster long in the making, the slow harvest of choices that were not all their own.

Yet the prayer does not finally hide behind that complaint, and that is the crucial thing to watch. Within a few verses it will stop pointing back at the fathers and say, of itself, woe unto us, that we have sinned (v. 16). The two confessions sit side by side without contradiction. There is a true sense in which a community inherits the consequences of generations before it; and there is a true sense in which each heart must own its own part.

A mature prayer can hold both - feeling honestly the burden it did not choose, and refusing to use that burden as an excuse. The road from verse 7 to verse 16 is the road from “this was done to us” to “we too have sinned,” and the prayer walks it without losing its honesty at either end.

The lament reaches its harshest verses, and the prayer does not look away. Famine has blackened the skin like the scorched wall of an oven (v. 10); the most defenseless have been violated (v. 11); princes are hanged up and the honored faces of the elders count for nothing (v. 12); the young men are set to the grinding usually done by slaves or beasts, and children stagger under loads of wood (v. 13). It is an inventory of a world turned upside down, where everything that should have been protected - the vulnerable, the leaders, the children - is broken or degraded.

The Scriptures do not flinch from recording it, and the prayer does not soften it into something easier to hear. There is a kind of false comfort that hurries past suffering like this, eager to get to the hopeful part. Lamentations refuses that hurry. It insists that the wound be looked at honestly and at length, because a hope that has not first reckoned with the real depth of the loss is too small to be of any use.

Only a prayer brave enough to name the worst is brave enough to ask for everything.

Two losses in these verses cut deeper than they first appear: The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick. The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning (vv. 14-15). The gate was the heart of a city's common life - where elders sat to judge disputes, where business was done, where the wisdom of the old steadied the young. Its silence means the whole framework of ordered community has collapsed.

And the musick of the young men, the dance, the joy of our heart - these name something even more inward. It is not only that the people have lost their land and their leaders; they have lost the capacity to rejoice. The songs have stopped. The dancing has curdled into grief. This is one of the truest things suffering does, and the prayer is honest enough to say it: deep loss does not merely take away what we had; it can take away our very ability to be glad about anything.

When the joy of the heart has ceased, the absence of song is itself a wound to be mourned - and, as the prayer will dare to ask, a wound only God can heal.

At the bottom of the descent stands the verse the whole prayer has been moving toward: The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned! (v. 16). The fallen crown gathers up every loss at once - the crown of the king, the crown of the city set on its holy hill, the crown of a people's dignity and calling, all of it tumbled into the dust. The prayer says woe unto us, that we have sinned. Here the catalogue of suffering turns, in a single clause, into confession.

The people own their own part in the disaster. This is the hinge of the chapter and one of the most important moments in the whole book. The earlier complaint - our fathers have sinned (v. 7) - does not vanish, but it is no longer the last word. The mature thing, the healing thing, is to be able to say of one's own ruin: we have sinned. Only here, with the crown in the dust and the truth told, is the prayer finally ready to ask for what it most needs.

For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim (v. 17). The honesty has cost them everything - and it has cleared the ground for grace.

With every earthly thing in ruins - land, city, king, temple, crown - the prayer suddenly lifts its eyes and finds the one reality that has not fallen: Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation (v. 19). After eighteen verses cataloguing what has been lost, the contrast is breathtaking. Jerusalem's throne lies empty; God's throne stands. The crown has fallen from the people's head; the LORD reigns still. This is the bedrock the whole book has been searching for: something underneath the ruin that the ruin cannot touch.

Earlier the prophet found one foothold in the wreckage: It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed… great is thy faithfulness (Lam. 3:22-23). Here that foothold becomes a throne. When everything that can be shaken has been shaken, what remains is the LORD Himself, unchanged from generation to generation. And it is no accident that the next verse dares to ask a hard question - Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time? (v. 20).

Only because the throne is eternal is the question worth asking at all. You do not plead with a God who has fallen with you; you plead with the One who still reigns.

Out of that unshaken ground rises the book's last great request, and it is the most important sentence in Lamentations: Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned (v. 21). Everything the prayer has confessed comes to rest here. The people have admitted they sinned (v. 16); they have admitted there is none to deliver them (v. 8); and now they admit the deepest thing of all - that they cannot even turn themselves back.

The turning they need is beyond their own reach. So they ask God to do it: Turn thou us - You do the turning - and we shall be turned. But hear the whole sentence, for it holds two truths together that we are forever tempted to pull apart. The verse fully expects a real turning of the heart to follow: we shall be turned. And the first word is Thou - God must begin it, and when He begins it, the heart truly turns.

This is grace that moves the soul - the LORD drawing, and the drawn one coming home. The same plea is heard in the prophets, where God says of His wayward people, Turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God (Jer. 31:18). To ask God to turn us, and to mean it, is already the turning beginning.

The second half of the verse asks for something the first half makes possible: renew our days as of old (v. 21). It is worth weighing the words carefully, because the prayer is not simply asking to rewind the clock. The days as of old were the days before the fall - but those exact days cannot be handed back; the city is rubble and the dead are not raised by nostalgia. What the prayer asks is to be renewed: a making-new of the worn-out present, the recovery of the very things this chapter has mourned as lost.

The joy that ceased (v. 15), the song that fell silent (v. 14), the dignity of the fallen crown (v. 16) - let these be made new. It is a larger and humbler request than mere restoration. The people are asking Him to do the one thing only He can do, which is to make worn and broken things live again. And there is a hope buried in the asking. A God who can turn the heart that could not turn itself is a God who can also renew the days that no human effort could bring back.

The two halves of the verse belong together: the One who turns us is the One who renews us.

And then the book ends on a line that refuses to pretend: But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us (v. 22). It is a startling close. We expect the prayer to resolve, to land on a note of assurance, to tie the grief off with a promise. Instead it ends with the ache still raw, the rejection still felt, the wrath still real. This is the deep honesty of Lamentations, and it is worth receiving rather than explaining away.

The book will not give a tidy ending to a grief that is not yet tidy. The exile is not over; the comfort has not arrived; the people still feel cast off. And yet - look closely - even this last hard sentence is spoken to God. It is not a verse about God muttered to the air; it is a verse addressed to Him: thou hast rejected, thou art wroth. A grief that has truly given up does not keep talking to the One it has given up on.

The very act of pressing this complaint into God's presence is an act of stubborn faith - a refusal to let go of Him even while feeling let go. (The ancient custom of reading verse 21 again after verse 22, so the book is not left on its darkest word, grew out of exactly this instinct: the hope of being turned is meant to have the final echo, even when the last written line is hard.) The prayer ends unresolved - but it ends in God's presence, still speaking, still there.

And a hope that keeps praying from the bottom has not died.