Lamentations 2:1 - Meaning and Application

It is a very sad picture of the state of God’s church, of Jacob and Israel, of Zion and Jerusalem. But the weight of these verses falls on God’s hand in the troubles they were suffering. The main sorrow is not just that these things happened, but that God did them. He seems angry with them. He is the one who disciplines them, and he does it in wrath and hot displeasure. He has become their enemy and fights against them, and that is the bitterest part of their suffering.

There was a time when God delighted in his church and showed himself as her friend. He appeared for her and was clearly on her side. But now his displeasure is against her. He is angry with her and seems to act against her as an enemy. This thought is repeated here again and again, and it is mourned deeply. What he has done, he has done in anger. That is what makes this day so dark, it is the day of his anger (Lam 2:1), and again it is in his wrath (Lam 2:2), and in his fierce anger (Lam 2:3), that he has thrown down and cut off, and in the fury of his anger (Lam 2:6). For anyone who knows how precious God’s favor is, nothing is more terrifying than his anger. Loving correction is easier to bear, but loving rebuke can wound deeply.

It is God’s wrath that burns against Jacob like a flaming fire (Lam 2:3), and it is a fire that destroys. It consumes everything around it, all her honors and all her comforts. This is the fury poured out like fire (Lam 2:4), like the fire and brimstone that fell on Sodom and Gomorrah. But it was their sin that lit that fire. God is such a tender Father to his children that we can be sure he is never angry with them unless they provoke him and give him cause. He is never angry beyond what is just.

God’s covenant with his people was that if they obeyed his voice, he would be an enemy to their enemies (Exodus 23:22). He had been that way for them as long as they stayed close to him. But now he is an enemy to them, or at least he acts like one (Lam 2:5). He has bent his bow like an enemy (Lam 2:4). He stood with his right hand stretched out against them, with a sword in it like an adversary. Yet God is not truly an enemy to his people, even when he is angry and corrects them in anger. We may be deeply displeased with our closest friends and family, and still have no real hatred for them. Still, sometimes he seems as an enemy to his people, when all his dealings with them appear to be moving toward ruin, when everything seems to be against them and nothing for them. But blessed be God, Christ is our peace, our peacemaker, who has broken down the hostility. In him we can agree with our opponent, and it is wise to do so, since it is useless to fight with him. He offers us favorable terms of peace.

There was also a time when God’s church appeared bright, honored, and respected among the nations. But now the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud (Lam 2:1), a dark cloud that is terrible to see and hides his face from her. The word points to a thick, black cloud, one that dims all her glory and hides her beauty. It is not like the cloud that led them through the wilderness, or the cloud that filled the temple when God took possession of it with his glory. No, the cloud now turned toward them is the same side that once turned toward the Egyptians at the Red Sea.

The beauty of Israel has been thrown down from heaven to earth. Their princes (2 Samuel 1:19), their worship, and the beauty of holiness, everything that made them admired by their neighbors and pleasant to look at, all that had lifted them up so high, has withered and gone because God covered it with a cloud. He has cut off all the horn of Israel (Lam 2:3), meaning all her beauty and majesty (Psalm 132:17), all her abundance and strength, and all her power and authority. In their pride they had lifted up their horn against God, and now God justly cuts it off. He has made them unable to resist their enemies. He has turned back their right hand, so they cannot carry out the blow they aimed, or ward off the blow aimed at them. What can their right hand do against the enemy when God draws it back and withers it, as he did with Jeroboam’s hand? So the beauty of Israel was cast down, when a people known for courage could not stand their ground or hold their position.

There was also a time when Jerusalem and the cities of Judah were strong and well fortified. The people trusted them, and enemies left them alone as if they were impossible to take. But now the Lord has swallowed them up in his anger. They are gone. Their forts and barriers are removed, and the invaders meet no resistance. The grand buildings that were their strength and beauty have been pulled down and laid waste.

The Lord has swallowed up all the dwellings of Jacob in his anger (Lam 2:2), both the city houses and the country homes. They were burned or destroyed in such a complete way that they seem to have been swallowed up, with no trace left. He has swallowed up and had no pity. One would have thought it right to pity such fine homes, so well built and furnished, and to have compassion on the poor people who were driven out and forced to wander. But God’s usual compassion seemed to fail. He has swallowed up Israel like a lion swallows his prey (Lam 2:5).

He has swallowed up not only the common houses, but also her palaces, all her palaces, the homes of her princes and great men (Lam 2:5). Those were the most impressive, strongest, richest, and best guarded. When God’s judgments come with his authority, they level palaces with cottages just as easily. If palaces are stained with sin, as theirs were, they should expect a curse that will consume them, along with their timber and stones (Zechariah 5:4).

He destroyed not only their homes, but also their strongholds, their castles, citadels, and places of defense. He threw them down in his wrath and brought them to the ground, for how could they stand in the way of his judgments or slow their progress? No, let them fall like autumn leaves. Let them be torn down to the foundation and brought to the ground (Lam 2:2). Again, he has destroyed his strongholds (Lam 2:5), for what strength could they have against God? In this way he increased mourning and crying in the daughter of Judah, because they could not help but be terrified when they saw all their defense taken away.

This point is stressed again in Lam 2:7-9. To swallow up her palaces, he handed over the walls of her palaces to the enemy. Those walls were their protection, and once they were broken down, the palaces themselves were soon ruined.

The walls of palaces cannot protect people unless God himself is a wall of fire around them. In his anger, God brought this ruin, but he did it on purpose. It came from a settled plan and wise providence, for the Lord had decided to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion, and he brought in the Chaldean army to carry out that judgment.

Whatever ruin God brings on his church, it comes according to his own counsel. He does what he has appointed for us, even when it feels most against us. Yet when he acts, he measures the work exactly. He stretches out a line, a measuring line, so the destruction goes only as far as he has marked. No more is cut off than what he has chosen. Or the line may mean a line of confusion, a leveling line (Isaiah 34:11). In that case, the thought is that he goes on with the work, and he has not pulled back his hand from destroying, that same hand he stretched out against his people as an enemy (Lamentations 2:4). As far as his purpose reaches, his action will reach too, and his hand will carry out his plan fully.

So he made the rampart and the wall, which the people had once rejoiced in, mourn. The walls and bulwarks fell together and seemed to grieve over their own collapse. Her gates vanished in an instant, as if they had sunk into the ground under their own weight. He destroyed and broke her bars, those gates of Jerusalem that he had once strengthened (Psalm 147:13). Gates and bars can give no help when God has withdrawn his protection.

There was a time when Judah’s government was strong, its princes were honored, and its kingdom stood high among the nations. Now everything was reversed. He has polluted the kingdom and its princes (Lamentations 2:2). They had first polluted themselves with idol worship, and then God treated them as polluted things. He cast them aside like refuse, which was the right place for them. He gave up their glory, the honor people treated as sacred, to be trampled and shamed. No one should be surprised that the king and the priest, once thought untouchable, are despised by everyone when God, in his fierce anger, has despised the king and the priest himself (Lamentations 2:6). He has abandoned them and judged them unworthy of the honors tied to kingship and priesthood, since they had forfeited both. So Zedekiah, the king of Judah, was treated with contempt, and Seraiah, the chief priest, was killed like a criminal. Their crown has fallen from their head, for their king and princes are now among the nations, prisoners among them, mocked and treated like the lowest people (Lamentations 2:9). It is just for God to bring low those who have already lowered themselves by sin.

There was also a time when God’s ordinances were carried out among them in power and purity, and his presence among them was shown by sacred signs. Now those signs were taken away, and part of the beauty of Israel was gone, in fact, the best part. The ark was God’s footstool under the mercy seat, between the cherubim. It was the most holy sign of his presence, and Israel often looked to it for protection and rescue. But now he did not remember his footstool. It seems the ark itself was allowed to fall into the hands of the Chaldeans. In his anger, God cast it off, as if it were no longer his footstool, for the earth itself is to be his throne and footstool, as it was before the ark was made (Isaiah 66:1). The signs of his presence mean very little when his presence is gone. This was not the first time God had let his ark go into captivity (Psalm 78:61). God and his kingdom can stand without that footstool.

Those who served in holy things had once been lovely to look at in the tabernacle of the daughter of Zion (Lamentations 2:4). They had been pure and bright, whiter than snow, whiter than milk (Lamentations 4:7). No one who loved God could look on them without pleasure. But now they were slain, and their blood was mixed with their sacrifices. So the priest was despised along with the king. When those who were once so dear in Zion’s tabernacle are killed, God must be acknowledged in it. He has done it, and the burning the Lord himself has kindled must be mourned by the whole house of Israel, as in the case of Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10:6).

The temple was God’s tabernacle, just as the earlier tabernacle had been called his temple while it stood (Psalm 27:4). Now he has violently taken it away (Lamentations 2:6). He has pulled up its stakes and cut its cords. It will no longer be a tabernacle, much less his. He has taken it away as a gardener takes down a hut or shade when he no longer needs it. He can remove it as easily and as quickly as a small shelter in a vineyard or a booth in a garden of cucumbers (Isaiah 1:8), or like a temporary shelter built in a field (Job 27:18). When people profane God’s tabernacle, it is right for him to take it away from them. He has justly refused to accept their solemn assemblies (Amos 5:21). They had driven him away, and now it is no wonder that he has destroyed the places where they gathered. What use were those places once the worship itself had become hateful?

He has now rejected his sanctuary (Lamentations 2:7). It was polluted by sin, the one thing he hates, and because of that he detests even his sanctuary, which he had loved and called his resting place forever (Psalm 132:14). He had done the same before to Shiloh. Now the enemies make as much noise of wild celebration and blasphemy in the house of the Lord as had once been made there by temple songs and music at a solemn feast (Psalm 74:4). Some take the places of assembly (Lamentations 2:6) to mean not only the temple, but also the synagogues and the schools of the prophets, which the enemy had burned up (Psalm 74:8).

The solemn feasts and the sabbaths had once been carefully kept in memory, and the people were regularly reminded of them. Now the Lord has caused them to be forgotten, not only in the countryside, among those far away, but even in Zion itself. There were no people left to remember them, and no places left where they had been observed. Since Zion lay in ruins, no one could tell Sabbath days from other days. Every day became a day of mourning, and so all the solemn feasts were forgotten.

It is right for God to take away the comfort of Sabbaths and holy feasts from people who did not value them or keep them carefully, but instead treated them with disrespect. This was one of the sins the Jews were often accused of. Those who have seen the days of the Son of Man, and treated them lightly, may later long to see one of those days and not be allowed to (Luke 17:22).

The altar that once made their offerings acceptable is now rejected, because God will no longer accept their gifts or honor their sacrifices (Lamentations 2:7). The altar was like the Lord’s table, but God would no longer keep house among them. He would neither bless them with his presence nor share fellowship with them.

They had been blessed with prophets and teachers of the law, but now the law is gone from them (Lamentations 2:9). It is no longer read among the people or explained by the scribes. The tablets of the law are gone with the ark, and the book of the law has been taken away and forbidden to the people. What should people do with Bibles if they did not make better use of them when they had them?

Their prophets also find no vision from the Lord. God no longer answers them through prophets or dreams, which was the sad condition of Saul, king of Israel (1 Samuel 28:15). They had persecuted God’s prophets and despised the visions they received from the Lord. So it is just for God to say they will have no more prophets and no more visions. Let them turn to the prophets who had flattered and deceived them with their own thoughts, because they will have none from God to comfort them or tell them how long this judgment will last. Those who misuse God’s prophets rightly lose them.