Lamentations 4:13 - Meaning and Application

Here we are told, first, what sins brought this destruction on them and made God’s judgment right. It was for the sins of their prophets and the wrongdoing of their priests. The people were not innocent, because they loved to have it that way (Jeremiah 5:31), and they pleased the people by doing as they did. But the main blame falls on those who should have taught them better, warned them, and shown them what would come at the end. The blood of those watchmen who gave no warning will be required from their hands.

Nothing prepares a people more for ruin, or fills up their measure of guilt faster, than the sins of their priests and prophets. Their special sin was persecution. The false prophets and corrupt priests joined their power and influence to shed the blood of the just in the middle of the city, including the blood of God’s prophets and of those who stayed loyal to them. They did not only shed the blood of innocent children, whom they sacrificed to Molech, a false god. They also shed the blood of righteous people, whom they sacrificed to a crueler idol, hatred of the truth and true religion.

This was the sin the Lord would not pardon (2 Kings 24:4), and it helped bring the final destruction on Jerusalem (James 5:6): “You have condemned and killed the just.” The priests and prophets were the leaders in persecution, just as in Christ’s time the chief priests and scribes stirred the people against him, when they might otherwise have kept crying out, “Hosanna.” Now these same people are described as wandering like blind men in the streets (Lamentations 4:14). They had strayed from the path of justice, and they were blind to everything good. But when it came to doing evil, they were sharp-eyed. God says of corrupt judges, “They know nothing, they understand nothing, they walk in darkness” (Psalm 82:5). Christ says of corrupt teachers, “They are blind guides of the blind” (Matthew 15:14).

They had so stained themselves with innocent blood, the blood of the saints, that people would not even touch their garments. They made themselves hateful to everyone around them, so that good people were as careful to avoid them as they would be around a dead body, which would bring ceremonial uncleanness, or around the bloody clothes of someone who had been killed. Nothing makes prophets and priests so despised as a spirit of persecution.

Second, we have the witness of their neighbors brought in against them, both to prove their sin and to show that God dealt with them fairly. Some people grow so bold in sin that they say they do not care what others think of them. But here God, through the prophet, wants the Jews to notice what the people around them said about them, especially what the surrounding nations thought of the corrupt priests and prophets (Lamentations 4:15, 4:16).

The nations mocked their claimed purity while they lived in open sin. They cried out to them, “Get away! You are unclean.” These people had been so strict that they would not even touch a Gentile, saying, “Get away, get away; stand aside, I am holier than you” (Isaiah 65:5). The men who accused Christ would not even enter the governor’s house, so they would not become unclean. But now, when God had handed them over to the Gentiles, could they keep the Gentiles from touching them? When they fled and wandered, they would tell the nations to keep away because they were unclean. But it would do no good. Those enemies would not be charmed or softened. They would show no respect for the priests, and they would not favor the elders. Even the most honored people would become despised in their eyes.

The nations also mocked them because of their sins and because of God’s anger against those sins. They cried, “Get away! You are unclean.” They openly shamed them and could easily see that God would not long let such a provoking people remain in such a good land. They knew God’s laws were right and expected Israel to be a wise and understanding people (Deuteronomy 4:6). But when they saw the opposite, they cried, “Get away, get away.” They quickly understood the sentence against them, that the land would spit them out, just as it had done to the nations before them. When they saw the scattered people of Jacob fleeing and wandering, they pointed it out. They said the Lord’s anger had divided and scattered them through all lands because they had no respect for the priests, even the faithful priests among them, such as Zechariah son of Jehoiada, Jeremiah, and others. They did not honor the elders either, but despised them and their authority when they tried to stop their sinful ways. Even the heathen could see that this would ruin them.

The nations also mocked their ruin as final and beyond repair. When they saw them driven out of their own land, they said, “Now they will never live there again. They have taken a final leave of it and will never return, because God will no longer care for them. How then can they help themselves?” They were wrong, because God had not cast them off forever. Still, this shows that everyone around them saw how deeply they had provoked God, and no one had reason to expect anything but complete abandonment.

Third, we hear the despair that almost took hold of the people themselves in their suffering. After hearing what the heathen said about them, we now hear what they said about themselves (Lamentations 4:17). “As for us,” they say, “our case is nearly hopeless. Our end is near” (Lamentations 4:18). They mean the end of both church and state. They thought they were standing right at the edge of the ruin of both, or even that the end had already come. They felt completely undone, as if a final and fatal stop had been put to all their comfort. The days of their prosperity were over, fully counted and finished.

So their fears matched the hopes of their enemies, that the Lord would no longer look on them. The shelters they ran to disappointed them. They looked for help from one powerful ally after another, but it came to nothing. The help they expected did not arrive, or it arrived without the success they hoped for. Their eyes grew tired from waiting for what never came (Lamentations 4:17). They kept watching, and watching again, with great eagerness and impatience, for a nation that had promised support, but it failed them and left their hopes empty. It could not save them, because it was too weak to stand against the Chaldean army. Help from people is empty help (Psalm 60:11), and we may wait for it until our eyes fail and our hearts grow weak, only to come short in the end.

The enemies they fled from caught up with them and overcame them (Lamentations 4:18). “They hunt our steps,” the people say, “so we cannot walk in our streets.” When the Chaldeans besieged the city, they built their defenses so high above the walls that they could control the town and shoot at people as they moved along the streets.

They hunted them down with their arrows from one place to another. When the city was broken apart and all the soldiers fled, those chasing them were faster than the eagles of heaven when they swoop on their prey (Lamentations 4:19). There was no way to escape. They chased them into the mountains, and when they thought they were safe, they fell into the hands of enemies who had set traps in the wilderness to cut off their retreat and gather up any stragglers.

Even the king himself could not get away, though he may have had every help that the danger of the moment allowed. Divine judgment followed him too, and then, as the text says, “The breath of our nostrils, the Lord’s anointed, was captured in their pits” (Lamentations 4:20). Some take this to mean Josiah, who was killed in battle by the king of Egypt, but it is more likely Zedekiah, the last king from David’s line, who was chased by the Babylonians and seized in the plains of Jericho (Jeremiah 39:5). He was the Lord’s anointed because he belonged to the family God had chosen to rule.

He was deeply trusted by the Jewish nation. They said, “Under his shadow we shall live among the nations.” They hoped that the few survivors left after Jeconiah’s captivity would, under his rule, grow strong again and bear fruit again. They could no longer expect to rule over other nations, as they had before, but they hoped they might at least survive among them without being mocked or torn apart.

People are often quick to cling to any small hope when their cause is failing. Jerusalem was like a person dying of a long illness. Even when she was close to death, she kept finding signs to encourage herself, and she built her hope on them. But what happened? The shelter they trusted in proved as weak as Jonah’s gourd, which withered in a single night.

The Lord’s anointed was caught in their traps, as if he were only some hunted animal. That shows how little respect they had for a person they should have treated as sacred and untouchable. When we make any creature the breath of our nostrils, and think we will live by it, it is right for God to take that breath away and strip us of the life we expected from it. God will have the honor of being our life and the length of our days.