Great is your faithfulness: hope in the middle of Lamentations

Lamentations is a book of five poems about the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. In 586 BC the city fell, the temple was burned and many of its people were taken to Babylon (2 Kings 25). The poems were written in the shadow of that event, most likely in the years soon after it. The Hebrew title is the opening word of the book, 'Eikhah', 'How', the cry of someone who cannot believe what has happened (1:1; 2:1; 4:1).

The book does not name its author. The Greek Old Testament adds a short note that Jeremiah sat weeping and spoke this lament, and Jewish tradition recorded in the Talmud (Bava Batra 15a) also credits Jeremiah. Many later Christian writers followed that view. Some modern scholars think the poems came from several anonymous poets in the community that remained in Judah, pointing to differences of style and viewpoint among the five chapters. The class does not depend on settling the question. What matters is that the writer or writers knew the siege from the inside.

The book sits in two places. In the English Bible it follows Jeremiah, as in the Greek tradition. In the Hebrew Bible it belongs to the Writings and is one of the Five Scrolls (Megillot), each read at a Jewish festival or fast. Lamentations is read on the Ninth of Av, the day Jewish tradition marks for remembering the destruction of both temples. So the first hearers were a grieving people, and the book has been used by a grieving people ever since.

Chapter 3 is the centre of the book and the longest poem. Its first-person voice, 'I am the man', is unusual. Chapters 1, 2 and 4 describe the ruin mostly from the outside. Here a single sufferer speaks from within it.

Lamentations 3 is Hebrew poetry, and it belongs to the genre of lament, the prayer of complaint found in the Psalms. Lament has its own rules. It speaks honestly to God about pain, it often blames God as the one who sends or permits it, and it usually moves toward trust. Hebrew poetry works by parallelism, a second line that repeats, sharpens or answers the first, and it uses vivid pictures (a bear, a lion, an arrow) rather than plain statements. These pictures are not literal descriptions. They are the language of someone who feels that God himself has become the attacker.

The form carries meaning. Chapters 1 to 4 are acrostics, poems whose lines begin with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in order. Chapter 3 is a triple acrostic: it has 66 verses, three for each of the 22 letters, and all three begin with the same letter. The form suggests completeness. Grief is poured out from A to Z, and it is held inside an order the poet imposes on it. The voice also changes. The singular 'man' speaks in verses 1-21, 'we' speaks in 22-24 and 40-47, a teacher addresses 'a man' in general terms in 25-39, and 'I' returns in 48-66. Scholars debate whether the man is Jeremiah, a typical Judean survivor or a representative of the whole city. The text lets the individual and the community stand together.

The key rule is to read verses 21-24 in the place where the poet put them. They are the best known words in the book, but they come after eighteen verses of unrelieved suffering and before a long passage that does not look away from the pain. They are not a cure that cancels the grief. A reader who takes them without the verses around them has read a different poem.

Verses 1–9

'I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of God's wrath.' The word 'rod' (shebet) is the shepherd's or king's staff of discipline, so the affliction is understood as coming from God's hand. The verbs that follow all have God as the subject: he has driven, worn away, besieged, walled in, shut out. Darkness, walls, chains and a blocked road paint a person who cannot move or be heard. Verse 8 is the worst of it: even prayer is shut out. This matches the covenant curses of Deuteronomy 28, which the book assumes (compare Lamentations 2:17).

Verses 10–18

The imagery grows more violent: a bear and a lion lying in ambush, a bow bent with the man as the target, arrows in the kidneys, which in Hebrew thought are the seat of the inner self. Job 16:12-13 uses almost the same picture. Verse 14 adds shame, since the man is the subject of mocking songs. Verse 15 names the taste of it: bitterness and wormwood, a bitter plant. Verse 18 is the low point: 'My strength has perished, along with my hope from the LORD.' The man does not say that God does not exist. He says that his hope in God is gone.

Verses 19–21

The turn begins with memory. 'Remember my affliction' is a plea to God, and in verse 20 the man's own soul remembers and bows down. Then comes the hinge: 'Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope.' What he calls to mind is not a happier memory of his own. It is a fact about God, stated in the next verses.

Verses 22–24

'Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!' Three words carry the weight. Chesed is the LORD's covenant loyalty, the steady love that keeps its promise. Rachamim, 'mercies', comes from the word for the womb, so it is the tender compassion of a parent. Emunah, 'faithfulness', is firmness, reliability. Together they echo God's own self-description to Moses (Exodus 34:6). The people have survived the siege, and the man takes the mere fact that they are not wiped out as evidence of that character. 'New every morning' is a fresh supply for each day, a counter to the long night of verses 1-18. Verse 24 adds, 'The LORD is my portion,' the language of the Levites, who had no land and whose inheritance was the LORD himself (Numbers 18:20). A man who has lost everything claims the one thing that cannot be taken.

Verses 25–30

A teacher now speaks. 'It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.' To wait (qavah) is to hold on in expectation. The advice to bear the yoke, sit in silence, put the face in the dust and offer the cheek reads as humble submission to discipline. The line in verse 29, 'perhaps there is still hope,' is modest: the word 'perhaps' keeps hope from being a demand on God.

Verses 31–39

The reason for waiting is stated: 'the Lord will not cast us off forever.' Grief is real, yet compassion follows 'according to His abundant loving devotion.' Verse 33 says God 'does not willingly afflict or grieve the sons of men', and the Hebrew idiom is literally 'from his heart'. Affliction is not what he delights in. Verses 34-36 list wrongs that the Lord does not approve: crushing prisoners, denying justice, perverting a lawsuit. This keeps the focus clear. God is sovereign over events (verses 37-38), but he is not the author of human injustice, and he sees it. Verse 39 asks why a person should complain in view of his sins. The book itself is a complaint, so the verse is better read as a call to see the whole truth, that the disaster was judgment on sin.

Verses 40–47

The people speak. 'Let us examine and test our ways, and turn back to the LORD.' The confession is blunt: 'We have sinned and rebelled; You have not forgiven.' They do not yet claim forgiveness. They describe the cloud that blocks prayer and the humiliation among the nations.

Verses 48–66

The 'I' returns, weeping until the LORD looks down. Verses 52-54 describe being hunted and dropped into a pit, a picture that recalls Jeremiah's cistern (Jeremiah 38:6) and the Psalms' image of near death. Verses 55-57 are the poem's resolution: 'I called on Your name, O LORD, out of the depths of the Pit.' The LORD heard, drew near and said, 'Do not be afraid.' The poet speaks of this as a past rescue, using the language of redemption (verse 58). The chapter ends with a prayer that the LORD repay the enemies (verses 64-66).

Lamentations 3 teaches that suffering and faith can be spoken together. The Bible does not require believers to hide pain, and it gives them a vocabulary for it. The same people who have the Psalms of praise also have the Psalms of lament and this book. The chapter shows that honest complaint, confession and trust belong in one prayer.

It also teaches the sovereignty and justice of God together. He rules even the hard events (verses 37-38), yet he does not will injustice and does not take pleasure in affliction (verses 33-36). The exile was understood as the covenant curse of Deuteronomy 28-30 coming true, which meant that the way back was also in Deuteronomy: return, and the LORD will restore (Deuteronomy 30:1-10). Verses 22-23 stand in the line of Exodus 34:6, a verse that the prophets and psalmists keep quoting: Joel 2:13, Jonah 4:2 and Psalm 103:8 use the same pattern of compassion, grace, patience and abounding loyalty. The Bible's answer to national disaster is neither that God has failed nor that he does not care, but that he disciplines and does not abandon.

The chapter stands at the centre of a book that ends unresolved. Lamentations 5 closes by asking whether God has utterly rejected his people. The canon gives the answer elsewhere: the return from Babylon, the promises of a new covenant (Jeremiah 31:31-34) and a restored people (Ezekiel 36-37). Chapter 3 holds the hope in the meantime.

The connection to Christ is in the first place one of fulfillment of the character of God. Paul says that every promise of God finds its yes in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20), and he calls God the Father of mercies (2 Corinthians 1:3). The chesed, rachamim and emunah of Lamentations 3:22-23 are the qualities that the New Testament sees displayed in Jesus. Luke calls the coming of Christ the tender mercy of our God (Luke 1:78), and Hebrews invites the afflicted to approach the throne of grace to receive mercy (Hebrews 4:16). The faithfulness of verse 23 becomes a person.

There is also an echo of the suffering man. The man who offers his cheek to the one who strikes (verse 30) and is mocked in song (verse 14) anticipates Jesus, who was struck in the face, spat on and mocked (Matthew 26:67; 27:29-30; John 18:22). The closest Old Testament match is the servant of Isaiah 50:6, who gives his cheek to those who strike him. These are echoes, not types in the strict sense, since Lamentations does not present its speaker as a coming deliverer and the man in verses 1-18 is suffering for the sins of his people, not for the sins of others. Yet the shape is the same: one who is afflicted, who trusts the LORD and whom the LORD vindicates.

The end of the chapter points in the same direction. The prayer in verse 57, 'Do not be afraid', is answered in the Gospels by Jesus in the same words to frightened people (for example Matthew 14:27; Luke 12:32). And the weeping that goes on until the LORD looks down finds its resolution in the promise that God will wipe away every tear (Revelation 21:4).