Lamentations 2:11

REGARDING THE DISTRESS AND DESPAIR OF THE PEOPLE

"Mine eyes do fail with tears, my heart is troubled;

My liver is poured out upon the earth,

because of the destruction of the daughter of my people,

Because the young children and the sucklings

do swoon in the streets of the city,

They say to their mothers, Where is grain and wine?

When they swoon as the wounded in the streets of the city,

When their soul is poured out into their mother's bosom.

What shall I testify unto thee?

What shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem?

What shall I compare to thee, that I may comfort thee,

O virgin daughter of Zion?

For thy breach is like the sea: who can heal thee?

Thy prophets have seen for thee false and foolish visions;

And they have not uncovered thine iniquity,

to bring back thy captivity,

But have seen for thee false oracles and causes of banishment.

All that pass by clap their hands at thee;

They hiss and wag their head at the daughter of

Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that men called The perfection of beauty,

The joy of the whole earth?

All thine enemies have opened their mouth wide against thee;

They hiss and gnash the teeth;

they say, We have swallowed her up;

Certainly this is the day we looked for;

we have found, we have seen it.

Jehovah hath done that which he purposed;

he hath fulfilled his word that he commanded in the days of old;

He hath thrown down and hath not pitied:

And he hath caused the enemy to rejoice over thee;

he hath exalted the horn of thine adversaries."

"My eyes do fail with tears ... my heart is troubled ... the children swoon in the streets ... or their soul is poured out in their mother's bosom" (Lamentations 2:11-12). This is one of the saddest pictures in the literature of mankind. Children crying for bread, fainting from hunger in the streets, dying at their mother's breasts from starvation! This is evidently the account of an eyewitness who had watched these things occur during that horrible siege that ended in the destruction of Jerusalem (2 Kings 25).

"The breach is great like the sea; who can heal thee?" (Lamentations 2:13). "This simply means `there is no end to it'"[18] The thoughtless may ask, "Why does God allow terrible things like this to happen"? But God has given men the freedom of their will, and not even the power of God can avoid the sorrows that result when men stubbornly do things contrary to God's commandments. Suffering of the innocent, in many circumstances, is a corollary of this. If a drunken driver guides his auto off a precipice, the innocent passengers also perish. Zedekiah, a wicked king, violated his oath which he swore in God's name to be loyal to Nebuchadnezzar; and when he violated it, Nebuchadnezzar destroyed him, acting as God's tool in the terrible destruction; but countless innocent persons were also the victims of terrible suffering and death. "It is monstrous to charge the providence of God with the consequence of actions which God has forbidden (W. F. Adeney)."[19]

"Thy prophets have seen for thee false and foolish visions" (Lamentations 2:14). There were prolific numbers of these false prophets in Israel, Jezebel sustained several hundred of them at one time (1 Kings 18:19). They pretended to have messages from God, but they were unprincipled liars, who merely prophesied what they knew their rulers wanted to hear. These false prophets did not preach against sin. We cannot leave this without noting that much of the preaching today smooths over the dreadful results of violating God's commandments.

It was the religious failure which lay at the bottom of Israel's trouble. Jerusalem had become worse than Sodom and Gomorrah (Ezekiel 16). The Temple itself had become a center of idolatry, and the women of Judah were worshipping the vile goddess of the Assyrians in the precincts of the Temple itself. (See a detailed account of all this in Vol. III (Ezekiel) of my commentary on the Major Prophets, pp. 87-91.)

He hath fulfilled his word that he hath commanded in the days of old (Lamentations 2:17). Israel should not have been surprised at the destruction of their nation. Moses had prophesied exactly what would happen to them if they forsook the Lord in Deuteronomy 28:52f; and, as Cheyne noted, "The sacred narrator here very likely alludes to that very passage in these words."[20]