Scripture Daily

Context No. 225 of 4322 · Lamentations

Context · Reflection

Lamentations 3:17-32: in context

17You have removed my soul far away from peace. I forgot prosperity. 18I said, “My strength has perished, along with my expectation from the LORD.” 19Remember my affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the bitterness. 20My soul still remembers them, and is bowed down within me. 21This I recall to my mind; therefore I have hope. 22It is because of the LORD’s loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his mercies don’t fail. 23They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. 24“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul. “Therefore I will hope in him.” 25The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him. 26It is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD. 27It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth. 28Let him sit alone and keep silence, because he has laid it on him. 29Let him put his mouth in the dust, if it is so that there may be hope. 30Let him give his cheek to him who strikes him. Let him be filled full of reproach. 31For the Lord will not cast off forever. 32For though he causes grief, yet he will have compassion according to the multitude of his loving kindnesses.

Lamentations is a set of funeral poems over Jerusalem after the Babylonians burned it in 586 before Christ. It is raw grief with almost no relief in it, mostly a city weeping over its own ruins. This passage sits at the exact center of the book, and it holds the one turn the whole thing is built around.

It begins at the bottom. My soul is far from peace, the poet says, I have forgotten what happiness was, and my endurance and my hope from the LORD have perished. He is not exaggerating for effect. The city is rubble and the people are starving or deported. Then comes a single hinge of a verse: this I call to mind, therefore I have hope. Everything shifts on that one act of memory. What he calls to mind is not a change in his circumstances, which have not changed at all, but the character of God. The LORD's steadfast love never ceases, his mercies are new every morning, great is your faithfulness.

The most quoted line about God's faithfulness in the Bible comes out of its saddest book, spoken over a graveyard rather than a garden. The hope is chosen deliberately, by recalling something true instead of waiting for something to improve. When my circumstances give me nothing, what have I trained myself to call to mind, that stays true whether or not the morning looks any different?

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