The Chosen Key Word in this Chapter is “Anger” it comes from the Hebrew Word “aph” which means “anger, nostril.”
Jeremiah describes God’s own hand in Jerusalem’s devastating judgment with sobering detail. Welcome to Bible Life Basics Chapter Reviews, I am Chris and this is Lamentations 2.
Jeremiah laments how the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in His anger, and cast down from heaven to the earth the beauty of Israel, and remembered not His footstool in the day of His “anger,” “aph” in Hebrew, describing how the Lord has swallowed up all the habitations of Jacob, and has not pitied, He has thrown down in His wrath the strongholds of the daughter of Judah, He has brought them down to the ground, He has polluted the kingdom and its princes. Jeremiah describes how the Lord has been as an enemy, He has swallowed up Israel, He has swallowed up all her palaces, He has destroyed His strongholds, and has increased in the daughter of Judah mourning and lamentation, He has violently taken away His tabernacle, as if it were of a garden, He has destroyed His places of the assembly, the Lord has caused the solemn feasts and sabbaths to be forgotten in Zion, and has despised in the indignation of His anger the king and the priest, describing how the elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence, they have cast up dust upon their heads, they have girded themselves with sackcloth. Jeremiah describes his own eyes failing with tears, his bowels being troubled, his liver being poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of his people, because the children and the sucklings faint in the streets of the city, urging her heart to cry to the Lord, urging the wall of the daughter of Zion to let tears run down like a river day and night, giving herself no rest, closing with a striking accusation against the false prophets, who have seen vain and foolish things for her, and have not discovered her iniquity, to turn away her captivity, but have seen for her false burdens and causes of banishment, this chapter’s unflinching honesty about God’s own direct role in this devastating judgment refusing to soften or minimize its genuine, sobering severity.
This chapter’s unflinching acknowledgment that the Lord Himself acted as an enemy against His own city refuses to soften judgment’s genuine severity or attribute it merely to impersonal circumstance or enemy action alone. Jeremiah’s own physical anguish, his eyes failing with tears and his heart poured out, reveals that genuine lament requires the whole person, body and spirit together, fully engaged in honest grief.
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