Let Us Lift Up Our Heart on Our Palms: A Reflection on Lamentations 3

Great is thy faithfulness.
Great is thy faithfulness.
Morning by morning,
New mercies I see.

Those are some of the most well-known Christian hymn lyrics ever composed. They were inspired by a couple of verses in chapter 3 of the Biblical book titled Lamentations. As great as that old hymn is (I and many others I know would list as a favorite), it falls far short of conveying the depth and richness of the text that inspired it. As I was reading these Scriptures recently, I was absolutely stunned by the layers and undulations of thoughts, emotions, questions, and beliefs that the author manages to condense into fairly terse language.

For those unfamiliar, the only essential context to understand, as an entry point to Lamentations, is this: it is believed to have been written in the immediate aftermath of the total destruction of Jerusalem in 586 B.C., and the author was an Israelite who lived in the city. Poetry is the medium through which the author expresses his lament, as well as his unambiguous belief that the destruction is a result of God’s judgment. The raw emotion lends credence to the feeling that the wounds were fresh at the time of composition.

Some of the book’s poignancy is apported through the way the poet plays with point of view. In the first few chapters, he mostly speaks in 3rd person:

“How she sits alone,
the city once great with people.
She has become like a widow.
Great among nations,
mistress among provinces,
reduced to forced labor.” (1:1, trans. by Robert Alter)

For roughly the latter half of chapter one however, the poet shifts to 1st person. In these particular verses, it is clear that the poet has taken on the voice of the personified city. He is not, at this point, referring to himself. This is the plainest way to understand the meaning of something like v. 15 — “The Master has spurned / all my champions in my midst, / has proclaimed an appointed time against me / to break my young men.” But even though semantically the 1st person and 3rd person passages are describing the same events and phenomena, the shift to 1st person has the effect of layering on additional emotional heft. We are enabled to hear the voice of Jerusalem herself, crying out in her anguish and bereavement.

Furthermore, though the poet is not referring to himself, he is certainly in some ways identifying with the city. After all, the “city,” in the sense that it is meant here, is not the material infrastructure. It is the people. The people have sinned, and it is the people who are the objects of God’s judgment. And as one of those people, the author takes personal ownership of both the crimes and the punishments. As we will see in later verses, he likely has the additional motivation of wanting his readers to join him in his lamentation and repentance.

Now, all of that being said, notice what happens next. Chapter 2 reverts back to 3rd person for the most part, and then chapter 3 begins with a sharp and harrowing turn:

“I am the man who has seen affliction
by the rod of His wrath.
Me He drove off, led away —
darkness and no light!” (3:1–2)

Suddenly, we are not in Jerusalem anymore. Or I should say, not merely in Jerusalem. We are now in the very heart of one its denizens. The poet makes this relocation as obvious as can be by referring to himself in masculine terms. The personified city is always depicted as feminine, so the writer is ensuring that we are aware of the transition by referring to himself now as a man.

We soon see that the poet has reserved some of his starkest images of God’s punitive measures for this most personal portion of the poem. The overriding image of the first two chapters is that of God handing Judah over to her foes (i. e. the enemy nations of Israel). It is they who do most of the harm, even though God deliberately allows it. Chapter 3, however, depicts God himself directly harming the author:

“Just to me He comes back,
Turns his hand against me all day.
He wasted my flesh and my skin.
He shattered my bones.
He built up against me, encompassed me
with misery and suffering.
He made me dwell in darkness
like those long dead.
He walled me in, I could not go out,
piled heavy bronze fetters upon me.
Even though I cried out and shouted,
he blocked my prayer.
He walled in my way with hewn stone,
He twisted my paths.
A lurking bear He was to me,
a lion in hiding.
My way He led astray and He ripped me apart,
He made me desolate.
He bent his bow
and stood me up as a target for the arrow.
He drove into my innards
the shafts of His quiver.” (3:3–13)

I’ll be honest: words like these impinge upon my theology. I prefer not to think of God as a lurking bear, or using my body for target practice. I don’t know what else to say about that. By merely expressing my preference to not think of God in this way, some might accuse me of having a too-narrow, grandfather-in-the-sky kind of conception of him. They might remind me that we don’t get to tell God who he is or who we think he should be. Fair enough. But it is also fair to ask the question, “Are we, the readers, being encouraged to see and understand God in these terms?” In other words, is the poet’s intent here to teach us that part of God’s character includes this sort of targeted and relentless torture of his own people?

I did promise that this chapter of Lamentations is a whole journey unto itself, and so maybe we should continue upon it before we settle on answers to our questions. But before we do that, I want to mention that this language is quite similar to language found in the book of Job. For one example:

“The arrows of the Almighty are in me,
my spirit drinks in their poison;
God’s terrors are marshaled against me.” (Job 6:4)

In this instance, we do in fact know that God himself, despite Job’s accusations, did not bring about Job’s suffering directly. God allowed Satan to target Job. And even though there is a sense in which God, in his sovereignty, ultimately takes ownership of what he allows and doesn’t allow, the distinction between what God does directly and what he allows is worth making. My point being, we have good reason to say that the fact that the Lamentations poet, in his anguish, depicts God as a lurking bear and a ruthless tormentor, does not necessarily mean that we are being encouraged to see God in this way.

As we continue on in Lamentations, the picture brightens a bit. One of the most frustratingly common errors I perceive — from both Christians and skeptics alike, when reading the Bible — is a frequent assumption that the writer did not anticipate our questions. Because of the gulf in time and space between ourselves and the original composition of the text, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that we in modern times did not invent doubt. Maybe we assume that anyone who composed a text that was God-inspired and became part of Holy Scripture must have had a perfect and unquestioning faith, and therefore could not have possibly have had the same questions in mind when they wrote it as I have in my head while reading it 2500 years later. So I truly do love the instances where the internal struggles of the writer bleed directly onto the page, and that illusion is dispelled.

After all of this imagery of darkness, bears, piercing shafts, and poison, there is a sonnet-like pivot in verse 21: “Thus I answer to my heart, / therefore yet I hope:” So here the poet is setting up the next passage by establishing that the preceding verses are not a full picture in and of themselves. They attempt, with dolorous honesty, to describe the suffering experienced by the Israelites during and after the destruction of Jerusalem. They attribute the affliction to God because, well, what other choice is there? It’s God’s city, and God’s people. It, and they, exist because of a specific plan that God set into motion centuries before, and God claims responsibility for both the blessings and the curses. But the poet is getting reading to tell us the reason he yet has hope, and this reason he frames as his own answer to the pain in his own heart. His heart has expressed the material and emotional trauma that appears to have been inflicted on him by God, and now he prepares to say why that picture is incomplete.

Then he exclaims:

“The Lord’s kindness has not ended,
for His mercies are not exhausted.
They are renewed every morning.
Great is Your faithfulness.
“My portion is the Lord,” I said.
therefore I yet hope for Him.
Good is the Lord for those who look to Him,
for the person who seeks Him out.
Good that he hopes in silence
for rescue from the Lord.
Good is it for a man that he bear
a yoke in his youth.” (3:22–27)

In faith, he assures his aching soul that kindness and mercy are the true and enduring substance of God’s nature. The poet may not fully understand every affliction; he may not know how long they will endure; he may not know how he can withstand it, but he falls back on one vital bit of theology: he knows that God’s kindness and mercy are the beginning and end of the story. Faith and reason both console him with the knowledge that because the story is God’s, suffering must be a temporary allowance.

I used the word “allowance” there deliberately, to point us back to the question of whether God is truly the direct source of the torments, or if he is merely permitting evil forces to do them. We have the aforementioned example of Job to teach us that it is indeed possible for a Scriptural author, in a sort of emotional lashing out, to ascribe these sorts of torments directly to God, while we as the reader know that they are being allowed by God but executed by Satan. Is there any indication that such is the case here in Lamentations? Maybe. Verses 33–36 give us something worth meditating on. In the Robert Alter translation that I’ve been quoting, they read:

“For He does not afflict on purpose
and aggrieve the sons of men
to crush beneath His feet
all the prisoners of the earth,
to sidetrack the case of a man
before the presence of the Most High,
to deflect a person in his plea —
the Master would not brook this.”

Before digging into the meaning of this, some potential translation issues need to be addressed. Honestly, as much as I love the Robert Alter translations, the phrase “on purpose” here is questionable. I say this not based any expertise on ancient Hebrew that I have (I have none); I say it based on Alter’s own footnote. He says that the “literal sense is, ‘He does not afflict from His heart.’” If that is the literal translation of the words, then “on purpose” may cause unnecessary confusion in a lot of readers. The opposite of “on purpose” is accidental, and I don’t think the text is trying to convey that God’s punishments come by accident. Other translations use the word “willingly,” and some others construe it to say “He does not enjoy” afflicting people. Either of these seem preferable to “on purpose.”

With any of these translations however, it’s safe to say that the poem is conveying that God has no desire for people to suffer. Suffering only has value insofar as it ameliorates our wickedness, and consequently prevents greater suffering that would otherwise be imminent. If God truly “does not afflict from His heart,” I take that to mean that affliction is not part of his most fundamental nature. I recognize that saying this does not provide a clear answer about the degree to which God is directly executing the afflicting actions, but it does raise an important point about our understanding of God’s wrath and vengeance. The way some Christian preachers and teachers have spoken about this subject, you would almost get the impression that God has this sort of fundamental urge/need to punish evil. They seem to say, in a twist on a famous Voltaire quip, “If evil didn’t exist, God would have to invent it.” Just like there is no Batman without the Joker, there is thought to be no God without evil. But this is false. God takes no pleasure in punishment. It’s a concession, and he would much prefer there to be no evil for him to punish. We have to believe that if there were no evil for God to punish, there is no essential part of his nature that would be missing in such a state. We should bear this in mind any time a Biblical author ascribes tormenting behaviors to God, just as the Lamentations writer did in the midst of deepest sorrow and contrition.

When we have done wrong, it’s important to recognize in humility that consequences are warranted, and that ultimately those consequences are from the hand of God. There is a sense in Scripture in which God is considered to be the sovereign author of not only that which he does directly, but also that which he chooses not to prevent:

Who can speak and it comes about
if the Master has not decreed it?
From the Most High’s mouth shall not issue
the evil and the good?
Of what shall a living person complain,
a man for his offenses? (vv. 37–39)

The author continues here to confront difficult truths and ask difficult questions. He even warns against finding answers too quickly and easily (see vv.28–30). The easy thing to do would be to fume and fulminate, and curse the agents of Babylon (more on that later). I’m sure there was plenty of expression being given to dreams of revenge in Judah at this time, maybe even some anger being directed at God for allowing this to happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if the author himself wrestled with such feelings before being inspired to write his poem. But his knowledge of the Lord, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit, is ultimately what prods him towards looking inward. As he gives us a window into his own struggling and grappling towards a true and prophetic understanding of what has befallen Jerusalem, we can see him leaning back on certain truths about God that he asserts with confidence:

1. God is just.
2. God’s discipline is for a moment, but his kindness and mercy are forever.
3. God takes a sovereign’s responsibility for everything, both good and bad.

These truths are bumper rails that keep him from running away from God or becoming confrontational. They train his instinct to, instead, run towards God, and to reflect inwardly. As he does so, there is another shift in point of view, this time to first person plural. He now seeks to take the hard-wrought perspective he has gained from all his searching and bring the rest of his people into it: “Let us seek out and plumb our ways / that we come back to the Lord” (v. 40). Then — in an image incredibly dense with symbols of worship, submission, vulnerability, and eager contrition — he exhorts, “Let us lift up our heart on our palms / to God in the heavens.” This is truly the most powerful and penetrating depiction of what we do when we lift our hands to God, isn’t it? We say, “Here is me and all of me, with my inmost being on full display, impurities and all. Take it. Examine it. Crush it and remold it if you must. Please, do anything but leave it alone.”

Then, and only then, does the poet’s attention turn in full focus towards Israel’s enemies. He has done the difficult work of grieving and of removing the log from his own eye. He will now give expression to a desire that God’s judgment will fall upon the adversaries. In doing, he is implicitly acknowledging that even though the destruction of Jerusalem was an outworking of God’s judgment, the human agents who brought it about are culpable. They were not mere automatons executing a divine program. God frequently accomplishes his objectives through the freely chosen and morally accountable choices of human beings.

It may be pertinent to point out that this portion of the poem reads like something of an afterthought. The theme of vengeance on the destroyers will not be returned to (to any significant length) for the rest of the book. The language is simple and straightforward, and conspicuously lacking in stark imagery, especially in contrast with what precedes and follows it. One gets the feeling that the poet was tempering himself. Or perhaps more accurately, allowing himself to be tempered by God. Vengeance is the Lord’s — a principle that the poet is now intimately familiar with. He vents it out briefly, then lets it go.

Lamentations may very well be the height of Israel’s grappling to understand its relation to the God who formed them and called them to his special purpose. Even within this one chapter, we are taken deep into one prophet’s journey, to see a microcosm of the process by which God has been using political and national striving throughout history for the purpose of pointing us towards the Lordship he seeks to take up in every human heart. The poet is a model for us, as he unreservedly laments the consequence of sin within his nation and city; he humbly takes ownership of his own sin; he exhorts his fellow man to join him in this simultaneously communal and personal contrition; and at every turn, he extols mercy and kindness as the most supreme truths about God and how he relates to us.

God will use every just means to establish Lordship in our hearts, but he will not take it by force. So we must lift up our hearts in our palms, in full trust of his mercy and great faithfulness.