GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LAMENTATIONS 2:1
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We are going to continue with Lamentations and our mediation on the three crosses to carry us from now into the season of Lent.
Chapter two is another complete acrostic poem which follows the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The focus of the chapter is the Lord’s anger with his people. Beginning with a general description of God’s wrath (which lends itself perfectly to a contemplation of the cross of Christ), there will be a few verses about the famine in Judah at the time of the exile (2:10-12), a true prophecy followed by a condemnation of false prophecy (2:13, 14-17), and a prayer of guilt and repentance (4:18-22).
2:1 How the Lord in his anger
has set the Daughter of Zion under a cloud!
He has hurled down the splendor of Israel
from heaven to earth.
He has not remembered his footstool
in the day of his anger.
Just as at the beginning of chapter 1, the prophet cries out, “How!” It is not all that far in English from the word “howl,” and we can almost think of it that way here in Lamentations. It is the Hebrew title of the book, and it is the outcry or howl of the author, who is so very deeply feeling the weight of what we will call the first cross, which here is the cross of the people of Judah in their exile to Babylon. They were the darling of the God of Israel, the “Daughter of Zion,” the treasured child of God. But this is no longer their status. Their sin brought about a change of status as visible and obvious as that of the serpent in the garden. The serpent, used by Satan to tempt Eve, was once “more crafty and clever than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made.” Its status was among the wild animals, not the crawling things (Genesis 3:1; Moses only classifies animals into five categories in Genesis: fliers, swimmers, wild animals, domestic animals, and crawling things). But when God punished man for Adam and Eve’s sin, he also changed the status of the serpent forever: No longer was the serpent the crafty wild thing. It was now “cursed above (we would say below) all the livestock and the wild animals” (Genesis 3:14). Its status illustrated the changed status of man, from having the sinless image of God (Genesis 1:27) but now having the sinful nature of sinful parents, handed down from generation to generation (Genesis 5:3). And now the dear, darling Daughter of Zion was no longer beloved and cherished, but crushed and banished; condemned for her sinfulness.
Three actions of the Lord are presented, each one a manifestation of his wrath over sin. Notice that “the Lord” is not the familiar gospel name, LORD, which usually reminds us of his grace and faithful love. Here it is adonai, “lord, master,” simply a reminder of his authority and especially here his authority to punish sin.
First, the Lord has set a cloud over the people. This is the only time the word ’ob, “cover with a cloud,” occurs in the Bible. The Latin Vulgate has obtexit caligine, “to cover with darkness (or fog).” Since the verb is spoken here in the causative hifil stem, we know that the Lord God is the one who has caused this to happen; it is not an accident or a coincidence– the grammar of Scripture matters. What is this cloud? It cannot be the cloud associated with his glory (Exodus 13:21; Job 40:6), but is rather the cloud of his wrath, the obscuring cloud that blocks out his blessings and leaves wretched and guilty sinners cold and dark.
Second, the Lord has thrown the splendor of Israel out of heaven. This was not a splendor that was earned, but had been a gift. “The king rejoices,” David wrote, “in your strength. You bestowed on him splendor and majesty” (Psalm 21:1,5). God himself is the splendor or glory of his people (Psalm 89:17) rather than the kind of splendor that the pagans have (Esther 1:4). But he had pitched such splendor or glory overboard like a rotten fish, like so much seaweed that got tangled in the net. The people in their sinfulness defiled the splendor of the Lord their God, and so he removed it from them to show them the results of sin. Clothed with Christ? Now stripped of Christ. Moses foretold all of this, when God showed him what was coming, when Judah would be stripped bare of the gifts God has once given: “Because you did not serve the LORD your God joyfully and gladly in the time of prosperity, therefore in hunger and thirst, in nakedness and dire poverty, you will serve the enemies the LORD sends against you. He will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you” (Deuteronomy 28:47-48).
Third, the Lord has set the memory of his beloved footstool out of his mind. We might ask, what is this footstool? And how can God remove anything from his memory? And the Scriptures answer both of these questions:
There are three footstools for God that the Scriptures describe. The first is the ark of the covenant. David said, “I had it in my heart to build a house as a place of rest for the ark of the covenant of the LORD, for the footstool of our God, and I made plans to build it” (1 Chronicles 28:2). This is the footstool of Psalm 99:5 and Psalm 132:7. But in Isaiah 66:1, the LORD says, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool” (also in Acts 7:49). Jesus refers to this when he says, “Do not swear at all, either by heaven, because it is God’s throne, or by the earth, because it is his footstool” (Matthew 5:34-35), that is, the second footstool. But there are also places where God says to his Son, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Psalm 110:1; also see Luke 20:42-43; Acts 2:34-35; and Hebrews 1:13 and 10:13). This third footstool is the place where one rests one’s feet over one’s defeated enemies: Given to Christ. It means that he has authority over his conquered enemies, and so there we are shown the devil, and the grave, and temptations, and the sinful nature of man, all stuffed like deer heads and prized game fish and set in a pile under the Lord’s almighty dominion. But, warns Luther, “It is a great misery when the devil does not sit but stands at someone’s right hand. For then God makes you the footstool of your enemies” (LW 11:361).
It is the same idea of dominion that shows the earth to be his footstool– but not in the sense of being conquered, but simply because it is his holy creation. The plants and birds and rocks and things that make up the created world are his to command, and they happily obey him, like the fish with the coin that bit at Peter’s hook (Matthew 17:27), and like the elements of nature that always listen to his voice (Mark 4:41).
But since God does not forget his creation, and has no reason to forget about his conquered enemies that are now silent under his feet, we must return to the idea of the ark of the covenant being his holy footstool. This must be what he has chosen not to remember in the day of his anger. For the ark stands for nothing else than the repentance of God’s people and of atonement that covers over all their sins: “The annual atonement must be made with the blood of the atoning sin offering for the generations to come. It is most holy to the LORD” (Exodus 30:10). This is what pointed ahead most clearly to the coming of Christ and the atonement of the cross.
How could God ever forget such a thing? Who could ever live under the curse of God forgetting to forgive? But he does not forget. He only recognizes that there are those people who choose to forget him, and then they are no longer covered by the atonement of Christ, which was only prefigured by the ark in the tabernacle. And when people sinfully rebel and turn away from God, and no longer trust in him for their forgiveness, they have set themselves outside his forgiveness, and they have sinned against the Holy Spirit. For them there is no more forgiveness– and this is what it is for God no longer to remember them.
This is a burden too terrible to consider! And this shows us the purpose of the law in the Word of God: It shows us God’s will, and therefore it shows sinful man our sins. Without Christ, we are wretched and condemned sinners. But that is not where the Scriptures end. For we also know that we have a true Savior from our sin, and while Judah was sent into exile to consider these things, we have been raised from spiritual death to spiritual life through the gospel. And we know and believe what Paul the Apostle teaches: “We are justified (declared not guilty of sin) freely by God’s grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood” (Romans 3:24-25).
There is more to say about this, and more good news for sinners that comes to us through Christ alone, and comes to everyone who puts their faith in him. But there is room and time to say more, for these Lamentations are far from over. Rejoice in Jesus your Savior and Rescuer. He has delivered you, brought you out from under the cloud of God’s wrath, lifted you back to heaven from earth, and he will not forget the footstool of atonement, which truly, firmly and eternally is the cross of our Lord Jesus.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
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Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota
God’s Word for You – Lamentations 2:1 Hurled, forgotten, and under a cloud