EXEGETICAL NOTES.—
(א) Lamentations 3:1. The author writes as if his own person was the object on which all the troubles had been inflicted. I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. The repression of the name of the wielder of the rod is remarkable in view of its reiteration in Chapter 2. That here it was of set purpose seems proved by the persistent omission till Lamentations 3:18, and is probably to be accounted for by the poet’s wish to indicate a sort of climax to a soul-struggle in which he could not take the name of Jehovah till all appeared lost. The rod signifies the means by which the affliction was produced, and is illustrated by the phrase, The Assyrian is the rod of mine anger (Isaiah 10:5).
Lamentations 3:2. The unnamed had accumulated affliction. He has led and caused me to walk in darkness and not in light, in perplexity as well as misery.
Lamentations 3:3. And it was continuously carried on. Surely against me he turns his hand again and again all the day.
HOMILETICS
THE MAN OF AFFLICTION
It is given to some men to catch and idealise the poetic instinct of a nation, to gather to a focus the ideas that have been dimly floating in the national mind, and, in words of burning passion, to express what all have been vaguely feeling, but none have been able hitherto to clothe in fitting speech. Another class of men represent the chivalric and military characteristics of a nation; another the judicial and ruling types. Jeremiah, distinguished as poet, prophet, and patriot, acquired immortal distinction in the annals of the Hebrew nation as the Man of Sorrow. In him the unparalleled sufferings of Judea seemed concentrated and individualised. His mournful dirge, sung in the minor key, gave voice, with lavish variety of imagery and felicity of phrase, to the overwhelming anguish of a distracted and ruined people. In this sublime elegy the poet-prophet touches the deepest woe of the sufferer in all ages, and provides it with adequate expression. Ewald justly remarks: “Very probably the prophet draws much of what he says from his own experience, but the whole that he sets forth is more than his own personality; it is the type and pattern of every individual. And here, therefore, is the summit and turning-point of the whole Book of Lamentations.” When the soul finds words in which to breathe out its sorrow, the oppression is already relieved. The hope of deliverance begins to dawn. Observe in this paragraph—
I. That the man of affliction regards his sufferings as the result of the Divine anger. “I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of His wrath” (Lamentations 3:1). It is the rod of His anger to chastise and correct, not the sword to utterly destroy. Even in the manifestation of His wrath God seeks to restore the sinner. The last stroke of His anger must be painful, alarming, crushing; the more so that it is felt to be so just. Behind the dark frown of the Almighty the light of mercy shines. “He doth not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men.” The most hopeful feature of affliction is the moment when the sufferer recognises the hand of God in it; when he acknowledges it as the fruit of personal sin. Then it is that wrath gives place to mercy: punishment is disarmed by pardon. Sin is antagonism to God, and merits nothing but wrath. A genuine repentance is the open door of escape.
II. That the man of affliction is plunged into bewildering gloom. “He hath led me and brought me into darkness, but not into light” (Lamentations 3:2). The darkness of suffering had a realistic meaning for Jeremiah, as he remembered the miseries of his incarceration in the dungeon (Jeremiah 37:15-16; Jeremiah 38:6; Jeremiah 38:10-13). But the language is a metaphorical description of afflictions in general, and is frequently employed in Scripture. In the most graphic and explicit terms the prophet foretold the experience he here describes (Jeremiah 13:15-16). Suffering is a dark enigma that baffles the wisest to solve. It is an aggravation of suffering when it has to be endured in darkness. We have heard of a strong man who had braved all kinds of dangers by land and sea, who was absolutely afraid of being alone in the dark: he had no fear of anything he could see, but was in mortal dread of the unseen. Darkness overawes the most volatile. A party of courtiers of Louis XV. were once gathered round Cassini to witness an eclipse from the terrace of the Paris observatory, and were laughing at the populace, whose cries were heard as the light began to fade, when, as the unnatural gloom came quickly on, silence fell on them too, the panic-terror striking through their laughter. There is nothing so distressing, so oppressive, so bewildering, so hopeless to contend with, as darkness.
III. That the man of affliction is smitten with repeated strokes of the Divine Hand. “Surely against me is He turned; He turneth His hand against me all the day” (Lamentations 3:3). It is not one stroke of affliction, but many, and these frequently repeated. Trouble never comes alone; it is often attended with a crowd of ills. Before we can recover from one calamity we are stricken with another. It may be difficult to find the kind heart behind the strong hand; but it is there. Not one blow more than is necessary will be permitted to fall. The most prolonged and reiterated suffering will cease as soon as its purpose is answered. While it continues there should be prayerful searchings of heart.
LESSONS.—
1. The fact of suffering testifies to the fact of sin.
2. Much of our suffering occasioned by witnessing the sufferings of others.
3. Suffering is a blessing when it brings us nearer to God.
GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES
Lamentations 3:1. Ecce homo. I. Consider the generality of affliction in the nature thereof. We met all generally in the first treason against ourselves in Adam’s rebellion; and we met all, too, in the second treason—the treason against Jesus Christ. All our sins were upon His shoulders. All the evils and mischiefs of life come for the most part from this—that we think to enjoy those things which God hath given us only to use. III. Consider affliction as bearing on man. “I am the man that hath seen affliction.” It was that man that is denoted and signified in that name that hath lain under affliction, and therefore no kind of man was likely to escape. Man carries the spawn and seed and eggs of affliction in his own flesh, and his own thoughts make haste to hatch them and bring them up. We make all our worms snakes, all our snakes vipers, all our vipers dragons by our murmuring. III. Consider affliction in its special application to one man. That man the prophet Jeremiah, one of the best of men. As he was submitted to these extraordinary afflictions, we see that no man is so necessary to God as that God cannot come to His ends without that man. God can lack and leave out any man in His service. The best of our wages is adversity, because that gives us a true fast, and a right value of our prosperity. Jeremy had it; the best of his rank must. No man is excused of subsequent afflictions by precedent, nor of falling into more by having borne some already. Our afflictions are as beggars; they tell others, and send more after them. When the hand of God was upon Jeremiah he declared God’s handwriting; not only to his own conscience by acknowledging that all these afflictions were for his own sins, but by acknowledging to the world that God had laid such and such afflictions upon him. St. Ambrose, in a journey from Milan to Rome, passed some time one evening with his host, who bragged he had never had any cross in his life. Ambrose at once removed to another house, protesting that either the man was very unthankful to God that would not take knowledge of His corrections, or that God’s measure was by this time full, and would surely, soundly, and suddenly pour down all together. IV. Consider the weight and vehemence of afflictions.
1. They are aggravated in that they are the Lord’s. They are inevitable; they cannot be avoided; they are just, and cannot be pleaded against; nor can we ease ourselves with any imagination of our innocency, as though they were undeserved.
2. They are in His rod. Our murmuring makes a rod a staff, and a staff a sword, and that which God presented for physic, poison.
3. They are inflicted by the rod of His wrath. Though there be properly no anger in God, yet God is said to do a thing in anger when He does it so as an angry man would do it. It is the highest extent of affliction that we take God to be angrier than He is. V. Consider the comforts we have in afflictions. “I am the man that hath seen affliction.”
1. That we see our afflictions, we understand, consider them. We see that affliction comes from God, and that it is sent that we may see and taste the goodness of God.
2. That, though afflicted, we still retain our manhood. God may mend thee in marring thee; He may build thee up in dejecting thee; He may infuse another manhood into thee, so that thou canst say, “I am that Christian man; I am the man that cannot despair since Christ is the remedy.”
3. That the rod of God’s wrath is also the rod of His comfort and strength (Micah 7:14; Psalms 45:6; Psalms 23:4).—Donne.
—God and human suffering:
1. Often brought into strange relationship.
2. Suffering is a significant revelation of how God views human sin.
3. Suffering may draw man nearer to, or drive him farther from, God.
Lamentations 3:2-3. The mystery of suffering. I. Impossible to solve by human speculations. “Into darkness, but not into light.” II. Increased by the difficulty of accounting for the part God takes in it. “He hath led me and brought me into darkness, but not into light” (Lamentations 3:2). III. Intensified by the apparent persistency of the Divine severity. “Surely against me is He turned; He turneth His hand against me all the day” (Lamentations 3:3).
ILLUSTRATIONS.—God’s anger man’s heaviest affliction. God’s anger exerts itself by embittering afflictions Every affliction is of itself a grievance, and a breach made upon our happiness; but there is sometimes a secret energy that so edges and quickens its afflictive operation that a blow levelled at the body shall enter into the very soul. What is the reason that David is sometimes so courageous that “though he walks through the valley of the shadow of death, he fears no evil;” and, at another time, God no sooner “hides His face, but he is troubled”? What is the cause that a man sometimes breaks through a greater calamity, and at another time the same person fails and desponds under a loss of the same nature? Whence can this be, but that God infuses some more grains of His wrath into the one than into the other?—South.
—The Divine anger. Anger is the whetstone of strength; in an equality of other terms, it will make a man prevail. Nothing is able to stand before a fire which is once enraged; so is it when the fire of the Lord’s revenge breaks forth upon the enemies of His Son. Add hereunto our disposition and preparedness for the wrath of God. Far easier is it to make a print in wax than in an adamant; to kindle a fire in dry stubble than in green wood. Wicked men have fitted themselves for wrath, and are procurers and artificers of their own destruction.—Bishop Reynolds.
Darkness and danger. Sailing once along a coast where a friend had suffered shipwreck, the scene which recalled his danger filled us with no fear; because, while his ship, on the night she ran ashore, was cutting her way through the densest fog, we were ploughing the waters of a silver sea, where noble headlands, pillared cliffs, scattered islands, and surf-beaten reefs stood bathed in the brightest moonshine. There was no danger just because there was no darkness.—Guthrie.
Darkness precedes light. The Lord ofttimes makes everything as dark as it can become, just that presently the light may shine more brilliantly. Ishmael faints before Hagar finds the well. Joseph is left in prison and oblivion before being raised to dignity. The Assyrian host surrounds Jerusalem ere they are smitten by the angel. Jeremiah sinks into the pit before he is placed on a rock. Violent persecution of the Christians preceded the triumph of the Gospel. Mediæval darkness preceded the dawn of the Reformation.—Oosterzee.
Affliction ripens character. There is a certain mellowness which affliction sheds upon the character, a softening that it effects of all the rougher and more repulsive asperities of our nature, a delicacy of temperament into which it often melts and refines the most ungainly spirit. It is not the pride of aspiring talent that we carry to heaven with us; it is not the lustre of a superiority which dazzles and commands that we bear with us there. It is not the eminence of any public distinction or the fame of lofty and successful enterprise; and should these give undue confidence to man or throw an aspect of conscious and complacent energy over him, he wears not yet the complexion of Paradise; and should God select him as His own, He will send some special affliction that may chasten him out of all which is uncongenial with the place of blessedness, and at length reduce him to its unmingled love and its adoring humility. The character is purified by the simple process of passing through the fire. “And when He has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”—Chalmers.
Suffering a mystery. As the Egyptian who carried something wound up in his napkin answered him who demanded what it was, that he covered it to the end that no man should see it; so likewise must we learn that if there be anything hidden and laid up in the works and dealings of God, it is of purpose kept from us, to the end that we should not be too curious to inquire after it; that it is far better to be utterly ignorant herein than to have all the knowledge thereof that may be.—Cawdray.