The Anatomy of Abandonment Text: Lamentations 1:17
Introduction: The Terrible Logic of Covenant Curses
We live in a sentimental age, an age that has trained itself to be allergic to the sharp edges of Scripture. We prefer a God who is a celestial therapist, a divine affirmer, one who would never, ever cause grief. But the God of the Bible is the sovereign Lord of history, and He is a covenant-keeping God. And a covenant has two sides. It has blessings for fidelity and it has curses for infidelity. What we are reading in Lamentations is not a random tragedy. It is not an unfortunate geopolitical event. It is the careful, deliberate, and just execution of covenant lawsuits, threatened centuries before in the book of Deuteronomy.
God had warned His people that if they turned away from Him to chase after the mud-puddle gods of the nations, He would turn the nations on them. He promised that He would make them a horror and a byword. He promised He would hide His face from them. We are uncomfortable with this because we want to believe that God's love is an indiscriminate, syrupy fog that covers all actions equally. But biblical love is a holy love, a jealous love. It is the love of a husband for his wife, and when that wife plays the harlot, the husband's love demands a response. That response is judgment, and that judgment is what we see here in excruciating detail. It is a judgment designed to bring the wayward bride to her senses.
This verse, Lamentations 1:17, is a concise and brutal summary of covenantal abandonment. It is a snapshot of utter desolation. We see a posture of desperate appeal, a reality of absolute isolation, a reason rooted in divine justice, and a result of repulsive defilement. To understand this verse is to understand the gravity of our sin and the terrifying holiness of our God. And it is only when we understand that gravity and that terror that we can begin to comprehend the breathtaking wonder of the cross, where God in Christ entered into this very abandonment for us.
The Text
Zion stretches out her hands;
There is no one to comfort her;
Yahweh has commanded concerning Jacob
That the ones round about him should be his adversaries;
Jerusalem has become an impure thing among them.
(Lamentations 1:17 LSB)
Desperate Posture, Deafening Silence
We begin with the image of Zion's plea and the universe's reply.
"Zion stretches out her hands; There is no one to comfort her..."
Zion, the city of God, the place where His name dwelt, is personified here as a woman in ultimate distress. She is stretching out her hands. This is not a gesture of welcome or praise. It is the universal sign of desperate appeal. It is the posture of a drowning man reaching for a rope, a beggar pleading for a crust of bread, a victim with hands up before an assailant. She is crying for help, for aid, for rescue. Her hands are empty, and she is flailing in the abyss of her own destruction.
And what is the response to this desperate plea? Nothing. Absolute silence. "There is no one to comfort her." Her former allies have betrayed her. Her false gods are impotent blocks of wood and stone. But the most terrible aspect of this silence is that it is God's silence. He who is the God of all comfort has withdrawn His comfort. This is the curse of a hidden face. God had warned them this would happen: "And I will surely hide My face in that day because of all the evil which they have done" (Deut. 31:18). This is not divine indifference; it is divine judgment. God is actively withholding comfort. This is a foundational aspect of Hell itself, to be utterly cut off from the source of all goodness, all light, and all comfort.
This is the cry that Jesus would echo from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" He entered into this ultimate desolation, this place of no comfort, so that we who trust in Him would never have to. He drank the cup of divine abandonment to the dregs so that it might pass from us. When we face our own dark nights of the soul, we may feel that there is no one to comfort us, but the promise of the gospel is that He is there, having already absorbed the very worst of that silence on our behalf.
The Sovereign Decree of Judgment
The next clause gives us the ultimate reason for this state of affairs. It was not an accident. It was a command.
"...Yahweh has commanded concerning Jacob that the ones round about him should be his adversaries;"
This is one of those verses that modern evangelicals, with their man-centered theologies, simply do not know what to do with. Notice the verb: Yahweh has commanded. The Babylonians were not freelancers. The Edomites were not acting on their own initiative. They were acting under orders. God is not wringing His hands in heaven, surprised by the aggression of Nebuchadnezzar. He is the one who signed the orders. He is the one who commanded the invasion. The adversaries surrounding Jacob, the covenant people, are there because God put them there. They are the rod of His anger (Isaiah 10:5).
This is the doctrine of God's absolute sovereignty. God is not the author of sin, but He is the sovereign ruler over it. He can and does use the sinful intentions of wicked men to accomplish His own righteous purposes. The Babylonians intended plunder and slaughter for their own glory; God intended righteous chastisement for His. Their action was sin; His purpose was justice. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery out of wicked envy; God sent him ahead to save a nation. The Jews and Romans crucified Jesus with lawless hands; God was accomplishing the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of His will to save the world.
If we do not grasp this, we are left with a universe where God is not truly in control, a universe where tragedy is meaningless. But the Bible teaches us that even in the most horrific judgments, God is on the throne, working all things according to the counsel of His will. This is a hard comfort, but it is a genuine one. It means that our suffering is not pointless. For the unrepentant, it is the just execution of a sentence. For the believer, it is the loving, though painful, discipline of a Father. The adversaries are on a leash, and the hand holding that leash is God's.
The Repulsive Result
The final clause describes the ultimate state of Jerusalem in the eyes of the nations, a state that reflects her spiritual reality.
"...Jerusalem has become an impure thing among them."
The Hebrew word here is niddah. It refers to menstrual impurity, a thing set apart as unclean, something to be avoided. Jerusalem, the Holy City, had become a filthy rag. She who was supposed to be a light to the nations, a city on a hill drawing all men to the worship of the true God, had become an object of revulsion and disgust. The nations look at her not with awe, but with contempt. She is ceremonially and morally defiled.
This is the end-game of sin. Sin promises freedom and sophistication and pleasure. It delivers bondage and degradation and filth. Jerusalem had chased after the idols of the nations, and in doing so, she became just like them, only worse. She had more light, and so her darkness was greater. She had prostituted herself, and now she was cast out into the street, covered in her own filth, an object of scorn to the very lovers she had pursued.
This is a picture of every man or woman apart from Christ. We are all, by nature, an "impure thing." Our righteousness is as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). We have no standing before a holy God. Our hearts are cesspools of idolatry and rebellion. The world may dress it up, but before the piercing eyes of a holy God, our sin makes us repulsive.
Conclusion: The Commanded Scourge and the Commanded Savior
So what do we do with such a grim passage? First, we must see the utter seriousness of our sin. We must not trifle with it. Covenant rebellion has consequences, and they are terrible. God is not to be mocked. A church, a nation, or an individual that turns its back on Him will eventually find itself with hands outstretched and no one to comfort it, surrounded by adversaries of God's own appointment, wallowing in its own impurity.
But second, we must see the gospel here in stark relief. The same God who commanded the adversaries to chasten Jacob is the same God who commanded His Son to go to the cross for Jacob. The same sovereignty that brought the judgment is the same sovereignty that brought the salvation.
On the cross, Jesus became the ultimate embodiment of this verse. He stretched out His hands, not in a plea for help He would not receive, but nailed to a Roman cross. He cried out that He was forsaken, with no one to comfort Him. God commanded His adversaries, the Romans, the Jewish leaders, the powers of darkness, to surround Him. And He, who knew no sin, became sin for us. He became the niddah, the impure thing, on our behalf. He was cast out of the city, made unclean, so that we who were unclean could be brought into the city of God, washed, and made holy.
The judgment on Jerusalem was temporal. Because of Christ's ultimate judgment, the comfort offered to us is eternal. God turned His face from His Son for a moment so that He would never have to turn His face from us forever. Therefore, when we see Zion's desolation, we should be driven first to sober repentance, and then to grateful worship of the One who entered that desolation in our place.