The Terrible Justice of a Covenant God Text: Lamentations 1:22
Introduction: Prayers We'd Rather Not Pray
We live in a sentimental age. Our worship songs are often sweet, our prayers are polite, and our vision of God is frequently domesticated. We like the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, but we are embarrassed by the Lord of Hosts. We are comfortable with prayers for healing and blessing, but we squirm in our seats when the saints in Scripture cry out for raw, unfiltered justice. And there are few prayers in Scripture more raw and unfiltered than the one we have before us in Lamentations.
This is not a prayer you will find cross-stitched on a pillow. This is the cry of a violated city, personified as a woman, who has been ravaged by her enemies and, more foundationally, judged by her God. Jerusalem is in ruins, her children are in exile, and the prophet Jeremiah, speaking for the city, is not pulling any punches. He is not praying a nice, tidy, "forgive them for they know not what they do" sort of prayer. No, this is a prayer that demands an accounting. It is an imprecatory prayer, a prayer that calls for judgment, and it is inspired Scripture.
This presents a problem for the modern Christian. What do we do with prayers like this? Do we quietly skip over them, treating them as some unfortunate remnant of an earlier, less enlightened stage of revelation? Do we spiritualize them away into meaninglessness? Or do we face them head-on, believing that all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable, even the parts that make our therapeutic culture deeply uncomfortable? The last option is the only faithful one. This prayer is in our Bibles for a reason. It teaches us something essential about the character of God, the nature of sin, the meaning of justice, and the foundation of the gospel itself. To understand this prayer is to understand the terrible holiness of God, which is the necessary backdrop for understanding the breathtaking grace of God.
This prayer is a righteous appeal to the highest court in the universe. It is not the petty cry of personal vengeance. It is a plea grounded in a profound understanding of God's covenant faithfulness. The city acknowledges her own sin, accepts God's righteous judgment for it, and on that very basis, appeals to God to be consistent in His justice and to judge her tormentors by the same perfect standard. It is a prayer that says, "God, be God. Be the righteous judge we know You to be." And that, rightly understood, is a prayer we all must learn to pray.
The Text
"Let all their evil come before You; And deal severely with them as You have dealt severely with me For all my transgressions; For my groans are great and my heart is faint.”
(Lamentations 1:22 LSB)
An Appeal to Omniscience (v. 22a)
The prayer begins with a petition that is staggering in its scope.
"Let all their evil come before You..." (Lamentations 1:22a)
This is not a request for God to find out about the wickedness of Babylon. God is not in need of information. He is not a celestial detective gathering clues. The psalmist tells us that God knows our thoughts from afar (Psalm 139:2). Nothing is hidden from His sight. Rather, this is a formal, legal appeal. It is the cry of the prosecutor in the heavenly courtroom, saying, "Let the full record be read. Let the indictment be unsealed. Bring all the evidence into the light."
Jerusalem is asking God to act as judge based on what He already knows. She is not asking for vengeance based on her pain, but for justice based on their crimes. "Their evil" refers to the sins of the Babylonians, the instruments God used to chastise Judah. But God's use of a sinful instrument does not absolve the instrument of its own sin. Assyria was the rod of God's anger against Israel, but God still promised to punish the proud heart of the king of Assyria (Isaiah 10:12). The Babylonians were not righteous agents; they were a cruel, idolatrous, and bloodthirsty empire. They carried out God's judgment, but they did so with sinful motives, with excessive cruelty, and for their own glory. And God saw all of it.
This is a foundational principle of biblical justice. God is not a respecter of persons. He judges righteously. This prayer is an expression of faith in that very character. It is a refusal to believe that evil has the last word. It is a confident assertion that there is a throne in heaven and a Judge who sits upon it, before whom all deeds, both good and evil, will one day be brought into account. We live in an age that wants to forget this, an age that believes it can sweep its sins under the rug of history. But this prayer reminds us that the rug does not exist. God sees everything, and one day, He will bring everything into the open court.
A Plea for Equal Weights and Measures (v. 22b)
The next clause is the heart of the imprecation, and it is grounded in a profound theological argument.
"And deal severely with them as You have dealt severely with me For all my transgressions..." (Lamentations 1:22b)
Notice the basis of the appeal. It is not, "Deal with them because they hurt me." It is, "Deal with them according to the same standard by which You have dealt with me." This is what makes the prayer righteous and not simply vindictive. Jerusalem has already confessed her sin. Throughout this chapter, she has acknowledged her rebellion, her uncleanness, her grave transgressions (Lam. 1:5, 8, 14, 18, 20). She has accepted the severe judgment of God as just and deserved. She has bowed to the verdict.
And now, having submitted to the righteousness of God's law for herself, she asks God to apply that same righteous law to her enemies. The principle is that of Deuteronomy 25:15: "You shall have a full and just weight; you shall have a full and just measure." God does not have two sets of books. He does not have one standard for His covenant people and another, more lenient standard for the pagans. His law is universal. His justice is impartial. Jerusalem is saying, in effect, "Lord, You have dealt with me in perfect, though painful, justice. I accept it. Now, be consistent. Apply that same perfect justice to them."
This is the furthest thing from self-righteousness. Self-righteousness says, "Punish them because they are sinners and I am not." This prayer says, "Punish them because they are sinners, just as You have punished me because I am a sinner." It is a prayer that takes the holiness of God with the utmost seriousness. It is a prayer that loves God's justice even when that justice falls upon itself. Only a people who have first trembled before the throne of God's judgment for their own sin can righteously ask for that same judgment to be meted out upon others.
The Groaning of a Broken Heart (v. 22c)
The prayer concludes with a raw statement of suffering, which serves as the impetus for the cry for justice.
"For my groans are great and my heart is faint.” (Lamentations 1:22c)
This is not a contradiction of the legal basis for the prayer, but rather the experiential fuel for it. The pain is real. The suffering is immense. The groans are not theatrical; they are the deep, guttural sounds of a people crushed by grief and loss. The heart is faint, on the verge of giving up. This is the reality of living in a world broken by sin, a world where God's judgments are being worked out in real time, on real bodies, in real cities.
This honest cry of pain gives us permission to be honest with God. He is not offended when we tell Him that we are hurting. He is not put off by our groans or our faint hearts. The Psalms are filled with this kind of language. This is the language of covenant relationship. We come to our Father not with stoic pretense, but with the reality of our condition. The suffering is what drives us to the courtroom. The pain is what compels us to cry out, "How long, O Lord?"
But the pain does not define the justice. Our suffering does not become the standard of righteousness. The standard is always God's character and God's law. The faint heart and the many groans are the context for the prayer, but the content of the prayer is a plea for God to be true to Himself. It is a cry that flows from a heart that is broken, not just by the Babylonians, but broken over its own sin, and now longs for the righteousness of God to be vindicated in all the earth.
The Cross and the Final Imprecation
How can a Christian pray such a prayer? We who are told to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us? The answer is found at the cross. The cross is the place where God's justice and His mercy meet. It is the place where the greatest imprecation in the history of the world was fully and finally answered.
In this prayer, Jerusalem asks God to deal with the wicked as He dealt with her for her transgressions. She is asking for a just payment, a righteous retribution. And where did God deal most severely with transgression? He dealt with it at Calvary. On the cross, God the Father took all the transgressions of His people, from all of history, and He laid them on His Son. He let all our evil come before Him, and He dealt severely with it. He poured out the full cup of His covenant wrath, not on us, but on our substitute.
Jesus Christ became the ultimate object of all the imprecatory prayers. All the curses of the law, all the righteous demands for justice, all the cries for sin to be punished, converged on Him. He absorbed the full, righteous fury of a holy God against sin. "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf" (2 Corinthians 5:21). The groans of Jerusalem were great, but they were nothing compared to the groan of the Son of God from the cross: "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?"
Because of this, we can now pray for our enemies in a new way. We can pray for their conversion, because the justice required for their sin has already been satisfied in Christ. We can ask God to destroy them as enemies by making them our brothers. This is the ultimate triumph of grace. But this does not abolish justice. For those who refuse this grace, for those who reject the substitute and stand on their own record, the prayer of Lamentations 1:22 still stands. There is a day coming when God will let all their evil come before Him. There is a day of judgment when He will deal severely with them for all their transgressions.
Therefore, we pray these prayers with fear and trembling. We pray them against the demonic powers and principalities that animate the rebellion of wicked men. We pray them against unrepentant and high-handed evil. And as we pray them, we thank God that for us, who are in Christ, this prayer has already been answered. The justice has fallen, the debt has been paid, and our groans have been turned to praise. Our faint hearts have been made strong, not because God overlooked our sin, but because He judged it completely and finally in the person of His Son.