The Terrible Meekness of God's Wrath Text: Lamentations 2:2
Introduction: When God Becomes the Enemy
We live in a soft age, an age of therapeutic deities. The god of modern evangelicalism is a god who is always affirming, always gentle, and whose most severe judgment is a furrowed brow of disappointment. He is a god who would never, ever do what is described in this verse. He is a cosmic therapist, a celestial butler, but he is certainly not the God of the Bible. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a God of terrible majesty, a consuming fire. And when His own covenant people commit high-handed treason against Him, His response is not a gentle chiding. It is de-creation. It is holy violence.
Lamentations is a book we moderns scarcely know what to do with. It is the funeral dirge for a nation that had been married to Jehovah and then played the harlot with every passing pagan deity. Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, is not just lamenting the destructive power of Babylon. That is a surface-level reading. He is lamenting the destructive power of a holy God who has finally brought the curses of the covenant to bear on His people. The Babylonians were merely the axe in God's hand. The terror of this book is not that a foreign army has breached the walls; the terror is that God Himself has breached them. He has become the enemy of His own people in order to save them.
This is covenantal cause and effect, as laid out with crystalline clarity in Deuteronomy 28. If you obey, you will be blessed in the city and blessed in the field. If you disobey, you will be cursed in the city and cursed in the field. For generations, Israel and Judah had been spitting on the covenant. They had ignored the prophets, murdered the righteous, and dragged God's holy name through the mud of their idolatries. God sent warnings, then chastisements, then more warnings. But they would not listen. And so, the final bill came due. What we see in Lamentations is not the absence of God, but the terrifying, active, and personal presence of His wrath. And we must not look away, because this wrath is the black velvet backdrop against which the diamond of the gospel shines most brightly.
The Text
The Lord has swallowed up; He has not spared
All the habitations of Jacob.
In His wrath He has pulled down
The strongholds of the daughter of Judah;
He has brought them down to the ground;
He has profaned the kingdom and its princes.
(Lamentations 2:2 LSB)
Divine Devouring (v. 2a)
The verse begins with a shocking and visceral image:
"The Lord has swallowed up; He has not spared All the habitations of Jacob."
The first thing to notice is the subject of the verb. It is not Nebuchadnezzar. It is not the Babylonian hordes. It is "the Lord." Adonai. The covenant Lord of Israel is the one doing the swallowing. This is not a tragedy that happened on God's watch while He was looking the other way. This is a deliberate, sovereign act of divine judgment. The language is that of a great beast devouring its prey, leaving nothing behind. It is total consumption.
And what has He swallowed? "All the habitations of Jacob." This is corporate judgment. It is not just the particularly wicked neighborhoods. It is all of them. God deals with His people as a corporate entity, as a federal whole. The sins of the fathers, the sins of the leaders, and the sins of the people had accumulated into a great covenantal debt, and the entire nation was now being foreclosed upon. This is why we must recover a biblical understanding of corporate responsibility. Our modern individualism wants to imagine that God only deals with us one-on-one, as isolated individuals. But the Bible knows nothing of this. We are in a family, a church, a nation. And when that corporate body rebels, the judgment comes upon the whole house.
He has "not spared." This is a terrifying phrase. It means there was no holding back. God's mercy, which had been extended for centuries, was withdrawn for a season of wrath. He did not spare the temple, His own house. He did not spare the king, His own anointed. He did not spare the women and children. This is because sin, when it is mature, brings forth death. And the sin of Judah was very mature. God is not a sentimentalist. When His people use His grace as a license to sin, His love demands a fierce and unsparing response. This is the severity of God that Paul warns us about in Romans 11. If God did not spare the natural branches, He will not spare you. This should put the fear of God into every one of us who names the name of Christ.
Wrathful Demolition (v. 2b)
The prophet continues to detail the Lord's active role in this destruction.
"In His wrath He has pulled down The strongholds of the daughter of Judah; He has brought them down to the ground;"
Again, notice the agency. "He has pulled down." This is not passive. This is active, intentional demolition. The word for "strongholds" refers to their fortresses, their walled cities, their military defenses. These were the things in which Judah trusted. They trusted in their military might, their strategic locations, their thick walls. They put their faith in the arm of the flesh. And so God, in His wrath, personally dismantled the very things they trusted in instead of Him.
This is a profound spiritual lesson. Whatever you trust in apart from God, God will eventually tear down. If you trust in your wealth, He will bankrupt you. If you trust in your reputation, He will humiliate you. If you trust in your political power, He will overthrow you. God is a jealous God, and He will not share His glory with another. The strongholds of Judah had become idols, and God smashes idols. He brings them "down to the ground." He levels them. He leaves nothing for them to hide behind, so that they will be forced to deal with Him and Him alone.
And this is all done "in His wrath." This is not a fit of pique. This is not an arbitrary temper tantrum. Divine wrath is the settled, holy, righteous opposition of God's character to all that is evil. It is the necessary reaction of a perfectly good and just Being to sin. Because God is good, He must hate evil. And because He is just, He must punish it. The wrath that fell on Judah was the culmination of generations of covenantal infidelity. It was righteous, it was just, and it was necessary.
Profaned Royalty (v. 2c)
The final clause shows the extent of the humiliation. It reaches the very top of the social and political order.
"He has profaned the kingdom and its princes."
To "profane" something means to treat what is holy as common. The kingdom of Judah was supposed to be a holy kingdom. The king was supposed to be the Lord's anointed, a sacred office. The princes were to be ministers of justice. But they had profaned themselves through idolatry, injustice, and arrogance. They had treated their holy calling as a common thing, a mere tool for their own self-aggrandizement. And so, God's judgment is a perfect poetic justice. You have profaned my name and my office, so I will profane you.
He did this by handing them over to a pagan king. The Lord's anointed, King Zedekiah, had his eyes gouged out and was dragged to Babylon in chains. The princes were executed. They who were once honored and robed in splendor were now treated as common criminals, as refuse. God stripped them of their dignity and their office and showed them to be what they had become in His sight: profane. This is a stark warning to all who are in authority, whether in the state or in the church. God gives authority, and He can take it away. And when leaders use their God-given authority to rebel against Him, He has a way of making them a public spectacle of His judgment.
The Swallowed-Up Savior
This is a hard word. And if we leave it here, in the rubble of Jerusalem, we are left only with despair. But this is not the end of the story. This terrifying display of God's covenantal wrath is a signpost pointing to a much greater and more terrible judgment. All the wrath that was poured out on Judah was just a thimbleful compared to the ocean of wrath that was deserved for the sins of the world.
On the cross, God did not just swallow up the habitations of Jacob. He swallowed up His only Son. Jesus became the "daughter of Judah," the representative of all of God's rebellious people. God did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all. In His wrath, God pulled down the stronghold of Christ's own body. He brought Him down to the ground, into the dust of death. On that cross, Jesus was profaned. He who was holy was treated as common. He was numbered with the transgressors. He was made a curse for us.
Why? So that we who are in Him would never have to be swallowed up. He was devoured by the wrath of God so that we could be welcomed to the feast of God. He was not spared so that we could be spared eternally. His stronghold was pulled down so that He could become our eternal stronghold. He was profaned so that we, the profane, could be made holy.
The judgment on Jerusalem was temporal. It was a de-creation that led to a re-creation. The city was rebuilt. The people returned. But the judgment on Christ was ultimate and final. He absorbed the full, unsparing, eternal wrath of God in His own body. And because He did, the message to us is not one of lamentation, but of grace. Repent of your idolatry. Turn from your sin. Flee to the cross. For if you are outside of Christ, the wrath described in this verse is but a faint shadow of the wrath that awaits you. But if you are in Christ, you are safe. You have already passed through the judgment in Him. He was swallowed by death, but death could not hold Him. He rose again, and He is now the King of a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and His princes are all those who have been washed in His blood.