The Deconstruction of God's Right Hand Text: Lamentations 2:3
Introduction: When God Fights Against His People
We live in a sentimental age. Our generation has constructed a god in its own image, a deity who is all affirmation and no edges, all therapy and no thunder. This god is a celestial butler, a divine teddy bear, whose job is to make us feel good about ourselves, regardless of how we live. He would never get angry, certainly not with his own people. He would never judge. He would never, ever, turn against the ones He loves. This god is popular, and he is a liar.
The book of Lamentations is a bucket of ice water in the face of this kind of mushy, therapeutic deism. Here, the prophet Jeremiah, weeping over the smoking ruins of Jerusalem, is not wringing his hands about a tragic accident. He is not blaming the Babylonians, though they were the instruments. He is not blaming bad luck. With brutal, unflinching honesty, he lays the blame squarely where it belongs: at the feet of a holy God who has come in covenant judgment against His own rebellious people.
This is a hard truth, and one we are quick to avoid. We want to believe that when things go wrong, it is always the devil, or the world, or our enemies. But the Bible is clear that God is sovereign over all things, including the calamities that befall His people. And when a people who have been brought into covenant with Him decide to live as though that covenant does not exist, when they trample His law underfoot, when they worship idols and pursue injustice, they should not be surprised when the God of the covenant shows up to enforce its terms. The covenant has two sides: blessings for obedience, and curses for disobedience. And God is faithful to both.
What we are reading in Lamentations is not the random violence of a pagan horde. It is the carefully orchestrated, righteous, and terrible judgment of God. He is the one taking His own house apart, brick by brick. He is not a passive observer; He is the active agent. And if we do not understand this, we will never understand the true nature of sin, the holiness of God, or the breathtaking grace of the cross.
The Text
In hot anger He has cut in pieces
All the strength of Israel;
He has turned back His right hand
From before the enemy.
And He has burned in Jacob like a flaming fire
Devouring round about.
(Lamentations 2:3 LSB)
The Fury of a Covenant Lord
We begin with the motivation behind this destruction:
"In hot anger He has cut in pieces All the strength of Israel..." (Lamentations 2:3a)
The first thing we must confront is the unvarnished reality of God's anger. The Hebrew is visceral; it speaks of the burning heat of His wrath. This is not a petty tantrum or a loss of control. Divine anger is the settled, holy, and righteous opposition of God's character to all that is evil. It is the necessary reaction of a perfectly good Being to sin. A god who is not angry at sin is not a good god. A god who looks upon child sacrifice, idolatry, and covenant-breaking with placid indifference is a moral monster. Our God is a consuming fire, and His anger here is the fury of a spurned husband, a betrayed father, a king whose laws have been mocked.
And what is the object of this anger? "All the strength of Israel." The word for strength is literally "horn." In the Old Testament, the horn is a symbol of power, pride, and military might. Think of a great bull, its horns lifted in defiance. God is saying that every source of Israel's self-reliance, every point of their national pride, has been shattered. Their armies, their king, their fortified cities, their political alliances, their temple, everything they trusted in besides God Himself, has been systematically dismantled and cut to pieces. When God's people put their trust in the arm of the flesh, God will be the one to break that arm.
This is a profound warning. We are always tempted to find our security in things other than God. We trust in our 401(k)s, our political party, our national identity, our intellectual abilities, or our moral reputation. But all of these things are "horns" of strength. And if we trust in them, God, in His fierce mercy, may be the one to cut them off, so that we might learn to trust in Him alone.
The Withdrawn Hand of Protection
Next, the prophet describes how God accomplished this dismantling. It was not by a direct act of smiting, but by a strategic, terrifying withdrawal.
"He has turned back His right hand From before the enemy." (Lamentations 2:3b LSB)
Throughout Scripture, God's "right hand" is the symbol of His power to save and deliver. It is the hand that parted the Red Sea, that brought plagues upon Egypt, that led Israel through the wilderness. The right hand of the Lord is glorious in power; the right hand of the Lord shatters the enemy (Exodus 15:6). For generations, Israel had relied on this divine protection. No matter how powerful their foes, God's right hand was their shield.
But now, in the face of the Babylonian onslaught, God does the unthinkable. He pulls His hand back. He stands down. He simply lets the enemy do what the enemy has always wanted to do. He removes the divine restraint, the supernatural protection that had been Israel's only true defense. Israel had spent centuries wanting to be like the other nations, relying on their own strength and their own gods. In this judgment, God finally gave them what they wanted. He said, in effect, "You want to face your enemies without Me? Very well. See how that goes."
This is one of the most terrifying forms of judgment described in the Bible: divine abandonment. When God gives a person or a people over to their own desires (Romans 1:24), He is not being passive. He is actively sentencing them to the natural consequences of their rebellion. He removes His hand of common grace and protection, and allows sin to run its horrific, destructive course. The chaos, the violence, the despair that engulfed Jerusalem was not evidence of God's absence, but of His active judgment through absence. He judged them by giving them what their hearts had craved: autonomy.
The Fire of Divine Presence
But God's judgment is not merely passive. He is not just a spectator. He is also the active agent of purification.
"And He has burned in Jacob like a flaming fire Devouring round about." (Lamentations 2:3c LSB)
The imagery shifts from a withdrawn hand to an active, all-consuming fire. This is the same God who appeared to Moses in a burning bush and descended on Sinai in fire and smoke. His presence is a fire. For those who are in right relationship with Him, it is a fire that purifies, warms, and illuminates. But for those who are in rebellion, that same fiery presence becomes a fire that devours.
Notice, He burns "in Jacob." This is an internal fire. God's judgment is not just coming from the Babylonians outside the walls; it is raging inside the covenant community itself. It is a holy conflagration that sweeps through the land, devouring everything in its path. This is the outworking of the covenant curses they had agreed to at that same Mount Sinai (Deut. 28). They had been warned that if they abandoned the Lord, He would set His face against them and His holy fire would consume them.
This is not a foreign fire. This is the fire of Yahweh. The tragedy of Jerusalem is not that a foreign god defeated Israel's God. The tragedy is that Israel's God was the one fighting against Israel. He turned His own weapons, His own holy presence, against His people because of their sin. They had polluted His land and His temple with their idols, and so He came with a holy fire to burn the pollution away. It was a terrible, necessary, and righteous act of divine sanitation.
The Cross and the Withdrawn Hand
This passage is dark. It is a portrait of a people under the full, unmitigated wrath of God. And if the story ended here, we would have no hope. If this is what God does to His chosen people under the Old Covenant, what hope is there for us sinners? But the story does not end here. This entire scene of judgment is a dark foreshadowing of another hill, outside that same city of Jerusalem.
On the cross, Jesus Christ became the true Israel. He stood as the representative of all of God's rebellious people. And on that cross, He absorbed the full force of the judgment described in this verse. In hot anger, God the Father cut in pieces all the strength of His own Son. He was stripped, mocked, and broken, His strength utterly spent.
Most terribly, the Father "turned back His right hand." At the moment of His greatest need, as the enemy surrounded Him, Jesus found Himself utterly abandoned. The protective hand of the Father was withdrawn, and He cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" This was the ultimate act of divine abandonment, the ultimate covenant curse. Jesus was handed over to the enemy, to sin, and to death.
And finally, He burned. The flaming fire of God's holy wrath against all our sin, the fire that should have devoured us round about, was instead poured out upon Him. He became the whole burnt offering, the sacrifice that fully absorbed the consuming fire of God's justice. He endured the full experience of Lamentations 2:3 so that all who are in Him by faith will never have to.
Because of the cross, when God's people today face hardship and discipline, it is never again the fire of retributive wrath. It is the fire of fatherly purification. He is not cutting us off; He is pruning us so that we might bear more fruit. He is not abandoning us; He is teaching us to depend on Him. The hand of God is never withdrawn from those who are in Christ. For us, the covenant curses have been fully paid. And so, like Jeremiah, even in the midst of our own laments, we can find our ultimate hope not in our own strength, but in the mercies of the Lord that are new every morning, secured for us by the one who endured the fire for us.