The Terrible Friendship of God: Lamentations 2:5
Introduction: A Theology for Rubble
We live in an age that wants a soft God, a manageable God, a God who is more of a celestial butler than a sovereign King. Our therapeutic culture desires a deity who affirms, who coddles, who would never, ever cause discomfort. We want the blessings of the covenant without the curses, the promises without the warnings, and the Sermon on the Mount without Mount Sinai. But the God of the Bible is not safe. He is good, but He is not tame. And when His people decide to play the harlot with other gods, He is terrible.
The book of Lamentations is a necessary corrective to our sentimentalism. It is a theology for rubble. It is the inspired song of a man sitting in the smoking ruins of a civilization that had been systematically dismantled by the very God who had built it. Jerusalem, the city of the great king, had become a charnel house. And Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, does not chalk this up to bad luck, a geopolitical miscalculation, or the superior military strategy of the Babylonians. He lays the responsibility squarely where it belongs: at the feet of a holy God executing the terms of His own covenant.
This is a hard truth, and modern evangelicals are often squeamish about it. We want to talk about God's love, and we should, but we cannot understand the height of His love at the cross until we have understood the depth of His wrath against sin. The covenant God made with Israel was a real covenant, a solemn bond with blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience, all spelled out in gory detail in places like Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. For generations, Israel had spit on that covenant. They had chased after every pagan deity on the block. They had filled the land with idols and injustice. And after sending prophet after prophet, all of whom were ignored, beaten, or killed, God finally did exactly what He said He would do. He brought the hammer down.
Our text today is one of the most jarring in all of Scripture. It is the kind of verse that makes us shift uncomfortably in our pews. It describes God, Yahweh, the covenant Lord of Israel, in terms that seem utterly alien to us. But if we are to be mature Christians, if we are to have a faith that can withstand real suffering and not just minor inconveniences, we must grapple with this text. We must understand how God can be both a loving Father and a consuming fire.
The Text
The Lord has become like an enemy.
He has swallowed up Israel;
He has swallowed up all its palaces;
He has brought its strongholds to ruin
And multiplied in the daughter of Judah
Mourning and moaning.
(Lamentations 2:5 LSB)
The Lord as an Enemy
We begin with the most shocking statement:
"The Lord has become like an enemy." (Lamentations 2:5a)
Let that sink in. The prophet does not say that the Lord has sent an enemy, or allowed an enemy to attack. He says the Lord Himself has taken on the posture of an enemy. The Hebrew is stark. He has become like one who hates. This is covenantal language. When you are in a covenant relationship, you are either a friend or an enemy. There is no neutral ground. Israel had treated God like an enemy for centuries through their idolatry and rebellion. And here, God responds in kind. He is treating them as they have treated Him. He is holding up a mirror to their sin.
This is not a contradiction of His love; it is the necessary expression of His holiness. A God who is indifferent to sin is not a loving God. A father who watches his children run headlong into a busy street and does nothing is not a loving father. God's wrath is His holy, settled opposition to all that is evil. And when His own covenant people had become so saturated with evil that they were indistinguishable from the pagan nations around them, His wrath had to fall. He had promised it would. To not bring judgment would have made God a liar. His faithfulness to His own Word and His own character demanded this action.
We must be very clear. God is not acting out of some capricious, petty rage. This is not the tantrum of a pagan deity. This is the deliberate, judicial, and righteous outworking of covenant sanctions. He is the judge of all the earth, and He is doing right. Jeremiah is not questioning God's justice here; he is affirming it through his tears. The grief is real because the relationship was real. The judgment is so painful precisely because it comes from the hand of a friend, a husband, a father. A blow from a stranger is one thing; a blow from your own father is another thing entirely.
The Devouring Judgment
The verse then unfolds what this enmity looks like in action. It is total and all-consuming.
"He has swallowed up Israel; He has swallowed up all its palaces; He has brought its strongholds to ruin..." (Lamentations 2:5b-d)
The verb "swallowed up" is used twice for emphasis. It is a picture of utter devastation, like a great beast devouring its prey, leaving nothing behind. This is not a trim or a haircut; it is a decapitation. God is not just pruning the nation; He is clear-cutting it. And notice the targets. He swallows up "Israel," the covenant people as a whole. This is a corporate judgment because the sin was corporate. The entire nation, from the king on his throne to the priest at the altar to the farmer in his field, was complicit.
Then, He swallows up "all its palaces." These were the symbols of the nation's wealth, power, and pride. This was the architecture of their arrogance. They had trusted in their fine buildings, their economy, their cultural achievements, instead of the God who gave them the skill to build them. So God reduces it all to rubble. He demolishes their idols of stone and cedar.
And He has brought their "strongholds to ruin." These were their military defenses, the walls and fortresses they believed made them secure. They had trusted in their military might, in their strategic alliances with nations like Egypt, rather than in the Lord of Hosts. God shows them here that a wall is just a pile of rocks waiting to happen if He is not its defender. "Unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman stays awake in vain" (Psalm 127:1). Their watchmen had stayed awake, and it was all in vain.
The Harvest of Grief
The final line of the verse shows the inevitable result of this divine demolition.
"And multiplied in the daughter of Judah Mourning and moaning." (Lamentations 2:5e-f)
The "daughter of Judah" is a poetic term for the people of the covenant, the inhabitants of Jerusalem. And what is their condition? God has "multiplied" their grief. The Hebrew speaks of a great increase, an abundance of sorrow. The words for "mourning and moaning" are heavy, guttural sounds, conveying a deep, visceral anguish. This is the harvest they have sown. For generations they had sown the wind of idolatry, and now they are reaping the whirlwind of God's judgment (Hosea 8:7).
This is covenantal cause and effect. God had set before them life and death, blessing and cursing, and had urged them to choose life (Deut. 30:19). They stubbornly chose death, and God, in His faithfulness, gave them what they chose. This is not God being cruel. This is God being true. The pain is intense, but it is also just. And, as we see later in Lamentations, it is this very justice, this very faithfulness of God even in judgment, that becomes the foundation for hope. A God who keeps His promises to curse is a God who can be trusted to keep His promises to save.
The Cross as the Ultimate Lamentation
Now, how are we, as New Covenant believers, to read a text like this? It is not enough to simply say, "Well, that was the Old Testament, and we are under grace." The New Covenant has curses too, and they are far more severe (Heb. 10:29). The principles of God's character do not change. But something has changed, and that something is the cross of Jesus Christ.
On the cross, we see this verse fulfilled in the most profound way imaginable. There, God the Father truly became "like an enemy" to His own beloved Son. On the cross, Jesus became "Israel." He stood in the place of His rebellious people, and God "swallowed Him up." The full, undiluted, terrifying wrath of God against all our sin, our idolatry, our pride, our rebellion, was poured out on Him. All the palaces of our self-righteousness and all the strongholds of our self-reliance were brought to ruin in Him.
On the cross, "mourning and moaning" were multiplied in the soul of the Son of God as He was forsaken by the Father. He cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matt. 27:46). That was the cry of Jerusalem. That was the cry of Lamentations. Jesus became the ultimate object of God's covenantal wrath so that we, who were by nature children of wrath and true enemies of God, could be made His friends and His children.
Because God treated His perfect Son like an enemy, He can now treat us, His rebellious enemies, like sons. Because Jesus was swallowed up by the judgment we deserved, we can be swallowed up by the grace we do not deserve. The judgment that fell on Jerusalem in 586 B.C. was a terrible foreshadowing. The judgment that fell on Jerusalem again in A.D. 70, which Jesus Himself prophesied, was the final exclamation point on the old covenant order. But the judgment that fell on Jesus on that Friday afternoon outside the city walls was the central event in all of human history.
Therefore, we do not read this text and despair. We read it with soberness and awe. We see the terrible holiness of God and the horrific nature of our sin. We see that God is not to be trifled with. And then we flee to the cross, where the enemy has become our Father, where the judgment has been exhausted, and where the mourning and moaning have been turned into everlasting joy. We must understand the rubble of Jerusalem to truly appreciate the solid rock of Calvary.