Commentary - Lamentations 2:7

Bird's-eye view

This verse is a gut-wrenching description of total covenantal breakdown. Jeremiah, weeping over the ruins of Jerusalem, is not describing a random military defeat but a deliberate, divine act of repudiation. The central nervous system of Israel's life, the place where heaven and earth met, has been systematically dismantled by the very God who commanded its construction. He has not just allowed it to be destroyed; He has actively cast it off. The altar of sacrifice, the sanctuary of His presence, and the palaces of the king are all handed over to the enemy. This is not a tragedy that befell Israel in spite of their God, but a judgment that came upon them from the hand of their God. The verse climaxes with a bitter irony: the house of Yahweh, once filled with the sounds of solemn feasts and psalms, now echoes with the profane shouts of a conquering army, a noise that God Himself has orchestrated as the just sentence for generations of covenant unfaithfulness.

The key to understanding this passage is to see it as the legal outworking of the covenant curses found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. God had warned Israel that if they forsook Him, He would forsake their sacred places. This verse is the fulfillment of that terrible promise. It is a holy God, in His righteousness, turning His back on a polluted and corrupt system of worship. Yet, even in this utter desolation, we see the groundwork being laid for a greater temple, a greater sacrifice, and a greater king. The rejection of the shadow is necessary for the coming of the substance, who is Christ Jesus.

Outline

Context In Lamentations

Lamentations is a collection of five poetic dirges mourning the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C. Chapter 2, from which our verse is taken, is a sustained focus on the fact that the Lord Himself is the one who has done this. The chapter is an acrostic, with each verse beginning with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a literary structure that communicates a sense of total, "from A to Z" devastation. The poet systematically recounts how the Lord has become like an enemy to His own people, destroying His tabernacle, scorning His feasts, and pouring out His fury. Verse 7 is the heart of this section, moving from the general destruction to the specific rejection of the very instruments of worship and atonement. It follows the description of God bending His bow like an enemy (2:4) and swallowing up Israel (2:5), and it sets the stage for the prophet's personal anguish and his call to repentance later in the book.

Key Issues

The Un-Hallowing

We live in a sentimental age that has great difficulty with the biblical doctrine of God's wrath. We prefer a God who is a celestial teddy bear, endlessly affirming and incapable of holy violence. But the God of the Bible is a consuming fire, and nowhere is this more clear than in His dealings with His own covenant people. When Israel's worship became a hollow sham, a stench in His nostrils, He did not simply ignore it. He took action. What we see in this verse is a divine un-hallowing. The places and objects that had been set apart, consecrated for His holy use, are now profaned, cast off, and treated as common.

This is a terrifying principle, but a necessary one. God is not beholden to religious real estate or ceremonial furniture. He is jealous for the honor of His own name. When the vessels of the Lord are used to promote hypocrisy, God Himself will be the one to smash them. The altar, meant for atonement, becomes a rock of offense. The sanctuary, meant to be a house of prayer, becomes a den of thieves. And when that happens, the Lord of the temple will visit His temple, not with blessing, but with a whip and a verdict of destruction. This is what Jesus did in His earthly ministry, and it is what His Father did here through the Babylonians. The judgment that fell on Jerusalem was not a sign of God's absence, but a terrible sign of His active, present, and holy displeasure.

Verse by Verse Commentary

7a The Lord has rejected His altar;

The verse begins with the central point of sacrifice. The altar was where the blood was shed, where atonement was made, where the sins of the people were symbolically dealt with. For the Lord to reject "His altar" is for Him to reject the entire sacrificial system as it was then being practiced. The Hebrew word for rejected, zanah, means to spurn, to cast off, to treat with contempt. This was not a passive neglect; it was an active and decisive repudiation. Why? Because the sacrifices being offered were no longer offered in faith. They had become a mechanical ritual, a religious smokescreen to cover over rampant idolatry and social injustice. The people thought they could appease God with the blood of bulls and goats while their hearts were far from Him. God's response is to kick the altar over. He is essentially saying, "I will have no more of this. Your worship is an insult." This anticipates the final sacrifice of Christ, which would make this altar and all its sacrifices obsolete forever.

7b He has abandoned His sanctuary;

The next logical step is the sanctuary, the holy place itself. The word for abandoned here is na'ar, which carries the idea of abhorring or scorning. God has a visceral reaction against the temple. This was the place where His presence, His glory, was said to dwell between the cherubim. For Him to abandon it is to withdraw His presence and His protection. In the visions of Ezekiel, we see this happening graphically, as the glory of the Lord departs from the temple in stages before the Babylonians arrive (Ezekiel 10-11). God does not live in buildings made with hands, and He will not be held hostage by a religious institution that has become corrupt. When the heart of the worship is gone, the shell is meaningless. God's abandonment of the physical sanctuary makes way for the great truth of the New Covenant: that God's people themselves are now His temple, indwelt by His Spirit.

7c He has delivered into the hand of the enemy The walls of her palaces.

The judgment extends from the explicitly religious sphere to the civil. The "palaces" represent the political and royal power of Jerusalem. The walls of these palaces were their strength and defense. God "delivers" them, or literally "shuts them up," into the hand of the enemy. This is a sovereign act. The Babylonians did not conquer Jerusalem because Nebuchadnezzar was mighty and Yahweh was weak. They conquered Jerusalem because Yahweh, the God of Israel, handed them the keys. He used a pagan nation as His rod of discipline, His instrument of judgment. This demonstrates that God is not a tribal deity whose fortunes rise and fall with His people. He is the Lord of all nations, and He will use Assyria, Babylon, or Rome to accomplish His purposes and to chastise His disobedient children.

7d They have made a noise in the house of Yahweh As in the day of an appointed time.

This final clause is dripping with the most bitter irony. The "house of Yahweh" was designed for a particular kind of noise: the singing of psalms, the blowing of trumpets, the joyful shouts of the great feasts, the "appointed times" like Passover or Tabernacles. Now, that holy noise has been replaced by a different sound. The shouts of the Babylonian soldiers as they pillage and destroy, their victory cries, their drunken revelry, now echo in the holy courts. And the prophet says this profane noise is "as in the day of an appointed time." God has appointed a new feast day, a festival of judgment. The shouts of the enemy are, in a terrifying sense, the new liturgy. God has ordained this cacophony. He has replaced the songs of Zion with the taunts of Babylon, and this is the just reward for a people who had turned the worship of God into a meaningless noise.

Application

The principle of Lamentations 2:7 is a sword that cuts straight into the heart of all nominal, cultural, and hypocritical Christianity. It is a permanent warning against taking the grace of God for granted. We are tempted to think that because we have our church buildings, our programs, our worship bands, and our doctrinal statements, that we have God in our pocket. We think that the external forms of religion are a fire insurance policy against judgment.

This verse forces us to ask the hard questions. What is the "noise" we make in our churches on a Sunday morning? Is it the joyful noise of heartfelt repentance and faith, or is it the hollow noise of ritual, performance, and self-satisfaction? Is our worship a fragrant aroma to God, or is it, as He said through Amos, a stench He cannot endure? God is not impressed with our sanctuaries if our hearts are abandoned to idols. He will reject our altars, our communion tables, if we come to them with hands full of greed and hearts full of malice. He will deliver our proudest institutions into the hands of our enemies if we use them for our own glory instead of His.

The good news is that God's rejection of the old temple was not His final word. He rejected the shadow in order to establish the substance. He abandoned the physical building so that He could build a living temple out of His people, with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone. The only way to avoid the judgment of this verse is to flee to the one true Temple, the Lord Jesus. He is the altar, the sacrifice, and the priest. In Him, our worship is made acceptable. Through Him, God's presence will never depart from us. If we are found in Him, our noise will be a true and joyful noise, and we will never have to fear God handing us over to the enemy, for our King has already conquered every foe.