Commentary - Lamentations 2:17

Bird's-eye view

Lamentations 2:17 is a stark and brutal confession of God's absolute sovereignty in judgment. In the midst of the wreckage of Jerusalem, with the bodies of the slain in the streets and the city's glory turned to ash, the prophet does not point a finger at the Babylonians as the ultimate cause. He looks higher. This verse is a theological anchor in a sea of sorrow, attributing the devastation not to chance, not to fate, and not even primarily to the might of Nebuchadnezzar, but to the meticulous, purposeful, and long-announced plan of Yahweh Himself. God is not wringing His hands in heaven, surprised by the turn of events. He is the one who has turned them. He has done what He purposed, He has fulfilled His word, and He has done so without flinching. This is a terrifying truth, but for the covenant people of God, it is also the only possible foundation for hope. If the judgment is this precise and this thorough, it means God is still on the throne and is still meticulously faithful to His word, the bitter parts as well as the sweet. The God who keeps His promises of curses is the same God who keeps His promises of grace.

The verse systematically dismantles any notion of divine passivity. God purposed, God completed, God commanded, God pulled down, God caused the enemy to rejoice, and God exalted the adversary. This is the active, governing hand of a sovereign. The horror of Jerusalem's fall is not a sign of God's absence, but a terrifying sign of His presence in judgment. He is using the wicked glee of the enemy and the exalted might of pagan armies as His instruments of chastisement. This is hard medicine, but it is necessary. Until we see that God is the one who has pulled down, we cannot look to Him in faith to be the one who will build back up.

Outline

Context In Lamentations

This verse sits within the second alphabetic acrostic poem of the book. Chapter 2 is a relentless catalog of the horrors of the siege and fall of Jerusalem, and a central theme of the chapter is that the Lord Himself has become like an enemy to His people (Lam 2:4-5). The prophet details how God has swallowed up Jacob, broken down strongholds, rejected His own altar, and poured out His fury like fire. Verse 17 acts as a theological summation of all this preceding description. It answers the implicit "Why?" that hangs over the devastation. The answer is not that God has lost control, but that He is profoundly in control. He is bringing to pass the very covenant curses He warned of centuries before in the Torah. This verse is the hinge that connects the present agony to God's past faithfulness to His warnings, and it sets the stage for the glimmers of hope that will eventually emerge in chapter 3, which are also grounded in the character of this same sovereign God.

Key Issues

The Terrible Faithfulness of God

We are modern evangelicals, which means we are sentimentalists. We like a God who is nice, a God who is accommodating, a God who is rather like a cosmic butler, there to help us with our plans. The God of Lamentations 2:17 is not that God. This is the God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and He is terrifyingly faithful. We love to talk about His faithfulness in keeping His promises of blessing, and so we should. But we must also reckon with the fact that He is just as faithful in keeping His promises of judgment.

The entire disaster that has befallen Jerusalem is here laid squarely at God's feet, and the prophet says that in doing all this, God was simply keeping His word. He was cashing a check He wrote centuries earlier. The covenant made with Israel through Moses was a conditional covenant, with blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience laid out in graphic detail (see Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28). Israel had systematically and flagrantly broken that covenant for generations. The prophets were sent to warn them, to call them back, to plead with them. But they would not hear. And so, the bill came due. This devastation is not random; it is the enactment of a legal sentence. It is the terrible, awful, and yet righteous faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God.

Verse by Verse Commentary

Yahweh has done what He purposed;

This is the bedrock of a Christian worldview. History is not a string of random accidents. It is the outworking of a divine plan. The fall of Jerusalem was not a geopolitical tragedy that caught God by surprise. It was something He purposed. The Hebrew word speaks of a considered plan, a thought-out design. God devised this. Before Nebuchadnezzar was a gleam in his father's eye, God had purposed the judgment of His unfaithful people. This is a hard thing to swallow, because it means God purposes calamity. But as the prophet Amos would later ask, "Does disaster come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?" (Amos 3:6). To deny this is to make God something less than God. A God who is not sovereign over the tragedies is not sovereign at all, and therefore cannot be trusted to bring good out of them.

He has completed His word Which He commanded from days of old.

God's purposes are not secret, abstract decrees. They are revealed in His Word. The destruction of Jerusalem was not just an event; it was the completion of a word. The Hebrew for "completed" can also mean "to cut off" or "to execute," like executing a sentence. God spoke, and now He has acted. What word is this? It is the word of the covenant curses commanded "from days of old," going all the way back to the books of Moses. "But if you will not obey my voice... I will set my face against you, and you shall be struck down before your enemies" (Lev. 26:14, 17). "The LORD will bring a nation against you from far away... a nation whose language you do not understand, a nation of fierce face, which shall not respect the old or show mercy to the young" (Deut. 28:49-50). The smoking ruins of the city are a terrible vindication of the truthfulness of Scripture. God does not bluff.

He has pulled down without sparing,

The judgment was total and unsparing. God did not mitigate the disaster at the last moment. He did not hold back. He "pulled down," a verb that evokes the violent demolition of a building. And He did it "without sparing," or "without pity." This is a phrase that should make us tremble. It appears repeatedly in the prophets when describing this judgment (e.g., Ezek. 5:11). Does this mean God is cruel? No, it means He is just. Pity, in this context, would mean setting aside the righteous sentence of the law. It would mean treating high-handed, persistent, unrepentant sin as though it were a small matter. True love does not always spare. The surgeon does not spare the scalpel when a cancer must be removed. God's unsparing judgment is a testament to the infinite value of His own holiness, which Israel had profaned.

And He has caused the enemy to be glad over you;

Here the bitter pill is made even more bitter. Not only has God destroyed them, but He has orchestrated the gloating of their enemies. The Babylonians are not independent actors; they are a tool in Yahweh's hand. Their joy, their taunts, their laughter over the corpse of Jerusalem, God caused this. He is sovereign over the emotional states of pagan kings. This is a profound mystery. God uses the sinful, arrogant joy of the wicked to accomplish His righteous purposes. He does not approve of their sin, and He will judge them for it in due time (see Jeremiah 50-51), but for now, their gladness is part of the judgment on Judah. It is a deep humiliation, designed to bring God's people to the end of their pride.

He has exalted the might of your adversaries.

The final clause reinforces the previous one. The "might" of the adversaries, their "horn" in some translations, which is a symbol of strength and power, has been "exalted" or "lifted high." And who did the lifting? God did. The military supremacy of Babylon was not ultimately due to their superior tactics or their greater numbers. It was a gift from the God of Israel. He raised them up to be the rod of His anger (Isa. 10:5). This is the ultimate theological checkmate to nationalistic pride. You think you were defeated because the other side was stronger? No, you were defeated because your God made them stronger, for the express purpose of disciplining you. Your only hope, then, is not in building a bigger army, but in humbling yourself before the God who raises up nations and brings them down.

Application

The message of Lamentations 2:17 is not one of despair, but of radical God-centeredness. It forces us out of our man-centered ways of thinking about the world. When our lives fall apart, when our nation seems to be collapsing, when the church is in disarray, our first question should not be, "Who did this to us?" but rather, "What is God saying to us?" This verse teaches us to see the hand of God even in the most painful providences. He is always working, always fulfilling His word.

For the believer, this is a source of profound comfort, even when it comes through tears. The God who is sovereign over judgment is also sovereign over salvation. The same hand that pulled down Jerusalem without pity is the same hand that did not spare His own Son on the cross. God poured out the full measure of His unsparing wrath for our sin upon Christ. He exalted the might of His adversary, death, over His Son, for a time. But because God is faithful to all His words, He also completed the word of resurrection. The cross was the ultimate fulfillment of God's purposed plan, commanded from days of old. Therefore, when we suffer, we do not suffer as those without hope. We suffer under the hand of a Father who is faithful and just, who uses even the malice of our enemies to discipline us, to humble us, and to drive us back to the cross, where His terrible faithfulness becomes our everlasting salvation.