When God’s Hand Falls: A Call to Midnight Prayer Text: Lamentations 2:19
Introduction: The Necessity of Ruin
We live in a soft age. We like our Christianity comfortable, our sermons encouraging, and our God manageable. We want a God who is always affirming and never afflicting. But the God of the Bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is not a tame God. He is a consuming fire. And sometimes, in His inscrutable wisdom and covenant faithfulness, He brings His people to ruin. This is a truth that makes modern evangelicals twitch, but it is a truth that is plastered all over the holy Scriptures. And nowhere is it more raw, more visceral, than in the book of Lamentations.
Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, is not writing poetry for a greeting card. He is sitting in the smoking rubble of Jerusalem. The covenant city has been sacked, the temple destroyed, and the people of God slaughtered or dragged off into exile. And he is clear-eyed about who did it. Verse 17 of this chapter tells us plainly: "The LORD has done what he planned; he has fulfilled his word." This was not a geopolitical accident. This was not bad luck. This was the disciplined, covenantal judgment of a holy God against a sinful and adulterous people. God’s hand did this.
Our text today is a call to prayer from the depths of that ruin. It is a desperate, urgent, midnight summons. But it is not a summons to despair. It is a summons to a particular kind of prayer, a prayer that is only possible when everything has been stripped away. When our idols are smashed, when our self-reliance is shattered, and when the consequences of our sin are lying in the streets for all to see. This is not a prayer for the comfortable. This is a prayer for the broken. And in our day, as we see the foundations of our own civilization cracking and groaning under the weight of our rebellion, it is a prayer we must learn to pray.
The Text
"Arise, cry aloud in the night
At the head of the night watches;
Pour out your heart like water
Before the presence of the Lord;
Lift up your hands to Him
For the life of your infants
Who are faint because of hunger
At the head of every street.” (Lamentations 2:19 LSB)
An Unsettling Summons (v. 19a)
The prophet begins with a command that cuts against all our natural inclinations in a time of crisis.
"Arise, cry aloud in the night At the head of the night watches..."
When judgment falls, when disaster strikes, the natural human response is to curl up, to hide, to retreat into a stunned silence or a dull despair. But the command here is the opposite. "Arise." Get up. Do not be passive. Do not simply endure this devastation as a brute fact. Engage with the God who sent it.
And the time for this engagement is "in the night." The night is a time of fear, of disorientation, of vulnerability. It is when our troubles loom largest. The "head of the night watches" refers to the beginning of the watches, when the darkness is freshest and deepest. God is not calling His people to a convenient, well-lit prayer meeting. He is calling them to wrestle with Him in the dark, when there are no distractions, no easy comforts, just the soul and God and the rubble.
This is a call to corporate, public lament. This is not a private journal entry. The cry is "aloud." This is the sound of a community whose heart has been broken. We have largely lost this practice in the modern church. We think repentance is a quiet, individual affair. But when a nation, a city, a church has sinned corporately, it must repent corporately. The sin was public, and so the grief must be public. This is a cry that should be heard in the streets, a cry that acknowledges the public nature of the covenant breaking that brought all this ruin to their door.
The Nature of True Prayer (v. 19b)
Next, Jeremiah describes the manner of this prayer, and it is a radical unburdening of the soul.
"Pour out your heart like water Before the presence of the Lord..."
This is one of the most potent descriptions of prayer in all of Scripture. It is not about reciting eloquent phrases. It is not about maintaining a pious decorum. It is about total, unreserved, unfiltered honesty before God. To pour out your heart like water is to hold nothing back. The water in a vessel takes the shape of the vessel. When you pour it out, it just goes. It doesn't try to maintain its shape. It hides nothing.
This is what God demands in our prayers of repentance. He wants the grief, the anger, the confusion, the shame, the bitterness. He wants it all poured out "before the presence of the Lord." You are not just venting into the void; you are pouring out your heart before the very God who has orchestrated your calamity. This requires a robust theology. You have to believe that God is sovereign enough to have caused your pain and gracious enough to want to hear about it. The pagan pours out his heart to an idol that cannot hear. The secularist pours out his heart to a therapist who cannot save. The Christian pours out his heart to the living God, the covenant Lord who wounds and who also heals.
This kind of prayer is the opposite of a self-justifying prayer. You are not coming to God to explain your side of the story. You are coming to agree with His verdict. You are pouring out a heart that has been broken by the recognition of its own sin. It is the prayer of the tax collector, not the Pharisee. "God, be merciful to me, a sinner."
The Posture of Desperate Supplication (v. 19c)
The internal state of the heart is matched by an external posture of surrender and appeal.
"Lift up your hands to Him..."
Lifting up the hands in prayer is a universal sign of surrender and dependence. It is the gesture of an empty-handed beggar. You are not coming with your own righteousness. You are not coming with a list of your good deeds. You are coming with nothing. Your hands are empty, and you are lifting them to the only one who can fill them.
It is also a posture of appeal to a king. You are acknowledging His authority, His right to judge, and His power to save. In the context of this utter devastation, lifting hands to God is a profound act of faith. It is to say, "You are the one who has struck us down, and therefore You are the only one who can raise us up. We have no other court of appeal. We throw ourselves entirely on Your mercy."
The Motivation for Prayer: Covenantal Desperation (v. 19d)
Finally, the prophet provides the immediate, gut-wrenching motivation for this midnight cry.
"For the life of your infants Who are faint because of hunger At the head of every street."
This brings the theology crashing down to the pavement. The consequences of sin are never abstract. Here, the covenant curses, promised long ago in Deuteronomy, have come to pass with horrifying specificity. The children, the very future of the covenant people, are starving in the streets. This is the fruit of apostasy. When a people abandons God, the judgment always falls hardest on the next generation.
Notice the argument. You are to appeal to God "for the life of your infants." This is a covenantal appeal. These are His children, too. You are, in effect, asking God to remember His own promises. You are pleading with Him on the basis of His own character. "Lord, look at what our sin has done. Look at the inheritance you promised to Abraham, now starving in the gutters. For the sake of Your name, for the sake of Your covenant, have mercy."
This is not a sentimental appeal. It is a theological one. The sight of dying children is meant to drive the people to their knees, not in a way that accuses God of being unfair, but in a way that acknowledges the terrifying righteousness of His judgments and the desperate need for His unmerited grace. The hunger of these infants is a sermon preached in the flesh. It is a visible, tangible manifestation of the spiritual famine that has plagued the nation for generations.
Conclusion: Pouring Out Our Hearts Today
We are not in the rubble of Jerusalem. Not yet. But we are living in the ruins of Christendom. The covenantal foundations of our own nation have been systematically dismantled. Our sins are public, high-handed, and celebrated at the head of every street. We have taught our children that good is evil and evil is good, and we are now watching them faint from a spiritual hunger that we created.
The call of this text comes to us in the night of our own culture. It is a call to arise from our comfortable slumbers and our quiet despair. It is a call for the church to cry aloud, to pour out her heart like water before the presence of the Lord. We must confess our own complicity, our own cowardice, our own love of ease. We must stop making excuses and agree with God's verdict on our sin.
We must lift up empty hands to Him, acknowledging that we have no solutions, no political fixes, no five-step plans that can save us. Our only hope is the mercy of the God who judges. And we must pray for the life of our children, for the generations that are starving for the bread of life because we have offered them stones.
But we do this with a hope that Jeremiah could only see dimly. We know that God did not ultimately abandon His people in the rubble. He raised up a Savior from the ruins of Israel. And this Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, experienced the ultimate judgment on a cross outside the city walls. He was forsaken so that we could be forgiven. He starved for righteousness so that we could be fed. He poured out His own lifeblood so that our hearts could be cleansed. Because of Him, we can pour out our hearts like water, knowing that He hears, He forgives, and He is able to rebuild what our sin has torn down. Let us therefore come to Him, in the night of our distress, and cry aloud for His mercy.