The Day of Your Anger Text: Lamentations 2:21
Introduction: The Unflinching Gaze
We live in a soft age. We prefer a god of our own making, a deity who is always affirming, never offending, and whose most severe judgment is a gentle frown of disappointment. Our therapeutic culture has trained us to recoil from what the moderns call "unpleasantness" and what the Bible calls "the terror of the Lord." We want the consolations of the faith without the cost, the resurrection without the crucifixion, and the crown without the cross. And so, when we come to a passage like this one in Lamentations, our instinct is to look away. We want to skip over it, to find the silver lining in the next chapter, to rush to "great is Thy faithfulness" without first walking through the smoking rubble of Jerusalem.
But the Holy Spirit does not permit us this luxury. He compels us, through the pen of the weeping prophet, to look steadily at the consequences of sin. He makes us walk through the streets of the fallen city and see what covenant rebellion actually produces. This is not gratuitous horror. This is medicinal. It is a severe mercy. If we do not understand the holiness of God, we cannot understand the grace of God. If we do not comprehend the terrifying reality of His wrath against sin, then the cross becomes a mere tragic accident instead of a glorious, wrath-absorbing triumph.
Lamentations is a funeral dirge for a nation. But it is more than that. It is a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God. In the midst of unspeakable suffering, the prophet does not accuse God of injustice. He does not shake his fist at heaven and cry, "Why?" Instead, with tears streaming down his face, he confesses, "The Lord is righteous, for I have rebelled against His commandment" (Lam. 1:18). This book is a master class in facing catastrophe with open eyes, refusing to blame God, and tracing the disaster back to its true source: our own sin. The scene before us is one of utter devastation, yet it is not chaotic. It is an orderly, covenantal judgment, promised centuries before in the fine print of Deuteronomy. God is not losing control; He is keeping His word.
Our text today forces us to confront the awful reality of this judgment. It is a close-up view of the human cost of defying a holy God. And we must not flinch, because in seeing the severity of the old covenant curse, we are being prepared to understand the magnitude of the blessing that has come to us in Jesus Christ, who became a curse for us.
The Text
On the ground in the streets
Lie young and old;
My virgins and my young men
Have fallen by the sword.
You have killed them in the day of Your anger;
You have slaughtered, not sparing.
(Lamentations 2:21 LSB)
The Awful Inventory (v. 21a)
The prophet begins with a stark, brutal inventory of the dead.
"On the ground in the streets Lie young and old; My virgins and my young men Have fallen by the sword." (Lamentations 2:21a)
There is no poetry here in the sense of euphemism. The language is blunt, like the thud of a body hitting the pavement. "On the ground in the streets." This is not the dignity of a quiet deathbed surrounded by family. This is public, shameful, exposed death. The streets, which should be full of the commerce of life, the laughter of children, and the greetings of neighbors, have become a charnel house. The public square is now a public grave.
And who lies there? "Young and old." The judgment is indiscriminate in its scope. It takes the elderly, who should have been honored in their gray hairs, and it takes the infants, who had not yet lived. This is the nature of corporate solidarity. When a nation rebels against God, the consequences of that rebellion fall upon the entire community. The covenant is with the people as a whole, from the greatest to the least. We modern individualists hate this. We want to believe we are autonomous units, responsible only for our own discrete choices. But the Bible teaches that we are bound together. The sin of Achan brought defeat upon all of Israel. The sin of David brought a plague upon the people. And the generations of idolatry and covenant-breaking by Judah brought this ruin upon everyone, from the elder in the gate to the child in the womb.
He then focuses on the bloom of the nation: "My virgins and my young men have fallen by the sword." This is the future of the nation, lying dead in the streets. The virgins represent the promise of new life, new families, new generations. The young men represent the strength of the nation, its defenders, its builders. By specifying their deaths, the prophet is saying that the future itself has been slain. The sword of the Babylonians has cut the throat of the next generation. This is the wages of sin. Sin does not just affect the sinner; it mortgages the future of his children and grandchildren. When a people abandons God, they are not just choosing their own destruction; they are choosing the destruction of their posterity.
The Unsparing Agent (v. 21b)
Now, in the second half of the verse, the prophet’s gaze moves from the slain to the Slayer. And this is the most shocking part of the lament. He does not ultimately blame Nebuchadnezzar. He does not curse the Chaldean army. He looks past the secondary causes and addresses the primary cause directly.
"You have killed them in the day of Your anger; You have slaughtered, not sparing." (Lamentations 2:21b)
This is breathtakingly direct. "You have killed them." He points his finger straight at heaven. This is not an accusation born of faithless rebellion. This is a confession born of robust, covenantal theology. Jeremiah understands divine sovereignty. He knows that the Babylonians are merely the sword in God's hand. They are the axe, and God is the one swinging it (Isaiah 10:15). To attribute this devastation to mere geopolitics or military misfortune would be a form of atheism. Faith sees the hand of God in all things, in blessing and in cursing, in prosperity and in calamity.
Notice the motive: "in the day of Your anger." This was not an accident. It was not a dispassionate act of cosmic administration. It was the personal, holy fury of God against sin. We must recover a biblical doctrine of the wrath of God. God is not a stoic philosopher. He is a person. He loves righteousness and He hates wickedness. His anger is not like our petty, selfish, sinful anger. His anger is the settled, holy, righteous opposition of His entire being to all that is evil. And because Judah had filled up the measure of her sins, because she had prostituted herself to idols and ignored the pleas of the prophets for centuries, the day of His anger finally dawned. This was the day of reckoning that Moses had warned about in Deuteronomy 28, when God promised that if they broke covenant, He would bring a nation against them from afar to besiege their gates and destroy them.
The final phrase is the most chilling: "You have slaughtered, not sparing." The Hebrew word for "slaughtered" is the word used for the ritual slaughter of an animal for sacrifice. It is a violent, bloody word. And God did it "not sparing." There was no pity held back. No mercy was shown in the heat of the battle. Why? Because for generations, God had shown pity. He had sent prophet after prophet, pleading with His people to repent. He had sent lesser judgments, famine and drought and minor military defeats, as warning shots. And they had despised it all. They had mistaken His patience for indifference. And so, when the final judgment came, it came without mitigation. The time for pity was past; the time for wrath had come.
Conclusion: The Slaughtered One Who Spares
So where do we go from here? A text like this hangs in the air, heavy and suffocating. If this is the righteous response of a holy God to the sin of His covenant people, what hope is there for any of us? We who have sinned in the face of far greater light than Judah ever knew. We who have the completed canon of Scripture and the indwelling Holy Spirit. If they were not spared, why should we be?
The answer is that we should not be. On our own merits, we deserve the same fate. We deserve to be laid out in the streets, young and old, under the unsparing wrath of God. But the central message of the Bible is that there was another "day of anger," another day of slaughter.
On a hill outside the very same city of Jerusalem, centuries later, the true Son of the covenant, the only innocent man who ever lived, was laid out not on the ground, but on a cross. And on that day, the full, unsparing, unmitigated fury of the wrath of God that was due to us for our sin was poured out upon Him. God took His only Son, the virgin-born, the strength of our salvation, and He slaughtered Him.
The Father did not spare His own Son (Romans 8:32). All the covenant curses of Deuteronomy, all the holy anger described in Lamentations, all of it was focused like a laser beam on Jesus Christ. He was not spared so that we could be. He was slaughtered so that we could be welcomed. He endured the day of God's anger so that we could be brought into the eternal day of God's favor.
Therefore, when we read a text like Lamentations 2:21, we should do two things. First, we should tremble. We should see the terrible price of our sin and hate it. We should not take the holiness of God lightly. Second, we should fly to Christ. We should run to the only place of safety from the wrath to come. In Christ, the slaughter is behind us. In Christ, the day of anger is past. He has absorbed it all. And because God did not spare Him, He now, with Him, freely gives us all things. He gives us pardon instead of the sword, and life instead of the streets.