The grief that gives birth to hope — five poems from Jerusalem's ashes
It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.
Lamentations 3:22-23Lamentations is the shortest of the Major Prophets — five chapters, five poems, written in the smoking ruins of Jerusalem after the Babylonian conquest of 586 BC. Tradition attributes the book to Jeremiah, who watched his lifelong warnings come true with terrible accuracy. The Hebrew title is simply 'Ekah' — 'How?' — the first word of the book, the cry of one who cannot believe what he is seeing.
The structure is more sophisticated than appears at first reading. Four of the five chapters are acrostic poems — each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The third chapter, the center of the book, contains a triple acrostic: 22 letters times 3, for 66 verses. The form is deliberate: grief structured by alphabet, anguish ordered into art. It is as if Jeremiah is trying to contain a catastrophe that exceeds all containment.
And then, at the precise center of this central chapter — verses 22 and 23 — comes one of the most extraordinary expressions of hope in all of Scripture: 'It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.' Out of the rubble, faithfulness. Out of ash, mercy renewed each morning. The hymn 'Great Is Thy Faithfulness' takes its title from this verse — written in the ruins of everything.
One chapter per day · read slowly and aloud
Hebrew acrostics work like English ones — each verse begins with the next letter of the alphabet, all 22 letters. Lamentations 1, 2, and 4 each use this pattern. Chapter 3 amplifies it: three verses per letter, for 66 verses total. The acrostic form has a meaning beyond cleverness: it imposes order on chaos. When the world has collapsed, the prophet still has language — and language still has structure. Grief that would otherwise be unbearable is held within form. The acrostic is a way of saying: even in this, God's world has not become incoherent.
Modern Christianity often struggles with grief. We rush past it toward 'victory' and 'praise.' Lamentations refuses this rush. It sits with sorrow for five chapters and reaches no triumphant conclusion — the book ends with the question, 'But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.' Yet the Holy Spirit included this book in Scripture. Why? Because real faith holds space for real grief. The Psalms of lament make up roughly a third of the Psalter. Jesus quoted Psalm 22 from the cross. Christianity is not the suppression of grief but its sanctification. Lamentations teaches us how.
Several details in Lamentations have been read for centuries as foreshadowing Christ. The 'man of sorrows' figure in chapter 3 (vv. 1-21) anticipates Isaiah 53. Christ wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41-44) using language echoing Lamentations — 'If thou hadst known...the things which belong unto thy peace!' On the cross, Christ embodied the lament of Israel itself. He is the true mourner over Jerusalem, the suffering King who shares fully in his people's grief and bears it into resurrection. Lamentations prepares the reader to see in the cross not just power but the depth of divine compassion.
In the precise mathematical center of Lamentations, surrounded on every side by grief, sits the book's most quoted verse: 'It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.' Thomas Chisholm wrote the hymn 'Great Is Thy Faithfulness' in 1923, taking the title and theme directly from this passage. It has been sung at countless funerals — because it was written for one. The verse is not denial of grief but defiance within it. The mercies are new in the morning *because* the night was so dark.