21 How the Lord has covered the daughter of Zion With a cloud in His anger ! He has cast from heaven to earth The glory of Israel , And has not remembered His footstool e In the day of His anger . 2 The Lord has swallowed up; He has not spared All the habitations of Jacob . In His wrath He has thrown down The strongholds of the daughter of Judah ; He has brought them down to the ground ; He has profaned the kingdom and its princes . 3 In fierce anger He has cut off All the strength of Israel ; He has drawn back His right hand From before the enemy . And He has burned in Jacob like a flaming fire Consuming round about . 4 He has bent His bow like an enemy ; He has set His right hand like an adversary And slain all that were pleasant to the eye ; In the tent of the daughter of Zion He has poured out His wrath like fire . 5 The Lord has become like an enemy . He has swallowed up Israel ; He has swallowed up all its palaces , He has destroyed its strongholds And multiplied in the daughter of Judah Mourning and moaning . 6 And He has violently treated His tabernacle like a garden booth; He has destroyed His appointed meeting place . The Lord has caused to be forgotten The appointed feast and sabbath in Zion , And He has despised king and priest In the indignation of His anger . 7 The Lord has rejected His altar , He has abandoned His sanctuary ; He has delivered into the hand of the enemy The walls of her palaces . They have made a noise in the house of the Lord As in the day of an appointed feast . 8 The Lord determined to destroy The wall of the daughter of Zion . He has stretched out a line , He has not restrained His hand from destroying , And He has caused rampart and wall to lament ; They have languished together . 9 Her gates have sunk into the ground , He has destroyed and broken her bars . Her king and her princes are among the nations ; The law is no more . Also , her prophets find No vision from the Lord .
Matthew Henry's Commentary on Lamentations 2:1-9
Commentary on Lamentations 2:1-9
(Read Lamentations 2:1-9)
A sad representation is here made of the state of God's church, of Jacob and Israel; but the notice seems mostly to refer to the hand of the Lord in their calamities. Yet God is not an enemy to his people, when he is angry with them and corrects them. And gates and bars stand in no stead when God withdraws his protection. It is just with God to cast down those by judgments, who debase themselves by sin; and to deprive those of the benefit and comfort of sabbaths and ordinances, who have not duly valued nor observed them. What should they do with Bibles, who make no improvement of them? Those who misuse God's prophets, justly lose them. It becomes necessary, though painful, to turn the thoughts of the afflicted to the hand of God lifted up against them, and to their sins as the source of their miseries.