Rehearsing Our Hope

The third acrostic poem of Lamentations is from the perspective of a man who witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem and all the related sufferings first-hand. After a first movement of familiar anguish, he introduces a new element to his lament: he forces himself to remember the character of God—to rehearse God's goodness. Holding both raw processing and theological conviction side-by-side without letting one cancel out the other, he shows us the way to a fully honest lament that still clings to hope.