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Lamentations 5
1Remember, LORD, what has come on us. Look, and see our reproach.
2Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our houses to aliens.
3We are orphans and fatherless. Our mothers are as widows.
4We must pay for water to drink. Our wood is sold to us.
5Our pursuers are on our necks. We are weary, and have no rest.
6We have given our hands to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.
7Our fathers sinned, and are no more. We have borne their iniquities.
8Servants rule over us. There is no one to deliver us out of their hand.
9We get our bread at the peril of our lives, because of the sword in .
10Our skin is black like an oven, because of the burning heat of famine.
11They ravished the women in Zion, the virgins in the cities of Judah.
12Princes were hanged up by their hands. The faces of elders were not honored.
13The young men carry millstones. The children stumbled under loads of wood.
14The elders have ceased from the gate, and the young men from their music.
15The joy of our heart has ceased. Our dance is turned into mourning.
16The has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned!
17For this our heart is faint. For these things our eyes are dim:
18for the of Zion, which is desolate. The foxes walk on it.
19You, LORD, remain forever. Your is from generation to generation.
20Why do you forget us forever, and forsake us for so long a time?
21Turn us to yourself, LORD, and we will be turned. Renew our days as of old.
22But you have utterly rejected us. You are very angry against us.
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Questions this passage answers
Why does God allow suffering?
Scripture never gives one tidy reason for all suffering. It says that pain entered a good world through sin, that God is neither its author nor its prisoner, that he uses it without approving of it, and that he entered it himself in Christ rather than explaining it from a distance. The Bible answers the question with a person before it answers it with an argument.
Why does God seem silent?
God's apparent silence is felt by some of the most faithful people in Scripture, not only by the weak in faith. David, Job and Habakkuk all cried out into what felt like empty air. Scripture never rebukes them for asking. It records their words as prayer, answers them in its own time, and teaches that God's silence is never his absence.