NOTES for Lam 5:1-22

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¹Remember, O LORD, what is come upon us: consider, and behold our reproach.

²Our inheritance is turned to strangers, our houses to aliens.

³We are orphans and fatherless, our mothers are as widows.

⁴We have drunken our water for money; our wood is sold unto us.

⁵Our necks are under persecution: we labour, and have no rest.

⁶We have given the hand to the Egyptians, and to the Assyrians, to be satisfied with bread.

⁷Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities.

⁸Servants have ruled over us: there is none that doth deliver us out of their hand.

⁹We gat our bread with the peril of our lives because of the sword of the wilderness.

¹⁰Our skin was black like an oven because of the terrible famine.

¹¹They ravished the women in Zion, and the maids in the cities of Judah.

¹²Princes are hanged up by their hand: the faces of elders were not honoured.

¹³They took the young men to grind, and the children fell under the wood.

¹⁴The elders have ceased from the gate, the young men from their musick.

¹⁵The joy of our heart is ceased; our dance is turned into mourning.

¹⁶The crown is fallen from our head: woe unto us, that we have sinned!

¹⁷For this our heart is faint; for these things our eyes are dim.

¹⁸Because of the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it.

¹⁹Thou, O LORD, remainest for ever; thy throne from generation to generation.

²⁰Wherefore dost thou forget us for ever, and forsake us so long time?

²¹Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.

²²But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us.

The suggestion that God can forget someone or something sounds strange. After all, the world exists only through God's will; whatever God does not remember, whatever He does not know about, simply does not exist — for being belongs to Him alone, and only He exists truly and fully, while everything else exists insofar as He wills it to exist. But there are different ways of knowing. We too, after all, recall only what we already remember, what we already know. Recollection is not the emergence of new knowledge, but the bringing of existing knowledge to mind.

Yet to recall something, we need to concentrate our attention on what we are trying to recall. God too can know and remember different things in different ways. Of course, He is not a human being; His consciousness and self-awareness exist differently from ours, and we cannot fully understand how. Yet, it seems, God too can remember someone or something — in the sense of the attention that He, like a human being, can direct wherever He chooses.

God knows everything, but in different ways. He may know only that someone or something exists — and that knowledge of His is enough for that person or thing to exist. But it by no means follows that someone or something that exists will necessarily exist or act in accordance with His will and His plans, or that events will unfold accordingly. Human beings are free, and freedom has a reverse side: it can always be used to oppose God, to resist His will.

In that case God turns away; He does not take part in what does not accord with His plans. He leaves those who oppose Him their existence, but “forgets” them, allowing events to unfold as directed by their will, which opposes His own. And for God to “remember”, to enter the life of a person or an entire people, to intervene in a situation and make His will manifest in it, we must turn to Him and ask Him to do so. For human beings are free, and God will not force His way into their lives without their consent. How to use that freedom is something each person decides for themselves.

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For Lam 5:1-22