NOTES for Lam 2:14
In the Book of Lamentations, as in some other biblical books, the theme sounds of God rejecting and punishing His people. At first glance these assertions may seem too human; God appears in them as someone like an angry earthly ruler. But on closer consideration, behind them one discovers spiritual depth and the awareness of certain very important laws of spiritual life.
The matter, of course, is not punishments in the human sense of the word. Sometimes, however, God may use rather severe methods of influence on a person in order to bring him into the needed spiritual state, but even here the matter is not punishment, but precisely a rather strong and sometimes unexpected spiritual influence for the person, which the person himself may at first perceive as something undesirable for himself. But more often it is different.
God has His plan for every person and every people. Or more precisely, He has His own plan for humanity, in which every person and every people can take part if they wish: there is a place in God's plan for everyone. All the more will there be such a place for the people of God, whose very existence is inseparable from God's plan. But what if an individual person or a whole people refuses to participate, does not want to use the opportunity to occupy the place God has assigned him in God's plans?
Then, obviously, such a person or people will find themselves where they were not meant to be, with all the consequences that follow from this. And then no longer God's will, but chance, will determine the existence of such a person or such a people. Not Providence, but fate, doom. And if this is destructive for any people, it is doubly destructive for the people of God, since their very existence is possible only within the framework of Providence. This very fact was what the people-community had to realize in captivity.