God’s Word for You
Lamentations 3:17-20 The Second Adam
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, March 9, 2025
17 You deprived my soul of peace.
I have forgotten what happiness is.
18 So I say, “My endurance is gone
and my hope from the LORD as well.”
19 Remember my poverty and my wandering,
the wormwood and the gall.
20 My soul remembers them well,
and it is humbled within me.
This is the spiritual bottom of the lament. The soul that does not know peace is a soul in torment forever. He has forgotten all about what happiness is or was. He cries out in verse 18 that his stamina or endurance is gone—and so is any hope he had left from the Lord. But then the prophet, our Jew in Babylon, remembers something else. He remembers things like his homelessness, his poverty, his wandering days. They weren’t days of begging. Someone who is homeless in a modern city can live by begging, or by stealing. In a village it’s much harder. But this was a man kicked out of civilization. He had nothing at all, and he was nowhere; no place. There was no one to beg from. There wasn’t even anyone to steal from. This was “wormwood.” This was gall; bitter poison. Under the first cross, there was only one thing left, and our prophet will remember in the next verses.
The second cross saw our Savior Jesus in agony on Calvary. His endurance was already gone before he ever got to the hill. Just as Jesus was leaving the city, the soldiers grabbed a man called Simon of Cyrene and forced him to carry the cross the final yards out of the city and up the hill (Matthew 27:32). There they offered Jesus wine mixed with gall (Matthew 27:34), but he refused to drink it. It is said that the women of Jerusalem had a custom of offering this as a pain-killer to anyone who was crucified, but Jesus wanted to suffer the cup given to him by his Father, and no other cup.
“Remember my poverty and my wandering” recalls Jesus’ entire ministry. He never had a home of his own. “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Matthew 8:20). But now, at Calvary, he was more than homeless. There was no more wandering. This was the end. There was only death ahead for the three condemned men. As for Jesus’ poverty, we would have thought that he had nothing left to give up, except that the soldiers took his clothes from him before he died and drew lots to see which of them got what (Matthew 27:35).
Paul wrote: “He emptied himself by taking the nature of a servant. When he was born in human likeness, and his appearance was like that of any other man, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:7-8 EHV). So we see that although the death of Jesus was a terrible torture and an excruciating death, and one to be pitied, that is not the meaning of the crucifixion. Other men died terrible deaths that are recorded in the Scriptures, men like Abel, and the seventy sons of Gideon the Judge, and Asahel the nephew of David, and Jonathan David’s friend who died with his father Saul, and Zechariah the prophet and priest, who was stoned to death “between the temple and the altar” (Matthew 23:35; 2 Chronicles 24:21). Their tragic deaths were not like the death of Christ. The death of Jesus was the atoning sacrifice to cover over the sins of all mankind. He died in full obedience to his heavenly Father, to atone for all sins, beginning precisely where Adam failed.
Adam sinned in a garden; to atone for this, Christ began his suffering in a garden.
Adam had blasphemed God because he wanted to be like God and tried to grab at his Creator’s crown. To atone for this, Christ allowed himself to be condemned as a blasphemer for doing nothing more than confessing to be God’s Son, which was the truth in every sense.
When questioned by his Judge, Adam lied and accused his bride, becoming a perjurer. To atone for this, Christ submitted to the accusations and condemnations of his Bride, the Church (at that time, the synagogue), and was condemned as a seditious rabble-rouser. “They all condemned him as worthy of death” (Mark 14:64).
After he fell, Adam tried to find excuses for his crimes. To atone for this, Christ kept silent before his accusers. “He did not open his mouth…, like a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” (Isaiah 53:7).
Adam was a genuine murderer and “Barabbas” since he brought death upon himself, his wife, and all their descendants. There has never been a greater murderer. To atone for this, Christ was presented before the people side-by-side with an arch-murderer, Barabbas, and Barabbas was released at the request and cries of the crowds (Matthew 27:21).
Adam had been dressed by God in righteousness and innocence, but the hellish robber and brigand Satan stripped him and undressed his entire body through sin, bringing guilt and shame, and this way the devil still wounds all mankind. To atone for Adam’s sin and to divert his shame, Christ allowed himself to be stripped naked and be wounded all over his entire body (John 19:1).
Adam stretched out his hands to the forbidden tree and took the forbidden fruit for his pleasure, bringing sin and death into the world (Genesis 2:17, 3:6). To atone for this sin and to conquer death, Christ stretched out his hands on the tree of the cross, and was given vinegar to drink in order to win the victory of righteousness and life for mankind, including Adam and his wife and all their descendants.
Through sin, Adam was locked out of the garden and forbidden to enter the gate of Paradise. Christ has opened and unlocked the gate, even assuring the criminal on the next cross of this, even has he hung on the tree, dying (Luke 23:43). “You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Psalm 16:11).
It is the word of God that teaches us all these things. This is the word of God that has the power of salvation for everyone who believes (Romans 1:16). This is the power that empowers us to pick up our crosses, our burdens, and our tests, and to carry them with joy in thanks for what our Savior has done. He has set us free, removed our guilt and our shame, and he promises to bring us home to be with him forever in Paradise.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.