God’s Word for You
Lamentations 5:17-18 jackals prowling
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Thursday, April 17, 2025
17 Our hearts are sick about it.
It’s because of these things that our eyes grow dim
18 for Mount Zion, which lies desolate,
with jackals prowling over it.
For most of the chapter, the prophet has been relating in terse poetic lines that Jerusalem is devastated. The people, what few remain, are humiliated and scrambling for scraps of food. Everyone misses all those who are gone. The dust of the masses of people who were marched northward to Babylon is mostly settled. The general silence of the city has become heartbreakingly familiar.
“Our hearts are sick about it,” he says, and the “it” is the sin of the people. When sinners comes face to face with God or his agents, their hearts melt in fear (Joshua 2:11, 5:1). To show repentance, the Lord told Joel, “Tear open your heart and not your clothes” (Joel 2:13).
The eyes of the people were growing dim. Why? “It’s because of these things,” on account of the many sufferings of the people. In Hebrew, eyes that grow dim do so on account of grief (Job 17:7; Psalm 88:9; Ecclesiastes 12:3). And as for the mountain? The mountain is a ruin, a desolate ruin, and wild animals like jackals roam through the rubble prowling in their packs.
It was to prevent the final desolation of Mount Zion that Christ came to become desolate himself; he became a ruin to prevent our ruin. His own eyes grew dim with grief for us, and then closed in death to rescue us, to give us liberty and freedom from the devil’s accusations.
We might talk about the jackals of verse 18 in a figurative sense, such as the jackals of the Sanhedrin or the chief priests that were prowling through the city, looking for Jesus, looking with ravenous hatred on their snarling lips, and so on. But if we can see them as actual jackals and not figurative ones, wouldn’t that be all the better? For it was to keep the city of God, the true Zion, the eternal Holy Christian Church, filled and protected that Christ came. He came to gather us in to his Father’s kingdom, into the city of God. Real jackals spook easily, like our American coyotes, and they shy away from people, especially people in groups. The Lord our God kept the whole human race from becoming a desolate ruin by sending his Son to atone for our sins.
And this brings us to the third cross, the cross of our present suffering. We, too, have sick hearts on account of sin. We, too, grieve on account of the pains of this life, the pains that make our eyes grow dim. We, too, grieve because the true Zion, the Holy Christian Church, seems in danger of shrinking down until it lies desolate, and dangerous creatures prowl and slink around in packs. And “your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).
There is confusion. There is fear. There are attacks from every side. Those who despise Christ have very loud voices in our world. Those who say that they love Christ but confuse law and gospel, and confuse justification and sanctification, and confuse salvation and conditions for salvation—such people are not our allies. If we yield to false doctrine for the sake of unity, we lose Christ. And therefore, the church seems to shrink even more. But the church will never disappear from the world. “It is taught among us that one holy Christian Church will be and remain forever” (Augsburg Confession, VII:1). And again: “There is an infinite number of ungodly within the church who oppress it. The church will abide nevertheless; it exists despite the great multitude of the wicked, and Christ supplies it with the gifts he has promised—the forgiveness of sins, answer to prayer, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. The Creed offers us these consolations so that we may not despair but may know all this. It says, ‘(I believe in) the Holy Christian Church’” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession). And Jesus said simply and for our supreme comfort: “The gates of Hades will not overcome my church” (Matthew 16:18).
When we become concerned about the numbers of believers in the church, and we are grieved by the smallness of those numbers, we heft this cross like any other. We must, on the one hand, do whatever we can to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ or to support the spread of the Gospel in whatever way we can. But on the other hand, we must remember that the marks of the true church are the preaching of the Gospel and the proper use of the sacraments, and therefore the world and the false church will avoid those things. So praise God for the blessing of giving us the signs to recognize the rightness of the church we belong to! In it we learn about Christ crucified for our sins, and the physical resurrection of the dead, and the promise of true and real physical life of body and soul forever in heaven. False churches reject these things, or reduce them to figures of speech. Therefore let the true Word of God live in our hearts always. He died so that we will live. Whatever the small numbers are, the Gospel tells us that you and I are among them!
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.