Lamentations 3:22-23: What Comes Before the Famous Verse

The verse turns up on mugs and Instagram graphics: his mercies are new every morning. Someone sent it to you, maybe, or you found it yourself at two in the morning, searching for something to hold onto. But the words came from a book written by a man watching his city burn, and it might help to know what he said just before them.

A book written after everything was lost

Lamentations is five poems written after Jerusalem fell. The city had been under siege, then destroyed. The temple, the center of worship and identity for that whole people, was gone. People had starved. Some had died in ways the text describes and we will not repeat here. The book does not soften any of it. It is, as far as we can tell, the record of someone standing in rubble and refusing to pretend otherwise.

This is not a book about a bad week. It is a book about the worst thing that can happen to a nation, written by someone who was there for it.

That matters for how we read chapter 3, because the famous lines about mercy did not come from a comfortable place. They came from inside the wreckage, from a voice that had already said much harder things and would say them again a few verses later.

What comes right before

Here is the passage in full, the part everyone quotes and the part right before it that almost nobody does.

Remember mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is bowed down within me. This I recall to my mind; therefore have I hope. [It is of] Jehovah's lovingkindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. Jehovah is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him. Jehovah is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should hope and quietly wait for the salvation of Jehovah. Lamentations 3:19-26

Read it slowly and notice the order. He does not start with hope. He starts with wormwood and gall, a phrase for something bitter enough to make you gag. He says his soul still remembers it, is bowed down by it. Then, in the very next breath, he says: this I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.

What is "this" he recalls? Not that the suffering is over. Not that it made sense. He recalls something about who God is, and it is that recollection, held right alongside the bitterness, that gives him something to stand on. The hope does not replace the grief. It sits next to it. In the same breath, in the same sentence structure, the wormwood and the mercy are both still there.

That is different from what the verse usually gets used for. It is often lifted out to mean something like: cheer up, tomorrow will be better. But the man who wrote it was not promised a better tomorrow. His city was still in ruins when he wrote this. He was saying something more like: even here, this is still true about God. Not that the rubble would be cleared by morning. That the character of God had not changed, morning after morning, even while the rubble stayed.

What it does not say

It is worth being specific about what this passage is not offering, because it gets stretched to cover ground it was never meant to cover.

It does not say the loss will be undone. The temple did not rebuild itself because the writer had the right attitude about mercy. It does not say that if you just remember God's faithfulness hard enough, your circumstances will lift. The very next chapters of the same book go back to describing horror in detail. Chapter 3 is not the resolution of the book. It is one movement inside a longer lament that keeps returning to grief after this.

And it does not say the grief should be resolved by now, whenever now is for you. If someone has handed you this verse as a way of telling you to move on, that is not what the verse is doing in its own text. The writer's soul is still bowed down in the same sentence where he finds hope. Both things are true at once, on the same page, and neither cancels the other.

This same pattern shows up elsewhere in scripture, the refusal to let hope erase grief. In one of the psalms of lament, the writer does not get a turn toward comfort at all within the poem:

O Jehovah, the God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee. Let my prayer enter into thy presence; Incline thine ear unto my cry. For my soul is full of troubles, And my life draweth nigh unto Sheol. I am reckoned with them that go down into the pit; I am as a man that hath no help, Cast off among the dead, Like the slain that lie in the grave, Whom thou rememberest no more, And they are cut off from thy hand. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, In dark places, in the deeps. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, And thou hast afflicted me with all thy waves. [Selah Thou hast put mine acquaintance far from me; Thou hast made me an abomination unto them: I am shut up, and I cannot come forth. Mine eye wasteth away by reason of affliction: I have called daily upon thee, O Jehovah; I have spread forth my hands unto thee. Psalm 88:1-9

That psalm is in the same Bible as Lamentations 3, unresolved. Scripture keeps room for both kinds of prayer, the one that finds its way to hope inside the pain, and the one that does not get there by the last line. Neither is a failure of faith.

Praying it now

If you came looking for this verse because someone is dying, or has died, or your life fell apart in some way that has no fixing, we are not going to tell you the mercy is a promise that things get better by tomorrow. We do not know that, and neither did the man who wrote it.

What his words offer is smaller and, we think, sturdier. He held the wormwood and the mercy in the same hand. You are allowed to do that too. You do not have to choose between naming how bad this is and saying, also, that something about God has not changed. You do not have to feel resolved to pray this. He didn't.

If it helps, try praying the passage exactly as he wrote it, out loud, including the bitter part. Let your soul be bowed down in the sentence, and let the hope sit next to it without doing the work of erasing it. That is what the text does. It might be what your prayer can do too.

If you want a place to put the specific thing you are carrying into words, you can start one at /pray.