Lamentations 1:14, ‘My transgressions were bound into a yoke; by His hand they were fastened together; they were set upon my neck…’
Jerusalem’s punishment from the Lord is nothing other than their own sins against the Lord poured back out upon them. Consider what it means to say that the horrors of the destruction and exile of God’s people really are nothing other than their own transgressions woven into a yoke and placed upon them….All this misery, all this pain, all this tortuous loss—this is their sin, this is their spiritual adultery, this is their rebellion against the Lord…this is what it has always been, except now it appears without its seductive mask.
So too, this text implies that it is nothing other than Jerusalem’s own sin—now stripped of its mask and revealed as the horror it has always been—that descends upon its neck in the exile. This may indeed be called God’s wrath since it is God who sees to it that one’s sins do in fact return upon them (HE fashions the sin into a yoke, HE places it on their neck), and yet the peculiar wickedness of the suffering (women raped, babies shattered on rocks, people driven to cannibalism in the extremities of starvation) are not themselves designed by the Holy God, rather, they are outworkings within the sphere of creation of the twisted horror that is rebellion against God.
But we cannot leave this verse until we visit Calvary. Calvary where the combined fibers of the totality of human sin, fashioned by YHWH into the eschatological yoke of the cross, is placed on the neck of the Beloved Son (Is.53:4-6). There the naked and unmitigated horror of what the Bride’s sin truly is, is poured out upon and borne in the body of her Lord and God in the agony of His cursed death (1 Pt.2:24, 2 Cor.5:21, Gal.3:13). All that Jerusalem experienced in her exile—and supremely, all that the damned experience in hell—this the Lord experiences in Himself in the paschal mystery of His passion and death and burial…
OUR transgressions were bound into a yoke; by His hand they were fastened together…and they were set upon HIS neck…(Is.53:6).
