New Every Morning

Lamentations is five poems written over the rubble of Jerusalem, and most of them are acrostics — grief composed with terrible discipline, each stanza taking up the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet in turn. The city has fallen; the temple is ash; children faint for hunger in the streets. And then, at the center of the book — in its longest poem, the one that climbs three times through the whole alphabet — the dirge does the last thing we would expect. It stops for hope: "But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope" (Lamentations 3:21).

What the poet calls to mind is not that things have improved; nothing has. It is one fact about God the ruins cannot touch: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:22–23). The word beneath steadfast love is hesed — covenant loyalty that keeps its word when there is no reason left to. And the picture is the plainest one there is: morning — not one grand rescue, but mercy that arrives the way daylight does, quietly and on time, whether or not we slept. This is not the easy comfort of a man who was spared. He is sitting where Job sat, on the ash heap, the worst already behind him and none of it undone; and still he says the light will come, because the God waiting on the far side of the night does not fail.

Yet we are right to ask how we know the supply will never, some morning, simply fail — how we know our night is not the one the light forgets. The answer is a morning bought at the bottom of the darkest night there has ever been. On the cross the true Man of Sorrows went down into a darkness with no dawn in it, forsaken in the place we had earned: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). He did not skip the dark. He stayed in it to the end, so that it would end.

Then, on the first morning of that week, while the ruin still looked complete, mercy kept its appointment once more — this time for good. "According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead" (1 Peter 1:3). Every daybreak since is a rumor of that one. Weeping may tarry for the night, the psalmist sang, "but joy comes with the morning" (Psalm 30:5) — and now we know the morning’s name.

So the poet’s next words become ours to pray. "The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will hope in him" (Lamentations 3:24) — portion was the share of land each family held in Israel, except that here the inheritance is not a field but God himself — and in Christ that portion can never be taken from us. Which is why the poem ends not with a demand but with a place to rest: "It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD" (Lamentations 3:26). We can wait quietly — not because the ruins are small, but because the morning is sure, and the salvation we wait for has already come looking for us once. That is a hope to sit still inside. Mercy is on its way, and it comes as it always has — like the light: new, over everything the night has done.