Lamentations 3:16

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"He hath also broken my teeth with gravel stones, he hath covered me with ashes." Lamentations 3:16 .

The figure would seem to represent the prophet as eating and drinking sorrow. Distress is his daily food. In the metaphor of the text the prophet has seized bread in the extremity of his hunger, and lo, when he comes to eat it he finds that his mouth is full of gravel stones. This is disappointment, this is mortification, this is fatal to faith. Who knows how far God can go in the infliction of punishment? We think we have tasted all the bitter ness of death, when we are suddenly taught that as yet we have not begun to know how terrible can be the judgments of God. The wise man has told us that "Bread of deceit is sweet to a man; but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel." How forgetful we are of that "afterwards"! Experience of this kind has not been unknown. "Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue; though he spare it, and forsake it not; but keep it still within his mouth: yet his meat in his bowels is turned, it is the gall of asps within him. He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly. He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper's tongue shall slay him." Gehazi supposed that he had enriched himself, but he knew not that the heart of Elisha had gone out after him in his felonious errand. Gehazi began as a hypocrite, and ended as a leper. By every metaphor that is graphic, and expressive of real torment, God has endeavoured to show us that the wages of sin is death. Take out of all these metaphors what we may, we still leave behind the essential truth that the way of transgressors is hard, and that no man can fight against God and prevail: his hands shall be enfeebled, his skin shall be filled with leprosy, his eyes shall be blinded, his teeth shall be broken with gravel stones; he shall be stripped of his purple and fine linen, and be clothed with the raiment of ashes.