A Lament over the Destruction of Jerusalem, and Prayer for Help 1

79 O God, the nations have invaded your inheritance;
they have defiled your holy temple,
they have reduced Jerusalem to rubble.
2 They have given the dead bodies of your servants
as food to the birds of the air,
the flesh of your saints to the beasts of the earth.

Psa 79:1
They have defiled your holy temple—This was not only the highest degree of the enemy's inhumanity and barbarity, . . . but also a calamity to the people of God never to be sufficiently deplored. For by the overthrow of the temple the true worship of God, which had been instituted at that temple alone, appeared to be extinguished, and the knowledge of God to vanish from among mankind. No pious heart could ponder this without the greatest grief.—Mollerus.

Psa 79:1-5
God is complained to: whither should children go but to a Father able and willing to help them? See what a change sin made in the holy city, when the nations were suffered to pour in upon them. God's own people defiled it by their sins, therefore he suffered their enemies to defile it by their insolence. They desired that God would be reconciled. Those who desire God's favour as better than life, cannot but dread his wrath as worse than death. In every affliction we should first beseech the Lord to cleanse away the guilt of our sins; then he will visit us with his tender mercies.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of International Bible Society.

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