The high notes of yesterday are not quite maintained. A recital of injustice, desperate pleas to God and a cry for vengeance are more prominent. Evil and pain are all-pervasive and cannot be ignored; they act as a constant challenge to faith, and anyone who pretends otherwise has not plumbed the depths of human agony or faced the questions that it raises.

Judah’s end was drawn out. The first exiles went to Babylon in 605 bc; this chapter depicts the siege which culminated in the fall of the city and the capture of Zedekiah in 587 (v 20). The descriptions are by now familiar: the slow death by starvation (v 9), the inability of mothers to feed their young (v 4), the rich reduced to living skeletons (vv 7,8) ,…

This, the shortest poem in the book, has much in common with the lament psalms. It repeats many of the earlier themes. The dire situation is described: invasion, occupation, starvation, rape, servitude, the collapse of social order, the destruction of the worship centre.

Little wonder that joy has been replaced by mourning (v 15).

A hundred years ago a French psychologist called Émile Coué believed that his patients could be cured if they repeated to themselves daily the words: “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” We don’t hear this kind of advice very much today.

Just the other day, when I was driving on the highway, someone abruptly cut in front of me, and I had to brake to avoid an accident. I don’t need to tell you what I felt at that moment. But then I remembered that I had done just the same thing to someone else only a few days previously.

The psalmist expresses his thanks to God with great joy and celebration. He knows that God destroys the evil people who threaten him. They are like short-lived grass that springs up but then is soon plucked out (vv 5-9). He has witnessed the destruction of his enemies and now he worships God with thankfulness (v 11).

We all want others to think well of us. As this famous passage in Proverbs points out, being a good wife is less about what a woman does and more about who a woman is. Yet, it’s easy to fall into a trap of believing that doing the right things will cause others to think well of us.