The Purpose of Lamentations. 

        One fallacy that is widely held is that inspiration is a question merely of authorship. For those who held it, the “fact” of Jeremiah’s authorship of Lamentations was sufficient justification for its being in the Bible. But the reason why any particular book is included in the Canon of Scripture must be deeper than that.

        The Bible sets out to give us every facet of the impact of God’s revelation on man. There is no aspect of human life, once it has been brought into the sphere of the operation of God’s Spirit, that is not illumined by some book of the Bible.

        Grief, great and crushing, is an unavoidable part of human life. Even in the new covenant it can come, and even there it can come as the result of sin, one’s own or another’s. To one who is passing through such an experience, who feels that the sun can never shine again as it once did, Lamentations may speak its word of comfort in ways that cannot be grasped by those who have not gone down into the vale of grief.