John Calvin Commentary Lamentations 3:41

"Let us lift up our heart with our hands unto God in the heavens." — Lamentations 3:41 (ASV)

To conversion he joins prayer, for we cannot be reconciled to God unless he buries our sins; nor can repentance and faith be separated. Moreover, to taste God’s mercy opens the door of prayer to us. And this ought to be carefully noticed, because the unbelieving sometimes seem to be very busy in seeking to return to God’s favor, but they only attend to the outward change of life. At the same time, they are not anxious about pardon but go boldly before God, as though they were not exposed to His judgment.

And we see under the Papacy that while they make long sermons on repentance, they hardly ever give any consideration to faith, as though repentance without faith were a restoration from death to life.

Therefore, I said that we ought to notice the method of teaching which our Prophet adopts: he begins with self-examination, then he requires conversion, but he does not separate it from faith. For when he exhorts us to pray, it is as if he had set God’s judgment before us and had also taught us that we cannot escape death unless God is propitious to us. How then is pardon to be obtained? By prayer; and prayer, as is well known, must always be founded on faith.

By telling us to raise up our hearts to God together with our hands, he instructs us to banish all hypocrisy from our prayers. For everyone, without exception, raises their hands to God, and nature itself, when we are pressed down with evils, leads us to seek God.

But most people stifle this natural feeling. When affliction comes, it is common for everyone to raise their hands to heaven, even if no one tells them to do so; yet their hearts remain fixed on the earth, and they do not come to God. And most people are included in that class mentioned by Isaiah:

“This people come to me with their tongue,
but their heart is far away” (Isaiah 29:13).

Since, then, people deal so formally with God and present a bare ceremony—as though God had changed and allowed His eyes to be covered—the Prophet instructs all deceit to cease from prayer: Let us raise up hands, he says, to God, and also hearts.

Joel speaks somewhat differently when he says, “Rend your hearts and not your garments” (Joel 2:13), for he seems to exclude the outward rite, because people, wishing to show that they were guilty before God, rent their garments. Joel says that this was superfluous and useless, and undoubtedly the rite itself was not so very necessary.

But since earnest prayers move the hands, our Prophet refers to that practice as useful. At the same time, he teaches us that the chief thing ought not to be omitted: namely, to raise up our hearts to God. Let us, then, he says, raise up our hearts together with our hands to God; and he adds, to God who is in heaven: for it is necessary that people should rise above the world and go out of themselves, so to speak, in order to come to God.

We now understand, then, the Prophet’s meaning: that those who repent from the heart should not go before God as though they were not guilty before His tribunal, but that on the contrary, they should be penitent and humble, so that they may obtain pardon. He afterwards shows that the right way of praying is when we not only perform the outward ceremonies but also when we open our hearts and raise them up, as it were, to heaven itself. It is, then, the right way of praying when the inward feeling corresponds with the external posture.