Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Lamentations · About this commentary
He Does Not Afflict Willingly
Lamentations 3:28-39
28 Let him sit alone and keep silence, because he has laid it on him. · WEB
The book's theological center is three statements about God's disposition, and the middle one is the only thing said anywhere in Scripture in quite these words.
The counsel in verses 28 to 30 is hard and is offered without softening: sit alone, keep silence, put the mouth in the dust, give the cheek to the striker. And one clause keeps it from being fatalism — if it is so that there may be hope. The silence is a posture of waiting, not of resignation.
Then verses 31 to 33, and they are the hinge of the book's theology. Three statements, each qualifying the one before.
The Lord will not cast off forever. The rejection is real and it is bounded — the poem does not deny the casting off, it dates it.
Though he causes grief, yet he will have compassion according to the multitude of his covenant love. The grief is attributed to him without evasion, and the compassion is measured not by the sufferer's endurance but by the abundance of something in God.
And then verse 33: he does not afflict willingly, nor grieve the children of men. The Hebrew is literally not from his heart. Set beside the second chapter, where the Lord has become as an enemy Lamentations 2:5, this is the book's answer — and it is an answer about disposition rather than about facts. Nothing done is denied. What is denied is that it came from the center of who he is.
Verses 34 to 36 then list three things the Lord does not approve: crushing prisoners underfoot, denying a man his right before the Most High, subverting his case. And verses 37 to 39 press the question of who does anything at all without his command — ending with the man's own conclusion, that a living man has no ground to complain of the punishment of his sins.
settled What this mark means