God Cries...
- White Stone
- 4 hours ago
- 14 min read
There is this one momentous reason why God cries...His divine love. We
might then wonder, coming from so high a Being, what must be the sounding
of the God who cries. Could it be a voice that reminds us of where we stand
with such a holy God? Could it be a sounding that gives us greater
understanding of how we are to see God? We might ought to understand
that there can be no technical description to any sound coming from God.
We know of the sound of thunder, we know of the sound of wind, of fire, of
lightning, trumpets, and even a still small voice. The soundings of God can
be revealed expressively or impressively through mountains, water, trees,
meadows, clouds, valleys, landscapes, and so much more, but most
persistently, through His Word. There can be no audible expression
attending God’s soundings without the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Holy
Spirit will help us hear God’s soundings whether God decides to speak
audibly, visually, or inwardly through impressions, or even while it walks. As
believers we have access to know the plans, mind, and purposes of God for
our life through the Holy Spirit. Some of us wait for the face to face encounter.
We must always consider the spiritual impressions of God’s nature. When
we are in the mind of that holy thing born, God sounds like our own voice.
Angels speak in both a physical and spiritual light. Who among us can
discern the characteristics of God’s love? Love is the greatest attribute of
God. When God sounds, He sounds to our faith, to our hope. God does not
have faith in the way we have faith, because He never has to “trust” outside
of Himself. God does not have hope the way we have hope, because He
knows all things and is in complete control. But God is love, and will always
be love. Can a faith that moves mountains be heard? Fortunately, we don’t
need to choose between faith, hope, and love. God cares about our coming
closer to Him. His crying is not dramatic. In our minds, with His will, we
engage with wisdom the understanding of God’s nature through a more
subtle path of discernment. God does not want us to discern in isolation. He
lets us hear His crying through people we know who are farther down the
path of holiness than we are. God has made us as an inherently relational
being and as we are striving to become what we are purposed to be, we find
ourselves deciding between sin and virtue. Then know that the voice of God
as He cries is through virtue alone. God never asks us to sin. God’s voice is
the sound of consistent love. God comes near us for a good purpose in a
contrite spirit. In the reality of God what does it mean that He sheds tears?
God is beyond human. Can God’s tears be more than an emotional
response? He tells us that His eyes run down with tears. God cries for the
pressures from the narrowness of circumstances of things that we are to
endure. He knows the grievous blows that are coming to His people. God is
love, and there is this principle taught in the divine Word, that true love weeps
with those that weep. This is exemplary of the Divine character. But God’s
peace of mind is never disturbed. His fatherly love that shares the sorrows
of His human family contains no anxiety over our eternal welfare. With Divine
serenity His wisdom has planned for the eternal welfare of all His people,
and in His serenity He knows His Divine love and power will attain that goal.
The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth…and
it grieved Him to His heart. Yes, God cried. During the crusades, soldiers in
route to the Holy Land slaughtered followers of Christ hiding in their
synagogues. Cries of anguish shrilled unto heaven as the wooden structures
were torched. And God cried. In Europe reformer’s blood flowed freely in
Roman Catholic countries as victims of the so-called “Holy” Inquisition
totaled in the millions. And God cried. Over 20 million Black beings were
enslaved and between 2 to 4 million died while in slave ships yet at sea
during the “Middle Passage” voyage to slave markets run largely by white
so-called Christians. And God cried. Six million people claiming to be the
people of God, descendants of those who reckoned his blood on themselves
and their children were hunted, gassed, and burned in the tragedy termed
Holocaust. And God cried. The first of two atomic bombs claimed 130,000
victims and terrified the world. And God cried. Ruthless governments of Nazi
Germany, Communist rule, American inexplicable wickedness and the
emerging pattern of its unhinged frothing hatred. And God is crying.
God’s empathy runs so deep that He actually knows, in the sense of feeling,
our troubles, sorrows and tragedies. God grieves with us, and He isn’t in a
hurry to superimpose His reality on ours aggressively, why? Because He
understands that our tears and temporal pain are a natural consequence of
the brokenness we feel which is a direct result of the brokenness in this
world. So He empathizes with us first, before He brings His truth to bear in
our reality, however long that takes, Love is patient. Does God cry is not an
academic question or an abstract philosophy. God suffers when man suffers,
and yes, God has His purposes for permitting suffering. God knows the end
from the beginning. God’s Son departed from his honor, his majesty to be
with us. The foreknowledge of God adds another dimension to the scope of
God’s crying. God is doing things too wonderful for us to understand right
now. But soon we will see with a clearer understanding of God, that we might
serve Him more faithfully and with greater appreciation. God’s last great cry
to humanity is going on right now throughout the whole world. We’re a part
of this cry, the Bride of Christ with the tears of Calvary, the tears of God, the
tears of Jesus, the tears of the Holy Spirit. The Bible tells us that we have
been made partakers of His divine nature. Contained in the tears of Calvary
are all the love, compassion, mercy of God. In the tears of Calvary, God
provided that all the fruits of the Spirit could be manifested in each child of
God’s life. God’s crying is not a sound. It is the sheer silence of His presence.
You want to hear God cry? Go outside, look around and see what we
consider the joy of His creation. Are we attuned to God spiritually?
Can we discern the movement of the Holy Spirit? Few there are that can even
recognize the voice of God, let alone hear it. Those who are in a right
relationship with God can tune out the noise of the world. As God hears their
cries, so they hear His. What does God cry about? Why does He cry? Sin
interrupted our walk with God and He cries to us in these memorable
words...”where art thou”? That cry has been going forth down through the
ages to other Adam’s, other Eve’s…God crying over His lost children. Think
of the multitudes who have been lost. As Noah and his family boarded the
ark, God cried. He cried those seven days the ark door stood open. God
thought about the first man and woman He made, how horrifying it had been
when they fell into sin, how it grieved His heart when He had to drive them
from the Garden and place cherubim at the gate with a flaming sword to keep
them out. Never will God forget the way He cried that day. God cried again
the day the ark door was to close. Those outside were given one last chance
to repent. As God stood looking at the ark so long in the making, He knew a
multitude of people were steeped in sin, darkness. All their thoughts were
evil continually. God, shedding the tears of His great love, His burning tears
of great compassion for lost humanity, the unseen hands of His angel took
hold of the ark door and pushed it shut. But when the ark door was sealed,
it was a tearless God who poured down the rains from heaven and opened
up the fountains of the earth. It might be that the people began to pray.
But they found no compassion, no tears of God, no crying; for their prayers
contained no love for God but were filled with fear and anger. Without a tear,
God brought judgment on those outside the ark of safety. God will not shed
tears when He brings final judgment to human beings; they would be useless
tears. God sheds tears when those tears can help. If people shut themselves
out of reach of His tears, if His tears will not move them, God cries no more.
It’s over and done with. How would we feel were God to look at us without
the tears of Calvary? Imagine what it would be like for those who are in sin.
Too many think they can find the Lord anytime they want – and they can as
long as He has tears for them. But one day those tears may not be there,
and there will be no hope of Heaven left at all. The only escape is in the tears
of Calvary, the only love, the only faith, the only salvation. Without those
tears...Do not think it makes God sound too vulnerable to say that He cries.
He cries because our unbelief causes us unnecessary grief and sorrow. Our sin is
committed against greater light. We stand on a higher mountain and see
more than any could ever see. We have a completed Word with a full and
detailed record of God's trustworthiness. We have the written testimonies of
generations of godly fathers and faithful others who have passed down to us
unshakeable proofs of God's love. And what of the countless personal
experiences. He cries because we fail to recognize who He is and rest in His
promises. We make God cry. And when we hear God cry, we move to a
higher reality of faith. And when we see God cry, we move into a new
revelation of His love. Our being made in the image of God and knowing that
our God cries lets us know that crying is not a sign of weakness but of
strength. Crying is more than an emotion, it is having the heart of God. God’s
cries and our cries are joined. God’s cry is a cry of invitation. There is this
war cry coming from God’s people today. This is born from confidence that
God is mighty and that He is with us. In these last days God will use our cries
to help others overcome difficulties. Our tears will be a blessing to many. As
the woman’s tears washed Jesus’ feet, our cries will strengthen hearts to be
cleansed through prayer and repentance.
Just as Jesus wept, not for the death of a friend, but for the lack of faith that
his presence means life. They knew not that he was a Savior who dwells
alongside, above, and within the creation itself. Our evils have afflicted God.
That is why we worship a Lord who experiences all the emotions of the world
so that we may relate and cleave to something who has borne our pain. We
serve a God who cries. There is no faltering on the part of God in dealing
with us in the spirit of fathership. He deals with us as His children. Christ was
brought to the extremity which we shall never reach but as he cried in the
spirit of sonship we see our God bitterest cry commence with “O my Father”.
If we remain faithful, we will go through arduous trials. God will agonize with
us. This was Christ’s own Godlike nature that leaped up in him. He is the
divine original. This compassion is peculiar to Himself dictated by his
originality. And so, we know God cries in the inwardness of His love which
may serve us for a pattern, but of which no pattern had existed before. This
suggest of the memorable intercession prayer of Jesus overwhelmingly
showing the deity of his affection. This is the first cry of our Savior’s
intercession for those who will be perfected. And his second cry was his
intercession for his enemies...Father, forgive them. All His intercession is in
a measure like the intercession of his prayer and on Calvary and his cries
help us to reason the character of the whole of His intercession above. Our
Savior prayed for persons who did not deserve the prayer, but on the
contrary, merited a curse - persons who did not ask for the prayer and even
scoffed at it when they heard it. Even so in heaven there stands the great
High Priest, who pleads for guilty men...and so our God still cries. There are
none on earth that deserve His intercession. He pleads for none on the
supposition that they do deserve it. He stands there to plead as the just One
on the behalf of the unjust. Not if any man be righteous, but “If any man sin,
we have an advocate with the Father.” God cries because His heart of love
is entreating the favor of heaven on our behalf. Tears and cries of
omnipotence.
God cries out of His own personal sorrow for what sin costs, representing
the richness and depth of His character. God is spirit. The Father and the
Holy Spirit do not cry literal tears as we do. We cry over situations that are
overwhelming or uncertain to us. God does not have that element of
uncertainty to deal with. He is never overwhelmed, for He has all authority in
heaven and on earth. How are God’s tears real? God stores our tears in a
bottle. God’s esteem for our tears is an acknowledgement that our sorrow
and our very lives are precious in God’s eyes. Christ will be glorious in the
eyes of the Lord; and those who are Israel, who are in Christ are truly glorious
that are so in God's eyes. We are His tears, just as we are His joy. Though
Israel be not gathered, yet shall I be glorious in the eyes of the LORD. Our
tears are not lost on God. These tears cause God to be deeply moved. And
we are called to be more than onlookers in this drama, to do more than
pronounce our judgment about which people God loves and whether God
could have done more to prevent certain tragedies. We too must allow the
tears being shed around us to disturb us greatly and move us deeply. We
need to recognize the tears that God is collecting and crying, and to choose
to take part in God’s redemptive and restorative activity on behalf of all those
who weep. God cries in our cry.
Many have difficulties connecting God with emotional concerns that we have
over situations. God’s Word tells us that we were made in God’s image and
it also shows us that we can make God joyful, pleased, or sad. Do we think
that our behavior has no effects to God’s heart? The spirit of God can be
grieved. God is sorrowful when we reject Him. When we willfully forsake His
way to walk somewhere else, due to personal passions, wills and ambitions.
The spirit of God is not indifferent but sorrowful in such cases. The bible
weighs in on what would appear to be the very first reference to the emotions
of God in the Old Testament. God repented and He was grieved in his heart.
God’s repentance and grieving gives reference to our understanding of Him.
For since we cannot comprehend God as He is, it is necessary that, for our
sake, He should, in a certain sense, transform Himself. For a God who knows
every event that will occur can repentance really take place in God? With this
consideration, nothing can happen which is by Him unexpected or
unforeseen. God is celestial and sovereign in all His rest. God forever is like
Himself, however, truth could not otherwise be known about how great is
God's hatred and detestation of sin, therefore the Spirit accommodates
Himself to our capacity to understand. God was so offended by the atrocious
wickedness of men, it was as if his heart was deeply wounded with mortal
grief. It is reality that both the image and the likeness of God were purposed
to give us spiritual insight to the infinite realm of what holiness is. The mode
of accommodation is for God to represent Himself to us not as He is in
Himself, but as He must seem to us. Although He is beyond all disturbance
of mind, yet He testifies that He is angry toward sinning sinners. Therefore,
whenever we hear that God is angered, we ought not to imagine any emotion
in Him, but rather to consider that this expression has been taken from our
human experience; because God, whenever He is exercising judgment,
exhibits the appearance of one kindled or angered. We learn this of our
God...divine emotion is the quiet, understatement of God’s love for His
people and His hatred for sin. This divine emotion spiritually bursts with
hidden meaning. Here is our coming unto God and understanding the truth
of His cries. Let’s discuss the drama of emotion to better understand how
God cries.
There is God and then there is us. A mystery is our created pattern in His
image, His likeness. Emotion is either divine or undivine. When misused it is
undivine and restricted to the physical and the shadowy mind. It’s an I, my,
mine mentality. Any emotion that binds our conscience should be undone.
Divine emotion should be pure in its source to expand our consciousness.
When it comes from our soul, it tells us, "I came from God.” God is divine.
His repenting, His grieving, God’s cries are divine. God’s cries open for His
followers an expression of their inner aspiration. We become better soldiers
in the fight against sin. We understand better why Jesus came to us as one
of us. In Christ, as he wept, God cried and we feel that humanity is part and
parcel of our consciousness, then we have divine emotion. We know why,
we know how God cries. We are affected because we truly feel our own
existence in the heart of humanity as is Jesus Christ our God. If we want to
transform our lower emotion, then we must start feeding our divine emotion.
We can consciously feed our divine emotion by feeling that each individual
is God's child and humanity's embodied hope. Then we will have the inner
urge to fulfil the divinity in humanity. The divine within us is totally responsible
for us and for others. God risks revealing this character peculiarity in His
crying to expand our consciousness, sweeten our existence and fulfil not
only our life but also the lives of those around us who will receive the truth.
For God to present a transform event of divinity and humanity, we come to
see that the impure, earthbound emotion can spiritually be transformed. It
will be thrown into the fiery sea of divine emotion, where everything is
purified. We prioritize this “feeling” of closeness with God over the
relationship itself, which is steeped in the truth of God’s Word. We come to
all of the law of God with the love and grace of God. We cry ourselves to
sleep desiring to understanding the hurt, the pain, the tenderness, the
intimacy, of our God that extends beyond the comprehension of our Creator.
Our God cries and He is the fountainhead of all wisdom, understanding, and
knowledge. And in His Being He becomes even more of a mystery to us. God
cries. How could He create something in us that He doesn’t understand on
the highest of levels or even possess Himself? It’s not that He doesn’t
feel. Indeed, God feels - He feels in a perfect way, untainted by the curse of
sin. Faith has us draw this inference...flowing out of the heart of God Himself
is His image in us to experience His love, His grief, His joy as qualities of our
own.
God’s feelings for His people are deep and genuine - so perfect that such a
feeling can never be possessed by fallen human beings, but only by the God
who embodies within Himself the utmost perfection of emotion. Here is how
God cries - Jesus wept. “Wept” doesn’t mean that His eyes got a little moist,
or that He had to swallow a lump in His throat. And it certainly doesn’t mean
He stood beside Mary and Martha as they grieved, with His arms crossed,
disappointed in their lack of faith. “Jesus wept,” means that He felt the gut
wrenching anguish that comes from losing ones you love and who you would
die for, and displayed it in a very human way - by shedding tears. Knowing
that he would raise one that was faithful didn’t stop him from entering into
their pain and experiencing it with them. We must begin to show the marks
of our divine origin. Our cries for others are not just tears. The Holy Spirit
must elevate our servitude above duty fulfillment. We will see many abandon
the truth. This will hurt us. We must be charged with sacred feeling for every
soul, while having profound and tender regret for those who refuse the
witness. We must let faith and truth be that powerful experience of godliness
that is the seat of our emotion. Our God is an awesome God, and part of His
awesomeness is His emotional-ness. Emotions are divine when we have
true reverence for God. The emotive poetry written in the word depicts God’s
heartbreak over the trauma of His broken relationship with His people is
unmatched anywhere. What are we to do with this? We are to cry out to God!
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