Faithful Man: Devotions for Living in Faithless TimesEgzanp

When God Hurts with You

When life knocks us down and tramples us under a thousand stampeding feet, we need to know that God doesn’t desire this pain for us. He isn’t up in heaven indifferent—or worse, secretly gloating.

In my mind, no moment depicts this truth more poignantly than when Jesus stood with Mary and Martha outside the tomb of their brother, Lazarus. When Lazarus fell ill, Jesus could have rushed to heal His friend—but instead He intentionally delayed His coming. 

When Jesus finally arrived, several days too late, He met the mourning sisters at the tomb. Jesus already had the happy ending planned. He knew that in mere minutes, He would call Lazarus back to life. The sisters’ cries of mourning would turn to shouts of praise. 

And yet. With all that joy only moments away, Jesus stopped. He stood there beside—I always picture Him between—these two sisters, and He wept with them.

I’ve heard people speculate all kinds of profound reasons for Jesus’s tears. Why would Jesus cry, knowing He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead? There must be more to the tears than empathy: Jesus must have been weeping for the lost world, or mourning His own impending suffering.

In my view, those theories are trying too hard—way too hard. I suspect it’s as simple as this: Jesus’s friends were hurting, so Jesus was hurting. In His tears, I hear these words: “I’m sorry I had to let you go through this. I see your anguish, and My heart bleeds with yours.” It didn’t matter that the pain was almost over—the pain still mattered.

Do you see what this means? Jesus hurts with us. Even if He has a happy ending planned for later, He hurts with us today—right here, right now, wherever we are: on the floor or in the car, at a playground or a restaurant, beside a hospital bed or a gravestone. He stands in our present-tense pain and lives it with us—stands with us, weeps with us, mourns with us because our pain is real, and our pain is His pain.

Now that’s love. That’s a God I can trust when I’m hurting. That’s a God I can pray to when life goes sideways. That’s a God I can lean on even when He doesn’t give me what I ask. That’s a God I can cling to even when He says, “No.”