A Record of Tears

Psalm 56:8

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You know, I don’t remember a word he said, but I remember exactly how his face looked. I’m thinking of the day that my mom passed away after her seven year battle with cancer. That morning the pastor came by and visited us, and I honestly, I don’t remember anything he said. But as we were there and in tears, I saw his eyes get red. I saw him start to tear up and it was just, it was so comforting. It was, it was such a great gift to know that, that in some way, not the same extent, but in some way he felt what I was feeling. That I wasn’t alone in mourning my mom’s passing. And there’s something to that. That we as people, we need to know that other people don’t just hear what we’re going through, but they feel it too. That they are there with us and that people are feeling what we’re feeling.

We need to know that and experience that with other people. But we also get to experience that with God. God is not distant from our sadness, from our tears. I love in Psalm 56:8 where it says,

You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book? (Psalm 56:8)

I love that picture of God having a record of every single tear you’ve cried. But it’s not just a record of it. There are sections in Scripture that describe God as experiencing grief and sadness like we do. If you go to Genesis six,(Gensis 6:5-6) the chapter where we get into the whole flood story, where because of all the violence in the world, God brings this flood and kind of restarts things with Noah. It says that God both, one he regretted having made man on the earth, and he regretted it because of all the violence that was there. And we’re told that as he was experiencing this regret, he had sorrow in his heart.

It’s interesting the primary emotion attributed to God or describing God with this account is not anger. Often people think the flood, you’re like, okay, that’s God’s anger, and surely God has just anger. But what Genesis six describes is sorrow. It’s sadness. God experienced that. When you think too when you get to Jesus in the New Testament, there’s a scene where Jesus is looking over Jerusalem and he’s weeping. (Luke 19:41-44) Actually, on Palm Sunday, we’re told that as people were cheering for him, he wept as he approached the city. There’s also the event where, when his friend Lazarus died, we’re told Jesus wept. (John 11:35) And in Isaiah 53, it talks about how he’s a man familiar with sorrows. (Isaiah 53:3) He took up our infirmities and everything on himself. He has literally taken our sicknesses, our guilt, our shame, our sin onto himself.

That’s what he did on the cross. He meets you there in your pain and in your sadness. He met you there when he went to the cross. He experienced what it was like to be forsaken. He experienced what it was like to be betrayed. He felt the sadness, the grief, the guilt, the shame, the sin of the world on himself. Which one, lets us know that he gets us. When we cry those tears he has cried tears. He understands us. He feels us in our pain. But it’s not just that. Jesus went to the cross to take our sin onto himself, to absorb it, to give us hope beyond it. He meets you there in your tears, but he did all that also to heal you from your tears. He rose again. And then the picture in Revelation is that there will be a day where he will wipe every tear away.

So if you find yourself needing to let those tears out, go ahead and then look and imagine the face of Jesus crying those tears, feeling what you feel. And then look to the cross, look to the resurrection, and know that one day it will all heal because of your loving Savior, Jesus.