THE TEARS OF JESUS
A Four-Part Devotional
on John 11:35; Luke 19:41–44; and Hebrews 5:7
Part One: Does God Cry?
Have you ever carried a pain so deep that words simply failed you? A grief so heavy that you lay awake in the dark, wondering whether anyone — anyone at all — truly understood what you were going through?
I want to share something with you today that has the power to change the way you see every sorrow you have ever carried.
Across the vast landscape of human history — through the rise and fall of empires, through the birth and burial of countless religions, through every philosophy that has ever flickered across the stage of civilization — not one single deity ever stepped down from heaven to walk among the people who worshiped him. Not one so-called “god” ever clothed himself in human flesh. Not one ever sat beside the weary, or entered into the sorrows of those who cried out to him. Not one ever felt the sting of human tears, or wept alongside those who wept.
None. Absolutely none.
None — except the God of the Bible.
And friend, that changes everything.
The God Whose Heart Breaks
Before the God of Scripture ever manifested in human form and walked the roads of Galilee, He was already a God whose heart felt pain and was moved toward human suffering. He told Moses at the burning bush, “I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and have given heed to their cry because of their taskmasters, for I am aware of their sufferings.”1 And in Genesis 6, when humanity plunged headlong into darkness, the Scripture pulls back the curtain on something almost unbearable to behold — the very heartbreak of God: “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.”2 The original Hebrew paints a picture of a heart pierced through — not a momentary flicker of displeasure, but a deep, settling ache, like a wound that will not close, a stab to the heart.
Some will undoubtedly note that these very words — “I have seen the affliction… I have heard their cry… I am aware of their sufferings… He was grieved in His heart” — do reveal that He is not a distant, unmoved Sovereign, but rather One whose heart breaks over the people He loved and created. Yet even so, His physical presence remained veiled. His voice could be heard. His hand could be felt. But His footsteps had not yet touched our world.
Until one day — they did.
The God Who Stepped Into Our World
In the fullness of time, God did not send another prophet or priest. He came Himself in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ. John tells us with breathtaking simplicity: “The Word became a human being and lived among us.”3 And when He looked upon a world fractured by sin, sickness, and sorrow, He did not remain aloof. He touched. He healed. He embraced. He wept — in human, physical form!
The great Princeton theologian Dr. Benjamin Warfield spent years studying every emotion attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. His conclusion? The single emotion most consistently and most frequently ascribed to our Lord was compassion. Warfield observed that Christ’s entire ministry could be summed up in one phrase from Acts — that He went through the land “doing good”4 — and that this goodness flowed from a heart of inexhaustible compassion. But Warfield pressed even deeper. He argued that the compassion of Jesus was never merely a human sentiment. It was, in his words, “the very compassion of God Himself, perfectly embodied in human nature.”5
Can you even imagine that? The God of heaven — the very God of love and compassion Himself — reached out and touched the untouchable leper! When He stood at the tomb of Lazarus, He had actual, human tears on His face. When He looked out over the hungry, hurting multitudes, His heart broke for them! These and other examples in the Gospels reveal that we are not watching a good man being kind. We are watching the God of the Old Testament step out from behind the veil of eternity and show us exactly what He has always felt toward broken humanity. In the compassion of Christ, we encounter divine mercy clothed in human flesh6 — a compassion that does not observe our pain from a safe distance, but steps down fully into the middle of it.
The God Who Wept and Weeps
And nowhere is this more powerfully on display than in the tears of Jesus.
Yes — His tears.
I want you to stop and marvel at this for a moment, because I believe many of us have read right past it our entire Christian lives. The Son of God wept. The Sovereign of the Universe — Majesty on High, the sinless and perfect Redeemer of all mankind — shed real tears. Not metaphorical tears. Not poetic tears. Real ones. The kind that well up and spill over when the pain is simply too great to hold inside.
And the Scripture records this not once. Not twice. But three times.
The first are what I call Silent Tears — found in the shortest verse in all the Bible: “Jesus wept.”7 Just two words. Standing at the tomb of His dear friend Lazarus, knowing He is about to raise him from the dead, knowing that in moments death itself will turn and run — Jesus still weeps with Mary and Martha. He does not stand above their grief. He steps down into it. These are personal tears. The tears of a Friend who loves you enough to cry with you — even when He already knows how the story ends.
The second are Sudden Tears. As Jesus descends the Mount of Olives during the Triumphal Entry and Jerusalem comes into full view, a sudden floodgate of tears opens up. The Greek word Luke uses suggests not quiet weeping, but audible, heaving, broken sobs.8 These are prophetic tears — the tears of a Savior who can see what His beloved city cannot: that judgment is coming because they did not recognize the day of God’s visitation. These are the tears of a heart that loves more deeply than the loved ones will allow themselves to be loved.
And then — perhaps most sacred of all — there are Sacrificial Tears. The writer of Hebrews tells us that in Gethsemane, Jesus “offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death.”9 These are not the tears of a man grieving a friend. These are not the tears of a broken heart mourning a wayward city. These are the tears of our Great High Priest — interceding, agonizing, pouring Himself out before the Father for you and for me. For your sin and mine. For your soul and mine. These are tears that preceded the cross.
Silent tears. Sudden tears. Sacrificial tears. Each one deeper than the last. Each one a window into the boundless, breathtaking love of the Son of God.
The High Priest Who Feels What You Feel
Before we venture into this incredibly daunting topic, I want to leave you with some hope from heaven.
The writer of Hebrews tells us in chapter 4, verse 15: “For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.”10 The King James Version renders it with unforgettable beauty: He is “touched with the feeling of our infirmities.”
That word touched — in the original Greek, sympatheō — is built from two powerful roots: syn, meaning “together with,” and pathōs, meaning “to suffer, to experience deep feeling.” Put them together and the word literally means: to co-suffer. To feel the very feelings of another. To experience someone’s pain as though it were your own.11
And the verb is present tense. This is not a memory Jesus occasionally revisits. This is an ongoing, active, right-now ministry. Every time you are broken, He is touched. Every time sorrow crashes over you at three in the morning, He enters that sorrow with you — right then, in that very moment.
Remember what the risen Christ said to Saul on the Damascus road? He didn’t ask, “Why are you persecuting My people?” He asked, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?”12 Every wound inflicted upon a believer on earth was being experienced by the glorified Christ in heaven. Their pain was His pain. Their tears were, in some mysterious and magnificent way, His tears.
And friend — the same is true for you today.
You Are Never Alone
The God who grieved in Genesis… the God who descended in the Gospels… the God who intercedes at the right hand of the Father… is with you and now lives in you.
You are not alone in your pain. You never were. The Savior who wept at Lazarus’s tomb, who sobbed over Jerusalem, who cried out in Gethsemane with strong crying and tears — that same Savior is not far off. He is as close as the breath in your lungs and the beat of your heart. And the Psalmist assures us that He has collected every single tear you have ever cried: “You have taken account of my wanderings; put my tears in Your bottle. Are they not in Your book?”13
So bring your pain to Him — without apology, without dressing it up, without minimizing it. He already knows. He already feels it. The throne of grace is not a courtroom where you must prove your case. It is a place of mercy, presided over by a High Priest who has already entered your pain.
And when the lie of grief whispers that you are utterly alone — that no one could possibly understand — let this truth answer it: there is One who not only understands your pain, but shares it. You are never forgotten. You are never beyond the reach of His compassion.
Because the God who weeps with you today has also promised that one day, He will wipe every tear from your eyes forever.14
That day is coming.
Until then — He weeps with you.
And listen to me carefully, friend: He is not weeping from a distance. He is touched — that is the Word of God — touched with the very feelings of your infirmities. Not once in a distant moment of sympathy, but each and every time the pain rises up fresh and the tears start again. He is there. He is touched.
He is acquainted with your grief. He understands your sorrow. The One who was ridiculed and maligned — publicly, viciously, without cause — knows exactly what that kind of wound does to your inner being. The Holy One who was beaten beyond recognition — oh, yes — He understands what it means to be persecuted by those who do not even know why they hate you. He has not merely observed your suffering from the throne room of heaven. He has entered it. Fully. Completely. Personally.
And when the pain goes so deep that even words abandon you — when all that remains are those wordless, aching groanings — do not mistake that silence for abandonment. Those are not the sounds of a soul forgotten. Those are the intercessions of the Holy Spirit Himself, praying on your behalf with groanings too deep for human language (Romans 8:26). God is not absent in your wordless moments. He is present in them in a way that words could never contain.
This is the wonder of wonders, my friend: the Man of Sorrows loved you so completely, so relentlessly, so personally — that He left the glory of heaven and stepped down into the very tragedies that break your heart. Not to observe them. Not to explain them. But to bear them with you — and ultimately, to bear them for you.
Until that day when every tear is wiped away forever — He weeps with you.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!
“For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”
— Hebrews 4:15–16, NASB
Footnotes
1. Exodus 3:7, New American Standard Bible (NASB).
2. Genesis 6:5–6, New King James Version (NKJV). The Hebrew word for “grieved” (עצב, ʿāṣab) carries the sense of a deep, piercing anguish — not mere displeasure but an ongoing, interior wound.
3. John 1:14, J. B. Phillips New Testament. The New Testament in Modern English by J. B. Phillips, copyright © 1960, 1972. Administered by The Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England. Used by permission.
4. Acts 10:38, NASB.
5. Benjamin B. Warfield, The Emotional Life of Our Lord. Warfield argues that Christ’s compassion is not a human sentiment merely, but “the direct manifestation of the divine nature in human flesh,” revealing God’s own heart toward human suffering. Available at: https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/emotionallife.html
6. Benjamin B. Warfield, The Person and Work of Christ. Warfield describes Christ’s compassion as “divine mercy clothed in human flesh” — a compassion that enters fully into the misery it came to redeem.
7. John 11:35, NASB.
9. Hebrews 5:7, NASB.
10. Hebrews 4:15, NASB. See also the KJV rendering: “touched with the feeling of our infirmities.”
11. NASB Discovery Bible, HELPS Word Studies, entry on sympatheō (Strong’s G4834). The compound structure (syn + pathōs) emphasizes mutual, shared experience rather than external observation. See also Hebrews 10:34, the only other New Testament occurrence of this verb, where believers are commended for having sympathized with those in prison — again pointing to a solidarity of felt experience, not merely intellectual awareness.
12. Acts 9:4, NASB.
13. Psalm 56:8, NASB.
14. Revelation 21:4, NASB: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain.”
8. Luke 19:41–44, NASB. The Greek word used here is éklauses (from klaĭō), indicating audible, expressive weeping — in contrast to the quieter edákrysen (“wept silently”) of John 11:35.