The God who Suffers

“In all their suffering he also suffered”

 (Isaiah 63: 9 – NLT)

Suffering pain and affliction are not attributes we readily associate with God when we consider his transcendent majesty. Despite our experience of the Father Heart of God, in which he reveals his sympathetic nature, we may still have a nagging feeling that he is in some way detached from our suffering and pain. Yet Father God is revealed in this verse as one who not only sympathises with us in our suffering – but as one who suffers with us. How can this be?

Although there is a great mystery here, we see the outworking of this truth in the death of Jesus. God the Father was in Jesus the Son as he died, or as one biblical writer puts it – “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5: 19 – KJV). The Father suffered in the Son. In one sense God died two deaths! Many a father would die for his son – but in the death of Jesus both the Son and the Father suffered. The pain of Jesus was the pain of the Father – just as the works of Jesus in his lifetime were the works of the Father.

So in our suffering He also suffers – I can not fully understand it – but my Daddy feels my pain, my loss, my brokenness, my disappointment, my emotion – what and amazing Father!