MAN OF SORROWS

October 19

Bible Reading: Hebrews 5

John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”

Luke 19:41-44, “And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, ‘Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.’”

Hebrews 5:7, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.”

You’ve read no doubt, of how Jesus wept at a funeral.  The “man of sorrows”…who was “acquainted with grief,” wept, though He was well aware that He would soon raise Lazarus from the dead.  The One who took on human flesh to rescue lost humans, embraced the sorrow of the grieving, with the full understanding of death’s ultimate cause and cure.  He wept at that funeral because He cared.  Love would lead Him down a sorrow-filled path and to a cross which would work to put death to death.

The Scriptures reveal two other occasions in which Jesus wept.  He wept over the city of Jerusalem.  “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:11).  Their rejection would bring unimaginable suffering and death when Rome besieged and destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70. Jesus knew all about it and he wept.  He had come to save.  He would give His all.  But hardened hearts had no room for Him!  It is a glorious truth that God “desires all people to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4).  Contrarily, the eternal doom of those who “do not obey the gospel” is good cause for tears (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9; Romans 9:1-3).

Finally, our text here in Hebrews speaks again of the tears of Jesus, “when he “offered up prayers and supplication, with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7).  Our thinking is drawn back to the Garden of Gethsemane.  We are told that Jesus was “sorrowful, even to death” (Matthew 26:38), and that being in agony at that “his sweat became as great drops of blood falling to the ground” (Luke 22:44).  The “Man of Sorrows” was to drink His own cup of sorrows, and He was well aware of the unimaginable pain and suffering lay ahead in taking on the sin of the world (John 1:29; 2 Corinthians 5:21).  He prayed three times, asking if it were possible that the cup would be removed from Him.  But the cup was according to the Father’s will, and as always, He embraced that.  The triumph over sin and death would come at infinite cost. “Yet it was the will of the Father to crush him (and) put him to grief” (Isaiah 53:10).

Phil Newton describes Jesus’ agonizing in Gethsemane this way: “All of the purity of his soul would be opened to the pitch-black darkness of human sinfulness. Our lies, lusts, deceitfulness, anger, complaining, cheating accompanied an innumerable host of sins, saturating as a sponge in water upon the spotless bosom of Jesus Christ. Our rebellion against the Law of God and our unbelief in Him as a merciful Redeemer in all of its lurid detail strikes the Son. In His own being He felt the combined weight of the world’s sins. That is why we find Him agonizing in the Garden as He fulfilled His high priestly office. He was soon to ‘appear before God’ on our behalf, sprinkling His own blood upon the mercy seat, satisfying the divine cry of ‘Justice, Justice, Justice!’ See Him bearing your sin. See Him agonizing over His separation from the Father. See how He feels the pains of hell upon His own spotless soul…Look at Him who ‘offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears.’ What was he doing? As the only sinless man he was expressing the agony of bearing sin; and as the only great high priest he was submitting to the will of the Father…The Father sustained the Son through the trauma of the cross, so that he might declare, ‘It is finished!’  His prayers were heard and the answer came as he successfully bore the judgment of God for us at the Cross and then rose from the dead in victory!”

Phil Newton

Jesus wept on the way to the way to the cross, so we could one day reside in a place where there’ll be no more tears.

Does Jesus care when my heart is pained
Too deeply for mirth or song;
As the burdens press, and the cares distress,
And the way grows weary and long?

O yes, He cares- I know He cares!
His heart is touched with my grief;
When the days are weary, the long nights dreary,
I know my Savior cares.