Often, we feel that God is so high and mighty that He does not understand our suffering and what it means to be human. Ps 138:6 says, ‘Though the Lord is exalted, he looks kindly on the lowly.’ The fact of the Incarnation means that God does indeed understand what it is to be human. He knows what it is to be weary, to be rejected, to be hurt. He knows what it is to lose family and friends. He has wept at a graveside (John 11:35) He has known betrayal. He has suffered unjustly. There is nothing we can go through in His life that is beyond the compassion of our God.
Jeremy Camp lost his first wife to cancer when she was only twenty-one and he was twenty-three, just three and a half months into their marriage. In his memoir ‘I Still Believe’ (named after a song God gave him two weeks after his wife’s death), he writes of the pain and bewilderment of suffering and God’s grace to Him during that time. A new song ‘He Knows’ returns to the same theme, namely that God knows all about us and has walked the suffering too.
‘All the bitter weary ways,
The endless striving, day by day
You barely have the strength to pray,
In the valley low,
And how hard your fight has been,
How deep the pain within,
Wounds that no one else has seen,
Hurts too much to show.
All the doubt you’re standing in between,
And all the weight that brings you to your knees:
He knows, He knows
Every hurt and every sting;
He has walked the suffering.
He knows, He knows,
Let your burdens come undone.
Lift your eyes up to the One who knows.
We may faint and we may sink,
Feel the pain and near the brink,
But the dark begins to shrink
When you find the One who knows.
The chains of doubt that held you in between,
One by one are starting to break free.
Every time that you feel forsaken
Every time that you feel alone
He is near to the broken-hearted
Every tear He knows.’ (Jeremy Camp, ‘He Knows’)