God with Us in Our Pain

by: Jill Ver Steeg

Today, in many churches altars are bare and crosses are shrouded in black to mark the darkest hour in history, when Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of the world. Isaiah foretold what was to come when God came in the person of Jesus to drink the cup of suffering in order to reconcile us to God. Jesus would be a “man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering” (Isa. 53:3 NIV). The suffering intensified until in the last hours of his life it reached an unimaginable level. On the cross, Jesus plumbed into the farthest depths of suffering. In his body he has carried not only our sins but our pains: every separation and loss, every broken heart, every wound of the spirit, all the raw experiences of men, women, and children across the ages.

This Suffering Servant still makes his way into our pain. The fact that Jesus came to earth to suffer and die shows us that God does not sit idly by and watch us suffer. In the darkest hour of the human race God was not removed from our pain, he was hanging on a cross, giving us himself as proof that he hears our cries, and cries with us. And when we “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” (Ps. 23:4) we can know that we never walk alone.