God Understands Our Suffering

“I thirst” teaches us that we have a suffering God who understands our pain. Many of us have never experienced burning, raging thirst—the kind of dehydration that comes from blood loss, exposure, and crucifixion. However, we’ve all known suffering. We’ve experienced pain we can’t explain, heartache we didn’t deserve, losses that make no sense.
Sometimes we wonder, “Am I suffering because I did something wrong?” While God does discipline His children out of love, many times we suffer for no clear reason—it’s random, mysterious pain. That’s when we need to remember that our God is a suffering God. He doesn’t just understand our suffering intellectually—He experienced it. When a father loses his son, when a wife plans her husband’s funeral after sixty years of marriage, when violence strikes randomly—God knows. He bore our sorrows. He carries our sufferings along with our sins. At the cross, we see that God wasn’t distant from our pain—He entered into it fully, and His presence meets us there.