Who wiped away the Lord’s tears when He was in this world? He looked for sympathy, but there was none; and for comforters, but found none (Ps. 69:20). Men hid their faces from the “Man of sorrows” (Isa. 53:3); even His disciples slept as He wept in the Garden of Gethsemane (Lk. 22:41–45).

He was pressed beyond measure there. The awful prospect of bearing our sin and being forsaken of God filled Him with holy foreboding. The prayers and pleadings He poured forth in words and weeping are the most powerful expression ever of anguish. But though He is the Son in the Godhead, He rendered perfectly, in death as in life, the devotedness due to God from man. He said to His Father, “not My will, but Yours, be done.”

On the cross He drank the cup the Father had given Him. It was from “the horns of the wild oxen” (Ps. 22:21), the point of greatest extremity, that He was heard of God and saved out of death. He lovingly wiped away Mary’s tears by speaking her name (Jn. 20:15–16). The grief of all the disciples was “turned into joy” as He showed Himself to them (Jn. 16:20; 20:20). And we who by grace “have not seen and yet have believed” (Jn. 20:29), have “joy inexpressible” even if we are grieved by various trials (1 Pet. 1:6–8). Our tears are precious to God; He puts them in His bottle (Ps. 56:8), but He enables us to make this vale of tears a “spring” (Ps. 84:6) as we tread it with Him, for it is the way home where there are no tears when He will set us “before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy” (Jude 1:24).