Does Jesus Weep With Us? | Theocast

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We're told in Scripture that Jesus is a sympathetic high priest. What does that mean?

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What's it really mean? Does he feel things with us? Does he lament the things that we go through?

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Does he weep with us? Does he see? Does he care? John and I are gonna have a conversation today about Jesus and his heart towards sinners.

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We're gonna try to have this conversation in the context of historical orthodoxy and all of the appropriate theological considerations.

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And we're gonna look to the Scriptures to see that we have a compassionate, sympathetic, gentle, lowly, and tender

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Savior who understands us, who's with us, who's for us, and we can trust him.

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We hope you're encouraged. Stay tuned. If you're new to Theocast, you may not have heard of this word.

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It's called pietism. Have you ever felt like the Christian life is a heavy burden versus rest and joy?

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That you wake up worrying about how well you're gonna perform instead of thinking about what Christ has done for you?

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It's dread versus joy, really. That's pietism. Pietism causes Christians to look in on themselves and find their hope, not in what

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Christ has done, but what they're doing. And we have a little book for you. It's free. We want you to download it.

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And we're gonna explain the difference between pietism and what we call confessionalism, Reformed theology, really, how it is that we walk by faith, seeing the joy of Christ, and when

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Jesus says, come to me and I will give you rest, what does that look like? You can download it on our website.

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Just go to theocast .org. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to find the sufficiency of Christ in all of life, to find the rest in Christ.

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And today we wanna have conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective and a confessional perspective.

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Your hosts are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church. It's been a few weeks,

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Justin. We're trying to knock the rust off here. Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. And I'm John Moffitt.

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I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. Yeah, you are. Yeah. You sure about that?

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I'm sure about that. We're about to head in. For you, this is the new year. You're a couple of weeks in. For Justin and I, we're closing out right here.

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This is our last time recording, right? Last time recording for the year. The last recording of 2024. Trying to finish strong.

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We're off to a rolling start here. Yeah, so it's good.

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I mean, what's hard about holidays is that they're so wonderful because you get to celebrate things.

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At the same time, it's exhausting because there's so much to do. So it's kind of a sweet moment.

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For those of you that are listening and are wondering, I wonder if there are any tickets left for this conference that we're doing for Theocast.

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The answer is there are a few. There are a few left. And I would hurry up and grab them because we are gonna sell out.

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And once we do, we have got no more spots. It's a limited seating. I think it's, whatever, right around 200.

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Is that what we have available? It's 250 or something like that. Something like that. Yeah. Anyways, it's gonna be

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April the 12th through the 14th, or 10th through the 12th. April 11 and 12 is the conference itself.

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10th through the 12th, right. Thursday night, April 10, we'll probably have a hangout somewhere. That's right, that's right. So you can go to theocast .org,

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sign up for that. Chad Bird is gonna be with us along with Ken Jones. Gonna be discussing the law and the gospel.

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And there's a lot of law gospel conferences going on right now. And I don't think we could have enough. We should have more.

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No, yeah. We should have more. Can't have enough St. Center conferences either, which may be a theme for a Theocast conference down the road, let's see.

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Come on now. And then if you are new to Theocast and you're really enjoying the content but would like to ask questions and talk with other people who also love law gospel distinctions and wanna talk about Christ and all of life, then come join our

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Theocast community. Almost 2 ,000 people are in there. You can have the app right on your phone. It's like Justin says, it's like Facebook but better with no ads.

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So it's a good place. We keep it safe conversation just about theology.

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And it's a lot of fun. Justin, today's topic is one that's near and dear to your heart.

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I'm not gonna steal any of your thunder, but this is something that you and I would say is the thrust behind what gets us out of bed, keeps us as pastors in the insanity of our world.

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It's because it's not of our own strength, that's for sure. It's because of a compassionate, loving

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Christ. So talk to us about our subject today. Yeah. The title of the episode is

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Does Jesus Weep With Us? And admittedly, that title is chosen on purpose because that's a question that people ask, and it's been a conversation.

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So yes, we want people to actually listen to this, and so we title episodes accordingly. Effectively, what we're talking about is the heart of Jesus Christ for sinners, though.

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How is he toward us now? Not just when he was on earth, but now glorified at the right hand of the

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Father. He's our great high priest. What's his heart toward us? We'll talk more personally and more sweetly about Jesus and everything that he is for us here in a minute, but before we get there,

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I want to front load this with some theological stuff. So we don't do this all the time in terms of rattling off theological categories like I'm about to do, and like you're about to interact with me over, but Theocast has always been concerned with doctrinal precision.

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We want to get the gospel right, and it's not just about being right. We want the gospel to be clear.

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We don't want Christ to be obscured. We always want to represent the character of God accurately from the

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Scriptures. We care about the history of the church and the rule of faith and the history of interpretation and historical orthodoxy.

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We care about all that stuff here at Theocast. None of this is foreign to us, right? So we are all about classical theism.

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We are all about Nicene orthodoxy when it comes to doctrine of God and the doctrine of the

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Trinity. So just really quickly, want to rattle some things off here for the listener. Don't tune out. These things really do matter because for us to be able to acknowledge all of this and say this before we get to the conversation about Jesus is really important.

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So we affirm Nicene orthodoxy when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity. We do not affirm a lot of the nonsense that's out there today under the banners and the rubrics of ESS and EFS, the eternal subordination of the

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Son or the eternal functional subordination of the Son. We understand that all three persons of the

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Godhead are equally God. God is one in three and three in one. And that when we talk about the

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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and we even will say that the Son is the only begotten of the Father, that the

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Spirit is spirated, that He proceeds from the Father and the Son, that this is in no way a hierarchical arrangement, but these are eternal relations of origin.

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And so I want to be really clear that we are affirming the Godness that the

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Father, Son, and Spirit are equally God. We also affirm divine simplicity that God is not divided, that there is one will in the

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Godhead, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all share the one divine will. We affirm divine impassibility, which means that God is not,

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He does not have passions or changeable emotions. And what we mean is this, because God clearly has emotions. He feels things.

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He's a person, not a force. Having said that, His emotional life is not like ours.

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Not only is He unlike the gods of the nations who are capricious, God is not like us in that we find ourselves in situations all the time where our passions and our cravings rule us, and we find ourselves in situations all the time where things happen to us that we have no control over that affect us.

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God has never found Himself in such a predicament. He is the only true, self -determining, self -sustaining, absolutely free and sovereign being in the universe.

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And so God is not only not capricious, He doesn't ebb and flow and vacillate in terms of His character,

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His nature, His emotions, but He also never finds Himself in a situation where something happens to Him from outside of Him that affects

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Him in a way that He did not foreknow and that He did not ordain and plan. So it's very clear in the

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Scriptures that things happen in time and space and in this arc of world history that the

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Lord feels things about. Like He'll say that He, for example, just early on in Genesis, that He laments, that He grieves that He had made man.

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It's like, well, is that legitimate? Is that really a feeling for God? Well, yes, it is. But had

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God foreknown that? Yes. Had God ordained the fall? Yes. So that even the ways that God feels about the fallenness and the wickedness of mankind, it's not as though this is happening outside of His knowledge or plan.

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And so His feelings about that are according to the relationship that He had put Himself into freely with His people.

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And this is gonna matter later because we're gonna talk about how the heart of Jesus is set upon His people, that the

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Father has done that, has set the heart of the Son on His people, and that God the Son has done that, has set

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His heart on us. And so Jesus now feels things and desires things for us, even as God the

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Son. And we're gonna discuss that later. So these things really do matter. So we affirm Nicene orthodoxy, we affirm divine simplicity, we affirm impassibility.

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And just to be really clear, lastly, in thinking about the hypostatic union, when God the

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Son took on a human nature and now has two natures in one person, Jesus of Nazareth.

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Jesus, like God the Son is no less God when He takes on a human nature. So Jesus of Nazareth is truly

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God. And so He still shares the one divine will with the Father and the

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Spirit as God the Son, and He also has a human will, as a truly human being. So when

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Jesus talks like in the Garden of Gethsemane, when He prays, not my will, but your will be done,

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He is praying as a human. When He talks in John 6, I've not come to do my own will, but I've come to do the will of the one who sent me,

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He's speaking as a human. Because He shares that one divine will, He knows the plan. He was involved in the covenant of redemption, right?

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He's all about it. But we need to be precise. Or when He says, for example, no one knows the day or the hour,

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He's not saying that as God the Son, He's saying that as a human. So we are all about precision and clarity on these things.

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That Jesus is no less God, you know, in taking on a human nature. Just want to be really clear about all that.

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John, do you have thoughts? Feel free, I said a lot. Yeah, but no, I wanted you to complete your thought. I hope people have heard this, because I don't want in what we're about to say, people to think that we are trying to depart from classical theism,

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Nicene orthodoxy, or a confessional heritage. We're not doing that. Listen, the impassibility of God is important in our assurance, because God is not reacting to us as if He is unaware.

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I know that sometimes we want God to be passable. In other words, we want

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Him to be changing. That gives us the freedom to do what we're going to do.

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So we have free will, we're going to choose. And then God's going to react to our freedom. Thankfully, the Lord does not do this.

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The Lord is completely aware of all things at all times. There's nothing outside of His control, and there's nothing outside of His knowledge.

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Therefore, it is healthy to know that God's compassion towards me does not change based upon my performance.

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He's like, oh, well, I didn't see this coming, John. And now His reaction is going to now change based upon my decisions, based upon my performance.

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This is why Romans 8 is so important. Romans 8 is built upon the foundation that God's affection towards us is not a response to us.

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We don't put our faith in Him, and He responds to us. He brings us to life because He set

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His love upon us, and that does not change based upon our performance. This is really important. So this is a doctrine that you and I want to embrace wholeheartedly.

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And often, we use the impassibility of Christ to fight back against things like the whole

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Christ or Lordship salvation, where there's almost like this transactional nature between God and us.

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And we want to fight and say, no, no, no, no. There's no transactional nature between that at all. And it's not as though you are

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Christ's today and you might not be tomorrow. It's not as though you have God's love today and you might not tomorrow or in 10 years.

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That's what you're saying. We want to uphold rightly that God is always the same and that His steadfast love endures forever and that His love and His pursuit of us and all these things, and even positionally how we stand before Him, it never changes the way

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He views us, right? And that's important, Justin, because it's the one aspect that He has that humans don't.

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Like we would love to say that our love is forever and that it's steadfast, but it's not.

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Not unless God implants it in us, which He does. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, He puts it in us. But on a human level, like you and I, even our love for each other has limitations.

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Like we can only put up with so much, right? And the reason why the impossibility of God is so important is that God doesn't have limits to where eventually, okay,

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He's gonna be moved off of His affection for us because His nature is not like our nature.

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These are the incommunicable attributes, things that God has that we don't have, right?

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So that's the way of saying that. So this is a nature by which God doesn't react in the same way in which we do.

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Now, that being said, if you only emphasize that and you only teach that, then you can overcorrect, or I would say leave things out that actually hurt the believer.

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And that's kind of what we wanna talk about now, where it's like we need to be precise for the sake of our assurance and the clarity of the

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God that we serve, and we wanna serve God, oh, sorry, we wanna worship Him and believe in Him rightly.

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So that means we need a holistic view of God and not just a one, like this is an important doctrine and a lot of people get wrong, but we need a holistic view of Him, not just one precise view of Him.

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Yeah, and we wanna represent His character accurately from the scriptures, right? And yeah,

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I'll go ahead and say it. I think that there is a tendency maybe, we're all prone to this in the confessional stream.

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I'm particularly talking, this is very much aimed at our quote -unquote our people, that those who are

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Reformed Lutheran confessionalist types. And I think there is a tendency for us in a situation where we're rightly concerned to guard a truth about God, for us to sometimes do theology somewhat in the abstract or philosophically, where we have this, all right, well, this is our conviction that we're going to guard at this theological, philosophical kind of abstract academic level, and this matters, of course, for how we understand

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God, but we so doggedly guard that that we then can really crash up against very clear passages in the scriptures that might indicate something different about the way we're representing

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God. And you and I were talking before we jumped on this recording, that even today,

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I mean, we're gonna say, we affirm all of these doctrinal categories that we've been talking about, and at the same time, sometimes, brothers and sisters, read your

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Bible, and that's not to be a Biblicist. We are not Biblicists. I mean, we have been shot at many times for the ways we have criticized

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Biblicism here on Theocast, and so in saying, read your

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Bible, we're not saying naked Biblicism, just chapter and verse, proof text, divorced from any kind of theological framework.

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We have a framework. We have a confessional framework, and at the same time, we wanna be faithful and accurate in how we represent the

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Lord, and we know that our brothers and sisters do, too, which is why we're having this conversation, and we hope it helped you.

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I wanna pivot us to talk about Jesus for a minute, and this is a piece, for me, of what began to change my life two decades ago.

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There's a lot that I would need to say alongside that. I don't wanna overblow this, but some of the things that we're about to discuss are really why

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I'm a pastor and why I'm a co -host of a podcast like this, and honestly, why

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I'm a Christian in the first place, is very much related to some of these things that we're gonna talk about pertaining to Jesus, and he does say that we're his and he is ours, and that he will lose none of us, and that's a big deal to me, because I'm gonna be his tomorrow or in 10 years, because he's not gonna fail me.

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I know you agree, and he is the same, yesterday, today, and forever. He is an all -sufficient

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Savior whose posture toward us is always one of mercy and compassion and grace, tenderness.

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He understands us, and this is not, it's the irony of that whole campaign, Jesus Gets Us.

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It's like, this campaign is whack, but that he gets us is absolutely true.

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He gets us better than we get ourselves. So yeah, we're gonna talk personally and sweetly about Jesus from the

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Scriptures, and I hope that this encourages you as you think about him, because for you to see the smiling face of Jesus looking upon you, and through that smile to see his heart is perhaps the greatest thing that could ever happen for any of us.

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For us to have seen our Savior is the greatest grace of God, and it's what keeps and sustains and nourishes our souls.

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All right, go ahead, John. Yeah, I'm gonna jump in here real quick. A little bit of history. Justin, sometimes we forget the context of the reader and if you and I were to write a book, for instance, you just did, and it's coming out, you are writing it with the

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American people, context, history, experience in mind. American church, whatever. Right, so you're not gonna necessarily be writing with, let's say, a country that's full of idolatry and paganism, because that's not necessarily at the moment what we're struggling with on our side.

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It's more like pietism, revivalism, and rationalism has destroyed our country.

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Well, these guys write, and there is, they do have things in the back of their mind, and they will allude to it, and they will make references to it, specifically churches that are near around Rome, where the

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Rome is just ravaged with paganism. And there is, you had mentioned this earlier, this is why

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I was thinking about it. You had talked about the gods, or the pagan gods of the nations that are capricious.

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There is a, some of these people that are writing, that the New Testament authors are gonna write to, and we're gonna reference here in a minute, their experience of deities and gods is angry, distant, cold, maniacal, angry gods.

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That's all they know. I mean, do you remember the disciples? They fly off the handle. They overreact to what humans do.

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They aren't, they are not impassable at all. So do you remember how shocked the disciples were when

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Jesus teaches them how to pray, and he says, oh, you say our father, and they're like, whoa. You mean we're gonna be intimate with him in that way?

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Like, we're gonna call him our father? And so what's interesting is like, I'll give an example even here.

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Hebrews 4, he is talking about the disposition of our high priest, our

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God and king, who is also our high priest, his disposition towards us. Now, why would it be necessary for the writer of Hebrews to make sure, hey, he wants them to be drawn towards the king, drawn towards our priest, and do so with great like familiarity, and he does so how?

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He shows a side of our God and our king and our great high priest does not exist in the universe in any other priest or any other gods that are out there.

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They don't exist. This is why they have to create clarity and say, I know what your experience is, and I know what your thought is, and at times it's humanistic and it's paganistic, but, or it's paganism, but let me tell you why it's different.

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And then he writes it this way. Since we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the son of God, our

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God, let us hold fast our confession for we do not have a high priest. Now, here's the comparative statement, right?

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For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin.

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Now, the writer is telling us he is sympathetic towards us. He is actually compassionate towards our state.

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Why? Because he has endured not in like one -for -one likeness. You know,

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I don't think Jesus suffered in the same ways in that, we have to be careful there, in like, you know, as a fallen nature, exactly.

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But he understands our weakness because he took on human flesh. And so it's important to understand that as we're reading these things, they are making a contrast.

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And the contrast is we're supposed to see it and go, hey, that's different. That's unique to this

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God. There's no one else like him. Hey guys, real quick, some of you are listening to this and it's encouraging to you, but you have questions.

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So where do you go? How do you interact with other people who have the same questions and share resources? We have started something called the

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Theocast Community. And we're excited because not only is it a place for you to connect with other like -minded believers, all of our resources there, past podcasts, education materials, articles, all of it's there and you can share it and ask questions.

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You can go check it out. The link is in the description below. And the word there that is, it's translated rightly, sympathize.

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I mean, it does mean, from an etymological standpoint, it does mean to suffer with.

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And that's with sympathy. To be affected with the same feeling as another. Yeah, and I mean, it is compassion, sympathy.

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These are the kinds of words we're talking about here that he is willing to suffer with or to feel the ways we do.

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Like, it's a real thing. And so what we would articulate right now is that that certainly was true of Jesus in his earthly ministry prior to his resurrection.

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And that we have no indication that any of that has ever changed about him from his resurrection to now, even as he sits at the right hand of God the

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Father. I mean, that's what Hebrews is saying, right? Exactly, because I mean, the writer of the Hebrews is post -resurrection of Jesus.

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He is very clear about the exaltation of Christ, who he is, how he's greater than everything.

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And yet he is this. He is sympathetic, he's compassionate. He understands our condition and our plight.

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And he actually feels things for us and feels things with us, even.

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And we ought not shy away from using that kind of language. So the backdrop. Yeah.

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I'm sorry, real quick. I'm just thinking about this because I want to go back and, that is the motivation of the

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Hebrew writers, because listen to the next phrase, let us then with confidence. That's verse 16.

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So he actually is using sympathy as the motivation for receiving grace and mercy.

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For sure. Yeah, absolutely. This is important to understand. Right, I mean, it is.

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So he has, I mean, and it's very clear, Jesus is our great high priest. He has passed through the heavens.

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He's the son of God. Like, that's very plain. All right, so let's hold fast to our confession because this is how he is.

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That's right. He is sympathetic. He is able to identify with us.

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He actually feels things for us in light of the fact that he has quite literally walked in our flesh.

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You know, he loves us. He has set his affection and his heart upon us. And so then the conclusion is, let us, like you just said, with confidence, draw near to the throne of grace.

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That's all grounded in the fact that Jesus's heart toward us is what it is. That's right. The backdrop to this conversation really quickly is that there are those who are concerned that because of divine impassibility, and even the fact that Jesus has been exalted and glorified and sits at the right hand of the

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Father, that we should not speak of Jesus grieving or lamenting or weeping or suffering with his people now.

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Like, of course he's compassionate. Of course he's sympathetic, but that's more of kind of a general category.

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But in terms of when something happens to us, we ought not say that Jesus weeps or grieves this, that he feels this with you, because that would be a misrepresentation of him and his nature and how things are now.

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And with all respect and charity and humility, we would push back against that and are, in this episode, that no, we have a

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Savior who really does feel things. He cares about us and has set his heart upon us in such a way that what we go through, it does affect him.

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And not in this, oh, he's powerless about it. He didn't want this to happen.

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He didn't will and ordain this to happen. No, he willed and ordained and wants all of it. And I'm gonna get to the high priestly prayer and some other things in a minute, in terms of how

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Jesus has set his heart upon us. Okay, so this is really sweet. You know,

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I always kind of, this maybe says more about me than it does about anybody else, but when I hear people talk about like life versus,

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I always kind of like internally go, oh gosh. You know, I sort of scoff at that. And that's an indictment, it's about me.

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It's my problem. But if I were to pick one verse that I would put down, you know, on my refrigerator for the rest of my life,

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John 17, 24 would be in the running. Where Jesus says to the father in the high priestly prayer that I desire that they, you know, not only the apostles, but all those who will believe in him through the word of the apostles.

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Jesus says, I desire that they would be with me where I am to see the glory that you gave to me before the foundations of the world because you love me.

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And man, there's a lot that could be said here, but Jesus speaks a lot in John's gospel about the commission and the charge that he's received from the father.

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That's about the covenant of redemption, that eternal plan to save a people and where it's like, son, you're gonna go, you're gonna do the work and your inheritance is gonna be them bodily resurrected to live with you with us forever in the new heavens and new earth.

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So Jesus talks a lot about that. So in one sense, it's right to say that God the father has set the heart of God the son on his people.

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And it is also right to say that Jesus, you know, God the son has set his heart upon us.

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Like he has voluntarily bound himself to us. Does that make sense? I mean,

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I know you're tracking. This is important that he has so bound his heart to us and us to him, that how we are in one sense is how he is.

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Like he desires, like he is God and needs nothing. And yet he can say that he yearns for us to be resurrected and be with him.

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And he is saying, father, I have your company and I must have theirs too.

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And if I have a glory, which I do, they need to be a part of it and they need to see it.

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That is how greatly and deeply Jesus has bound himself to us and us to him.

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And we should talk like that. Unless anybody think that I'm going rogue here. I mean,

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I am taking a category straight from Thomas Goodwin's book, The Heart of Christ, which

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I wholeheartedly agree with. And Goodwin wrote like this. He is a respected

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Puritan voice, the successor to Richard Sibbes, a contemporary of John Owen, one of the framers of the

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Savoy Declaration. Spoke this way about the heart of Christ for sinners.

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That's right. I can't help, but I just preached through first Peter. So I can't help but think of Peter dealing with a congregation that is on the outskirts of Rome.

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And they are, man, they're feeling it. They are, they're feeling it. They're feeling the spiritual attacks.

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They're feeling the physical attacks. They just all moved because they had to scatter. So they're re like the relocating and they're questioning like, is this like, what are we doing?

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And I love that towards the end of the letter, he is closing it down.

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And listen, in our day and age, I just like, I struggle with anxiety.

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I struggle worrying, thinking about this and that. And what about this?

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And I can feel the weight of life. And I, no way I'm feeling the same thing this church was feeling in Rome.

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Maybe I will one day, but I love what Peter says as he's kind of closing it down.

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And he's walking them towards the end of the letter. He says this to him, he goes, cast your all, all your anxieties on him.

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Not because it's sinful, not because like, how dare you not trust the sovereignty of God?

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As a matter of fact, the one before it, it says, humble yourselves, therefore under the mighty hand of God. It's like, and he starts the letter with,

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God's power has given you everything. So how dare you question him? How are you not running around, whistling the tune of God's wonder and his glory and his sovereignty?

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Peter acknowledges their anxiety. He says, and by the way, it's casting. He says, casting, doesn't say cast.

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It's a constant, every moment, every day. And this is how he motivates them.

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This is so important. Casting your anxieties on him because, because he cares for you.

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Like that's that sympathy. That's that affection. That's that, I actually care that you're suffering.

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I actually care that this is a struggle for you. I actually care that you are wrestling with life.

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And I want you to come tell me it. Because to cast, it's like, you know, Justin, you and I do this even to each other.

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We were, before we got on the microphones today, we were talking about our struggles and talking about the things that are going on.

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And hey, this is what's going on in my life. We were, in many ways, I'm casting my experience upon you because I know you care about me.

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And I know you want to carry that burden with me. And Peter is saying, you can do this with your

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God. Jesus actually cares about you. And you can say, you know, Jesus, I'm anxious about this.

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This is bothering me. And you know what you should be imagining on the other side of this conversation is one with a sympathetic, gracious, intrigued and anticipating listening to what you, not a crossed armed, you know, not one who's like,

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I can't believe you're struggling with this still. Like, why haven't you got over this? This is important because this is the disposition.

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What do we have, three books now? This is the disposition of our God towards us. And it's important that we preach this and believe it because it helps us get up in the mornings and work through life when life is just kicking us right in the teeth.

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We know we have a God who wants to hear from us and say, God, I'm struggling. This is hard.

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Oh gosh, so many thoughts. And I just, these are in my mind and I'm just going to go with what's there.

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So in Matthew 11 is a passage we often will reference towards the end of the chapter. And in verse 27, it's very interesting how

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Jesus says that the father has given everything into the son's hand. And the very next thing he says is what?

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Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden and I'll give you rest. And he talks about how he is gentle and lowly at heart, you know, and how his yoke is easy and his burden is light.

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And he's going to give us rest for our souls. Like this is the posture of Jesus and the heart of Jesus towards sinners.

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He always bids us to come to him. And the thing that's awesome is that he always comes to sinners. And that is just as true today as it ever was during his earthly ministry.

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And so he has moved to come to sinners. And he does that through the proclamation of his word.

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This is one of the reasons why we are so like, yes and amen with the marrow men as they're known to hold out, to preach the whole

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Christ. We're not just preaching justification, sanctification and glorification in Jesus name.

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We are preaching Jesus, his person and his work. And we hold him out to sinners because in holding him out, right?

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We understand that people see him and that this is exactly how people not only come to him in the first place, but remain in him is to continue to see his face and his heart, right?

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And so this matters a lot to us. And these things are not unrelated to another beautiful verse,

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John 6, 37, where all that the father gives me will come to me, says Jesus, that's covenant of redemption language if I've ever heard it.

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And then he says, and whoever comes to me, I will never cast out.

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And some of the Greek grammar nerds that listen to us, ourselves being maybe two of them, will know that there's a double negative in front of the verb.

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Like it is, I will never, ever, I will not, not,

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I will not, exclamation point, cast anyone out who ever comes to me. And his compassion, his tenderness and his sympathy is really important when it comes to this.

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It's not just that he is this, well, you know, I am God, I'm the same yesterday, today, and forever, I've saved you, and that's what it is, end of conversation.

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And I'll never cast you out, but I'm kind of like frustrated with you, or I'll never cast you out, but I'm kind of tired of dealing with your weakness or whatever, that's not how he is, right?

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Like envision this, the Puritans used to do this, and I really appreciate, this is one of the good parts of, so not all

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Puritans are created equal, I mean, that's a whole other conversation for another day, but like Richard Sibbes used to do this, I mean, others would do this, they would depict these hypothetical dialogues.

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So I'm gonna do that real quick. Like imagine, and this is where, just envision

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Christ, like hit the eyes of your heart, imagine a sinner cautiously, nervously approaching

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Jesus. I've done it again, to which he says,

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I know, but you don't understand, there are times that I find sin attractive,

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I know that too, but I haven't fought hard enough, I understand.

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I wanna do better, Lord, I want to do better, but I get tired and weak, and I find myself in the same patterns.

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Well, then you're exactly the kind of person that I'm hearing. I'm here to help. But sometimes things are so dark and heavy and frustrating,

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I can't help but be discouraged. And I don't know what to do, let me carry it.

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But it shouldn't be this way, Lord, like I shouldn't feel like I do, I should be stronger, I should be better, that's why

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I'm here. But my sins, Lord, are ultimately against you. Well, then

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I'm in the best position to forgive them. But you're holy, how can I ever stand before you?

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I've given you my own righteousness. But what if this keeps happening? I'll never cast you out.

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We always say, like our word is always but I, and his word to us is

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I will never, right? Because this is the kind of savior he is, this is his heart toward us, and we wanna represent that all the time, wanna hold this out all the time.

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Because brother, if he ain't like this, if he ain't like this towards us, then what are we doing?

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That's right. This is part of the gospel that I think often gets lost, this is why you and I like doing the

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Theocast, clarifying, pulling the clutter off the gospel. Sometimes we emphasize the gospel as you did bad,

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Jesus corrected it. It's like almost like Jesus is the judge and that's it.

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That's it. Our relationship to him is just judge only. Yeah, it's just forensic stuff.

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And this is why I think John 3 16 is so powerful and yet a verse we always, but what's the motivating factor?

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The motivating factor is love and a love that you and I will never fully understand, but we'll live and experience in the depths of it for all of eternity.

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That's good. Because God's love is never ending, it's sacrificial, right? And it's full of compassion in ways in which we don't even understand.

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Like we are compassionate people, but we can't understand this kind of compassion. Like Justin, so far in our life, we've not been put in a position where we have to give up one of our children to demonstrate compassion, right?

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We just have not done that. And I don't even think we will ever fully understand

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God's compassion and his patience and his love and his mercy towards us. This is why the

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Psalms, I think, people are drawn to Psalms and at times Isaiah, because it like, sing to the

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Lord because his mercies are ever new, his compassions never end, right? So those are things that we wanna celebrate and it's important that we don't disconnect it like compassion's just being like, yeah, he forgave me once.

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No, his compassion towards us is in our constant current state. Like it's not that Jesus wipes us clean and says, okay,

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I was compassionate towards you, but don't expect me to do it again.

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And yet the Psalmist says, oh no, his mercy never ends. His compassionate is without end.

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Like there is no ceasing to his affection towards us. This is why I love going back to Hebrews is that it's, and even first Peter, it's that it's while we remain in this fallen state, we are gonna be boldly running into the throne room of our compassionate savior who loves us.

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And we're gonna be casting constantly our anxieties upon him because he cares for us, right? He's sympathetic and he cares.

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I mean, there are times I've, you know, you've seen someone who's sympathetic like, yeah, yeah, that's happened to me before too.

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That sucks, man. You're just kind of like, I'm glad you're sympathetic, but doesn't seem like you care.

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And we are told not only is he sympathetic, like he understands, he gets it, but he cares for us.

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And that's that compassionate nature to when you are suffering with your sin, or you're thinking about the

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God to whom you love. I mean, Justin, we've given him our entire life.

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Like he owns everything and we want him to have everything. And what allows this relationship to have a sweetness to it is that we're not fabricating a humanistic view of God.

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We're actually gleaning from scripture, the very God who wants us to see him in this way.

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At times people can say, well, you're just trying to, you know, humanize God so that you can relate to him.

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And we're over here saying, listen, I understand there's a tendency to do that. And we want to, you know, this is where, you know, we can get really sideways theologically.

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Yeah, of course. We're not doing that. We're trying to show you from scripture. This is very clear. It is true he's impassable, but also he relates to us in ways we can understand.

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Well, right. And we need to shut this down. So I'm just gonna make a brief comment. I think what we're trying to hold out today for the listener is how you do theology in this regard, that yeah, you can fall off one side of the horse and you can overly humanize

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God and be anthropomorphic in how you describe him. But then the creator -creature distinction is real, where he is not like us.

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He has condescended and has revealed himself to us in his words so that we might know him truly. We will not know him exhaustively, but he has been very clear that he feels a lot of things about the world and that he is with us and that Jesus is compassionate and sympathetic in all the things that we've presented him as today.

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And at the same time, we can maintain his impassibility because he is God and not us in the ways that we have described, where he has foreknown and he has ordained and planned.

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And even when he has set his heart upon his people, which unobjectionably he has done in the scriptures,

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I mean, he has set his heart upon his people. That is not something that he was forced to do, compelled to do, and he did it freely.

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He chose to do it. He planned and ordained it all. And so the things that he now feels with and for his people is something that he has freely and sovereignly chosen to feel.

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And he has freely and sovereignly chosen to put himself in a position where he feels things with us and for us.

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And so he's impassable, and yet all of the things that are said, these beautiful things that are said about our high priest, our savior, are true.

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We can trust him. Amen. Well, I'm gonna let that be the last word because it's a good one.

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Amen. Well, thank you for listening. We hope and pray that this was encouraging to you, that you can rest in the sufficiency of Christ in a world full of chaos and where we aren't sure about a lot of things.

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The one thing we can be sure of is the gospel, is the good news of our

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God and King who loves us and will never let us go. Trust in that.

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This is when the writer of Hebrews says, hold fast to our confession. Hold fast to that. First Peter says, be watchful.

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The adversary of the devil is prowling around. He wants to rob you of the hope of the gospel. Don't let him do that.

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Fill your mind with the truth of Jesus. And hopefully this has been helpful for you to do that today.

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Thanks for listening. Justin and I are super thankful for you. We look forward to meeting you around the throne of the

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King one day, if not here. And we'll talk to you soon. Hey everyone, before you go, Justin and I first wanted to say thank you.

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And if this has been encouraging to you in any way, please feel free to share it. But we also need your support.

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And it's when you give that it really helps us financially reach more people. So the next time you consider giving to a ministry, we hope that you would pray about Theocast and partner with us as we share the gospel around the world.