The more you love someone, the more that person’s grief and pain becomes yours. And so even in the first chapters of Genesis, we see God is suffering because of our suffering, because of the misery of the world. Here we have no abstract deity, no “divine principle,” no “rational structure behind the universe.” This is not merely the “spark of divine life in every living thing.” This is a transcendent but personal God who loves us so much that his heart is filled with pain over us.
