It is not the injured pride of a tyrant that we see here, but the pain of a suffering parent. “Ye have abandoned me,” He responds. Then we read, “and He could no longer bear to see Israel suffer.” (“His soul was grieved for the misery of Israel” in the King James Version.) In the language of scripture, this is God’s response to human sin, an underlying sorrow, not anger. Sin is pain, and the intensity of His response to sin is commensurate with the intensity of that pain He knows sin will entail, and in which He has already chosen to share. For He is the God who weeps.
