Man of Sorrows

“Like Jeremiah, Jesus experienced sorrow and opposition. But Jesus’ suffering was unique not only in its extent but in its result.”

Jeremiah has been called “the weeping prophet.” In Lamentations 3:1, the prophet declares: “I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the LORD’s wrath.” The prophet could just as easily have been speaking for himself as for Judah when he said, “My eyes overflow with tears” (Lam. 1:16).

Jeremiah’s sorrow anticipated that of Jesus Christ, who wept over Jerusalem and shed tears at the grave of Lazarus (Luke 19:41; John 11:35). Isaiah, a prophet to Judah who lived a century before Jeremiah, predicted that the Messiah would be “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain,” “despised,” and “one from whom people hide their faces” (Isa. 53:3).

Certainly, like Jeremiah, Jesus experienced sorrow and opposition. But Jesus’ suffering was unique not only in its extent but also in its result. Isaiah predicted that the Messiah would not only be familiar with (literally: “know”) pain, but He would also take it up and carry it away (Isa. 53:4). This language echoes Leviticus 16, which describes how, on the day of atonement, the High Priest would “lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites—all their sins—and put them on the goat’s head” (v. 21). After this, he would drive the goat into the wilderness. Leviticus 16:22 explains: “The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place, and the man shall release it in the wilderness.”

Directly or indirectly, all our griefs and sorrows are traceable to the entrance of sin into human experience. Jeremiah was a man who had seen “affliction by the rod of the LORD’s wrath” (Lam. 3:1). But Jesus is the God-Man who took that wrath upon Himself for our sake. Jesus solved our sin problem by suffering for us (see Heb. 13:12). As the apostle Paul explains in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” Jesus sympathizes with our sin. He has shed tears over sin’s consequences. But because He is God in the flesh, He has gone even further and carried our sin away.