Message in a bottle…..
Yesterday, at the close of a funeral service I was conducting, I read as I usually do at that point of the service, the passage from the Book of Revelation chapter 21:4 …And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes…! I believe that this tells us that in heaven there will be no reason for us to weep, as there will be no more death, nor sorrow or pain. The ability to weep, to have tears is an amazing part of God’s creation in our lives. The shortest verse in English in the Bible is as follows…Jesus wept..John 11:35.
We have no record of Adam or Eve weeping or having tears form for the first time in their eyes, although I am sure they did.
The first mention of tears in the Bible is found in, 2Ki 20:5 Turn again, and tell Hezekiah the captain of my people, Thus saith the LORD, the God of David thy father, I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee: on the third day thou shalt go up unto the house of the LORD.
The first mention of some one weeping however comes much earlier with Hagar the Egyptian women who came with Abraham from his sojourn there in Egypt, Gen 21:16 And she went, and sat her down over against [him] a good way off, as it were a bowshot: for she said, Let me not see the death of the child. And she sat over against [him], and lift up her voice, and wept.
I find it amazing this ability that God has built within us that is released when the impact of pain or sorrow or struggles are expressed through our eyes via tears.
Why this little Biblical journey on this subject? Each time I see our Lord weeping it reveals to me some important lessons.
His tears were always for others pain and suffering. His weeping was at its greatest on Palm Sunday as He wept greatly over the City of Jerusalem and His people Israel, when they missed His planned visitation. He saw what sadly lay ahead for them under General Titus in 70 A.D. when the Temple was destroyed and the people suffered greatly.
God has designed us to be able to weep, to be able to have tears. May we use this amazing ability as our Lord did. As we see our loved ones and our world as Jesus sees it, may our tears be in response to our prayers for the salvation of those who do not know Him. May they be the most precious prayer we could ever pray without the utterance of a word.
Psalm 56:8 You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.
How wonderful it will be to arrive in heaven and see that bottle knowing what it took to fill?