The God Who Sees You...Gets It

“You just don’t get it!”

Ever hear that from the mouth of a teenager? Back when I had four of them in the house at once, I heard it a lot—often punctuated with the slam of a door or a toss of the head. My son and daughters all had times when they were convinced I had no clue what they were going through or what their lives were like.

And you know what? In a way, they were right. I had forgotten a lot about what it was like to be young—to obsess over grades, walk the popularity gauntlet at school, and experience my first heartbreak. Plus, some of the things my kids experienced were just not part of my world when I was their age. Drugs and alcohol did not figure into my daily school reality. I had no cell phone, no pressure to be bone thin, no parents walking through divorce. Internet porn didn’t even exist when I was a kid.

The truth is, understanding what my kids’ lives were like required a huge effort of imagination on my part, plus a fair amount of research. Sometimes I succeeded in “getting it,” but often I didn’t—and my kids knew that.

Have you ever felt that way about God? Have you ever suspected that He just doesn’t get what it’s like to be you?

It’s one thing to be seen. It’s another thing—a wonderful thing—to be loved. But can an all-powerful, purely good God truly appreciate what it’s like to be human—subject to sin and sniffles, dirt and disease, pushed around by our hormones and our families, vulnerable to grief and pain?

Can a perfect Being understand what it’s like to be far from perfect?

He certainly understands the limitations of our bodies because He made us in the first place. “He knows our frame,” the psalmist insists. “He remembers that we are dust” (Ps. 103:14)—or, as Eugene Petersen translates, “that we’re made of mud.” God’s well aware of our physical limitations, our emotional shortcomings, the way our histories and our choices have limited or even crippled us. And somehow, under it all, He sees potential. . . .

But God did so much more than understand our limitations. . . . God actually chose to become human—which means He really gets it.

He actually put on skin and flesh and became what we are. We call it the incarnation. The coming of Jesus.

When God chose to be born on earth as Jesus, He accepted the reality of nerve endings. He learned what it was like to need sleep, to be hungry, to be lonely and disappointed. He experienced life through the five senses. He heard children laughing and maniacs screaming. He gazed at dancing flowers and leprous feet. He reveled in clean, smooth linen and felt the stab of thorns on His brow. He enjoyed the salty tang of fresh-caught fish and tasted vinegar from a sponge. He inhaled the smell of bread baking and the unmistakable stench of death.

Jesus laughed. He wept. He knew what it was like to live in a human family, to be held in a mother’s arms and looked up to by little brothers and sisters and supported by loving friends. He also knew what it was like to be hated and rejected by others for doing good. He knew what it was like to feel forgotten and ignored and invisible.

And yes, He knew temptation, too. The Bible says Jesus was “tempted in every way, just as we are” (Heb. 4:15). He knew what it was like to feel the pull of the flesh, to want to give in to selfishness or pride or lust or just plain weariness, to want to take the easy route instead of the right one. Even, perhaps, to be disobedient to His calling.

“Tempted,” the Bible says, “in every way.” Jesus’ decision to turn away from temptation, to show the world it was possible to be human and not sin, came with a mighty struggle. He knows firsthand what it means to wrestle with weakness.

And if God didn’t get suffering before the incarnation, He certainly understood it once He became human. Fear, anger, hunger, thirst, suffering, even death—because He chose to become human, God has experienced it all.

He’s the God who gets it, who can love us from a place of true understanding.

Adapted from The God Who Sees You by Tammy Maltby (with Anne Christian Buchanan). Copyright 2012 David C. Cook. Used with permission. Permission required to reproduce. All rights reserved.