Does God Himself Suffer?

"Yahweh was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him in his heart" (Genesis 6:6). Long before the incarnation, Scripture already refuses to describe God as untouched by what happens in his creation. The language here is deliberately strong and unflinching — grief, not mere disapproval.
This is not an isolated poetic flourish. Scripture affirms real divine suffering without compromising God's ultimate sovereignty or self-sufficiency — and holding both truths together, rather than sacrificing one for the other, is essential to what the text actually says. Hosea pictures the same divine anguish generations later: God crying out over a rebellious people he cannot bring himself to abandon. In the incarnation this same capacity for suffering becomes fully, physically embodied: the Son experiences weariness, thirst, grief, and distress exactly as any human does, offering up, as Hebrews puts it, "loud cries and tears" (Hebrews 5:7). At the cross this reaches something even the Old Testament grief passages had not yet shown — not sorrow over creation from the outside, but the total rupture of the Son's own relationship with the Father, borne from the inside. A God incapable of genuine suffering could never be fully trusted by those who actually suffer; but a God with no real sovereignty over suffering could offer no genuine hope that it will ever end. Scripture insists on both at once, refusing either as a shortcut around the other.
Nowhere is this held together more starkly than in the cry from the cross itself: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). The one who grieved over creation from heaven now grieves from inside it, on a cross, so that the grief itself might finally be brought to an end.