Tear Bottle

Jesus is God, with all the attributes of Deity. But He is also the Son of Man, who feels our pains and our sorrows. Isaiah 53 reminds us, “He was despised and rejected . . . a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief ” (verse 3). The passage goes on to say, “Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down” (verse 4 NLT).

He not only carried your sin, He carried your sorrow. We’re told in Psalm 56:8, “You have seen me tossing and turning through the night. You have collected all my tears and preserved them in your bottle! You have recorded every one in your book” (TLB).

On a tour of Israel a number of years ago, I was exploring the old city of Jerusalem with my sons, Christopher and Jonathan. At one point in our ramblings, we stopped at an antiquities store, and I noticed a number of little bottles in various sizes and shapes. I asked the shopkeeper, “Sir, what are these bottles for?”

“Oh,” he said, “those are Roman tear bottles.” “What were they used for?” I asked.

“Well, the Romans believed that when a loved one dies, you need to keep your tears in a bottle. So they would store the tears in these little containers.”

I have a tear bottle now. But it isn’t on Earth; it’s in Heaven. And I’m not the one who has to collect my own tears because God has already said He would do that.

So why does God keep our tears in a bottle? Because He sees and cares about every one of them. He takes note of our every tear. He hears our every sigh. And the Bible says that a day is coming when God will wipe away all of the tears from all of our years.