Compassion is closely related to the Hebrew word for “womb.” Like a nursing mother, compassion is literally the sharing of affliction or suffering with another. We must display God’s grace and compassion to a lost world, because God has created everyone, even those who are enemies of God today, to be his image bearers.
Women are created with a womb as the very picture of compassion, birthing and nursing children God loves. But today, the womb has become a place of death. Every year globally 40 million precious unborn lives are destroyed.
The cross is God’s payment for sin. It represents the heartbreak and pain caused by sin. Should we conclude that God the Father feels pain in his heart too?
“The Lord regretted that He had made mankind on the earth, and He was [deeply] grieved in His heart.” Gen. 6:6 AMP
C.S. Lewis writes in his book The Problem of Pain: “In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submit's to the possibility of such defeat. What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by it's own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.”
Is Lewis correct about “the possibility of defeat”? If not, what might a different view say about God’s character?
