John 11:33-38 When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him! And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it.
It is believed that Jesus wept over the death of Lazarus, but Jesus had no reason to grieve for Lazarus. Jesus knew that Lazarus was death before He went to Bethany. Jesus also knew that Lazarus would be taken care of, and Lazarus would be taken care of even if the Lord had not raised him from the grave on that day. Jesus knew that death is nothing, that He had come into the world to destroy death.
The people who were there with Martha and Mary thought that Jesus was weeping for Lazarus, and this causes the reader to assume that is the case. But the passage clearly says that Jesus was troubled when He saw Mary. It is not death that causes sorrow for the Lord, but the sorrow experienced by the living. Death is nothing at all, and God sees our resurrection as clear as the events of the past and present. There is no reason for the Lord to grieve over the dead. We cannot see the future and when we lose someone, we only know that they are out of our lives. God experiences sorrow through us.
Genesis 6:6 And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
God does experience sorrow and He knew He would experience sorrow before He created the world and therefore, He must have wanted to experience sorrow. The world as it now exists is the only way God could have experienced sorrow.
God never changes, and yet God is influenced or affected by creation.
Genesis 6:7 And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.
We see in the Bible that creation affected God, and this would be a reaction by God that God would not have had had He not created the world. Whatever reason God had for creating the world, God had a reason for creating the world, which is to say that God is in some way changed by creation. How then can we say that God never changes?
God transcends time. This means that creation from start to finish will always be before God. Creation from start to finish has always been before God, and any change that creation provides to God was always part of God. It would have to be true that God created the world for His own purpose. Creation would have to be a natural and unavoidable product of the nature of God.
God is love. It would be essential for God to experience all aspects of love.
