Is God a God of glory, or suffering?

God is glorious in His original nature, but history has made Him a God of suffering. Because His parental heart binds Him to humanity, every human fall and betrayal has grieved Him. His glory will be fully revealed when His lost children return and the world of true love is restored.

Many believers picture God in two very different ways. In worship, God is the glorious King enthroned in majesty, untouched by pain. Yet, when we read the Bible honestly, we keep bumping into a God who grieves, weeps, and suffers. So, which is He? The answer of the Principle is that both are true — but in a specific order and for a specific reason. God is a God of glory in His original nature and ultimate purpose, and a God of suffering in the actual course of human history. Understanding why unlocks the deepest secret of the Bible: the broken heart of God.

The God of Glory

The Bible's portrait of God's glory is unmistakable. "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork" (Psalm 19:1). When Moses asked to see God's glory, the sight was so overwhelming he could only be shown God's back (Exodus 33:18-23). Isaiah saw the Lord "high and lifted up," with seraphim crying, "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3). This is the God of omnipotence and perfection, the Creator whose eternal power and divine nature are visible in everything He made (Romans 1:20). As it is written in Psalm 145:3, "Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised; and his greatness is unsearchable."

This glory is not accidental to God; it is who He is. God is the harmonious subject of original internal character and original form, the source of all energy, purpose, law, and love. Before anything went wrong, God's intention was pure joy. He created human beings as His children and His object partners of love, so that He could experience boundless joy through them. Genesis shows God looking at each stage of creation and seeing that it was "good," and finally "very good" (Genesis 1:31). The world of God's ideal was to be a world of glory — God's joy and humanity's joy, one and inseparable.

The God Who Suffers

Yet, only a few chapters later, the tone changes completely. "And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart" (Genesis 6:6). How can the omnipotent, glorious Creator grieve? If God truly cannot suffer, this verse is meaningless. But the Bible insists on it again and again. God says through Isaiah, "In all their affliction he was afflicted" (Isaiah 63:9). Through Hosea, God cries out like a heartbroken parent: "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? How shall I deliver thee, Israel?... My heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together" (Hosea 11:8). Jeremiah records God weeping over His people's destruction: "Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" (Jeremiah 9:1). Indeed, as the Psalmist laments in Psalm 78:40, "How oft did they provoke him in the wilderness, and grieve him in the desert!"

The crucifixion of Jesus is the summit of this revelation. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" (John 3:16). Any parent knows that watching a child suffer and die is infinitely more painful than suffering oneself. When Jesus hung on the cross, mocked and rejected by the very people He came to save, it was not only the Son who suffered — it was the Father whose thousand-year hope was being nailed to that cross. God's suffering is the price He paid for loving human beings who kept betraying Him.

Why God Suffers: The Parental Heart

The reason God suffers is found in His most essential attribute: Heart — the irrepressible, emotional impulse to love, to seek an object partner, and to experience joy through giving. God created us out of that Heart, investing everything of Himself into His children. This means God's relationship with humanity is not that of a detached king managing subjects, but of a parent bound to children by unbreakable love. And a parent's heart cannot be indifferent to a child's destruction. When Adam and Eve fell, God did not lose an experiment; He lost His children. When Cain killed Abel, God watched one of His sons murder the other. Every war, every betrayal, every crushed life in human history has been another wound in the heart of the parent who has watched it all, unable to simply force His children to love Him back, because love must be freely given to be love at all.

This is why God could not simply restart creation or annihilate fallen humanity, and why salvation has taken so painfully long. God is bound by His own love and by the principles of creation He established, which require human beings to fulfill their own portion of responsibility. So instead of erasing the nightmare, God has walked through it with us — working through Noah, Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and finally Jesus, always paying the greater price, always absorbing the greater grief. The history of restoration is, from God's side, a history of suffering.

Glory Through Restoration

God's suffering is not the end of the story, and it is not weakness. It is the measure of His love. The Bible promises a day when "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain" (Revelation 21:4). Notice that this verse speaks of tears being wiped away — whose tears? Ours, certainly, but the whole sweep of Scripture reveals the suffering of God Himself finally comes to an end when His children come home. The glory of God will be fully manifest when the original purpose of creation is finally realized: true families, true love, and a world where God can rejoice over His children rather than mourn for them.

Living the Principle

God is a God of glory whose heart has been plunged into suffering by the loss of His children. This means every act of ours matters to Him personally. When we live selfishly, we add to the grief of a parent who has already suffered more than any being in the universe. When we comfort others, serve sacrificially, and work to restore this broken world, we become a source of joy and consolation to God's heart. The most precious offering we can give God is not worship from a safe distance, but a life that helps end His long suffering and welcome His long-awaited glory.

These answers explain the Bible in the light of the Divine Principle, the teachings of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. .

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