The inner life of God revealed

Following the logic of the text, Yhwh does not reveal the dramatic tension of His inner life primarily for the benefit of the readers, though with the canonization of these oracles this obviously became a central purpose of the text. God’s tears also introduce anew a note of hope for Jeremiah. They witness to a deeply involved God and to the changing nature of divine inner life. Divine tears raise the possibility of forgiveness and healing. In other words, taking the flow of the narrative seriously, it looks as if the divine tears encourage Jeremiah to persist in his intercessory prayer effort on behalf of the people (cf. Jer 14:19–22). Perhaps no other book of the Bible witnesses so clearly to the divine tension between love and wrath. Together, love and wrath cause divine pain, something that comes to powerful expression in these verses.—Standing in the Breach, page 374