Can God relate to me — to the specific weight of what I’m carrying right now? If you’ve ever asked that question, you’re not alone, and you’re not wrong to ask.
A God who exists outside of time, who spoke the universe into existence, who is all-knowing and all-powerful — what does he know about exhaustion? About grief? About the kind of pain that makes you wonder if you’ll make it through the day?
This is where the Christian claim about Jesus gets deeply personal. Not just intellectually interesting — personally meaningful. Because if Jesus was truly both fully God and fully human, then the gap you feel between yourself and God isn’t as wide as it seems.
Can God really understand what I’m going through?
The technical term is the “dual nature of Christ” — the doctrine that Jesus was 100% God and 100% human at the same time. It sounds like a theological puzzle, and honestly, it is. But behind the doctrine is something that touches the most human part of your experience.
Jesus got hungry. He got tired. He had close friends who betrayed him. He felt the weight of grief so acutely that he wept openly at a tomb. He knew what it was like to be misunderstood, rejected, and in physical pain so severe most of us can’t imagine it.
This wasn’t performance. It wasn’t God pretending to feel things to seem relatable. Scripture presents Jesus experiencing the full range of human emotion and limitation — genuinely, not theatrically. He didn’t have secret access to divine pain relief that the rest of us lack. He went through it.
Carey shared something in our latest episode that has stayed with me. She described a conversation with her father, who was dying of cancer, about this very idea. Her father had never considered the fact that Jesus understands what it’s like to be in terrible, unrelenting pain. That you can go to Jesus and say, you know what this is like — help me hang on. And her father was comforted. Not by a theological argument, but by the reality that Jesus had been there.
Why does it matter that Jesus was fully God and fully human — not just one or the other?
Here’s where it gets important: Jesus didn’t just sympathize with human experience as an observer. He entered it. And he did so voluntarily, without abandoning who he was as God.
What this means practically is that when you bring your hardest moments to God, you’re not presenting them to someone reviewing your life from a safe distance. You’re bringing them to someone who chose to know exactly what it’s like — hunger, rejection, exhaustion, physical suffering, the feeling of being utterly alone. Can God relate to me in those moments? Because of the incarnation, the answer is yes — from the inside, not the outside.
Hebrews 4:15 puts it plainly: Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses because in every way he was tempted as we are — yet without sin. That word sympathize doesn’t mean pity from a distance. It means he felt it from the inside.
And because of that, the commands and examples he left us aren’t coming from a being disconnected from our reality. When scripture talks about enduring hardship, resisting temptation, submitting your will even when it’s costly — those weren’t easy things for Jesus either. He modeled them from within the same constraints you face, not above them.
What do you do when God feels too distant to reach?
If faith has felt like reaching toward someone who can’t possibly understand your life, I want to gently push back on that picture.
The Christian claim isn’t that God watched from heaven and said, “I understand their struggles in theory.” The claim is that God became one of us — not halfway, not symbolically — fully. He took on everything it means to be human and carried it all the way through death.
That means your pain isn’t foreign to him. Your doubt isn’t foreign to him. The gap you feel isn’t evidence that he’s unreachable. It might just mean you haven’t yet seen him clearly as the one who already closed the distance.
In Series 2, Episode 1 of Barriers to Belief, we dig into the theology and the humanity behind this — what the early church councils actually decided and why, what it means that Jesus voluntarily set aside independent use of his divine power, and why this doctrine is foundational to everything else in the Christian faith. It’s one of those conversations that starts in the deep end of the theology pool and surfaces somewhere surprisingly personal.
Watch Series 2, Episode 1 of Barriers to Belief:
If you’re someone who wants to feel connected to God but isn’t sure he’s someone you can actually approach — that’s exactly the conversation we exist to have. You don’t have to have it figured out first.
Written by Kristen Davis, Ph.D. | Founder, DoubtLess Faith
