Jeremiah 9:1
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! 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 was by nature timid and shrinking in disposition, and he longed for the peace and quiet of a retired life where he would not have to witness the continued impenitence of his people. His cry is anguish over the apostasy of the beloved nation and its disobedience to God's law, and over the ruin and desolation wrought by sin. He longs for his head to be waters and his eyes a fountain of unceasing tears, that he might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of his people and for the Lord's flock carried away captive.
That grief was prophetic, looking forward to coming destruction with a prophetic glance that took in years. Within the limits of human understanding he shared Christ's anguish over lost souls and a lost nation, yet his weeping is small beside Christ's. Christ's prophetic glance took in not years but ages when He beheld Jerusalem's coming destruction, with the destroying angel poised over the city, alien armies surrounding the walls, mothers and children crying for bread in the siege, the holy house and palaces burned to ruins, the covenant people scattered in every land, and in that temporal retribution the first taste of the cup of wrath to be drained at the final judgment.
The image of endless tears shows the depth of compassion God's servants should feel for those lost in sin, and his sorrow stands as a model of sympathy for perishing souls and as one example of how the prophets wept over Israel. It is sorrow for sin as God sees it, not tears shed to win sympathy, for true penitence deplores the wrong itself and its harm to others.
The same cry expresses the pain of seeing people in the church become stumbling blocks who point others away from Christ. It is an agony of soul over corruption teeming in the church, over children whose intellect and purity are weakened and thrown away in self-abuse, over pleasure gatherings and singings that spread the evil, and over sleeping parents who feed animal passions and fail to teach and guard their homes. It is a call to weeping intercession that would arouse fathers and mothers to begin reformation in their own houses before it is eternally too late and the blood of their own children is upon their garments.