There is a caricature of God as vengeful, vindictive, and a great punisher of evil. There are some passages in the Old Testament, especially taken out of context, where it is possible to misunderstand the nature of God in this sort of way.

Recent events in the Cambridgeshire town of Soham have forced me to ask how God views the abduction and murder of two young girls. I know that each day after their abduction, and before their ultimate fate was known, I listened eagerly on the radio for news, hopefully good news. Alas none came.

At the time of writing this, a man has been arrested, and his female partner charged, and already people are making judgments. But I want simply to ask the question: how does God view all this? Is He angry (as we all are) that such a deed has been done? Of course ascribing any emotion to God in human terms is anthropomorphic, and will fall short of the full truth. But our humanity is surely 'in His image', and must be some sort of clue about how He responds to events. So, given these provisos, how does God respond to events like this?

I know I feel grief, and I believe God does too. In fact anger and grief go hand in hand. Most Sunday mornings the congregation where I worship will sing 'Forty years long was I grieved with this generation ...' (referring to the generation that was miraculously delivered from slavery in Egypt) from Psalm 95 verse 10. 'Grieved' is the Coverdale and King James Version word. The RSV gives us 'loathed', and the NIV has 'was angry with'. The writer to the Hebrews quotes this psalm too (Heb 3:10) and uses a Greek word whose root means 'to be heavy laden'. The word conveys a very deep emotion, of loathing coupled with suffering.

It is clear from the Bible that all our evil actions grieve God. Paul exhorts us not to 'grieve the Holy Spirit' (Ephesians 3:30) and in the preceding and following verses we get some mention of the kind of actions that do grieve the Holy Spirit of God. They are precisely what you would expect, the list concluding with ' ... every form of malice.'

The grief of God is a powerful concept. I know what it feels like to suffer grief, though I have not suffered this emotion very often, or even very deeply, I suspect, compared with some. It is worth remembering that only those who love can grieve. It is only love that makes us vulnerable in this way. No indifferent person ever grieves.

I dare not consider the couple charged with crimes regarding these two young girls, and I am truly glad not to be part of the system of justice by which society will deal with them. The parents of the two girls will know the greatest grief, because theirs was the greatest love. But all of us ordinary folk, having no contact with the events except as spectators of the news reports, have felt something. And God has felt the deepest grief of all, I am pretty sure.

So today I ask God for His grace and help, so that what I do, or fail to do, does not grieve Him.