Nothing sets a life on fire quicker than unbridled anger. It burns and devours through the overflow of harsh and hurtful words that cut, sting, and burn. Yet hardly have I ever met anyone, even the best of Christians, who has mastered this emotion perfectly.
Recently, I was reading Good and Angry by David Powlison, and I cannot recommend this book highly enough. He helped me gain the biblical wisdom to face this battle.
I have found within modern Christianity the way this is dealt with is an all-out ignoring of it or attempts at fighting it with therapeutic or worldly techniques. While I can agree that taking a deep breath and assessing your surroundings can help you get ahold of yourself and find self-control, it will not overcome the beast of anger in the long run.
So what is anger? According to Powlison,“Anger is the fighting emotion. Anger is the justice emotion. Anger is the deliver-the-oppressed-from-evil emotion. It stems from love for the needy. All of us come wired with a sense of justice.”
Essentially, it is our emotional response to injustice. Anger flows from love. Anger perceives that something is unjust and attempts to correct it. This makes it a powerful weapon. Yet, as Powlison argues, it comes from the heart of God first.
God is love, and therefore, although He is slow to anger, He responds appropriately to injustice. We are made in His image, and from the moment that we become aware of injustices in this life, specifically those directed toward ourselves, we are able to become angry.
I see this on the daily in my household. Between my three boys, while my wife and I, along with the gifts of friends and family, have more than enough toys, tablets, and attention, as best as possible, to go around, desires and injustices appear to flow on the daily.
One child desires to play with a specific toy, and the other child, unaware, is laying on said toy. This unleashes the fury of a thousand suns from the fists of doom wielded by my three-year-old. Punches and kicks are thrown, and the tears can flow in the few seconds before Mom or Dad can step in to intercede.
You see, my son, just like me, has an overwhelming sense of self-love. He loves himself and values his joys and his pleasure, and so when he perceives an injustice being done to him, he lashes out with anger.
This is the image of God in him, but the image of God tainted by sin. God is a God of justice, and although He is described as slow to anger, He pours out His justice.
Apathy When We Should Be Angry
Because anger is the justice emotion, if viewed not as something to be harnessed and handled with care but as something to be ignored altogether, then we refuse to direct it in the right direction.
Anger is the fight-for-the-oppressed emotion. This means that as believers in Jesus, we, like Jesus, have the calling to be angry but in control. We must be angry at injustice.
I would argue that our anger is tainted and dangerous because our love is tainted and dangerous. We fail to love what God loves and who God loves, and so our anger flows down at the wrong things.
We get angry at the weather. We get angry at traffic. We get angry at our fellow believers. We get angry at our family. And although we sometimes would be loath to admit it, we get angry at our Creator.
This all happens because our love for ourselves has been distorted, and our love for God and neighbor has failed.
When we seek to see the world and the minutiae of our lives from the heavenly perspective, then the love that flows will be a love that directs us to be slow to anger, controlled in our anger, and directing our anger at the things we need to be angry about.
The Cross
In the cross, we see the ultimate overlap of love and anger in the character of God.
God, in His great love for His own glory and for His creation, hates sin and the destruction that it has brought. He abhors the evils that have destroyed humanity.
Each one of us has committed sins against Him and our fellow human beings, earning us complete separation and suffering in a place called Hell.
Yet God, in His overflowing and abounding love, desired to love us in spite of all of this. So He sent His Son, Jesus, who went willingly to the cross and endured the wrath that we deserve.
When and How to Be Angry
The prime example of Jesus’ anger toward injustice is seen in the cleansing of the temple. In Mark 11:15–17, Jesus enters the temple and drives out those buying and selling. He overturns the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling pigeons, and He says, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? But you have made it a den of robbers.”
Jesus was angry because the house of God was intended to be a house of prayer. When the name of our God is blasphemed and turned toward wicked ends, it should anger us.
The Court of the Gentiles was the outer portion of the Temple complex where Gentiles could worship. It was also the area beyond which certain people who were excluded from the inner courts—including those with certain physical disabilities and certain forms of ritual impurity—could not go.
Think about this. The very place where those who could not enter farther into the Temple could come and worship God had become a marketplace.
But notice what Jesus quotes: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations.” The worship of God was being corrupted, and those whom God had invited to worship were being hindered by the very people who were supposed to facilitate that worship.
It angered Him that people were being prevented from coming to God in prayer.
His anger flowed because of His love for people and His love for His Father.
Notice this was not a common occurrence in the life and ministry of Jesus, but His anger came out in other ways, often toward the religious leaders when they were going after the truth or others.
This is where we must be careful as Christians. The answer to our anger is not simply to suppress it. Nor is the answer to unleash it whenever we feel that we have been wronged. We must learn to love what God loves so that we can become angry at what God is angry about.
Our anger is often sinful because our love is sinful. We love ourselves, our comfort, our preferences, our schedules, our possessions, and our reputation. And when those things are threatened, our anger comes roaring out. We call it righteous indignation when, in reality, it is often nothing more than self-love defending its territory.
For us, our anger needs to remain under control and fueled not with a sense of personal vengeance, but slowly approached and slowly executed in love or in service of the truth of our God and the love of others.
The Christian must learn a different kind of anger.
Our anger must be directed toward the right object. It must be motivated by the right love. And it must be expressed according to the will of God.
Jesus gives us the perfect picture. He was angry at hardness of heart because He loved the suffering man. He was angry at the corruption of the temple because He loved His Father and desired that the nations would come and worship Him. His anger was righteous because it was directed toward the right object, motivated by the right love, and expressed according to God’s will.
That is the kind of anger we should seek—not anger that burns everything around us, but anger that burns for the glory of God and the good of others.
great word brother