There is no one dead, living or future, who hasn’t been or won’t be in their life angry, even Jesus.
Anger is a definite part of life. Walk into any household and I’m sure to find harsh words and strife, for good reasons and bad. Anger is a universal emotion and is recognizable even in a different language; I know when I am being yelled at.
Just because anger is so common, though, doesn’t classify it as bad. A lot of anger is bad and pointless, but that doesn’t make the thing itself evil. Some love can be as detrimental to my health as physically hurting myself. Love itself is not bad, but love that is not in accord with God and His law is. (Read this for a greater expansion on that thought.) What sort of anger is acceptable to display then?
Most anger around our house is pointless. Disgruntlement with a failed task. Hate directed toward a half teasing sibling. Anger with a responsibility that I really didn’t want. Innocent bystanders can see these things in their true light, but if they try to set me aright I’d probably jump on them, too. This sort of anger, though unpleasant, doesn’t usually have a long lasting effect on me, but it would be very easy to slip from there into the kind that does tear families apart and make wounds that last for years. Not to take daily anger lightly, Jesus says in 1 John 3:15, “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer; and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.†Dwell on that.
Perhaps, this is why some try to avoid any kind of anger. Maybe, they have a very bad temper and are afraid of opening the flood gates, but some things truly deserve my wrath, i.e., sin. God is angry with the wicked every day, and so must I. This confuses many people who have the idea that God is only love. Or that Jesus, as God of the New Testament, is different than the God of the Old Testament. How is it possible that God can both love and hate? Aren’t those opposites?
When Jesus came to earth as the perfect sacrifice He said that He came to fulfill the law, not do away with it. That fulfillment took place on the cross and now I am able to enter into God’s presence daily, because the blood of Christ covers me. But, if there were no salvation for my soul, then I would be hated by God for my sin and spend eternity in Hell.
The best example of God displaying righteous anger is that of Jesus with the moneychangers. He physically tossed the moneychangers out of the temple and overthrew their tables with a big bang! I’m sure that His disciples wondered what had come over the man, who talked of loving your neighbor and turning the other cheek. He definitely didn’t mean standing idly by when God’s laws are broken and His temple is desecrated.
Checking anger in my life is hard. I would hide myself in shame if someone were to recount to me all the times I behaved abominably around the house for absolutely no reason, (math isn’t a reason), then disciplined a little brother for throwing a fit. That makes me a hypocrite. Double whammy. Being Irish is no excuse, but I sure know that I didn’t have a saint for an ancestor. I don’t have any problem being angry when I hear stories of little girls being shot in school, though. That really deserves my hate. It’s easy to be angry and shocked at such incidents, but if those incidents happen every day in America, I would soon cease to be shocked. Just like it’s not so easy anymore to be shocked at abortion or sodomy. Well, I cannot don black for every baby killed, but I can never stop hating the thing that is consuming millions of little lives. I have to be careful here now, not to measure my sin with sin by saying, “this isn’t so very bad compared to this.†I must always judge all things by God’s law and firstly hate the sin in my own life, no matter how small, before anything else.
In Christ,
Grace