anger and God
The Bible is full of wisdom. God knew that we would struggle with anger and He didn't leave us hanging on that topic. Today I'm just going to focus on a few of the verses that deal with anger.
“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.”
It has been my experience that we take the first two parts of this verse and separate them depending on the situation. I think, as always, that the verse must be taken as a whole and in context. Anger is separate but linked to sin here. It is not sin, however there is a recognition that sin often follows anger. My life can attest to this. Don't let the sun go down on your anger. Long term anger is not what we should be engaged in. We need to keep short accounts. It's the last part of the sentence that really gets me though. Give no opportunity to the devil. I've come to ask myself when I find myself getting angry, "Am I giving an opportunity to the devil in this area?" More often than not, yes.
Priscilla Shirer points out in her study, The Armor of God, that our battle is not against flesh and blood.
“Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
If it has flesh and blood, it's not the enemy. This also has been a pivotal point in my thinking. When I find myself getting angry at someone, remembering that they have flesh and blood, and are therefore not the enemy, and asking if I'm giving an opportunity to the devil have helped me to refocus. We must know who our real enemy is and when we feel anger taking hold of us, we have got to get on our knees and clothe ourselves for the real battle. By the way, if you haven't done The Armor of God study by Priscilla Shirer, I would highly recommend it.
But what about righteous anger, you ask, because we all know that Jesus cleared the temple and that He was right to do so.
“And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers.””
After all, Ephesians 4 tells us to be angry and not sin. We are supposed to get angry, right? Certainly we should be angered by injustice, disrespect of our Lord and other such things. We see the wrath of God demonstrated on many occasions in the Bible. Do you notice something missing in the text from Matthew though? Jesus forgot to call his posse, er disciples to the temple beat down. I think there's significance in that. He could have said, "Come on guys, we've got to fix this." He could have said, "Go and do likewise." He didn't. I think that He was keenly aware that we very rarely really experience righteous anger.
“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”
I think we we're meant to see that righteous anger generally relates to the kingdom and name of God, not to our own egos. God has an eternal perspective. Which brings me to a third question I've learned to ask when it comes to anger. Does this matter in the light of eternity?
James tells us to be slow to speak and slow to anger. That word, slow, in the Greek is bradys. It literaly means slow and it's only used 3 times and two of them are in this verse. The third time, it's used in Luke as Jesus chastises the men on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection because they had been slow to believe all that the prophets had said. It seems significant that there are only two things that we are commanded to be slow in doing. Speaking and anger. He knows us so well, doesn't He?
The times in your life that you will wish you hadn't been so angry and had kept your mouth shut will far out number the times that you will wish you'd been angrier and said more in the heat of the moment. God doesn't just know about how we sin in our anger. He knows the place of righteous anger. He knows what true injustice does to us, how it makes our souls writhe. How when we submit it to Him, to His timeline, that He can accomplish much. God's timeline and ours, there is no conversion rate, no way to translate one to the other. Righteous anger has the space to be slow because it is not dependent on our actions or words. Righteous anger is most effective when we let God do His work in us and then through us.
Next week I'll be laying out some additional ways that you can deal with anger in your own life. If you haven't read the past two posts in this series, you can read about the reasons we get angry here and how our brains process anger here.
