Faithful Steward Ministries and FSM Women's Outreach

“Do not say, “I cannot help having a bad temper.” Friend, you must help it. Pray to God to help you overcome it at once, for either you must kill it, or it will kill you. You cannot carry a bad temper into heaven.”

– Charles Spurgeon

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Most folks if they are being honest have had moments as depicted above. In the series, Ralph was constantly threatening (we all knew it was baseless so that made it funny) Allice he was gonna send her to the moon. Alice would quip back with a sharp comment and Ralph would get even madder. Of course, by the end of the 30-minute broadcast, all was well in the Cramden house until next week.

Many folks can not deal with anger well even when it is righteous anger. For many ex-military like me, one of the symptoms of PTSD is anger. What is important is that through Christ we can mitigate if not eliminate the unrighteous anger WE ALL POSSESS.

Anger – A state of indignation and outrage, often resulting from distress caused by injustice or insult. Scripture affirms God’s righteous anger against sin and urges moderation in regard to human anger.

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Martin H. Manser, Dictionary of Bible Themes: The Accessible and Comprehensive Tool for Topical Studies (London: Martin Manser, 2009).

ANGER – The nature of anger

Anger is a state of disturbing and energizing passion in which strong negative emotion is triggered by a perception of wrong done to oneself or others or both. The capacity for anger, like that for joy and grief, is ours as moral and relational beings made in God’s image, for Scripture frequently depicts joy, grief, and anger in God as well as in his human creatures. Anger asserts itself in attitudes of indignation and acts of aggression, both expressing a sense of outrage and a wish that appropriate punitive hurt overtake the wrongdoer. Anger threatens human self-control, prudence, and good judgment: ordinary speech describes angry people as having lost their ‘temper’ (equable balance) and ‘head’ (wisdom) and as being ‘mad’. Yet Scripture speaks of anger as motivating admirable action too (see 2 Cor. 7:11; Is. 59:16; 63:3–6).
Analysing anger in any particular instance requires that we review our apprehension of the offending events, the arousal of our hostile reaction, our approval of our negative feelings, and our assault, such as it was, on the object of our anger (perhaps God, as with Jonah [Jonah 4]; perhaps oneself, as with Judas [Matt. 27:3–5]). This assault may stop at cherishing ill-will, or break out in verbal or physical violence; or, if the object of our anger is also an object of our love, it may issue in tragic, frustrated distress at the good that has been lost and the harm that has been done; and if we are already committed to serve God and others, anger may teach us to be more careful in future. So anger may be righteous or unrighteous, justified or unwarranted, virtuous or vicious, constructive or destructive in its effects, depending on what one is angry at, and on one’s own prior character and commitments. The biblical writers view anger, human and divine, within this frame of understanding throughout.

The vocabulary of anger

Anger is multiform, and both OT Hebrew and NT Greek have a variety of words for its various expressions. The commonest Hebrew noun is ap̄, which means first the nose or nostril (Num. 11:20; Is. 2:22) and then the quivering, snorting and flaring of the nostrils that indicate anger (Gen. 27:45; Job 4:9). ‘Slow to anger’ in Proverbs 14:29; 15:18; 16:32 (NRSV) is literally ‘long of nose’. The imagery of heat and of burning is also drawn on, as is the vocabulary of fury, hostility and the quest for revenge. In the LXX and, echoing it, the NT, thymos and orgē are used as synonyms, often paired, to render all the Hebrew anger-words in application to both God and humans, and these are the commonest NT words for the idea. In secular usage orgē is more suggestive of thoughtful deliberation and thymos of thoughtless outburst, but in biblical Greek these distinctions of nuance do not apply.

Anger and sin

The loss of control and wisdom that anger brings lets loose what is worst in fallen human nature, namely love’s opposite, the revengeful hatred of thwarted and wounded pride. Thus in Genesis Cain kills Abel (4:3–8), Lamech threatens wholesale slaughter (4:23–24), Esau plans Jacob’s death (27:41–45), Simeon and Levi massacre the Hivites (34:7, 25–29; 49:5–7), and Joseph’s brothers hate and sell him (37:4, 8, 11, 18–28). Small wonder, then, that James says Christians should be ‘slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires’ (1:19–20, NIV), and that Proverbs constantly represents the indulging of anger as the trouble-making style of the cruel fool (12:16; 14:17, 29; 15:18; 19:19; 27:3–4; 29:22; 30:33; cf. Eccles. 7:8–9). NT surveys of sins regularly include angry attitudes and behaviour patterns (rage, envy, jealousy, hatred, fury, malice, murder) as habits to abjure and to replace by goodwill, self-control, patience, and peaceable purposes (Mark 7:22; Rom. 1:29–31; Gal. 5:20, cf. 22–23; Eph. 4:31, cf. 26–27; Col. 3:8; 1 Tim. 1:9; Jas. 3:14–18). Proneness to anger is specified as unfitting a man for eldership (Titus 1:7).

The anger of jesus

Indications of anger on Jesus’ part appear in Mark 1:43 (at the prospect of unwelcome publicity), 3:1–5 (at the Pharisees’ ill-will and indifference to suffering), 10:14 (at the disciples’ arrogance towards children), 11:15–17 (at the desecration of the temple; cf. John 2:13–17), 12:24–27 (at the Sadducees’ complacent errors about resurrection); Matthew 16:23 (at Peter’s rejecting of his prediction of the cross), 23:13–36 (at the Pharisees’ sham religiosity); and John 11:33–38 (at the repellent legacy of sin, namely death). In light of the NT insistence that Jesus, the Son of God incarnate, was totally sinless (John 8:46; 2 Cor. 5:21; Heb. 4:15; 7:26; 1 Pet. 2:22), these passages must be held to show that anger at what dishonours God, so far from being sinful, may be just the reverse—a truth already modelled in the Psalms and prophets (Ps. 139:21–22; Jer. 15:17).

The anger (wrath) of God

Though God is ‘slow to anger’ (Exod. 34:6) in relation to what his human creatures deserve, his anger at sin (‘wrath’ in most EVV) is frequently highlighted in both Testaments. Conceived in a way that excludes the fitfulness, arbitrariness, waywardness and foolishness that disfigure human anger, God’s wrath is viewed as a judicial expression of holiness repudiating unholiness, as it must. God’s wrath is retribution re-establishing righteousness where unrighteousness was before, so vindicating God’s goodness. Divine wrath touches both individuals and groups—family units (Num. 16:25–34; Josh. 7:24–26), urban units (Gen. 19:1–29; Luke 21:20–24) and national units (2 Kgs. 17:1–23; 24:20). Israel’s lapses into apostasy brought drought, bad harvests and captivity, as Leviticus 26:14–45 and Deuteronomy 28:15–68 had warned; Revelation anticipates wrath in world history until it ends (Rev. 2:5; 11:18; 15:1; 19:15, etc.); Romans 1:18–32 diagnoses divine wrath in the spiritual and moral degenerating of society. Also, Jesus and the NT writers proclaim a coming ‘day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed’, when everyone will receive a destiny matching his or her personal life-choices (Rom. 2:5–16; 2 Cor. 5:10). So ‘leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord’ (Rom. 12:19 [NIV], citing Deut. 32:35).

God’s anger pacified

A significant NT word group expresses the thought of propitiating (satisfying, and so quenching and pacifying) the anger of God against sinful human beings. The words are: the noun hilasmos (propitiation, that which propitiates: 1 John 2:2; 4:10); the verb hilaskomai (with dative, be propitious to: Luke 18:13; with accusative, make propitiation for: Heb. 2:17); the adjective hilastērios (having a propitiatory effect: Rom. 3:25); and the noun hilastērion (technical term in LXX for the propitiatory covering, the ‘mercy-seat’, in the tabernacle; Heb. 9:5). As the context in each case shows, it is the sacrificial death (‘blood’) of Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Son, that quenches divine anger against sinners, just because Christ’s death was a vicarious enduring of the penalty that was our due. The once popular view that expiation of sins is all that this word group signifies rested on the supposition that there is no wrath of God needing to be dealt with, rather than on linguistic or contextual considerations, and is now largely abandoned. The NT idea of propitiation is that of pacifying God’s judicial anger by removing sin from his sight, which is what the atoning blood of Christ has done. Sinners with faith in Christ are no longer in the hands of an angry God (to echo Jonathan Edwards’ famous phrase), but enjoy the forgiveness and favour of the God who quenched his own wrath by sending his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10).

Bibliography

J. Fichtner et al. in TDNT 5, pp. 382–447; H. C. Hahn in NIDNTT 1, pp. 105–113; L. Morris, The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross (London, 31965); idem, The Cross in the New Testament (Exeter, 1967); R. V. G. Tasker, The Biblical Doctrine of the Wrath of God (London, 1951)

J. I. Packer, “Anger,” in New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, ed. T. Desmond Alexander and Brian S. Rosner, electronic ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 381–383.

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What does the Bible say about anger?

DEVOTIONAL

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