Anger is an emotion characterized by feelings of annoyance, irritation, frustration or hostility. Someone cuts us off while driving. Or we get yelled at by delaying the checkout line. Or we are betrayed by a friend. Or we are interrupted in an important meeting. So many actions, situations and circumstances can bring us to the point of anger. Our blood boils, the heart beats faster, the mind races, the eyes narrow. And then we react with anger. We tend to perceive anger as a negative reaction, because the actions often associated with it can destroy, tear down, damage and hurt.
The story of Jesus getting angry at money changers outside the temple is fascinating. Matthew 21:12-13 says, “Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you are making it a den of robbers.” You can imagine Jesus yelling, pounding His fists, pushing down tables and scowling as He spoke.
Jesus got angry, and yet He did not sin. This action by Christ helps us to understand anger as a neutral emotion that can be experienced and used in a positive, God-honoring way. Anger can be useful to identify problems, protect us from threats, challenge the status quo, push for change or improvement, to help others, or to give a burst of energy to finish a task.[1] You can be angry and not be wrong. You can also be angry in a way that leads to sin. What’s the difference?
What makes God angry? Righteous anger, the kind that God allows and is not sinful, is being angry at the things that make God angry. God is good. In fact, God is the definition of Goodness. Because His nature is good, everything He does is good. Not only good, but also perfect. And perfectly right. Anything that is the opposite of this, God calls evil. And it’s okay to be angered by evil. This is Jesus at the temple, seeing a holy place of worship perverted into a business full of cheats and heretics. Money that should be given freely to God used to buy lackluster offerings that God neither wanted not accepted because they were less than the best and given out of rote practice instead of genuine humility and a desire to please Him. What should have been a place of prayer and devotion had become a religious casino. Jesus had every right to be angered by this, and He was. Because God His Father was.
The closer we grow to God, the more we become like Jesus, the more our emotions will reflect His. We will become “greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked,” and find “their lawless deeds” tormenting (2 Peter 2:7–8).[2] Think about our culture today and what might cause righteous anger… the killing of unborn children, ethnic and economic injustice, abuse (emotional, physical, sexual), sex trafficking, slavery, adultery, persecution. These call for anger, and often action—like Jesus at the temple.
What makes men angry? Sinful anger, on the other hand, is rooted in man’s desire to please himself over pleasing God. This is the anger that leads to “quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder” (2 Corinthians 12:20). Man’s anger is selfish, causes division, and is often displayed as a tantrum. God tells us to avoid this anger—to put away “anger, wrath, malice” (Colossians 3:8). Jon Bloom wrote, “Sinful anger alienates us from God. It does not move us toward acts of faith and love and true justice, but rather toward acts of selfishness like sullen withdrawal, irritability, rudeness, obstinacy, and bitterness. Sinful anger is characterized by the self-oriented grief of self-pity, not godly grief over evil. And it produces the cancer of cynicism that eats away at faith, eroding our desire to pray.”[3]
Staying on the right side of anger. Displaying righteous versus sinful anger is an exercise in the spiritual disciplines. Are you reading and studying the Bible daily? Are you in prayer constantly? Do you worship regularly? Do you practice other spiritual disciplines that are acts of humility and faith, such as fasting and service? The right expression of anger comes from a mind aligned with God. You won’t be angered by the things that anger God if you are not in sync with Him daily. And you’ll fall into sinful anger when you stray from the will of God and follow your own selfish objectives.
A righteous example. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was in high school, he won a writing and speaking contest. He and his teacher returned home to Atlanta, Georgia by bus after the competition. The bus stopped and some white passengers got on, and told King and his teacher they would need to give up their seats. Though King wanted to stay seated, his teacher urged him to keep from making a scene, and they stood up in the back of the bus for the remaining 90 minutes of the ride. King later said, “That night will never leave my memory. It was the angriest I have ever been in my life.”
King’s daughter, Bernice King, later said many years later, “My father was extremely angry from that incident. So much so that he expressed it later on by saying that he came very dangerously close, at that particular time, to hating all white people.” King instead channeled that anger into action, and became the central leader of the Civil Rights movement, known for his nonviolent resistance to racism, and his fiery speeches. Bernice explains, “If you internalize anger, and you don't find a channel, it can destroy you. That’s why when Daddy reiterated, ‘Hate is too great a burden to bear.’ He knew it was corrosive and erosive.”
