Genesis says that in earth’s earliest days, the elder son of Adam and Eve, Cain, was angry. His wrath was directed at his brother, Abel, who had worshipped God with the prescribed offering; but ultimately it was aimed at God, who appeared to Cain and asked, “Why art thou wroth? And why is thy countenance fallen?” God graciously counseled Cain that he need only do right by bringing the offering that was required, and all would be well. But Cain yielded to anger and killed his brother, the first recorded murder in history. It was a sin born of hatred and disobedience, and it is written into the record of history as an example of how not to deal with anger towards God and jealousy and ill-will toward other human beings.
American author and theologian Frederick Buechner, in his book Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, says that “of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontation still to come, to savor the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back; in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
Aristotle said that “anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time and in the right way—that is not easy.”
Solomon spoke well and wisely to the matter when he admonished his son to “make no friendship with an angry man, and with a furious man thou shalt not go, lest thou learn his ways.” (Prov. 22:24,25) And, again, the wise man warned: “Be not angry in thy spirit; for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.” (Eccl. 9:7)
A parable on the subject: “A big, mean lion met a monkey in the jungle. The lion pounced on the poor monkey and asked, ‘Who is the king of the jungle?’ The frightened monkey replied, ‘You are, O mighty lion.’ So the lion let him go. The next animal the lion met was a zebra. He pounced on it and roared, ‘Who is the king of the jungle?’ ‘You are, O mighty lion.’ So the lion let him go. The lion next met an elephant and asked him the same question. The elephant grabbed the lion, twirled him around, and threw him 50 feet. The lion picked himself up and huffed, ‘Just because you don’t know the answer is no reason to get rough.’” Maybe the moral of this clever parable is: Be careful about tossing your weight around; you just might rouse the anger of the wrong person!
So, as Aristotle said, there is a time and place for one’s anger to be aroused. Jesus displayed righteous anger on more than one occasion, sometimes dealing with it by what He did, as when He cleansed the Temple in John 2; sometimes dealing with it by what He said, as when He excoriated the self-righteous Pharisees in Matthew 23, when He called them “fools and blind…hypocrites…whited sepulchers…generation of vipers;” and sometimes by both what He did and what He said, as when He again cleansed the temple late in His ministry on His final trip to Jerusalem. (Matt. 21:12-17) So, Henry Ward Beecher—the 19th-century pastor and abolitionist—may have been right when he said that a man who does not know how to be angry does not know how to be good. A man that does not know how to be shaken to his heart’s core with indignation over evil things, Beecher said, is either a fungus or a wicked man.
The English poet William Blake put it this way: “I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow.” Paul said that we ought at times to be angry, yet in doing so we ought not to sin. He concludes, “Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath.” (Eph. 4:26) He clarifies further: “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice.” (Eph.4:31)
A Christian counsellor once said, “The greatest danger to a man’s success is uncontrollable anger.” King Herod, angry with the wise men from the east who had come to worship the Christ child, had hundreds, maybe thousands, of Judean Hebrew babies slain in a fit of rage because the wise worshippers did not tell Herod where they had found Jesus.
It is so very distressing to witness the wrath, anger, bitterness and evil speaking in recent days against the Jewish nation, Israel, in the wake of the October 7th terrorist attack, during which Hamas committed unspeakable atrocities and in which they took hundreds of innocent civilians hostage. Family members and loved ones have posted pictures of some of those Israeli hostages, including children, and we have witnessed angry, hate-filled people pulling down the pictures in contempt.
The Roman emperor Caesar Augustus was quoted as saying that “whenever you are angry, say or do nothing before you have repeated the alphabet to yourself.” And another wise person said, “Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to its rest. Call for the grandest of all human sentiments, what is that? It is that man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.” (Thomas De Quincey)
“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: for the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” (James 1:19,20)
YOU and GOD 