stevengworld

The Anger Angle

The pandemic has unveiled quite the smorgasbord of brevity, bravery (fake), and boasting. Twitter fingers as Drake so eloquently labeled them in his song have run rampant. I can admit to being caught up in the fray a time or two. Maybe not in my original posting, but possibly in my replies. Amazed by the new stated positions of friends and acquaintances left me with dropped jaw and furnace ignited anger.

But this only shows the hypocrisy of people who call themselves Christians, right?

Not exactly! There’s this resounding gap that I find often hidden in plain sight in most situations, but like the proverbial pink elephant, it goes about its business ignored by those with vision.

God is slow to anger. The Old Testament says this many, many times. Eventhough many believers find themselves to be ‘faithful’ when they can state and then act as if they’re never angry. For those who are sports and consumption fans, we can rest assure that our exploding actions often fail to underscore our statements. Or those on the other side, who have no problem with being consumeristic and capitalistic in their faith, refusing to be bothered by the anger they showcase at any given moment, because they ‘keep it real’ or ‘want to be authentic’ despite the message they’re sending, aren’t concerned with what the Bible says because God made them that way.

Notice I didn’t say God doesn’t get angry, but he is slow to anger. God the Father is shown to be angry quite a lot in the Old Testament. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons (misconceptions) for why some think the God of the Old Testament is harsher than the God of the New Testament. But God the Son, Jesus, is shown to be angry a few times in the New Testament as well. One time his anger led him to create a whip that was used to clear out the temple. But we as humans often forget to and clearly fail to square away our tendency to be angry with the character of God while highlighting our own character.

If only our sights were set on being like God and less like these personality tests and knee-jerk reactions say about us. In other words, what type of testimony might we be able to give if we were slow to anger and abounding in love? If the anger angle we as a community, be it family, church, neighborhood, job, etc, desired to follow now was congruent with the true statements of God, then the command by Paul (be angry and do not sin) would hit us with more joy than skepticism. This cannot happen until we are ready to abound in love and compassionate mercy towards others. Again, setting our sights on this love overflowing for God, self, others (family, friends, foes, strangers), and creation serves as a catalyst for being slow in our anger process.

No, we don’t get rid of anger. Why? Because when you love someone or some thing that gets misused in any way, anger is sure to follow. However, God calls believers to imitate him, so we trust in Jesus for our holiness and trust in Holy Spirit for our words and deeds. So, let’s try taking the slowest road to anger with God, self, others, and creation out of our love for God, self, others, and creation.

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