Angry and Holy: How Your Anger Can Be Righteous
If you’ve been around kids long enough, you know how short their temper can be.
I sat on the floor with one of my fourteen-month-olds, helping him learn to build a tower with rubber blocks. He had watched his older brother and his twin brother do it, and now he wanted to try himself. I lay down on the mat and gathered eight blocks in front of him. I placed the red one to start and handed him the orange one. He smiled, and his big brown eyes lit up as he took the block in his little, pudgy hand. He delicately placed it on top of the red and grinned at me as he clapped his hands together. I cheered for him and passed him the yellow one.
He lifted the block above the orange, but not quite high enough. The yellow block in his hand bumped the orange one and knocked it to the floor. As he watched the orange one fall, he quickly tried to put the yellow one on top of the red, but with his haste, it tumbled to the floor as well. He furrowed his dark brows together and grunted, then tossed the red block.
My first instinct when I see anger in my children (or in myself) is to squash it. No, you’re not allowed to be angry; anger is a bad emotion. Stop being angry and start being happy, grateful, or some kind of positive emotion. Anger is sin.
When I started therapy, however, I was taught that anger isn’t an enemy to squash. As I, in turn, searched Scripture, the Holy Spirit guided me to see that he’s not anti-anger either. All anger isn’t sin. Rather, anger is a good emotion when rightly used. As a professional emotion-stuffer, this has been a hard lesson to learn and one that God, in his good patience, is teaching me over and over again as I parent my children and re-teach myself.
Is Anger Always a Sin?
I saw a pastor post online, “Only one person [Jesus] can have a ‘righteous frustration’ just as there is one who can have a ‘righteous anger.’” When someone challenged this comment by reminding the pastor that the Bible instructs us to be like Christ, he said this was a divine attribute we are unable to foster. I know this pastor’s beliefs are not alone; I remember hearing a similar sentiment from a professor lecturing at a Christian university a few years prior.
Many Christians are taught that anger is sinful and—like me—stuff their anger and shame themselves for having such an emotion. Yet is this true? Can only the holy Godhead have righteous anger?
In Psalm 4:4, David instructs Israel by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “Be angry, and do not sin.” Paul, quoting this Psalm, tells the church in Ephesus, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26). Both passages instruct believers to be angry, and their only qualification is to avoid sin. If righteous anger is impossible, why would the Bible call us to it?
We like to set boundaries for ourselves as believers to avoid sin, but often we go beyond Scripture to the point of declaring what God calls good evil. Yet just because an act or emotion raises the possibility of being abused by our sinful hearts doesn’t make it evil.
The Pharisees did this during Jesus’s day. In efforts to protect Israel from breaking God’s law again, they created man-made laws that stretched beyond God’s perfect law, to the point that they followed their man-made laws to the neglect of God’s law. They wouldn’t help the poor on the Sabbath because it was classified as work by their man-made laws. They cleaned their drinking cups to be spotless but neglected the sin staining their souls. Jesus had scathing, angry words for the heavy yokes these teachers laid on the backs of God’s people. He called them whitewashed tombs—for their outward laws made them appear bright and clean, but inside their hearts were rotting and dying with sin (Matt. 23:27). They claimed to follow God, but their hearts were far from him.
Any emotion can lead to sin. Our happiness over a new job could lead to unkind gloating when we’re with our friends. Our passion for theology can lead to pride when studying the Bible with those who don’t understand the long words we use. Anger likewise can become sinful, but it can also be untangled from our sinful nature and become righteous as well.
Righteous Anger in Action
Where do we look to learn righteous anger? We look to Jesus, who in his humanity experienced everything we do, yet without sin.
Jesus was angry about sin and false teaching (Matt. 23:1–39). He condemned the Pharisees for their false theology and the many burdens they laid on people. He became angry when people used God’s place of worship to make money (Matt. 21:12–17; John 2:13–17). He was frustrated by the religious leaders’ lack of mercy (Mark 3:1–6). God the Father likewise becomes angered at injustice and sin.
As believers, we should rightly feel anger in our spirits against sin, false teaching, and injustice. We should be angry when pastors abuse their authority to harm people in the name of God. We should cry hot, angry tears when babies are murdered in the womb. We should be angry when political leaders rule with cruelty. We can even feel angry when someone harms us—because it is sin, and God hates sin.
The anger we feel is an agreement with God that what we’re seeing and hearing is wrong. The great theologian B.B. Warfield declared that to be a moral being is to be angry: “It would be impossible, therefore, for a moral being to stand in the presence of perceived wrong [while] indifferent and unmoved” (The Emotional Life of our Lord, 50). He further wrote that the only way to be compassionate like Jesus is to have the same anger over injustices. As Warfield wrote,
Jesus’s anger is not merely the seamy side of his pity; it is the righteous reaction of his moral sense in the presence of evil. But Jesus burned with anger against the wrongs he met with in his journey through human life as truly as he melted with pity at the sight of the world’s misery: and it was out of these two emotions that his actual mercy proceeded. (76)
Likewise pastor Benjamin Vrbicek writes for TGC, “included within the imago Dei [is] a sharing of God’s love, holiness, and justice, and it seems to me (and others) that as these shared attributes combine, there ought to be a place—albeit a small and delicate one—for an affection that accords with the injustice of our world.” If we feel nonchalant about the injustices and suffering around us, how will we rightly sympathize with the hurting?
Licensed counselor Alison Cook explains that anger is one of the many cues our body sends us to tell us something isn’t right and needs our attention. “Emotions are not the enemy. Anger. Sadness. Guilt. Fear, even Shame are CUES. They need your attention, compassion, and understanding, not nice-sounding spiritual platitudes.”
Rather than stuffing our anger or stomping out its flames, we need to stop and be curious about what we’re feeling. We need to pause. In another post, Alison Cook lays out five steps for controlling our anger (not stuffing it): Notice the signs of your anger, take time out to pause and reflect, give voice to your anger in a safe place, connect with the vulnerable feelings behind the anger, and speak assertively (not aggressively) about what you need. In this way, we start to use our anger as a cue and turn our passion into righteous anger rather than losing control of it to our sin nature. Like Jesus, when he sat down to braid his whip before chasing the salesmen out of the temple, we can pause to reflect on our anger and what our actions should be.
A Recovering Emotion-Stuffer
Emotional-stuffing is my automatic yet poor-coping strategy. I’m still recovering from the years I spent stuffing every negative emotion and learning how to set better boundaries with them. I’m learning that self-control isn’t the absence of emotions. Rather, self-control is acknowledging my emotions, like anger, and learning the Christlike way of expressing them.
Jesus beckons us to be angry over sin and injustice, yet without sinning. God knows we won’t do this perfectly; he’s not surprised by our sin and shortcomings. Jesus died for our sins, even when we lose control of our anger and hurt others. Christ offers us forgiveness when we sin, calls us to repent to those we harmed, and extends to us the heart-changing power of the Holy Spirit. By his grace, we can learn to be righteously angry like he was, rather than stuffing anger and plastering a smile to our faces. We can be righteous and angry.
As I plant these truths in my own heart, I’m striving to come alongside my boys in their own anger. When blocks inevitably tumble or don’t fit perfectly together, instead of scowls and pointed fingers I remind myself to say, “Wow, that made you angry! What’s another way we can deal with this feeling?” And sometimes, I say the same to myself.
Lara d’Entremont is first a wife and a mom to three little wildlings. While the wildlings snore, she designs websites and edits for other writers, but her first love is writing—whether it be personal essays, creative nonfiction, or fantasy novels. She desires to weave the stories between faith and fiction, theology and praxis, for women who feel as if these two pieces of them are always at odds. You are welcome to visit her online home at laradentremont.com.