Anger without sin

Most anger, even mild irritation, is a response to thwarted plans. In a church seminar on anger, the pastor who said this also explained that most anger is sinful because it is all about me. I don’t like what someone does because it messes up what I want.

Yet Jesus got angry. He dumped over the tables of the money changers and tossed them out of the temple. He angrily called the Pharisees hypocrites and a brood of vipers. Since the Bible says He is sinless, His anger was not sinful. This could be very confusing, except for a couple of verses in Ephesians.

Be angry, and do not sin: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, nor give place to the devil. (Ephesians 4:26-27)

The anger that is not sinful is sometimes called righteous indignation. This is an angry response to sin and injustice. It is the anger that God feels and a justified outrage. Since Jesus lives in me, at times I can expect to feel His emotions, including anger.

I often am angry when I read the newspaper or watch television news and become aware of horrible things people do to other people. Seniors robbed. Children beaten and killed. Everyone knows the headlines and, if we are sensitive to our emotions, can be overcome with distress. It is this distress that these verses are talking about.

While it is a good idea to deal with ordinary human anger before the sun sets, the context isn’t about the anger that I feel when someone messes up my plans. This admonition is for righteous indignation, the rage felt when someone messes with the will of God. He says that I need to take care of that wrath before I go to bed at night.

The first way is by prayer. As I talk with God about unjust world and local events, I am giving my concerns to Him. During such conversations, He may take them from me, or He could ask me to do something about it. How many shelters, orphanages, group homes, rehab centers, and so on exist because someone took their rage over human suffering to God and He gave them a job to do in His name?

But if I do not talk to God and instead nurse the rage, the devil finds fertile ground to jump in and get me to do his bidding instead of whatever the Lord might want me to do, or not do. Not only that, I’ve noticed more and more that I cannot easily hear God speak when I am angry. It is during my anger that I am vulnerable to Satan’s lies.

As I look at these verses, they almost sound like a command; “Be angry . . .” in the sense that righteous indignation should never be shut down in the name of “staying calm” because such emotion has a divine purpose. It is okay to be angry about sin and injustice, yet whenever I feel it, I need to pay close attention. My emotions may be a signal from the Lord that He is about to send me into a place or situation to do something about those things that make Him angry also.