Last week, we examined the reasons for our anger. By definition, anger says, “I am god, you are not, and as god, I am not happy with you.” Or, as one book we quoted stated, anger is saying, “I am against that.” It is critical that we know why we are angry, and it is critical that we see our anger as the sin it is. Yet, if we do not repent and desire to have new affections replace our old fleshly inclinations to anger, we will remain in the same angry rut.

So where should we start in discussing how these new affections for Christlike patience and gentleness might blossom in the old sinful positions of anger and bitterness in our hearts? Let’s start where the book The Heart of Anger by Christopher Ash and Steve Midgley starts in Part 2 of the book. That is, on the anger of God.

I imagine that if I were to ask you, as a Christian, what the hardest thing to accept about the Bible is, you would probably reply, “The anger of God.” Now, you may not say it that way exactly. You would probably express it by saying, “Why do people have to go to Hell forever to suffer the consequences of their sins eternally?” I tried to work through this in a 2023 blog called “Four Views of Hell,” which you can read here: https://www.flatrun.org/blog/post/four-views-on-hell.

After reading the book Four Views on Hell in seminary, I came to the conclusion that the reason I struggle with the eternality of Hell and would like a different manifestation of the doctrine is because I do not love God like I should. I trust my wisdom more, and I am not as offended at what offends Him for people to rightly deserve His fiery, eternal judgment on the final day. Simply put, we are not in a place to judge God and His actions. He does what He does because He is God, and He is fully capable and right to do so.

Understanding the wrath of God is going to help us cultivate godly affections because it will rightly show us what anger looks like and what our anger should look like. Entire volumes have been written on the subject of God’s anger and wrath. Here are a few simple thoughts.

The first thing we need to understand is that God is angry. When studying the person of God Himself (Theology Proper), theologians highlight the term “Attributes of God.” Louis Berkhof, in his Systematic Theology, prefers the word “Perfections of God,” and he defines it as “the perfections which are predicated of the Divine Being in Scripture, or are visibly exercised by Him in His works of creation, providence, and redemption.” In other words, the perfections/attributes of God are biblical descriptions of who God is and how God acts. Thus, His wrath is an attribute that describes His actions against sinful man. Psalm 7:11 says, “God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day.”

The wrath of God is significantly underemphasized today in popular preaching and Christian music. I find it interesting that the beautiful modern hymn “In Christ Alone” is often played on contemporary Christian radio stations but with the second verse omitted. The reason is because of the line, “Till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.” Now, to be fair, there is some theological debate over a finer theological point here, but my assumption is popular-level music that rarely engages in theology is quibbling over a historical point. The verse is completely omitted because God’s wrath is offensive.

Yet the prophets and the apostles never shied away from proclaiming the wrath of God. At times, people suggest that the Old and New Testaments are vastly different in their presentation of God because, in the Old Testament, God seems (they say) to be an angry bully constantly expressing anger and judging. Yet the New Testament is where we see God’s love and kindness. I want to say to people who have this warped idea: Have you ever read the book of Revelation? Have you ever read John the Baptist in the Gospels when he says the Pharisees need to flee damnation (Matthew 3:7)? Or Jesus when He said if you do not turn from your sin, you will be cast into Hell (Matthew 5:27–30)? God’s wrath must be proclaimed in order for the gospel to be taken seriously.

The biblical presentation is that people in the Bible feared God’s wrath. Read Exodus 32 and Revelation 6. Romans 1:18 states, “For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” Paul’s thought is that God’s wrath is being expressed right now. We do not have to wait and see it on the final day. Therefore, we must let God’s anger against sin lead us to repentance.

So, God is angry, and because God’s anger is a communicable attribute of God, His anger should inform us of how we should be angry. A communicable attribute means an attribute of God that we, as beings made in the likeness and image of God, must emulate. We must emulate God’s wrath, not our sinful wrath. How do we do that?

That leads us to the second truth about God’s wrath, and that is that God is slow to anger. The Bible is filled with examples of this. Exodus 34:6–7 says, “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’” The Hebrew word for “slow” in “slow to anger” is A-REK. The Enhanced BDB Hebrew and English Lexicon defines this word as “long.”

Simply put, God’s anger is long. When God told Noah He was going to judge the old world with a flood, He gave them 120 years to repent before the waters came down. God graciously sent Jonah to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. God’s grace was evident to Adam in the Garden of Eden by not judging him immediately when he sinned. The best way to understand this is that, though the sentence of justice has already been declared on sin, there is a season of patience to carry out the sentence.

Think about how patient God is with us! God is gracious to us in not giving us what we deserve the moment we sin. Lamentations 3:22–23 states that His mercies are new every morning, or we would be consumed.

My friend, a fast track to becoming patient with people like God is realizing, first and foremost, that God is patient with you. The reason we are so quick to judge others and lash out against them is because we do not see the severity of our sin against Him and His longsuffering nature toward us.

James 1:19 says, “Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” The ethic of being slow to anger flows from the nature of God Himself.

God’s patience is not to breed indulgence in us or presuming upon His grace, because He will consistently judge the wicked. But one thing we know is that God is patient and longsuffering with others. So should we.

Last of all, we need to see that God’s anger is good. When God expresses His anger in judgment, He is giving people what they rightly deserve. He is justly and rightly punishing offenses against His holy nature and law.

The focus of God’s anger is always against sin. It is never arbitrary because God gets up on the wrong side of the bed. His anger is consistent. Jesus, in the temple, cleansed it of wicked men who were extorting God’s people coming in to make sacrifices. Jesus hates religious hypocrisy and leaders who are truly abusing His people. But this anger was a controlled, narrowly focused anger against sin and wickedness.

This is an important point for us if we are going to kill the sinful anger that lies within us. We must reorient and rechannel our sinful anger to an anger that is channeled toward what God is angry with, in the way Jesus was. This is called righteous indignation. Friends, we need to be humble about this godly affection and not always assume our anger is righteous, because most of the time it is not. Even when it is, it is tainted with streams of selfishness.

Last week, I quoted the book Good and Angry by David Powlison. On the topic of righteous indignation, he writes, “Rarely, and wonderfully, anger arises as a simple and constructive good.”

As we close this blog, we need to remember that if we are going to see ourselves for who we are, we must see God for who He is. In terms of this communicable attribute of God’s anger, we must seek to desire to be angry like He is. Not sinfully expressing anger, but righteously expressing anger at sin. We must be patient, knowing that we are not God but that, by faith, He will take care of all things the way He sees fit on the final day. His wrath is good, and ours is not for the most part. But with the new affections for Christ, we can experience a righteous anger. More on this next time.

Soli Deo Gloria