About “Righteous Anger?”
By Brant Hansen
Why isn’t righteous anger ever listed among the things that a Spirit-filled life will bring us? If it’s righteous, why is it not akin to the “fruit of the Spirit,” like love, joy, peace, and gentleness? Why is anger in Scripture so consistently lumped in the other lists with things like, say, slander and malice, with no exclusions for the “righteous” variety? (See, for example, Colossians 3:8).
We aren’t to just pretend anger away or feel guilty for the initial emotion of anger. But we are to deal with it, with the goal of eradicating it within us. This, of course, is not easy to do, but it’s not complex to understand, either.
Few ever present the radical implications of what it means to die to ourselves and what it means to practice a lifestyle of forgiveness. “Stepping out of anger,” Dallas Willard says, “means you are surrendering your will to God. It means you have accepted that you don’t have to have your way.”[1] When I’ve read commentaries on Ephesians 4:31, where Paul says to get rid of bitterness, anger, evil speaking, and so on, the commenter very often inserts the word unreasonable before anger. But that’s not in the text, and the commenter doesn’t extend the “unreasonable” standard to anything else on the list. (What about “unreasonable bitterness”?)
We take something like “Love your enemies” and “Pray for those who persecute you,” and tack on “But, really, holding on to anger is justified.” We do this with the apostle James, who, in the Bible, said point-blank that anger does not produce the kind of righteousness God wants in us: “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20 ESV). “But didn’t some biblical heroes act out of anger?” Well, sure they did. They were humans. I’m so thankful the Bible is not a just-so story, not a singsongy, children’s pop-up book of SuperClean Heroes. Its stories are of people, like us moderns, who lie and cheat and steal and harbor anger and occasionally even kill innocent people. It’s a mess. To say, “Well, Moses got angry at injustice in Exodus 2” is not to say that we should kill Egyptians too. Those stories aren’t how-to templates for our lives; they’re stories that point us, ultimately, to the goodness of God.
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Adapted from Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better by Brant Hansen.
Click here to learn more about this book, and click here to learn more about the video Bible study.
Why isn’t righteous anger ever listed among the things that a Spirit-filled life will bring us? If it’s righteous, why is it not akin to the “fruit of the Spirit,” like love, joy, peace, and gentleness? Why is anger in Scripture so consistently lumped in the other lists with things like, say, slander and malice, with no exclusions for the “righteous” variety? (See, for example, Colossians 3:8).
We aren’t to just pretend anger away or feel guilty for the initial emotion of anger. But we are to deal with it, with the goal of eradicating it within us. This, of course, is not easy to do, but it’s not complex to understand, either.
Few ever present the radical implications of what it means to die to ourselves and what it means to practice a lifestyle of forgiveness. “Stepping out of anger,” Dallas Willard says, “means you are surrendering your will to God. It means you have accepted that you don’t have to have your way.”[1] When I’ve read commentaries on Ephesians 4:31, where Paul says to get rid of bitterness, anger, evil speaking, and so on, the commenter very often inserts the word unreasonable before anger. But that’s not in the text, and the commenter doesn’t extend the “unreasonable” standard to anything else on the list. (What about “unreasonable bitterness”?) We take something like “Love your enemies” and “Pray for those who persecute you,” and tack on “But, really, holding on to anger is justified.” We do this with the apostle James, who, in the Bible, said point-blank that anger does not produce the kind of righteousness God wants in us: “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:20 ESV). “But didn’t some biblical heroes act out of anger?” Well, sure they did. They were humans. I’m so thankful the Bible is not a just-so story, not a singsongy, children’s pop-up book of SuperClean Heroes. Its stories are of people, like us moderns, who lie and cheat and steal and harbor anger and occasionally even kill innocent people. It’s a mess. To say, “Well, Moses got angry at injustice in Exodus 2” is not to say that we should kill Egyptians too. Those stories aren’t how-to templates for our lives; they’re stories that point us, ultimately, to the goodness of God.
How does the Bible Deal with Anger?
Feeling powerless is sometimes excruciating. We want justice, and we want it now. If we can’t get it, we can at least harbor our self-righteous anger and righteous indignation. Sometimes, it’s all we think we can do....
The whole article can be read here
Adapted from Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better by Brant Hansen.
Click here to learn more about this book, and click here to learn more about the video Bible study.
