September 21, 2002

First of all, the notion that anger is a sin, says that God Himself is a sinner. Scripture is chock full of references to God getting angry. I used my handy electronic concordance and got tired of counting the references. Suffice it to say the number is in the hundreds. Like all things in life, anger can be misused and become an instrument of sin, but anger in and of itself is not a sin. Consider the following quote:

ANGER. The emotion of instant displeasure and indignation arising from the feeling of injury done or intended, or from the discovery of offense against law.

The anger attributed to God in the NT is that part of God that stands opposed to man's disobedience, obstinacy (especially in resisting the gospel), and sin, and manifests itself in punishing the same.

Anger is not evil per se, being, as love, an original susceptibility of our nature. If anger were in itself sinful, how could God Himself be angry? Paul commands the Ephesians <Eph. 4:26> that when angry they are not to sin. "Paul does not forbid the being angry in itself, and could not forbid it, because there is a holy anger, which is the 'spur to virtue,' as there is also a divine anger; . . . but the being angry is to be without sin" (Meyer, Com., ad loc.).

Anger is sinful when it rises too soon, without reflection; when the injury that awakens it is only apparent; when it is disproportionate to the offense; when it is transferred from the guilty to the innocent; when it is too long protracted and becomes revengeful <Matt. 5:22; Eph. 4:26; Col. 3:8>.

(from New Unger's Bible Dictionary - (originally published by Moody Press of Chicago, Illinois. Copyright (C) 1988.)

This thinking, that anger is a sin, is rather pervasive and it is troubling. I find it particularly troubling in our current times. I am amazed at how many people have not expressed anger and outrage in response to the terrorist attacks. Worse yet is the fact that such anger has been discouraged by many, particularly in Christian leadership. If ever there was a justification for "holy anger which is the 'spur to virtue'" those attacks qualify.

Many would say that the problem with anger is that it so often results in violence. They would then go on to argue that even if I have proven anger is not a sin, violence IS a sin and since anger so often leads to violence, it should be discouraged.

Once again, we run into a problem here. If violence were a sin, would God ever be violent? Of course not! And yet God is often violent. Remember your King James translation. Have you ever heard a joke or comment about the word "smote"? I bet you have "God did a lot of smoting in the Bible." Consider the following definition from Strong's dictionary:

1986 halam (haw-lam'); a primitive root; to strike down; by implication, to hammer, stamp, conquer, disband:

KJV-- beat (down), break (down), overcome, smite (with the hammer).

Sounds violent to me. Again, we are left with the fact that violence is not in and of itself a sin, but it can be used in a sinful manner.

Here we are confronted with two pretty important tools in God's arsenal that the world is working desperately to irradicate. Why would that be?

To me the answer is fairly simple. The preeminent mantra of our time is "Live an let live." Which reduced to its most naked form is a way of saying don't make me do anything I don’t want to do, or prevent me from doing what I want to do. In the end, violence is a means of controlling the behavior of someone else. It is a pretty simple formula, violence raises the consequences of some behavior or lack of behavior to the point that that someone has no choice but to comply or die.

That is pretty ugly sounding isn’t it -- "they have no choice but to comply." And thus we have developed this whole "Violence is bad" thing. By removing violence as a means of coercing behavior people are allowed to do pretty much whatever they want.

And now we have a problem. See if I am the one that wants to misbehave, this is great, but if I am somehow a victim of misbehavior I am robbed of what may be my only available means to prevent my victimization. Is it any wonder that so many people in the world today feel victimized? All this no anger, no violence stuff has robbed them of a great deal of control of their own fortunes.

That's pretty important if you think about it. Sometimes violence is the only way we can prevent ourselves from being victimized. This is so blatantly obvious in the current case of world terrorism that opposition to its use would be laughable did they not have so much political support.

But this is also true for "violence" in lesser forms than guns and bombs, and punches and kicks. Being the kind of person I am, it has been quite frequent in my life that I have been chastised to moderate my rhetoric, using the reasoning that it is "verbal violence." I was severely berated in a Sunday School class once for declaring loudly that someone was "misguided and wrong" -- those words were "too strong." The person had uttered a heresy in the name of God and I was chastised to moderate my vocabulary?! Had this person's thoughts been allowed to go unchallenged, they could have eaten into the spiritual lives of others in the room like a nasty cancer -- I did not wish to be a victim of such blather.

I think this incident shows the real intention of the "no anger, no violence" crowd -- such reasoning is the only way they can win. If I cannot defeat the enemy I shall disarm him until I can.

Anger is indeed a "spur to virtue." This is a good thing, not a bad one. Violence is not the first choice of getting the other to behave in a reasonable manner, but it is useful in some cases, whether it be physical or verbal. They are both tools to build and weapons to defend truth and goodness and God. They are to be used judiciously and with care. But in some cases they must be used. Those that would take these tools from us may hide in the clothing of the peaceful, but they are saboteurs, attempting to destroy their enemies' weapons before they can be used in battle. And thus a new battle line is drawn.

I am coming to the conclusion that such people cannot be allowed to sit in their stew of misguided ideas. These ideas have grave consequences far beyond the immediate. We need to become much more active in combating such thinking.