Our Angry God

The January 9, 2010, edition of The Times-Picayune gives the sad tale of an emergency room doctor–of all people–who let his road rage get the best of him. He’s going to prison for five years because of his lack of self-control.

Christopher Thompson of Los Angeles, age 60, was convicted in November for assault with a deadly weapon (his car), battery with serious bodily injury, reckless driving, and mayhem. What he did was to throw on his brakes suddenly, causing the bicyclists to slam into his car. One came through the rear window. Both were injured.

What led up to that moment we’re not told. But we can imagine.

If the cyclists were anything like those around this city, they were not obeying the traffic laws. I would wager not one biker in a dozen in any city in America knows that they are required to obey the same laws as automobiles, stop at the same stop signs, stay in the same lanes, give the same signals, etc.

It can be infuriating watching them dart in and out of traffic, scooting around cars in a line, speeding through four-way stops. Motorbikes and motorcycles are worse, of course, because they are bigger and faster.

You can get angry. But you cannot get even.

Road rage is a condition we experience when other drivers blatantly ignore written or unwritten laws of respect and safety on the highways.

It’s a rare driver who has not experienced that sensation. You’re tooling along the highway, it’s a lovely day, you’re feeling good, and suddenly out of the blue a speedster appears out of nowhere and fills up your rear view mirror.

He flashes his lights for you to move over, practically paints himself onto your back bumper, and endangers everyone in your car and his. Your first impulse is to stay right where you are, to slow down even, and to guarantee that this guy is never going to pass your car in this lifetime.

Not good. Let him by. He’s an accident looking for someone to happen to. Don’t let it be you.

Anger is a normal reaction of the human mind when we are crossed, offended, endangered, or hurt. Everyone gets angry now and then.

Even God.


I take slight consolation in seeing from Scripture that even Jesus grew angry.

In a synagogue for a Sabbath service, Jesus noticed a man with a withered hand among the crowd. The Pharisees, self-appointed guardians-of-orthodoxy were present also, standing nearby, ready to pounce on the Lord if He were to do something so blatantly blasphemous as to heal the guy on the Lord’s Day.

The Lord called the man out. “Stand up in front of everyone.”

Then, looking at the crowd, He said, “Which is lawful on the Sabbath–to do good or evil? to save a life or to kill one?”

There is no way they were going to respond to that. To do so would mean conceding His point. So they remained silent.

Mark writes, “He looked around them in anger, and deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.” (Mark 3:1-5)

So readers will know that the Lord had accurately taken the measure of these naysayers, the next verse reads, “Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.”

If you violate our religious rules, we will kill you. How’s that for keeping the faith?

Jesus was clearly angry the day He drove moneychangers and animal-sellers out of the Temple. (In the four accounts of this in the gospels, at no point does Scripture actually say He was angry. It seems a logical inference, however, from what He did.)

I think the Lord was angry at Herod for beheading John the Baptist.

At the request of my niece, I’ve been reading “The Shack,” the best-seller of last year which no one who read it has been neutral about. Everyone loved it or hated it. I’m still trying to decide, but since I still have 100 pages to go and Lisa and I aren’t scheduled to discuss it for another 24 hours, I’m good. What I am not “good” about, however, is the way our Triune God is presented.

Author William Paul Young presents God as three persons who meet with Mack, the protagonist, over a weekend at the shack where his small daughter was taken and brutalized after being kidnaped.

That weekend, Mack makes discoveries about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit which transform his life.

A lot of the story is as biblical as the sermon you will hear from your pulpit next Sunday. But here and there, Young takes a detour to turn God into the kind of deity he thinks He ought to be.

One significant thing that involves is ‘a complete absence of anger.’

Young’s God is mad at no one. Not at religious charlatans and drug pushers, and not at murderers or rapists or the serial kidnaper who took Mack’s little daughter. Everyone has this wonderful potential, although they may be screwed up, corrupted, or lost. As the anthem of the flower-child generation put it, “Everyone is beautiful in his own way.”

Hardly, if I may be allowed to disagree.

Not everyone is beautiful and God is not without anger.

“The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men….” (Romans 1:18)

And this: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:31)

Clearly, the wrath of God is a fearsome thing. However, there’s good news: “Since we have been justified by (Jesus’) blood, we shall be saved from God’s wrath through him!” (Romans 5:9)

I for one am glad we serve a God with the capacity to get mad.

Last Wednesday, I sat with my 15-year-old grandson in the new Solomon Victory Theater at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, watching a film on that war. Toward the end, the narrator told how Adolf Hitler ended his own life in a Berlin bunker rather than have to give account to the world for his misdeeds.

I heard that and thought, “He did not miss out on the accounting, however. He will stand before Almighty God, whose laws he flouted and whose people he murdered by the millions, and he will pay for what he has done.”

If this life is all there is, if one can do as he pleases in this earthly existence, then die and cease to exist forever, there is no justice and the universe is pointless.

There has to be a reckoning.

This week, the State of Louisiana put to death a child murderer in the State Penitentiary at Angola. Ten years ago, this man had forced his 12-year-old step-daughter to perform a sex act on him, then strangled her. He was convicted and sentenced to die, and the verdict was carried out.

Was justice served? Not hardly.

That man’s life was not worth one-tenth of the value of that child. To swap his for hers was no bargain and still leaves the balance scales of justice lopsided.

If there is no reckoning after this life and no hope beyond it, then “we are of all men most miserable.” (I Corinthians 15:19)

I daresay most of us have not given thanks lately for the wrath of God, but it’s in order.

Any parent worth the name would feel anger at that which is threatening his child.

That’s what His anger is all about.

(Note: You can tell from the introduction that I had started to write something entirely different from what this turned out to be. As it became more of an essay on God’s anger and less about the anger of man, it became clear the introduction hardly fits the rest of the piece. However, since the flow of the article accurately traces the way it unfolded in my mind, I decided to leave it alone and send it forth as it is.)

5 thoughts on “Our Angry God

  1. Your segue between what makes me mad (bikers who don’t obey the law but get mad if I don’t) and what makes God mad is beautiful. I serve as a Court Appointed Special Advocate which means that in cases of abuse and/or neglect, I represent the interests of the child in the court. In the process of doing investigations I have faced situations when all I could do was keep the contents of my stomach in place. Regardless of any punishment we may dish out here, I believe that God has something “special” for those who violate our children. Thanks for your message.

  2. I read “The Shack” and I agree with your analysis. I was uneasy about the “familiarity” wiht the Trinity. You pinpointed for me my other uneasiness that I had not grasped and that is the lack of wrath of God against the kidnapper.

    Dr Joe – you did it again -clarify and define my thoughts.

    Dr J

  3. My problem with “The Shack” is that the average Christian and certainly an unbeliever will get a totally wrong impression of GOD and for the unbeliever, short of the Grace of GOD and HIS overruling, will spend an eternity in hell.

  4. See Joe, it didn’t strike me as much as the absence of God’s anger as it was that God was teaching a real hard lesson in forgiveness toward the murderer. If there were no forgiveness, the remainder of Mack’s life would have been a waste. I have seen it before, just different circumstances. Maybe I’m just shallow. It is amusing to me how everyone has taken away something different from reading The Shack.

  5. Great post Bro. Joe. I read The Shack and enjoyed it, but was uneasy about many parts. It is certainly NOT for a young Christian who is not well grounded in the Word.

    God does indeed love all of His creation, but He is still a just and righteous Judge, who cannot ignore evil. People may indeed escape justice in this life, but they will receive their punishment in the next. If they don’t, then Jesus is a liar and could not be the Son of God because He himself talked about Hell on many occasions. He also suffered and died for nothing, if there is no punishment for those who do not accept His free gift of salvation.

    Thanks Woody for being a CASA. I am also and have had to keep silent many times when I wanted to unload on someone involved in the case.

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