DISCLAIMER: As with all my sermons in this Proverbs series, I have benefited much from the preaching ministry of Tim Keller.
WISDOM FOR ANGER
Proverbs: Wisdom for Living
Proverbs
THE TEXT:
Proverbs 6:16
There are six things that the Lord hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
Proverbs 8:13
The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil.
Pride and arrogance and the way of evil
and perverted speech I hate.
Proverbs 10:12
Hatred stirs up strife,
but love covers all offenses.
Proverbs 14:29
Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding,
but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.
Proverbs 15:1
A soft answer turns away wrath,
but a harsh word stirs up anger.
Proverbs 15:18
A hot-tempered man stirs up strife,
but he who is slow to anger quiets contention.
Proverbs 19:11
Good sense makes one slow to anger,
and it is his glory to overlook an offense.
Proverbs 22:24
Make no friendship with a man given to anger,
nor go with a wrathful man,
Proverbs 29:22
A man of wrath stirs up strife,
and one given to anger causes much transgression.
GRAB THEIR ATTENTION
We’re beginning the New Year in the book of Proverbs which is all about wisdom. In 1 Kings 3, Solomon prays for wisdom and he defines it like this: “God give me a heart of wisdom that can discern right from wrong.” And you say, “Solomon had the law of God… so why did he need wisdom to discern right from wrong?”
And last week we said that wisdom isn’t less than knowing right from wrong, but it’s so much more because there are many circumstances in life that the moral rules don’t address. You need a heart that discerns, a heart that has insight, the ability to foresee and plan.
RAISE THE NEED, SIGNPOSTS, STATE THE DESTINATION
Today we’re reading Proverbs in order to understand anger. Now, you have anger, and you need to discern it in yourself. But you are surrounded by angry people too, and you need to be able to handle anger in others.
In order to be wise regarding anger you need to learn…
- Anger’s Activity
- Anger’s Goodness
- Anger’s Disorder
- Anger’s Redemption
- ANGER’S ACTIVITY
All of the verses we read had a theme: being stirred up. The sins of others stir up our anger, or our sinful anger stirs up others. Throughout Proverbs, anger is always active. Something has been done to incite anger and anger does something to incite action.
Robert Jones, a professor of counselling, defines anger as: “our whole-personed active response of negative moral judgment against perceived evil.”
- It’s an active response. It’s an action, an activity. It’s something we do, not something we have.
- Anger engages the entire person. It’s not just an emotion.
- It’s related to our heart: revealing what we desire.
- It’s cognition: a way of thinking.
- It’s volitional: meaning it engages our will.
- It’s behavioral: anger includes actions we take.
- It’s even religious: who are we, who is God, how should we be treated.
- Anger is a response against something. Human anger doesn’t arise in a vacuum or pop into being out of nothing. It’s provoked. This doesn’t mean that anger is caused by others. Anger begins in our hearts—but our hearts are always active; responding to people and circumstances.
- It’s a negative response; a negative moral judgment. Anger is the heart’s judgment that something wrong has taken place. In humans, it’s the sense of displeasure provoked by an offense. Anger is the heart saying, “I’m displeased because it ought not be like this. A standard of obligation and duty has been broken, and I’m irritated.”
So, anger sounds like this:
- This is wrong, shameful, or selfish.
- That’s unjust.
- This must stop.
- She’s cruel.
- He’s a liar.
All of these are indignant judgments. So, there it is: anger’s activity. Anger is our whole-personed active response to a perceived evil.
- ANGER’S GOODNESS
It may surprise you to hear a pastor say that anger is a good thing, but it’s a very Biblical thing to say. Most of us think of anger as an explosive thing, or a seething thing. We associate anger with blow-ups or bitterness. But when we read Proverbs we realize the Bible says astoundingly positive things about anger.
First, the Bible says that God isn’t just angry… it says he hates. Proverbs 6:16
There are six things that the Lord hates,
seven that are an abomination to him:
Now, the Bible also teaches that God is morally perfect, and therefore, his anger and his hatred are morally justified and good things.
Proverbs also teaches that it can be good for us to hate. Proverbs 8:13:
The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil.
Pride and arrogance and the way of evil
and perverted speech I hate.
Now listen… it’s actually a sin to never get angry. The Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:26 says, “Be angry and do not sin.” It’s an imperative, a command. He does not say, “Ok, I know you might get angry, but try to keep it at a minimum.” No! Be angry.
Some of you are thinking, “Ok, Jonathan. A lot of these sermons are really tough to obey… but I feel good about this one.”
Why would God command you to be angry? Why would God reveal himself as angry? I mean, that’s not popular to a modern audience… we want a God of love, not anger. A-hah! There it is. If you have a God who never gets angry, then you don’t have a God of love.
If you never get angry at anything, you don’t love anything. Becky Pippert in Hope Has It’s Reasons puts it like this:
“Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it. . . . Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference. the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor. If I, a flawed, narcissistic, sinful woman, can feel this much pain and anger over someone’s condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them? God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer of sin which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.”
What’s Proverbs saying? God isn’t just angry because he is holy… he is angry because he is loving. One pastor put it like this: anger is love in motion toward a threat. If someone or something you love is threatened, you go into action.
This is why Jesus Christ is the perfect man…he’s a man of perfect love and he drives out the money changers in the Temple. He’s angry at the hypocritical religious leaders. And listen… In John 11, when Lazarus dies… Jesus goes to the tomb and the Greek says, “He bellowed in anger.” Why would Jesus, who is about to heal Lazarus, rage at the tomb? Because he loves Lazarus… he made Lazarus, and he hates death. He hates sin which has brought about death and corruption.
Only a man of perfect love can experience a perfect hatred of death and sin. Unless the God behind the world really and unalterably detests evil, then he cannot be loving.
- ANGER’S DISORDER
Augustine of Hippo, one of the great teachers of the church said that our basic problem is disordered love. Disordered love means there are many good things in this world: your family, your job, your home, your political cause. And you were made to love them all—but not equally. You shouldn’t love your work more than your family. You shouldn’t love your family more than God.
Sin is when you turn a good earthly, created thing into an ultimate thing. You take the family, which you ought to love, and you love it more than you love God. You look at your family and say, “This! I have no meaning in life apart from this.” You’ve turned a creaturely good and basically said, “You will not function in the role of God in my life.”
So, here’s an example: if your invest your time and money into a political candidate and they lose, you’re sad. The opponent wins and you’re mad. Fine. But if, when you’re candidate loses, you want to kill yourself, or you post videos of yourself screaming in rage… what’s happened? You’ve turned that cause into a functional savior. You’ve made it an absolute. “I must have this.”
And when that happens, you turn a creaturely, earthly thing into an ultimate thing. You look at it and think about it in a way that you should only look at and think about God. Because your loves are disordered, so are your emotional responses.
Now, let’s apply this very specifically to anger. We said earlier that anger is love in motion toward a threat… but if our loves are disordered, then sinful anger occurs under one of two conditions: Sinful anger is when we oppose good rather than evil. Sinful anger is when our anger controls us rather than us controlling it.
Two words: Calibration & Control. Disordered anger isn’t calibrated to the proper object, and it isn’t under control.
Calibration
First, anger is dangerous when it isn’t calibrated to the proper object. What do I mean by calibration?
Proverbs 8:13 says:
The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil.
Anger is a good emotion when it is calibrated toward evil. It’s a disordered emotion when it’s calibrated towards good.
When my wife began her photography business she kept running into a problem. She would edit her photos on the computer but when printed, all the colors appeared different than they had appeared on her monitor. The reds we maroon. The greens were too yellow. She realized that every single computer monitor, phone screen, and photo printer is inaccurate and inconsistent. Some aren’t bright enough, while others don’t show enough contrast. And even the room the monitor is in, its environment, can distort a screen’s appearance. So, she did some research and bought a colorimeter. It’s a device which attaches to your screen and measures the colors being displayed and compares it to the industry standard color profile. It then adjusts your system to the standard.
And, in the same way, from birth, our anger is not properly calibrated. Our anger, because of sin, is bent.
- We are angry at the success of others and take pleasure when they fail.
- How often are we frustrated by our work, yet we take our frustration out in sinful anger on our spouse or children.
- We make bad decisions, then blame God for our circumstances.
- Christians often display anger at the sin of others, while ignoring their own.
- Even in our own city are places known as “Rage Rooms,” when you can pay money to release your anger. For $48 you receive 30 minutes to break 17 glass objects and beat a car with a baseball bat.
Ask yourself:
- Is my anger a reaction against actual sin, or a breech of my preferences?
- Is my anger focuses on God, his kingdom, his laws, his concerns, or me and my self-centered concerns?
Friend, one of the best ways to calibrate your anger is to read Scripture daily. Take notice of what displeases God, then ask him in prayer, to cause those same things to displease you.
Control
Disordered anger is not just a matter of calibration. It’s also a matter of control. Is your anger under your control, or does it control you?
My son and I have been playing a card game called Marvel Champions. You pick your superhero and fight villains, and in one of the decks is Hulk. He can be incredibly helpful because he’s big, he’s strong, he can really do a lot of damage to the villains, but there’s a problem… why does he turn into the Hulk? He’s anger is out of control. And, in this game, whenever you play his card there’s a random chance that not only will he hurt the villain, but he’ll also hurt the good guys.
Now, we take that chance in the card game, because no one really gets hurt… but in reality, there are many people whose anger is out of control, and when your anger is out of control, real people who are innocent get hurt.
And one of the biggest lies our culture has bought and swallowed is the lie that you can’t control your emotions; that you can’t control what you feel. It’s just what is. Your feelings are what define reality, they are the arbiter of truth.
This is a giant contradiction in our culture. On the one hand we say, “You can’t control you feelings,” but on the other hand our sense of justice is rightly offended when an angry dad abuses his children.
If it’s true that you can’t control what you feel, then we have no right to pass judgment on any action which proceeds from an emotional state. But if it really is wrong for angry men to hit women, or angry bosses to yell and scream at employees, then will you also admit that it’s wrong to suggest that our emotions can’t be controlled?
Listen, the Biblical ideal is not no anger or blow-up anger… it’s slow anger.
Proverbs 14:29
Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding,
but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.
Proverbs 15:18
A hot-tempered man stirs up strife,
but he who is slow to anger quiets contention.
Proverbs 19:11
Good sense makes one slow to anger,
and it is his glory to overlook an offense.
The wisdom of God comes to us saying: slow down. Assume first that your anger is likely clouded by sin, ignorance, or a combination of the two. Assume you don’t know everything yet. There is likely information you don’t yet have, motives you don’t understand. Be angry, and slow down so you do not rush into sin.
In Exodus 34, when Moses met God on Sinai, Moses says, “God, show me your glory.” And…
6 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,
How important is it to be slow to anger? God says, “This is my glory. This is who I am. You want to know me? You want to be like me? I’m slow to anger.”
We were made to image God, to reflect his glory—to hate what he hates, and the be slow to anger. So, how can our sinful human anger be redeemed?
- ANGER’S REDEMPTION
Proverbs 10:12
Hatred stirs up strife,
but love covers all offenses.
The idea of covering is used throughout the Old Testament. In the book of Job, all kinds of calamities have come upon Job and he’s trying to figure out why it’s happening… and in Job 31:33 he basically says, “I haven’t covered up my sin.” The idea is that when you’re guilty, you are either going to cover it up or you’re going to admit it, you’re going to uncover it.
And listen, covered up anger isn’t the answer. If you are an explosively angry person, I am not telling you to go home and bottle it all up, put it under cover. If you try to stuff your anger, you’re turning yourself into a powder keg. Eventually the right spark with come along and blow you sky high. There’ll be collateral damage everywhere.
Or, if you stuff your anger, and let’s say you’re really good at it. You’ll become prideful and sneering. You’ll think you’re above everyone else. You’ll say, “Not only will I not respond in anger to you, I won’t respond for any reason whatsoever.” You’ll withdraw and calcify. You’ll turn to stone. At the end of the Four Loves C.S. Lewis says this:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
Listen, you can’t stuff your anger. You have to admit it. Be angry and do not sin. You have to become more vulnerable to others. When you admit your anger, you are saying to the other person, “You have a kind of power over me. You are able to effect change in me.” That’s scary, but it’s the only way.
But also, when you uncover your anger… when you admit it, you also have a chance to analyze it. If you refuse to admit your anger you just feed it. But if you admit it you can step back from it and ask some questions.
Now, here’s the hardest thing I have to say to you today: what really makes you angry is not what happened to you, but what you tell yourself has happened to you. What makes you angry is not what you lost, but what you say to yourself, “This is what they took from me.”
A spouse doesn’t act the way you expected them to act. You can say to yourself, “maybe there’s something I’m not seeing.” Or, you can say to yourself, “See, they don’t really love me.”
A decision is made in your team at work, and you want to explode. Admit your angry and analyze. Are you angrier because the decision is going to harm the goals of the team, or because it’s going to make you look foolish?
Analyze. Whenever you get angry, ask, “What is this big thing that is so important to me that I’m defending? What is this big thing that is so important to me that I’m willing to clobber everybody if I don’t get it.”
9/10 when I’m uncontrollably angry I’m not defending God or his law. I’m not defending an innocent person. I’m defending my ego. I’m defending me.
Jeremiah 45:5 says, “seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not” Use that on yourself. Analyze. In my anger, what is it that I love most? Am I angry at the right thing? Is the degree of my anger appropriate? Or am I just seeking my own disordered loves?
Uncover your anger. Admit it. Analyze it.
But in the end, Proverbs tells us that it’s not enough for our anger to be uncovered. Proverbs 10:12 says that love covers it back up. What’s going on?
In Genesis 3, after our first parents, Adam and Eve defied God’s authority and his love they sewed together fig leaves to cover their shame. They were concealing their sin. They were covering up their guilt. And they hid from God. They concealed not just their sin, but they concealed themselves from God.
And though God had every right to vaporize them, he was slow to anger. God had said that in the day they disobeyed they would surely die. And yet, when they disobeyed, they didn’t die. God didn’t thunder in from the heavens, lightning bolts in hand. Instead, he took their fig leaves, and he made for them clothing of animal skins.
What’s going on? The Lord God covered their offenses. But it couldn’t be done with leaves… it required blood. God gave the judgement that was due to Adam and Eve to another. He substituted a sacrificial animal in order to cover their wrongdoings.
Listen, God didn’t stuff his anger. There was a death. But he also didn’t blow up in uncontrolled anger. He showed patience and mercy. He was slow to anger. How slow?
Here’s how slow: not only did he not destroy Adam and Even in the Garden, he showed patience and slowness for thousands of years. He actually permitted sinful human anger to bubble and boil for centuries. And how absolutely uncontrollable did human anger get? How disordered and upside down is our rage?
When the Son of God became human, when he became vulnerable, even though he wronged no one, when we got him in our grasp, we took hold of him, we beat and mocked him, we spat on him, and in all that he did not revile us in return, so we took him to the cross, and we killed him.
And in that crucifixion, Jesus Christ became the true covering for sin that was only foreshadowed in the Garden. Adam and Eve deserved to die. We deserved to die. We’ve destroyed God’s creation. We’ve offended his law and his love. And if God were to punish for our own wrongdoings he would be utterly justified.
But we stand at the foot of the cross of Jesus Christ and like Moses, at Sinai we see his glory: The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
Admit your anger. Confess it to those who’ve angered you. Become vulnerable. Analyze it. Figure out why your anger is disordered. But then allow God, through the shed blood of Christ to cover it. See him there, receiving the blow of justice in your place… and stare at it until it melts your angry heart.
If you know that in Christ, God has treated you far better than you deserve, you can in turn love others when they treat you worse than you deserve. If you have a source of infinite love and mercy flowing into your life from Christ, you can show mercy and patience to those who wrong you this week.