What does the Bible say about anger?

Question 6031.

Not all anger is sinful anger, and any teaching that starts by treating the emotion itself as a fault will lose the argument with Scripture very quickly. God is angry. Jesus was angry. The Psalms are full of it.

What Scripture does is draw a line, and it draws it in a place most of us would rather it did not. Let us find where it runs.

The Bible does not forbid anger

Paul quotes the Psalms and says be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger (Ephesians 4:26). Read that carefully. The command permits the emotion and regulates its handling, which means sinful anger is a particular use of anger rather than anger itself.

That fits the wider picture. God’s wrath appears hundreds of times in the Old Testament, and it is never presented as a lapse. It is His settled opposition to what destroys what He loves, and a God incapable of it would be a God indifferent to evil.

Jesus looked around at the Pharisees with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, before healing the man with the withered hand. He made a whip of cords and cleared the temple. Whatever else that is, it is not detachment.

Where the line falls

The distinction is not intensity. Righteous anger can be fierce and sinful anger can be quiet. The distinction lies in what the anger is for and what it does next.

Righteous anger is provoked by what offends God: injustice, cruelty, the exploitation of the weak, the dishonouring of His name. Sinful anger is provoked by what offends me: my convenience, my status, my plans, my sense of being owed.

James puts the outcome test alongside it. The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God (James 1:20). If the anger is producing damage rather than righteousness, the label it is wearing is not the label it deserves.

Two words worth knowing

The New Testament uses orge for a settled, considered indignation, the kind that builds and endures, and thumos for a sudden boiling over. Both appear in lists of things believers are to put away, and both appear elsewhere without condemnation.

The sudden sort is what most people mean by a temper, and it does its damage in seconds. The settled sort is what most churches actually suffer from, and it does its damage over years without ever raising its voice.

I would not want to say which is worse. The explosive man frightens people and is at least visible. The cold man corrodes a family or a congregation while maintaining an unimpeachable reputation.

What sinful anger reveals

James asks where quarrels come from and answers his own question: is it not this, that your passions are at war within you (James 4:1-2)? You desire and do not have, so you murder. Anger is nearly always the alarm attached to a thwarted desire.

That makes anger diagnostic. What made you furious this week tells you what you were counting on. If a delay ruins your day, you were relying on control. If a slight destroys your evening, you were relying on esteem.

This is why sinful anger is not really an anger problem. It is a worship problem wearing an anger costume, and treating it only with breathing techniques will never reach the thing underneath.

The damage it does

Proverbs is full of practical observation. A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger. Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly. A man of wrath stirs up strife, and one given to anger causes much transgression.

The New Testament adds a warning about opportunity. Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil (Ephesians 4:26-27). Unresolved anger is described as an opening, which is a startling thing to say about a mood we generally treat as private.

And Jesus raises the stakes in the Sermon on the Mount by placing anger with a brother in the same category as murder. He is not equating the acts. He is locating the root, and telling us that God assesses the root.

Slow to anger

The phrase used of God more than any other in this area is slow to anger. It appears in His self description to Moses, and it recurs through the prophets. Note that it is slow, not incapable. The capacity is there and it is held under a long patience.

James applies it to us: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger (James 1:19). The order is instructive. Most sinful anger in my own life would have been prevented by getting the first two right.

Slowness is largely a matter of habit. It is the pause before the reply, the decision not to answer the message tonight, the willingness to ask a question before delivering a verdict. Unspectacular, and it changes households.

When you are the one who is angry

The first move is honesty, because sinful anger is remarkably good at rebranding itself. It calls itself passion, or standards, or being direct. It claims to be about principle when it is about pride, and it will produce a theological justification within seconds if allowed.

The second move is speed. Paul’s sundown rule is not sentimental; it recognises that anger hardens. What could have been resolved in an evening becomes, after six months, a settled position about a person’s character.

The third is confession, both to God and to whoever was in the blast radius. Anger seldom stays private, and an apology that names the specific behaviour does more good than a general expression of regret ever will.

When you are on the receiving end

Living with an angry person is exhausting, and Scripture does not tell you to pretend otherwise. Proverbs advises against close friendship with a man given to anger, lest you learn his ways, which is practical rather than harsh.

Forgiveness is commanded and it is not the same as leaving yourself unprotected. Where there is intimidation or violence, protection comes first, and any counsel that tells a frightened person to endure it quietly is not biblical counsel.

And forgiveness itself is not a feeling you wait for. It is a decision to release a debt, made because a far larger debt was released for you (Ephesians 4:32).

The anger that is safe to leave with God

Paul tells the Romans never to avenge themselves but to leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, vengeance is mine, I will repay (Romans 12:19). That is not a demand to feel nothing. It is permission to stop carrying something.

There is enormous relief in that if you have been wronged badly. The account will be settled. It does not have to be settled by you, and your inability to settle it is not an injustice that will stand for ever.

That is where sinful anger finally loses its grip: not by suppression, but by handing the case to a Judge who sees everything and misses nothing. See also the article on the wrath of God.

Anger that turns inward

Not all sinful anger goes outward. A good deal of it is turned on the self, and it presents in the consulting room and the vestry as low mood, self contempt and a punishing internal commentary that would be considered abusive if directed at anyone else.

Scripture does not commend that. The command to love your neighbour as yourself assumes a baseline of ordinary care for your own person, and the believer who flogs himself daily for old failures has not become holier than the rest of us. He has found a religious outlet for anger.

The remedy is the same as for the outward sort: bring it into the open, name what was actually lost or wanted, and let the cross settle the account. God has forgiven what you are still prosecuting.

Anger, the tongue and the household

James spends a whole chapter on the tongue because that is where sinful anger usually surfaces. A great forest is set ablaze by such a small fire, he writes, and anyone who has watched a marriage damaged by a sentence knows the arithmetic is accurate.

Paul tells fathers not to provoke their children to anger, lest they become discouraged (Colossians 3:21). That word is worth pausing on. The result of parental anger is not rebellion in the first instance; it is a child going flat, giving up on ever getting it right.

Households absorb the emotional weather of whoever is loudest. If that has been you, the good news is that it works in reverse too, and a home can be re trained by an adult who decides to change. See also the article on parents teaching their children.

So, now what?

Look back at the last time you lost your temper and ask what you had been counting on. That answer is more useful than any resolution to try harder.

Adopt the sundown rule for one month. It will force some awkward conversations at inconvenient hours, and it will stop several grudges before they set. Sinful anger depends on being left alone overnight.

And if anger has done real damage in your home, go and say so to the people who live there. Not a general apology, but the actual words about the actual evening. Who has been waiting a long time to hear that from you?

Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.

Ephesians 4:26-27 (ESV)