Is it a sin to feel angry?

Question 11068.

Feeling angry troubles conscientious Christians more than almost any other emotion, partly because we have been taught that gentleness is a fruit of the Spirit and have concluded that anger must therefore be its opposite. Many believers carry a low grade guilt about an emotion they cannot switch off.

Scripture takes a different line, and it is more helpful than either the suppression we often practise or the ventilation the culture recommends. Let me set out what it actually says.

God himself gets angry

This is the fact that settles the question in principle. The wrath of God appears hundreds of times in Scripture, and it is never presented as a flaw in his character or a lapse in his composure. It is his settled opposition to what destroys what he loves.

If anger were sin by definition, God could not have it. That single observation dismantles the idea that feeling angry is automatically wrong, and it tells us something important about what anger is for.

Anger in Scripture is a response to wrong. It is the emotional shape love takes when what it loves is being damaged. A father who felt nothing when his child was harmed would not be gentle. He would be absent.

There is an important difference, though, between his anger and ours. God’s anger is never self serving, never disproportionate and never uninformed. He knows every fact of the case, including the ones we would prefer he did not. That is why James 1:19 to 20 tells us to be slow to anger, since the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God. The problem is not the emotion. It is the one having it.

Jesus got angry too

Mark records that Jesus looked around at the synagogue with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, before healing the man with the withered hand. The account is at Mark 3:5, and the word used is unmistakable.

He also cleared the temple, made a whip of cords, and overturned the tables of the money changers. That is not the behaviour of a man having a bad morning. It is deliberate and it is directed at people exploiting worshippers.

Since Jesus was without sin, feeling angry cannot in itself be sin. I have written more on this in whether Jesus sinned when he was angry, because the point deserves careful handling.

The command that assumes it

Paul writes, be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Notice the structure of that. He does not forbid the emotion. He puts a fence around it and sets a time limit on it.

That is remarkably practical. Feeling angry is treated as something that will happen to believers, and the instruction concerns what we do next rather than whether we feel it at all.

The time limit is the part we ignore. Anger that is dealt with the same day is a passing weather system. Anger left overnight, and then for a week, becomes something else entirely, and Paul plainly regards that as ground the enemy will use.

Where feeling angry turns into sin

The turn usually happens in one of three places. Anger becomes sin when it is aimed at the wrong target, when it is out of proportion, and when it is kept rather than resolved.

The wrong target is the commonest. Somebody is angry about their job and shouts at their children, or angry with God and takes it out on a spouse. The energy is real and it lands on someone who did not earn it.

Proportion is the second. James says the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God, and much of our anger is simply the reaction of a thwarted will. Somebody took my parking space and I responded as though a great injustice had been done.

The third failure is timing. Anger is at its most dangerous while it is hot, and almost every damaging thing I have said in my life was said within ninety seconds of feeling angry. Proverbs commends the man who is slow to anger as better than the mighty, which suggests that the delay itself is a form of strength rather than weakness.

Anger kept becomes bitterness

The third failure is the most damaging. Anger that is nursed becomes resentment, and resentment sets like concrete. Hebrews warns about a root of bitterness springing up and causing trouble, and by which many become defiled.

That word defiled is worth pausing on. Kept anger does not stay in one compartment of a life. It leaks into how a person reads other people’s motives, how they hear a sermon, how they treat somebody who reminds them vaguely of the offender.

Feeling angry for an afternoon is human. Feeling angry for eleven years about something the other person has forgotten is a prison, and the door is not locked from the outside.

Suppression is not the answer

Many Christians deal with anger by pretending it is not there, which achieves nothing except a delay. The emotion goes underground and reappears as sarcasm, coldness, or an eruption over something trivial three weeks later.

The Psalms show a better way. David tells God plainly what he feels, including things that make modern readers uncomfortable, and in doing so he puts the emotion where it can be dealt with. Honesty before God is not irreverence.

So bring it into the open rather than burying it. Feeling angry and saying so to God is a good deal healthier than feeling angry and telling yourself you are fine.

There is also a difference between telling God and telling everybody. Bringing feeling angry into prayer is not the same as broadcasting it across a family or a congregation. The first puts the emotion where it can be examined by someone who loves you and cannot be harmed by it. The second usually creates new offences to be angry about later.

Neither is ventilation

The opposite advice, that anger must be expressed or it will damage you, is equally unbiblical. Proverbs says a fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back, and Proverbs 29:11 is not describing repression but self control.

There is a difference between acknowledging an emotion and obeying it. I can know perfectly well that I am furious and still choose what comes out of my mouth, and that gap is where the Spirit works.

Self control appears in the fruit of the Spirit precisely because emotions need governing rather than either denying or unleashing. The Greek term for wrath, orge, carries the sense of a settled swelling rather than a sudden flash, which is why it has to be watched.

What to do with it

Ask what the anger is telling you. Sometimes it is telling you that a real wrong has been done, in which case the right response is to address it properly rather than to feel guilty about noticing. Sometimes it is telling you that you have an idol, because we get angriest about the things we cannot bear to lose.

Then deal with it before the day ends, as Paul says. That may mean a conversation, an apology, or a decision to forgive and stop rehearsing the offence. Forgiveness is not pretending it did not matter. It is releasing the debt.

And where the anger is chronic rather than occasional, look underneath it. Persistent anger is often grief, fear or exhaustion wearing a more acceptable face. I have written more in what the Bible says about anger.

Where the anger is towards God himself, say so. Job did, and God’s final verdict was that Job had spoken rightly of him while his cautious friends had not. Suppressed anger towards God does not evaporate. It hardens into distance, and God would far rather have the argument than the silence.

So, now what?

Name what you are actually angry about this week rather than carrying a general irritability. Most people discover the target is not what they assumed, and naming it accurately removes half the force straight away.

If there is a person you have been quietly furious with for a long time, take one concrete step towards releasing it. Forgiveness rarely arrives as a feeling first. It usually arrives as a decision that has to be made repeatedly until the feeling catches up, and that is not hypocrisy.

Then apply Paul’s deadline. Deal with it today, even imperfectly, rather than letting it settle overnight. That one habit would transform a good many marriages and a good many churches.

And be kinder to yourself about the emotion itself. Feeling angry is not evidence that the Spirit has left you. What matters is what you do in the ten minutes after. What are you still carrying that should have been laid down months ago?

“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 to 27, ESV