Feeling angry

“Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast?” 

Those are the searching questions that the LORD asks Cain in Genesis chapter 4. Then comes the warning. “Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

It’s a powerful image. Sin crouching like an animal craving to be let loose on its prey. To harm. To destroy. Cain didn’t rule over his anger. Instead it ruled over him. He took his brother to a field and killed him. 

I wonder if those closest to us might, if they dare, have occasion to ask us “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast?” Recent surveys suggest people are increasingly feeling angry. Maybe we are too.  

The Bible has much to say about anger. Especially, God’s righteous anger. God’s anger which is always slow. God’s anger, which is aroused only by things that are genuinely wrong. But human anger (my anger, if I’m honest) rarely flows from righteous motives. And sadly, like Cain, many of us do not rule over our anger. Instead, it is expressed in wrong words and actions.

Often we’re angry simply because we’ve been inconvenienced. Our plans haven’t worked out as we hoped. We get angry because of traffic jams, because of faulty technology, because of delay, because people (maybe our own children, if we’re a parent) stop us from doing what we wanted to do. Our anger flows from being inconvenienced. We want to be in control. We’re angry when we’re reminded that we’re not. Ultimately, much of our anger flows from a desire to be god, to organise life differently.

Christopher Ash, in his book “The Heart of Anger” writes this: “The sin that sits beneath much of our outrage is the sin underlying all sins. It is the desire to be god. And we get angry when our sovereignty is opposed. In our efforts to impersonate the living God, we create our plans. And when something or someone stands in the way of our sovereign purposes – we blaze with fury.”

The amazing reality is that when God himself walked on the earth, his anger was never aroused by a desire for personal convenience or a pain free existence. He was not angry at those who asked to be healed, who came with their problems, who stopped him from resting. He wasn’t angry with those who arrested him or nailed his hands to the cross. But he was angry for others – like when the children were kept away from him – or when his Father’s Temple was abused. Jesus’ anger was other-person centred.

So the next you feel anger crouching at your door, stop and ask your own heart the question God asked Cain: “Why are you angry?” And if your answer is to do with matters of convenience or your plans being thwarted, then rule over your anger. Take control of it. Ask for the help of the true God. Consider the Lord Jesus – who as Paul writes in 2 Philippians “Being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant.” Jesus was never angry for his own sake. Instead he came to take God’s wrath, God’s righteous anger, for people like you and me.

Let’s rule over our wrong anger as we keep our eyes on him.