To most of our violence-ridden generation this is needless advice. We are not short on anger. Indeed, it is one of the problems of our day that anger is in such plentiful supply. The citizen who does not get things all his own way is apt to become very angry and to take his anger out on those with whom he is displeased. Anger provokes anger and violence flourishes.
Anger on the part of individuals is paralleled by anger at the international level. Nations large and small have a way of putting their own interests first and being angry with anyone who hinders the realization of those interests. So we are confronted with a continuing series of wars and rumors of wars. Anger and violence have become a way of life with us.
All this anger tends to polarize us. We readily identify with one of the parties or the other and, assuming the right to be angry ourselves, become selective in our anger. We are angry with the other side, rarely with our own. Some of us are very angry with the violent persons of the left and some of us are very angry with the violent persons of the right. It is rare to find anyone angry about both.
In this situation of abundant anger, Christians, curiously, are often apathetic. We make vague deprecatory noises and on the whole would like things to be different from what they are. But all too often we do not feel very deeply about the situation. We save our concern for building up our local congregations, for expanding our youth work and enlarging our giving to missionary causes.
Let me say at once that I am not opposing any of these things. On the contrary I am right behind them. But I wonder whether in our concentration on our own immediate problems we are not overlooking something of importance. It is a matter of “These ye ought to have done and not leave the other undone.” For Christians ought to be more deeply concerned than they usually are about affairs in the communities in which they are set.
They can profitably reflect that their Lord “looked round in anger” at certain wrongheaded people who opposed the doing of good because it did not square with their ideas (Mark 3:5). This kind of thing ought to set the pattern for us. I do not mean, of course, that the Christian ought to react in anger to not getting his own way, as they do. I am suggesting that we should take far more seriously than we do the implications of scriptural teaching on anger and the like emotions.
“Neither doth he abhor anything that is evil” (Ps. 36:4, Coverdale’s translation) is a terrible condemnation of a person’s character. It is no virtue but a sorry defect that our faculty of indignation is so often chilled. We find it easy to content ourselves with a mild “Tut, tut” and to have no really deep feelings about the evil that mars our community and our world.
Not so our God. One of the most neglected aspects of biblical teaching is that of the wrath of God. I imagine we are paying the penalty for some too enthusiastic endorsement of anger in past days. There have been those who have so gloated over the punishments they think God will mete out to the wicked that they have repelled men from taking seriously the divine repugnance at evil. And some have been so sure that their judgment on the matter and God’s coincide that they have led people to think that a God like that is not worth serving.
Our past mistakes and our recognition that the basic truth about God is that “God is love” have combined to make many of us ready to accept a position like that of C. H. Dodd, that if we retain the expression “the wrath of God,” we do so because it is an archaic form of words well suited to convey an archaic idea.
But a proper penitence for our hasty omniscience in the matter of the way the divine wrath operates ought not to prevent us from seeing that the concept is deeply rooted in Scripture, so deeply rooted that no one who takes the Bible seriously can overlook it. There are more than 580 references to the wrath of God in the Old Testament and the concept persists in the New. As we have already seen, Jesus was angry with some who opposed the doing of good on God’s day. Again, he drove the traders out of the temple, and it was in no gentle mood that he denounced those who put all their emphasis on the outward: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”
This last passage reminds us that there are many places in the New Testament (and for that matter in the Old) where the wrath of God is plainly in mind even if none of the wrath words actually occurs. I think of such passages as that in Second Thessalonians 1:
The Lord Jesus [will be] revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance upon those who do not know God and upon those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They shall suffer the punishment of eternal destruction and exclusion from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.
There is no mention of anger here, but there is no overlooking the divine wrath either.
What we are in danger of missing, we who have so well learned that “God is love,” is that the love of God is no insipid thing that operates without regard to the best interests of those God loves. Someone has pointed out that the more a man loves his son the more he will hate in that son the liar, the bully, the cheat, and all the rest. It is sentimentality, not love, that is calm about these things.
There is an equivalent in the love of God. We ought not to think of that love as a meek acquiesence in any evil men may do. Nor should we think of the wrath of God as something in opposition to the love of God, something that must somehow be reconciled with that love or else abandoned. The wrath of God is identical with the love of God. The wrath of God is the love of God blazing out in fiery indignation against every evil in the beloved.
And it is because God loves with such an intensity that his people ought not to be complacent in the face of evil. Those who have a passionate concern for mankind cannot be calm in the face of the evil that human beings do and the evil they bring on themselves. A true love for mankind will involve hot anger against evil.
