Angry Enough to Turn Tables? It Might Not Be Righteous Zeal.

Brad Hambrick oversees counseling ministries at Summit Church, a North Carolina church with 14 campuses and about 13,000 in attendance. He also teaches biblical counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of books like Angry with God.

How do you distinguish between good and bad anger?

All anger says two things: “This is wrong, and it matters.” In the interpersonal space, sinful anger says a third thing: “This is wrong, and it matters more than you.” I can be right about the first two: “You shouldn’t have done that, and it’s important.” But when I’m willing to sin against you, then just because my prompt is theologically and morally accurate, that doesn’t mean my expression of anger is righteous. When you move toward social media and politics, in many ways, the “you” either becomes very far off or very ambiguous. People feel a lot more freedom to vent or to rage because they don’t really see a person. They just feel a cause.

Where do you see destructive anger?

Anger shows up most in private settings. If somebody is blowing up at Walmart, their regulation and social filters have deteriorated significantly.

We want to use an oversimplified test for righteous anger. “If I’m right, and it matters, this is okay. Tell me where I’m wrong.” Usually when we’re in that righteous anger spot, we love Jesus turning over tables in the temple. That’s what we feel like we’re doing.

And if you look in Matthew 21, after Jesus is finished turning over the tables, it says, “The blind and the lame came to him.” In my mind’s eye, when I think about Jesus in the temple, he’s just gone full on Incredible Hulk. He’s turned green. He’s staring through people’s souls and everybody’s backing away from Jesus because we messed up. But in Jesus’ most expressive moment of anger, the most vulnerable felt protected and attracted. Not scared.

Am I doing Christlike anger? It’s not that Jesus didn’t get mad. Anger is one of God’s attributes, that means it can be done well. It can be done beautifully. It’s not inherently off limits to the Christian as if we’re stoics. But if we’re going to do it in a Christlike manner, then those who are in need of care—there should be a clear sense of attraction and protection around what we’re doing.

What are the tools for this angry moment we are in?

A category that I think is helpful is responsibility allocation—realizing what you can influence. When I get most intense about where I have the least influence, my anger is going nowhere good. As we start to feel more powerless, we start to rely on anger, to try to get back some of what we felt like we’ve lost.

In the cultural discourse, everybody’s saying, “We need to calm down and chill out the rhetoric.” But nobody’s doing it. Even if it’s not from the top down, it ought to be from the bottom up, and culture ought to demand it of its leaders, if leaders will not lead the culture.

Do different principles apply for anger over current events versus, say, anger over betrayal in personal relationships?

There is selfish anger. There’s also suffering anger. If you look at Psalm 44, in the first few verses, life is going great. And then you hit a selah. You don’t know what happened. But it was a train wreck. In the next 12 or so verses, the psalmist gives God every bit as much blame for the bad things as the psalmist did giving God credit for the good things in the first part.

It’s this angry mic drop. There’s heresy in there. The psalmist is calling on God to wake up, when we know God doesn’t sleep. But there’s no sense that the psalmist needs to repent. The psalmist is going through a season of suffering in life that doesn’t make sense, and the moral equation isn’t balancing. I do think there is innocent grief-anger, in response to suffering.

So the Psalms are a good place to go with anger?

One of the common features of anger is we don’t feel heard, and we don’t feel understood. And so we increase our volume to make sure we’re heard and we increase the sharpness of our words trying to be understood. And the angrier we get, the more people pull away from us.

It’s not as if we necessarily come to the Psalms and we get some deep penetrating insight that explains away our situation, and we go, “Oh, I have no reason to be angry.” What we do often find is where we have felt like, “This is off limits,” and everybody’s pushed us away—we can bring those kinds of things to God and know that he cares and that he’s not deaf to that.

On this theme, you’ve got Moses at the burning bush. Moses had an anger problem. He killed a man in a moment of rage. When the golden calf was made, he ground it up and made them drink it. He threw a temper tantrum in Numbers 20 and started beating on the rock and scolding it.

One of the first things that God says to Moses at the burning bush after “Take off your shoes” is “I heard the cries of my people. I’ve seen their suffering.” If you’re thinking about what it would have been like to have been Moses—“Okay, I shouldn’t have killed the man. That was a flash of anger. That was bad. But at least I did something. God, you do nothing.” And God says, “I’ve heard, I’ve seen, I’m paying attention.” We don’t get our own burning bush, usually—that’s not a common human experience—but the Psalms are a place where we get that from God.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.