Any emotion can lead to sin. Our happiness over a new job could lead to unkind gloating when we’re with our friends. Our passion for theology can lead to pride when studying the Bible with those who don’t understand the long words we use. Anger likewise can become sinful, but it can also be untangled from our sinful nature and become righteous as well.

If you’ve been around kids long enough, you know how short their temper can be.

I sat on the floor with one of my fourteen-month-olds, helping him learn to build a tower with rubber blocks. He had watched his older brother and his twin brother do it, and now he wanted to try himself. I lay down on the mat and gathered eight blocks in front of him. I placed the red one to start and handed him the orange one. He smiled, and his big brown eyes lit up as he took the block in his little, pudgy hand. He delicately placed it on top of the red and grinned at me as he clapped his hands together. I cheered for him and passed him the yellow one. 

He lifted the block above the orange, but not quite high enough. The yellow block in his hand bumped the orange one and knocked it to the floor. As he watched the orange one fall, he quickly tried to put the yellow one on top of the red, but with his haste, it tumbled to the floor as well. He furrowed his dark brows together and grunted, then tossed the red block. 

My first instinct when I see anger in my children (or in myself) is to squash it. No, you’re not allowed to be angry; anger is a bad emotion. Stop being angry and start being happy, grateful, or some kind of positive emotion. Anger is sin. 

When I started therapy, however, I was taught that anger isn’t an enemy to squash. As I, in turn, searched Scripture, the Holy Spirit guided me to see that he’s not anti-anger either. All anger isn’t sin. Rather, anger is a good emotion when rightly used. As a professional emotion-stuffer, this has been a hard lesson to learn and one that God, in his good patience, is teaching me over and over again as I parent my children and re-teach myself. 

Is Anger Always A Sin?

I saw a pastor post online, “Only one person [Jesus] can have a ‘righteous frustration’ just as there is one who can have a ‘righteous anger.’” When someone challenged this comment by reminding the pastor that the Bible instructs us to be like Christ, he said this was a divine attribute we are unable to foster. I know this pastor’s beliefs are not alone; I remember hearing a similar sentiment from a professor lecturing at a Christian university a few years prior.

Many Christians are taught that anger is sinful and—like me—stuff their anger and shame themselves for having such an emotion. Yet is this true? Can only the holy Godhead have righteous anger?

In Psalm 4:4, David instructs Israel by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “Be angry, and do not sin.” Paul, quoting this Psalm, tells the church in Ephesus, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Eph. 4:26). Both passages instruct believers to be angry, and their only qualification is to avoid sin. If righteous anger is impossible, why would the Bible call us to it?

We like to set boundaries for ourselves as believers to avoid sin, but often we go beyond Scripture to the point of declaring what God calls good evil. Yet just because an act or emotion raises the possibility of being abused by our sinful hearts doesn’t make it evil. 

The Pharisees did this during Jesus’s day. In efforts to protect Israel from breaking God’s law again, they created man-made laws that stretched beyond God’s perfect law, to the point that they followed their man-made laws to the neglect of God’s law. They wouldn’t help the poor on the Sabbath because it was classified as work by their man-made laws. 

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