Whether we’re sinfully angry or sinfully sedated against things that should make us angry, we must seek God’s grace for our sins and the power of His Spirit to turn away from them. May God thereby discipline our anger and use it for His glory.

As the West spirals further into chaos and depravity, righteous men are continually given new provocations to anger. After all, what we’re experiencing isn’t just a matter of unfortunate circumstance, but deliberate attacks on our faith, our people, our civilization, and even our children by men and women who actively hate us. When a pervert attempts to groom his child, surely a father ought to get angry. When foreigners try to take away the country his fathers gave him and give it to strangers, surely a man ought to get angry. When his brothers and sisters abandon Christ’s teachings for the Spirit of the Age’s, surely a Christian ought to get angry.

As Christians, we have a surfeit of evidence that anger can indeed be righteous. Scripture tells us that God is both slow to anger and that His wrath is quickly kindled depending on the circumstance, but both acknowledge the reality of holy anger. And Jesus Christ, the only perfect and sinless man, felt and even acted in anger on several occasions towards money-changers and Pharisees. To call anger inherently sinful is therefore an explicit denial of God’s Word and condemnation of His character.

Most Christians will agree with this in principle. They will acknowledge that anger can, theoretically, be righteous. However, they will quickly point out that while God’s holy anger proceeds from His perfect justice, the same cannot be said of sinful men. Our sense of justice is corrupted by our sinful nature, and so any consequent anger will be sinful as well. When we rationalize our own sins rather than confess and repent of them, we suppress the truth in unrighteousness and thereby distort our moral judgments. What’s more, we are prone to sins like pride and envy which produce the kinds of anger which are in direct opposition to true righteousness. Add to all this the fact that we are simply fallible and therefore that our judgments may be in error due to ignorance or mistakes. All of this is true, and it is entirely necessary for Christians to understand this sinful weakness in our nature.

Burying Our Anger

Unfortunately, these truths are often immediately followed by a vile and pernicious lie: “Therefore, a Christian should strive to avoid anger.” For the shallow-minded, it seems to follow quite logically. If your anger is inevitably going to be sinful, you should do whatever you can to rid yourself of anger. You may not be able to avoid feeling angry sometimes, but you should certainly ignore it or suppress it instead of acting on it until your emotions catch up to the forgiveness God has commanded you to offer. In this view, as a Christian grows in holiness (if they even acknowledge that possibility), he’ll also find himself being less angry and more tranquil regardless of provocation.

One can recognize the error in such instruction quite easily by applying the same reasoning to the parts of our psyche which tend to oppose anger. For example, by nature, our tranquility is no less sinful than our wrath. Our judgment is still corrupted by our suppression of truth in unrighteousness, so we are liable to say “peace, peace” where there is no peace. We are prone to sins like sloth and gluttony which produce the kinds of languid calm which are in direct opposition to true righteousness. And, of course, we remain fallible beings and can therefore mistakenly think everything is fine even as it all burns down around us.

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