Saul became angry for God and His people when under threat from the Ammonites. He righteously focused his anger, mustered his troops, and with holy zeal for God defended the cause of God and His people. But then, at the end of his reign, he became angry at the popularity of David, because it was a threat to his own rule, and that anger conceived and gave birth to murder. He was seeking his own kingdom, rights, and concerns, and not the Lord’s. Brethren, if you’ve been angry this week, was it because of zeal for God’s kingdom and God’s will? Or was it for your own Kingdom, like Saul?

I. Introduction

Our subject for this evening is something that poses great danger to the unity and well-being of your families and of this church. Very often, it is excused and tolerated, even while it is destroying relationships among us. There may be someone in here who has overlooked and tolerated this sin to such a degree that you are not even sure what is going wrong in your life.

I’m talking about sinful anger.

I’m talking about the man who loses his temper at someone at customer service. The mother who yells at her kids. The church member who’s offended by another member. The one who loses his temper in traffic. Or the one who yells at his computer screen. The sister who feels bitter at someone who left her out. The wife who feels resentful because she can’t get her husband to understand her. The husband who feels angry that his wife doesn’t consider his needs.

In his book Uprooting Anger, Robert Jones says,

“Anger is a universal problem, prevalent in every culture, experienced by every generation. No one is isolated from its presence or immune from its poison. It permeates each person and spoils our most intimate relationships. Anger is a given part of our fallen human fabric…Sadly this is true even in our Christian homes and churches.”[1]

And brethren, we are not immune to this deadly sin.

What is anger? Anger is a passion that is aroused by a sense of injustice carried out against us or against someone else. Jones defines it as “a whole-personed active response of negative moral judgment against perceived evil.”

But if you read this definition carefully, anger is not always sinful. The Apostle Paul makes this clear in our text, Ephesians 4:26, where he says, by the Holy Spirit:

“Be angry and do not sin.”

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be preaching on the subject of sinful anger. My hope in this series is to help you discern where sinful anger is at work in your life, and to equip you with Scripture truth that will help you to bring it into subjection to Christ.

Tonight, my goal is to help you distinguish righteous anger from sinful anger and to discern the causes of both. In this first sermon, I will address: I. Distinguishing Two Kinds of Anger, II. The Roots of Righteous Anger, and III. Some Roots of Sinful Anger.

But before we begin, let’s pray and ask God for help and understanding…

II. Two Kinds of Anger

Jonah was very angry. And the Lord appeared to him and asked, “Do you do well to be angry?” And this is the big question that the Lord wants us to ask ourselves when we are angry.

The Bible teaches that there are two kinds of anger, righteous anger and sinful anger. In our text, “be angry and do not sin,” we learn that not all anger is sinful. There is such a thing as righteous anger. God himself is sinlessly angry, and we may be sinlessly angry. However, we must never assume that anytime we are angry, it is righteous anger. In fact, most of the time that we’re angry, it is sinful anger.

The Lord condemns sinful anger, and it ought not characterize a Christian. The Lord told his disciples that “anyone who is angry with his brothers is liable to the judgment”, likening it to murder (Matthew 5:22). The Holy Spirit desires that “men should pray, lifting holy hands without anger or quarreling” (1 Tim. 2:8). The Apostle says that we are to “put away anger and wrath” (Col. 3:8) and he condemns “fits of anger” (Gal. 5:20). All of these are in reference to sinful anger.

Now, on the surface, some might read our text, “Be angry, and do not sin,” as if it implies that the internal feeling of anger is neutral, and only its fruit or expression is sinful. But I believe this way of reading the text is unbiblical.

God does not ever permit us to harbor sinful beliefs and feelings. We know that sin is not only committed with our mouths or hands, but with our minds and our hearts. So, this text is not teaching that we may harbor sinful anger so long as it doesn’t leak out from the heart into the mouth. No, Jesus teaches that it is the heart that defiles us, and that out of the heart flow sinful actions. If our mouths speak angrily, it is because we have angry hearts. And that is the real problem.

Paul is commanding the Ephesians to be righteous in anger, and not to sin. There are things in this world that should make Christians righteously angry. But there are also sinful reasons to be angry. Moreover, there are righteous ways to express anger, and there are unrighteous ways to express anger. This text teaches that we are to be only righteously angry both internally, in our minds and hearts, and externally, in our words and actions.

There are at least two things to look for in knowing whether our anger is righteous or sinful. The first is the root, or motivation, of the anger. That’s what we’ll focus on this evening. The second is the expression of the anger, or the fruit of the anger, or what anger does – Lord willing, we’ll talk about that next week.

But now that we have noted the two kinds of anger, let’s move to our second heading, the root of righteous anger.

III. The Root of Righteous Anger

We know that there is such a thing as righteous anger, because our God is righteously angry.

Psalm 7:11 says, “God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day.” Nahum 1:2-3 says, “The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and keeps wrath for his enemies.”

God never sins when he is angry. His anger is always righteous. When God is angry, he is angry with actual sin, or sinners, in the purest sense. God is angry for righteous purposes because his own holy and perfect will is being violated. He’s angry with sin that opposes his very character, rule, and rights. God is goodness itself, so to oppose God is to oppose all that is good and beautiful.

And then, God always expresses his anger in a righteous and holy manner, consistent with his revealed moral will. His anger is not arbitrary (random) or uncontrolled, but it is holy and absolutely virtuous in its expression.

Our Lord Jesus was righteously angry. In Mark 3:4, we are told that he was angry with the Pharisees and grieved at their hardness of heart. The Lord Jesus was zealous for the glory of God, and so he was angry with sin. Yet the Lord was never sinfully angry. He was never angry for sinful reasons, and His anger was never expressed in sinful ways.

And because our Lord is righteously angry, God’s image bearers may also be righteously angry. We may feel and express anger in a way that is consistent with God’s moral will. If we witness egregious sin against God or his image bearers, anger is an appropriate and even righteous response. If some things don’t make us angry, we need to check our pulse, because we may be spiritually dead. Sin should make us angry. How can we say that we love God if we don’t hate sin?

But then, because of our fallen nature, the opposite is often true. We’re not angry with what God is angry with, and we are angry at things that God is not angry about. What is it that makes anger righteous, and how do we know when it crosses the line into sin?

Robert Jones draws from Scripture three helpful criteria for righteous anger. These three standards mark God’s righteous anger, and they should mark ours as well.

First, righteous anger must be in reaction to actual sin. Second, it focuses on God and His Kingdom, rights, and concerns, and not on me and my kingdom, rights, and concerns. Third, it is accompanied by other godly qualities and expresses itself in godly ways.

I’d like to flesh these out just a bit and give some examples from Scripture.

First, righteous anger must be in reaction to actual sin. And this means, brethren, that we need to ensure that we have a thorough knowledge of the moral will of God. This is why 1/3 of our catechism is about the law of God. The question you must ask yourself when you are angry is, “What is the sin that I am angry with?” If there is no sin, then you are the first to sin by becoming angry at something that is not the moral will of God. Another good question to ask would be, “Is God angry about this?” If not, then that should give us immediate pause. Who are we to be angry at something that God is not angry at? To be angry at such things makes us like Cain.

Cain was angry with Abel, because Abel’s sacrifice was accepted, and his was not. Because of his anger at another’s righteousness, he became the sinner against God, one worthy of death. The subject of our anger must be actual sin.

Second, righteous anger is focused on God and His concerns, and not on me and my concerns. This means that righteous anger must flow out from that prayer of the Lord that we often pray, “Your Kingdom come, and your will be done.” He is the priority.

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