Is it wrong to get angry with God?
The Primal Scream
"Why has your heart carried you away,
and why do your eyes flash,
so that you vent your rage against God?" (15:12-13)"Dialogue" is a very polite term for what happens in Job. Really it is an argument, and a hot one at that. Not only does Job argue with his friends, but he also argues with God. As for the friends, they too are engaged in a heated dispute with God, but like many people they do not care to admit this, and so their anger is directed instead against Job. A man like Eliphaz thinks that if he gets mad at God, God in turn will get mad at him and condemn him. So Eliphaz suppresses his anger and lives in continual, subconscious fear of divine wrath. He is like a hermit who prides himself on having no interpersonal hassles to upset his tranquil and ordered lifestyle. But anyone who lives in a family, in close fellowship with others, lives with tensions, complaints, disputes. Different families cope with these stresses in different ways - some quietly and some noisily, some effectively and some pathologically - but no family survives for long without some form of argument, and the family of God is no exception.
Is not the whole human race engaged in one long argument with God that is called "history"? The difference between believers and unbelievers is that while the former argue on speaking terms with the Lord, the latter do so by turning their backs and giving Him the silent treatment. Those who choose to live outside the family circle end up with no proper forum for expressing their hurts and resentments against their Heavenly Father. But those who gather around the Father's table know that such problems must be regularly aired, for if they are not, they will poison intimacy.
In our culture anger is generally frowned upon as being disruptive. But there are different ways of being disruptive. A chronically loud, critical person is certainly disruptive. But a polite, well-behaved person may also be disruptive, and in a church such a person may be using their friendly and unassuming ways to obstruct the purposes of God. A cult of niceness is as effective as heresy for destroying the spiritual life of a church. Anger, on the other hand, may be used by God to break up a spirit of complacency. Ezekiel, who when the Lord first called him to a prophetic reacted "in bitterness and in the anger of my spirit" (3:14). case the Lord used anger and bitterness to inflame Ezekiel's heart with passion for Him. If Ezekiel had insisted on remaining a mild-mannered priest (which he probably was by nature), he would have thwarted God's purposes.
Little wonder that the great believers of the Bible have also been great arguers with God - from Jacob, who actually came to blows with the angel of the Lord, to Peter who in Acts 10 answered a divine command three times with the words, "Surely not, Clearly, anger at God can be a sign of spiritual growth. It can mean we are outgrowing a concept of God that is no longer adequate for us. It could even be said that our anger is directed not at the living God Himself but at our own idolatrous concept of Him. While we ourselves may not understand this, nevertheless our anger functions to move us closer to God as He really is. Religious phonies will go to almost any lengths to hide the fact that their relationship with God is not real or satisfying. But people who truly love the Lord have a consuming hunger for reality. Freedom, truth, peace,joy: such things have a taste and a feel all their own, and we know them when we see them. If the people of God are deprived of these fruits of the Lord's real presence, naturally they grow angry and disconsolate. Is it their fault that they cannot live without God?
There are times when the Lord is actually honored and glorified by our anger at Him, in ways that He may not be by an attitude of unruffled "trust." Job provides a healthy balance to the traditional picture of the bloodless, gutless, cheerfully suffering saint. At the very least, anger means that we are taking God seriously and treating Him as a real person - real enough to arouse our passions. Angry prayer is not to be recommended as a steady diet, perhaps, but it is certainly preferable to lip-service prayer. Doesn't artificiality in relationships belie a far greater hostility than the honest expression of deep emotion? In the prim and proper prayer lives of many devout folk, a good old-fashioned temper tantrum might one of the best things that could happen. In the courts of Heaven there is a place for the primal scream.
(Mike Mason, The Gospel According to Job, Crossway Books, 1994: 175-176)
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2 comments:
reminds me of II Kings 13:14-19
14 Now Elisha was fallen sick of his sickness whereof he died. And Joash the king of Israel came down unto him, and wept over his face, and said, O my father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof.
15 And Elisha said unto him, Take bow and arrows. And he took unto him bow and arrows.
16 And he said to the king of Israel, Put thine hand upon the bow. And he put his hand upon it: and Elisha put his hands upon the king’s hands.
17 And he said, Open the window eastward. And he opened it. Then Elisha said, Shoot. And he shot. And he said, The arrow of the LORD’S deliverance, and the arrow of deliverance from Syria: for thou shalt smite the Syrians in Aphek, till thou have consumed them.
18 And he said, Take the arrows. And he took them. And he said unto the king of Israel, Smite upon the ground. And he smote thrice, and stayed.
19 And the man of God was wroth with him, and said, Thou shouldest have smitten five or six times; then hadst thou smitten Syria till thou hadst consumed it: whereas now thou shalt smite Syria but thrice.
The past few years i have been trying to see God as my Father, in the role of an actual father. Since I get angry with my father at times, I don't see why I can't be angry with God. We get angry because we don't understand everything, but anger in this sense I don't think is a sin. It is passion to debate, to try and understand what your Father is doing. Disrespect isn't okay, just like with our worldly fathers, but angry debate to show your emotions and thoughts is okay.
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