Taking Off Unrighteous Vengeance to Put On Righteous Anger (1)

In Ephesians 4:26-27, the Apostle Paul writes, Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: Neither give place to the devil. Next to lying (v. 25), unrighteous anger is the most prevalent sin in human behavior. The human nature is, if nothing else, a volatile thing. There are those exceptional people who seem not to get angry no matter what. Most of us, however, have a breaking point. In my own younger days, I had a problem with anger, which God worked on through His Word. To understand anger, we must look at two things that are brought out in our text.

First, the New Testament speaks of righteous anger. There are those who believe and teach that spiritual behavior demands that we suppress all anger, that all anger is sin. As almost all commentators recognize, however, the text clearly does not say not to be angry at all. If Paul that’s what wanted to say, surely he would have just written, “Never get angry.” Rather, what he says is, “In your anger, don’t sin.” In fact, the clause be ye angry is a Present Imperative in the Greek, that is, a command to be continuously angry. That, of course, doesn’t mean we go through life always angry, rather there will be times throughout life that we are to get angry.

May we also interject that one reason for the teaching that we must never be angry is no doubt due to today’s “touchy-feely,” syrupy sentimentality and false love that comes from liberal teaching. It’s really nothing but a resurrection of the philosophy of the ancient Stoics (300 B.C.), who condemned all anger because they believed that man should live rationally and in harmony with nature, and we hear the same nonsense from the New Agers and mystics.

Such teaching must in the end conclude that we aren’t even to get angry at sin. We submit, however, that there’s something dreadfully wrong with any Christian who is not angered at the some one-and-a-half million babies that are slaughtered in their mother’s own womb every year in America. There’s something terribly awry with “Christian” leaders who are not righteously indignant with the compromises that are being made to the Gospel and the wholesale abandonment of absolute Truth. As beloved J. Vernon McGee puts it, “No believer can be neutral in the battle of truth.” Amen! Tragically, however, some believers are actually on the wrong side these days as they refuse to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).

What, then, is Paul saying? He is telling us that there is an anger that is settled and right. Just as not all sex is sinful, but only the wrong kind (that which is outside of marriage), likewise only the wrong kind of anger is sinful.

So what kind of anger is right?—righteous anger. Simply put: Righteous anger is a settled state of mind in which there is an indignation and hatred of that which is offensive to and sinful against God and a desire for God’s justice. No, we do not seek revenge, for, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Rom. 12:19); rather we are commanded to a continuous, enduring anger against sin and look forward to God dealing with sin in His judgment. The Christian can, and should, get angry at immorality, ungodliness, apostasy, disobedience, unfaithfulness, rebellion, unyieldedness, and all other sin against God’s will and commands. While we certainly are to be concerned for the sinner, and will witness to him concerning coming wrath, at the same time we look forward to God’s judgment on those who reject His Word and blaspheme His name.

One Greek authority offers a tantalizing consideration. He says that it is quite possible that the thought here in our text is that our anger is actually “to be understood as participation in the anger of God.” In essence, then, “our” anger is not really ours, but God’s. What a challenge! Let us each ask ourselves, “Do I get angry at the same things at which God is angered?” All sin is sin against God, as David realized in Psalm 51:4—“Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this evil in thy sight”—so sin should, indeed, anger us.