Uprooting Anger

Biblical Help for a Common Problem

Robert D. Jones

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781596380059
• eBook ISBN: 9781596389151
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Focuses on changing underlying motivations and beliefs of the heart that drive angry behavior, promoting thorough andlasting change. Includes discussion and application questions in each chapter.

1

What Is Anger?

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. The believer in Christ is not exempt from anger. His words and gestures betray it. He wrestles with its remnants within, realizing the task assigned by 1 Peter 2:11, “to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul,” and heeding the call of Ephesians 4:31, to “get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.” He battles it daily.

Jack became a Christian at age seventeen and met Jill when he was twenty-four. In their eleven years of marriage, God has blessed them with steady employment, a comfortable home, and two healthy children. In many ways, they are living the American middle-class dream. They are active members of their local church and serve Christ each week as Sunday-school teachers.

Yet beneath this veneer of success lurks long-standing relational dynamics of anger. A high achiever and hard worker, Jack drives himself and his family to perform up to his standards. And when he doesn’t get the results he wants—Jill’s affection, his supervisor’s approval, his daughter’s obedience—Jack explodes.

Jill, too, has an anger problem, though she rarely erupts. Inside she resents Jack for the demands he places on her and their daughters. At times she even feels betrayed by God. Why did you let me marry him? she murmurs to God. I never knew it would turn out like this. She resonates with that frustrated wife who once quipped, “When I married I was looking for a great deal, but instead found it to be an ordeal, and now I want a new deal.”

Do you see the dynamic? Can you relate to it? Jill reacts to Jack’s blowups by withdrawing; Jack reacts to her withdrawing by blowing up. They feed each other’s anger, and, to extend the metaphor, they willingly digest it and reply in kind. Both attack and defend. Both retreat and wallow. Both feel justified. Meanwhile, their relational gulf widens, their children inhale their secondhand smoke, and God is dishonored. We’ll return to Jack and Jill in a later chapter.

Anger is easier to describe than to define. We can’t always dissect it, but we know it when we see it in others or feel it rising in our own veins. Our friend’s protestation, “Angry? No, I’m not angry,” rarely fools us, any more than our denials cover our angry expressions. You and I, and Jack and Jill, are more angry than we care to admit.

So what is anger? While the Bible presents no formal definition, it repeatedly pictures angry people. It uses a wide variety of terms that flavor our understanding. Scripture graphically describes the many forms of anger, warns us against sinful anger, and prescribes wise ways to uproot it.

A Working Definition of “Anger”

Let’s start with a working definition of “anger,” a definition that brings together the biblical data into user-friendly categories.

Our anger is our whole-personed active response of
negative moral judgment against perceived evil.

This definition imbeds several key ideas.

1. Our anger is an active response. It is an action, an activity. Anger is something we do, not something we have. It is not a thing, a fluid, or a force. The Bible pictures people who do anger, not have anger.

2. Our anger is a whole-personed active response. It involves our entire being and engages our whole person. We must resist various compartmentalized distinctions that emerge from pop psychology rather than from Scripture. Much popular literature labels anger as simply an “emotion.”1 Meanwhile, cognitive theorists stress belief systems, and behaviorists focus on angry reactions.

God’s Word, of course, recognizes and addresses anger’s many emotional, cognitive, volitional, and behavioral aspects. Anger in Scripture conveys emotion, spanning the spectrum from red-hot rage to icy-blue rejection. But it always involves beliefs and motives, perceptions and desires. And the Bible describes it in behavioral terms that are rich and graphic.

Yet the Bible does not slice the pie into neat analytic categories. Anger is more than mere emotion, volition, cognition, or behavior. Scripture resists simplistic schemes. Anger is complex. It comprises the whole person and encompasses our whole package of beliefs, feelings, actions, and desires.

3. Our anger is a response against something. It does not arise in a vacuum or appear spontaneously. Anger reacts against some provocation. Such a provocation, of course, must not be viewed as a causation (“He made me angry.” “I was angry because my car broke down.”). As we’ll see in chapter 3, anger’s causal core lies in our active hearts. But our active hearts are always responding to the people and events in daily life.

4. Our anger, in essence, involves a negative moral judgment that we make. It arises from our judicial sense and functions under the larger dynamic of judgmentalism. In this sense, we may call anger a “moral emotion.”2 Anger protests, “What you did was wrong!” It pronounces, “That action is unjust!” It pleads, “This must stop!” Anger objects to wrongs committed.

We call it a “negative” moral judgment not because it is always sinful but because it opposes the perceived evil. Our anger postures us against what we determine to be evil. It casts negative mental votes against unjust actions. It determines that all offenders must change, be punished, or be removed. It issues mental death-penalty verdicts against the guilty. No wonder Jesus taught that anger is the moral equivalent of murder: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment” (Matt. 5:21–22). The apostle John repeats this truth: “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him” (1 John 3:15).

There is, however, another sense in which our anger is moral. We do it before God’s face, coram Deo, in the sight of him who gazes into the very depths of our being.3 His eyes pierce and penetrate our inward beliefs and motives. And the God who sees most assuredly judges every aspect of our anger activity (Prov. 5:21; 15:3; 16:2; Jer. 17:9–10; Heb. 4:12–13).

5. Our anger involves a judgment against perceived evil. Our moral judgment arises from our personal perception. In anger we perceive some action, object, situation, or person to be evil or unjust. Jack and Jill see things in each other that they dislike and oppose.

Our perceptions, of course, may be accurate or inaccurate. We may assess the other person’s actions in correct or incorrect ways. To further complicate things, our responses to our perceptions may then be godly or ungodly. In any event, our anger arises from our value system. It expresses our beliefs and motives. When a tyrant murders an innocent citizen, we perceive that act to be unjust and we react with anger. When the state executes a ruthless serial killer whose evil is beyond a reasonable doubt, we react with approval.

One theologian summarizes the biblical evidence for anger as judgmentalism: “Human anger is usually directed against other men. The reason for human anger can be that someone has been treated unjustly . . . , that one sees how other men are exploited . . . , or that one’s fellow men manifest disobedience or unbelief in God.”4

One benefit of our working definition is that it allows us to cut through some common smokescreens we might offer. “I’m not angry,” we lamely protest. “I’m just frustrated (or bothered or upset).” But what the two different words might connote becomes irrelevant when we see that they both are reactions to some perceived unfairness or injustice. We may quibble about nuanced distinctions between such words as “anger” and “frustration,” but the bottom line is that I am reacting to what you wrongly did to me.

Our working definition of “anger” lines up with the descriptions of several wise thinkers. The Puritan pastor Richard Baxter described anger as “the rising up in the heart in passionate displacency against an apprehended evil, which would cross or hinder us of some desired good.”5 Notice several key components in Baxter’s definition. Anger comes from within, from “the heart.” It includes a negat...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. What Is Anger?
• 2. Is Your Anger Really Righteous?
• 3. Getting to the Heart of Anger
• 4. Repentance: The Road to Uprooting Heart Anger
• 5. Changing Our Angry Behavior: Sinful Revealing
• 6. Changing Our Angry Behavior: Sinful Concealing
• 7. Anger against God
• 8. Anger against Yourself
• 9. Helping Others Deal with Their Anger
• 10. Why You Must Deal with Your Sinful Anger
• Appendix A: Sample Growth and Application Assignments
• Appendix B: Reconsidering Two “Anger” Texts: Ephesians 4:26 and Hebrews 12:15
• Notes
• Index of Scripture
• About the Author