Burning Temple

Facing Our Anger at God

Freeman

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781532611087
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Being angry at God is full of pain, confusion, and loneliness. Where does a believer in Jesus Christ turn when they find themselves angry and suspicious of God? Where did the anger come from? When will the pain end? Can God be trusted? These are the questions those angry at God ask. Where can hope be found when a believer feels let down by God? There is path away from being angry at God that takes us from rage to peace and trust. It is a long journey that is both familiar and unknown.

Part I

A Hemorrhaging Faith

Chapter 1

More than We Know

As she drives away, I hear myself say, “Why are you letting this happen to me again?” It will be years before I understand why someone important leaving feels familiar, why I say “again” as she leaves. But right now, all I feel is pain. No one gets married expecting to be divorced within two years. No one thinks about getting divorced at all. I stand there not knowing what to do. Do I keep wearing my wedding ring, or should I throw it toward the heavens that remain silent? I don’t know how to move from the very place I stand, much less how to move on. Somewhere amid all my questions, I feel a rage begin to ache. Why is God letting this happen to me? Where is he?

Being angry at God might be the loneliest place a person can be. We still believe God exists. We still believe he is somehow who we need the most. And yet, we now want nothing to do with him. Now when we think about him, every ounce of our being stiffens. If our hearts had hands, they would be clinched, ready to throw a punch. Is there a more isolated place than feeling God has walked away from you? We don’t have all the words needed to describe the situation, but we seem to know that God deserves our anger. We feel resolute but altogether confused. Paralyzed but ready to fight. Full of questions but shouting demands.

There is something about anger that narrows and hardens us. We see everything as either black or white. Right or wrong. There is no room for ambiguity or paradox. The pain we feel is real, and something must be done about it. Whatever questions we have pale in comparison to how assured we are about our “right-ness.” We are right to feel how we feel. We are right to act the way we are acting. This felt right-ness is confusing when God is the one in our angry crosshairs.

But what if there is more to the story? What if being angry at God is only the blinding glare bouncing off things inside us? What if there is more pain, more to us, more to God, and many more of us angry travelers than we know?

More Pain

It is torturous describing the pain tangled within our anger at God. Is it being stabbed in the heart, or death by one thousand cuts? Is it being smashed and flattened, or stretched and ripped apart? Burned, or frozen out? Imprisoned, or exiled? Maybe it’s all of these rolled into one tangled ball of confusion and confinement. It is hard to explain to others because we ourselves cannot fully understand. How do believers in Jesus Christ find themselves raging against God? Despite all of our questions, we know one fact: we cannot stop being angry at God.

But where does the pain come from? God let us down when we most needed him. God let someone die as we prayed for her recovery. People who promised to stay left as God sat on his hands. Our reasons are as numerous as they are personal. But the common thread is God’s action or inaction when we most needed him. He should have been better for us, or gotten things right. We are in pain because he let us down in the worst possible way: he isn’t the God we hear him claim to be.

We usually say it in different ways: “Why would God let this happen?” “Where was God when I needed him?” “What possible good can he bring from this tragedy?” It’s hard to blame us for asking such questions when we suffer. And we are suffering more than we know. We can’t see it right now, but we have been suffering for a long time. Whatever the event (death, broken relationship, cancer, autism), it is just the latest pain in a long line of suffering, both big and small, finally caving in on us. Our anger feels so singularly focused, but we will be surprised to find it bleeding out from places inside us where we have not visited in a long time.

The instance of suffering making us angry with God might be the biggest and most painful one of them all, but it is not the first time we tasted the heavy hand of hurt. Wounds have a way of piling up, even for the most forgiving and devout believers. Pain informs pain just as receiving praise enforces behavior. Our suffering tells us a story. Our anger at God finds its home in our suffering, past and present. We have even more pain and sorrow inside us than we realize. Our pain has deeper roots than the present suffering we are facing. While our anger at God is sharp, it is only the tip of what bludgeons us.

More to Us

Our anger at God consumes. It taints everything. It touches every relationship we have. And it pursues us into all that we do. Because we cannot shake our need for him, our anger at God seeps out of us as we walk through our days. Our anger becomes the currency we use in the marketplace of our relationship with God. There is more of our personal beings involved in our anger than we know.

We might think our anger can be compartmentalized, but it can’t. We might even think anger is somehow a purely intellectual response. But anger is a “full person” action. Our anger can be felt in our fatigued bodies as much as it resounds in our words. There is always a deeper part of ourselves in emotions that can go unseen. Our anger at God is no different. A deeper and more honest part of us is found in our anger at the God we once praised as our truest need and desire. This honest part of us doesn’t always get to breathe when we are around others. We are even unaware of how we keep it hidden from ourselves. But pain has a habit of squeezing our truest selves out from behind the veneer we use to hide. As awful as our suffering is (and as much as it might not be our fault), our anger comes from inside us and not the events of our pain. We never thought we would be angry at God when we first responded to him in faith. Our anger shines a light on places inside us we never knew existed. We know less about ourselves than we think, even though our anger hardens our opinions about our rightness.

And in a strange way, our anger at God reveals something about him inside us. At the beginning of all things, God put something of himself inside mankind. And from Adam and Eve on, the image of God bounces around inside us as we pinball from one life event to the next. Our emotions might be tainted by sin, but they still reveal something of God in us. Our anger, in a strange way, is our attempt to live out of the image in which we are created. Said another way:

The goal to evade anguish is undesirable because our dark emotions have a redemptive side (although this fact does not make them any less painful). Though tainted in our expression of them, they nonetheless reflect the character of God. They have the power to vocalize our deepest cry—and when that cry is uttered before God, our hearts are exposed and transformed as we glimpse his heart for us.1

Could we actually be trying (albeit imperfectly) to be angry at what God gets angry about? Confused as we might be, we know our motives and emotions are not as pure as God’s. But we cannot shake how true our anger at him feels.

Anger is a secondary emotion that comes from the deeper waters of our soul. Those waters are filled with memories, hurts, fears, and beliefs to which we rarely pay attention. But these waters are as true about us as our need to breathe air. We might think our emotions can have no deeper meaning past their surface, but what might we find if we swim down into them? Who will we find if we look behind our anger at God? Answering that question will be as important as seeing there is more to God than we know.

More to God

We know that there is more to God than we see. But we never imagined that he would be a God who fails us. When we considered God’s mysteries, we never thought we would find pain and loneliness for ourselves. But even as we burn in anger against him, we still hope that we don’t know the whole story. But it’s hard to hope when you are in such pain.

There is more to God than we know. It’s a simple thing to say. We are finite creatures, and he is an infinite creator of universes. Of course we don’t know everything about him. But what if our anger is just as limited as any other knowledge of him? We scream a lot of things about God in our rage. We make big assumptions about his character and worth because of pain’s presence. Our “where,” “what,” and “why” questions are full of these assumptions. But how did we come to these assumptions? One step at a time.

For now, it’s hard enough to accept how little we know about God. We need an openness to the idea that, even in the face of the pain we think God gives us, there is more to him than we see. Is there a way to be honest about both our suffering and our God at the same time? Can our suffering and God’s goodness be true at the same time? That’s only possible if we can both be angry at and in love with God at the same. The “God-angry” believer is just that: a true believer of God who is angry at him; no less a believer and no less angry. As much as we need to see ourselves more clearly, so too God. There is more to God than our anger and pain let us see. We are face to face with the paradoxes and tensions generations of believers have wrestled to understand. Our pain makes everything feel urgent, but there is no fast track to healing what ails us. Our pain hardens us toward an idea that we know more than we actually do.

More Travelers

Our anger feels lonely. We feel left out in the cold somehow. As we look around during Sunday worship gatherings, we are certain we are adrift on a solitary life raft. Everyone happily sings the songs and nods in agreement during the sermons. It’s hard not to feel like a stranger during the required small talk after the last prayer.

If suffering is a fact of life in this fallen world, then we cannot be alone on this sea. There are more God-angry believers than we can imagine. We are not solitary travelers on this journey. While our stories are different, our hurts and confusions are the same. I am always surprised by how many people identify with my anger against our God. They never talk in large groups, but after cornering me somewhere, people confess to their fists shaking toward the heavens. We might burn in solitary confinement, but we are not the only burning temples of God.

Convincing ourselves that we are the only believers weak enough to be angry at God keeps us from living a relational life. We become more isolated and lonely. We wall ourselves off from God and his followers. Where do we have left to go other than to cave in on ourselves? We keep tumbling over our anger and pain. But we do so separated from those we most need. Because our anger involves our most precious and vulnerable wounds, we keep them hidden. But it’s hard to travel in the dark without light. It feels like a great risk, especially in a church culture with little room for those stuck and helpless. But we need to step out into the light. Traveling out of our anger starts with an honest confession. We will find more angry travelers than we thought.

Anger at God sounds like strong statements and proclamations. But, the truth is, anger at God is filled with painful questions we feel he leaves us to answer on our own. If we listen, which we rarely do, we will hear “why,” “what,” and “where” bleeding out of us more than proclamations of certainty. Our questions point to a tension sufferers carry thousands of miles every day. We are certain of our pain, but don’t know what to do with it. We know we don’t have the whole story, but we try to fill in the gaps for ourselves. The picture is blurry because of our tears, but we keep assuring ourselves of what we see.

If you have picked up this book, you are beginning to step out of the denial of your anger at God. Most of us feel we only have three options when dealing with difficult emotions: denial, evasion, or fight. Most of us have been denying the anger we feel toward God. We don’t like the idea of being angry with the God who hears our worship songs. And we hate the looks we get from others when the anger slips past our defenses and sees the public light of our relationships. Denial only hinders and deepens the pain.

Evasion can feel like denial in action. But it goes further. We might acknowledge our anger toward God, but through willpower and busying ourselves, we evade its reality by attempting to create a new reality with good Christian disciplines. Sometimes these disciplines are just a game we are attempting to win. But another Bible study never does the trick. Or as the great Dr. Seuss tells us, sometimes the loneliest games are the ones we play against ourselves.2 It’s devastating to realize how many of our church activities are our best attempts to run away from our hearts. We use Bible studies, group devotionals, and even Sunday worship gatherings as ways of detaching and hiding from the rage we feel toward the God who let us down.

Others of us attempt to fight both God and ourselves. We fight ourselves by placing guilt and shame upon our heads. We beat up ourselves for being “stupid enough” to believe we could actually be angry at God. Other times we fight against God, believing he has entered into a conflict against us. We believe our suffering is God’s way of bringing this fight to us. It’s frightening to believe God opens up his holy arsenal against us. Because we see ourselves being in conflict against God (and God in conflict against us), our anger with...