How do we deal with being angry at God? Is that a legitimate emotion?
It’s tempting to just point to the book of Job and encourage you to meditate there—which is not bad advice, though it’s a complex book—but it is an experience that we have all had at some point I imagine.
Life under the sun involves pain. Every Christian knows this, we all have a litany of questions to ask the Lord: why did that happen? It felt like you wanted me to do that, but it blew up in my face, why was that? Why is everything so hard? Why did they get sick? Why did they die?
When we boil it down, it’s death that gets us. The graves that most of us have in our shadows act like drag on a boat for our progress through the world, and if you don’t know what I mean then I’m afraid you will as you age. We all have questions, it’s not hard for those questions to burn into either the boiling rage that we call ‘anger’ or the simmering poison we call ‘bitterness.’ They can fester like an open wound.
What do you do if you find yourself angry with God? It can seem self-fulfilling as you don’t really think you’re supposed to be angry and so you don’t do anything with the emotion and it take up residence like a particularly hoary troll under the bridge of your soul, ready to jump out and demand a toll whenever you think you’ve recovered from the tragedy that befell you.
We can also get caught in the concern that we’re somehow sinning really badly because ‘surely we shouldn’t be angry at God?’ The problem is we don’t know who else to be angry at. Is it sin to be angry with God? Probably, as we most likely have wrong conceptions about who the Lord is at the base of our pain. However, we can get very caught in that, forgetting that we sin all the time. Repent, friends, he is merciful and waits with open arms. But that probably isn’t your first move.
Your first move is to stop being angry at God and start being angry at God. What I mean is to take that anger that you allow to squall about your insides and address it directly to the Lord. Use the Psalms of lament, if that would help you, as while you won’t find anger with God there, you will find a lot of complimentary emotions. Get in his face. Ask him why. He invites us to do so with the words of those Psalms.
Then, the aim isn’t to stop being angry. Death should provoke great anger, so start being angry at things you should be angry at. Be angry and do not sin (Ephesians 5). Go to the imprecatory Psalms and direct them at death and the devil. Be angry that life is ruined by foul tragedy. You won’t immediately find your anger with God fades, but you will be being angry in the right direction.
Then, relearn the gospel. Genuinely. What reduces the drag of the graves in your shadow and turns them into ballast against the storm? The resurrection of dead, which we know is certain because of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ. Because God stepped into history, allowed death to kill him, and then bound the strong man plundering all his goods (Matthew 12), which include things like the keys to death and hades (Revelation 1); because of that deep truth we can know that the shadows of death are grim but momentary, and our many graves will be planted as magnificent gardens.
These aren’t three steps in a process, you’ll find your heart spiralling around them, but what you’re doing is catechising yourself into the truth. You’ll need a place to ask difficult questions about the sovereignty of God and evil, which don’t have neat resolutions. You’ll need to keep expressing your pain. I do believe that as you express it to God, you’ll find that your grief doesn’t diminish but anger fades as you lean on the everlasting arms. You won’t have all the answers, but you will believe that he does. You won’t be able to wrap it up in a neat rhetorical bow—or perhaps you will but it won’t be emotionally satisfying when you do so—but you will know that the Father who made the world is good, and loves you, and his arm is not shortened. You will know that the Christ has conquered death and one day will wipe every tear from our eyes. You will know that the Spirit of life will come and dwell with you to uphold you in your grief and teach you to bear it with hope.
Anger won’t fade, necessarily, though it’s an exhausting emotion to maintain, but it will redirect towards Satan, your own sin, the powers, and death itself. The resurrection is the only thing that makes the world make sense. It’s the only thing that makes the human condition bearable.
Eventually in this swirl of emotion you will need to assess where you might need to repent, You probably do believe things that are untrue about God. Others in your church can help you with this. But the most important thing to do is to get to God and tell him exactly how you feel. He can handle it, he does loves you, and he will meet you with mercy. He is, despite everything, good.
Photo by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash
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