Some thoughts on anger: Men, what makes you angry? What arouses your wrath? Insubordination? Incompetency? Unfair treatment at work? A referee’s blown call? Getting cut off on the freeway? Having your steak undercooked?
How about sin? Your kids’ sin? Your wife’s sin? Your country’s sin? What about your sin?
I’ve recently been reading The Cross of Christ by John Stott. It is easily one of the best books I’ve ever read and I’m only half way through. In the chapter “The Salvation of Sinners,” Stott talks about what God accomplished by substituting Jesus on our behalf. I just read the section on propitiation. Although not a popular modern word, I’m convinced that the church of Jesus Christ must take back this word, understand it and use it in our understanding of the gospel. Stott says “to propitiate something means to appease or pacify . . . anger” (169). To propitiate God, then, is to appease his wrath. Stott then goes on to discuss some of the debates about propitiation before coming to his reasons why propitiation is necessary to understanding what Jesus did on the cross in our place. He says the following:
First, the reason why a propitiation is necessary is that sin arouses the wrath of God. This does not mean (as animists fear) that he is likely to fly off the handle at the most trivial provocation, still less that he loses his temper for no apparent reason at all. For there is nothing capricious or arbitrary about the holy God. Nor is he ever irascible, malicious, spiteful or vindictive. His anger is neither mysterious nor irrational. It is never unpredictable, but always predictable, because it is provoked by evil and by evil alone. The wrath of God . . . is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations. In short, God’s anger is poles apart from ours. What provokes our anger (injured vanity) never provokes his; what provokes his anger (evil) seldom provokes ours.
Okay, so what’s the connection? I guess I was just smashed in the nose by the truth that so often my anger is aroused by petty grievances against me. My anger most often reflects the words of the Apostle James:
Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God (James 1:19-20).
I want to be angry about the things that Jesus was angry about:
And he looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart (Mark 3:5).
So men, let’s examine our lives to see what we get angry about, how we spend our anger, and with the Helper’s help let’s learn to be angry like God as we become more and more like him. Indeed, God was so incredibly angry about sin that he sent his only Son to our world to die a sinner’s death in the place of sinners.
