God chastises me – not as a punishment, but to teach me – so that I will know how to do better in the future.
Sometimes I get so angry that I cannot even cope with the feeling at all.
Sometimes I am angry not from one big problem but from a million little ones that build up over time and cause me to become consumed with anger. Sometimes it bubbles inside me so that it can barely find a way to be contained.
And when I experience feelings of anger like this I often think about the reasons why. After all it is rarely a terribly big problem that actually sets me off in an angry rage. Instead it will be a million trivial little things that end up being one final straw that breaks the camel’s back that causes me to flare up in a rage.
And I have been thinking about this today and I have been thinking about God.
God is perfect and infinite, which means that He has the infinite ability to control His own anger. Imagine all the millions or billions or trillions of little (and not so little) slights that God is subjected to. Imagine all the times when people have criticised God and offended Him and sinned against Him. Imagine all the instances – just in my own life – when I have deliberately made a decision not to control myself and not to hold a check on my anger. And all those times in the whole course of my lifetime, I have offended God. Sometimes I have offended Him carefully, planning out my sin and making a deliberate decision to be bad. Sometimes I have offended Him carelessly, without even thinking about all the terrible damage that my sin would cause to Him and to the world and His Order and Holy Will in it. And in both instances, God holds His anger in check. He does not flare up and explode – for if He did that the world would cease to be. Instead, He controls Himself and communicates His anger in perfect control and with perfect love to redirect the course of my actions so that I cannot make matters worse.
And it occurs to me today that this is really the real difference between the righteous anger of God and my own terrible anger. For when God is angry – as He deserves to be – His anger, like everything else is an expression of love. When He directs His anger in His own controlled way, at me or my actions in the world, He does so to chastise me – not as a punishment, but to teach me – so that I will know how to do better in the future. In comparison, when I am angry, I just explode and there are terrible ramifications for that in all the world…
And I have been thinking about that anger today as I have been thinking about God. For there is such wonderful love in the righteous anger of God…
For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.
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