Sermon Tone Analysis
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Anger
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Anger
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By Pastor Glenn Pease
I had an awful temper as a child.
When I was in first or second grade I broke a pool cue over the head of one of my brother's friends, and for years after I was reminded that I caused the scar on his forehead.
My older brother came close to getting even worse.
In one of our fights he picked me up and threw me down on the floor.
In a rage of anger I grabbed the steel stove poker, and would have clobbered him had it not been for parental interference.
Blood banks could triple their business if they could figure out how to prevent parents from preventing sibling violence.
I don't know how many doors my father had to fix because of my angry slamming of them, and yes, I was one of those kids who shouted at my parents in anger, "I hate you!"
The point is, I didn't learn it all from TV, for it didn't exist then.
I know from personal experience how anger can be filled with potential for evil and senseless destruction.
In the process of maturing, and by growth as a Christian, I got over being a hot head, and gained control of my anger.
This is the case with many, and even most Christians, but my question is, can we get so in control of our anger that we lose the value of being capable of anger?
Is it possible that we eliminate the vice of anger, but in so doing also eliminate the virtue of it?
It is obviously not Christ like to be losing your temper and blasting people, and seeking revenge.
But on the other hand, it is also not Christ like to never be angry at the forces of evil.
Jesus was the perfect man yet He got angry at the Pharisees for their hardness of heart that made them more concerned about their Sabbath legalism then the life of a fellow worshiper.
So what we have in this same context is perfect illustrations of the two sides of anger-the awful anger of men, and the awesome anger of God.
The worse kind and the best kind of anger are illustrated right here side by side in verses 5 and 6.
We want to focus on each in order to see the clear distinction, and thus, be able to channel our own anger in the proper direction.
Let's look first at-
I. THE AWFUL ANGER OF MEN.
v. 6
This verse reveals the most wicked example of anger the world has ever seen.
Here were good and godly men who were the religious and political leaders of God's people, and yet they let anger motivate them to plot the murder of the only perfect man who ever lived.
This is depravity at its lowest depth.
Anger is the worst emotion man is capable of, for it leads to the justifying of the murder of another human being.
Cain in anger killed his brother Abel, and most murders every since have been motivated by anger.
Every person in a state of anger is a potential killer, and, therefore, anger is the most dangerous of human emotions.
Anger is the emotion that led men to despise and reject Jesus, and then crucify Him.
You look in vain to find a more dangerous emotion.
But let me keep the paradox before you.
Jesus was angry, and so we cannot loose sight of the fact that there can be value in this most dangerous of emotions.
In 1899 a school teacher by the name of Billy Rankin was convinced that a certain hill in Idaho was filled with copper.
He started to dig, and continued to do so for years.
He left off from time to time to work in a saw mill to buy enough dynamite to keep blasting deeper into the earth.
He dug for 50 years until he died.
He poured his whole life into a hole in the ground, and found nothing of value.
It would seem equally futile to try and dig into the dark pit of this emotion of anger to find anything of value.
But the fact is, there is treasure to mine from this pit that has produced so much evil.
This emotion which can make us potentially among the worse of men is also a vital ingredient in the character of the best of men.
This is a paradox if there ever was one.
So as we look at the awfulness of anger I don't want you to forget it also has great potential for good.
The usual message about anger is that it is bad stuff, and so get rid of it.
Paul in Eph.
4:31 says just that: "Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger...." In Col. 3:8 he says, "But now, you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips."
There are a lot of things that are just not appropriate for the Christian, and among them is anger.
The Greek word Paul used in these two texts is the same Greek word Mark uses to describe the anger of Jesus.
So we can forget trying to make a case for two different emotions, and pretend that righteous indignation is some sort of sanctified version of anger.
Anger is anger, and whatever the cause or the consequences, it is the same emotion in the saint and the sinner.
Christians do not have a specialized anger.
It is the same anger they had as non-Christians.
The emotion that Jesus felt was the same as that felt by Cain when he killed Able.
Paul is negative about it because anger in Christians is almost always just as bad a source of evil as it is in non-Christians.
It is just a high risk emotion anyway you look at it, and the primary goal of the Christian is to avoid it.
You do not have to be a bad person to be a poor handler of the emotion of anger.
Some of the best people in history have failed to control their anger.
Moses made God mad because of his hot temper, and he was shut out of the promise land because of it.
Jonah, one of the best known prophets in the Bible, was a temper-tantrum prophet, and has a terrible reputation because of it.
James and John, two of the three closest disciples to Jesus, were such hot heads that Jesus had to rebuke them and calm them down or they would have been guilty of homicide against the Samaritans.
The best of people as well as the worse of people can have a problem with anger control.
Paul wrote to Christians, "Be ye angry and sin not."
It was also to Christians that Paul wrote in Eph. 4, "Never go to bed angry, don't give the devil that sort of foothold."
The point is, Christians do this and let Satan trip them up all the time in the area of anger.
It is the sin of the most morally upright and other wise outstanding Christians.
Joyce Landorf in The Fragrance Of Beauty is one of the famous Christians who admitted her battle with anger.
She was a hot head who often lost her temper, and she was a mother-monster.
Not as a non-Christian, but as a Christian.
She was 5 foot 6 inches tall before she became a Christian, and 5 foot 6 inches tall after she became a Christian.
She had the emotion of anger before she came to Christ, and she had it after she came to Christ.
She was a Christian for 15 years and still had her inner fire.
The problem was not in having the fire.
The problem was that the fire had her.
She was not using it, but it was using her.
She realized that a Christian woman should not be having temper tantrums, and so she worked at control and she grew.
But the point I am making is that Christians have this battle.
It is not won by coming to Christ.
There is a lot to do in Christ to learn anger control.
Paul Hauck in his book Overcoming Frustration And Anger says that the single greatest cause for divorce is anger.
Yes, there is money, sex, in-laws, jealously, job stress, and dozens of other factors.
It is anger over these things that destroys the marriage.
If people did not get so angry, all of these things could be worked out.
Awful anger multiplied by two equals disaster.
The world and the church are both damaged by the awful anger of men.
Will Rogers said, "People who fly into a rage always make a bad landing."
Anger is often far more hurtful than the injury that caused the anger.
We could go on and on about the awful anger of men, but we need to shift gears and figure out how our Lord could have anything to do with an emotion that is so awful.
So let's look at our second point which is-
II.
THE AWESOME ANGER OF GOD.
The anger of Jesus here is the anger of the God-man.
It is human anger, but it is Godlike, and thus, not a vice but a virtue.
It is a part of the very holiness of God. C. S. Lewis in the Narnia tales says, "Aslan is not a tame lion."
The lion, of course, represents Christ.
For God not to be angry at sin, cruelty, and injustice would be to deny his very essence.
It would be like a bride not being angry at one who threw mud pies at her wedding gown.
It would be like a surgeon not being angry at one who put all his surgical equipment in a pail of bacteria infested slime.
It would be like anybody not be being angry at one who deliberately violates their being and values.
The person who does not have the capacity to be angry at such evil has gone to the opposite extreme, and does not murder the evil one, but murders the Spirit of God.
The Bible calls it quenching the Spirit, but it is a form of murder, for it kills the Spirit of God and eliminates the will of God from the conflict, and lets evil have the victory.
For Jesus to have said, "I'm sorry fellas, I didn't mean to upset your traditions by healing this brother on the Sabbath," would have been to choose evil rather than good.
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