To know Good’s heart is to know God’s love. To know that God is love is also to understand His anger. God’s anger, unlike ours is unsullied by rage and vindictiveness. But it is nevertheless real since it is the other side of His perfect love. Where human love can be polluted by sentimentality, selfishness and the desire to control. God’s love is pure.

If we have never experienced deep anger, it may be that we have never really known love.

As sons and daughters of God we have emotions that we inherit from our Father. Everything that came from the hand of the Father was good – including the potential for anger. If we don’t feel anger, maybe we don’t feel much at all. Maybe we don’t love much or  have never been truly loved. It’s what we do with emotions that determines whether our actions are good or evil. Do we abuse or harm people with our anger? Or do we allow our anger to motivate us to work towards the elimination of injustice and abuse? Do we harness our anger so that it propels us to multiply love?

A.W. Tozer writes, ‘There is a strong tendency among religious teachers these days to disassociate anger from the divine character and to defend God by explaining away the Scriptures that relate it to Him. This is understandable, but in the light of the full revelation of God it is inexcusable.’

It’s inexcusable also to claim that anger is illegitimate in human life – particularly when such denial is associated with passivity and the effete kind of piety that neuters our humanity; emasculates our person so that  we pretend that genuine Christianity is a bunch of people going about being   ‘nice’ to each other. In such a state we are incapable of taking a stand for truth and justice and thus we fail to love.

Then there’s the misguided attempt to get the abused and sinned against to deny their anger and attempt to extinguish it with premature forgiveness – as though the abused must stop feeling angry for the comfort of those at hand.

We cannot offer genuine forgiveness until we have let our heart be angry. Until we have acknowledged the pain and anger resulting from the assault of un-love on our heart, we cannot offer genuine forgiveness.

The cancer of society is not that we are hated. It’s the institutionalization of un-love.

God is love and God experiences anger. But the wrath of God does not mean that He goes about constantly mad at human beings. The wrath of God and the love of God are seen in the Person of Jesus. Jesus bears the penalty of our sins while revealing the love of God. Tozer writes, ‘God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the diphtheria or polio that would destroy the life of her child.’

We do not realize how deeply enmeshed and accepting we are of un-love and un-life. We come into the world expecting to be loved and to live life to the full, but time causes us to lower the bar. We accommodate ourselves to the landscape of death and try to make religion out of it.

Jesus is saying to His people today, ‘I see you good works. But why are you so absorbed in healing soul and body when your being remains so crippled?’ There is no lasting peace when our being is in pieces.

‘They offer superficial treatments for my people’s mortal wound. They give assurances of peace when there is no peace’ Jer 8.11 NLT.

So let’s be rid of the notion that false doctrine with its slanders about the Father, the diminishing of Jesus, the debilitation of the power of the cross, the substitution of ‘endurance’ for the authority of God’s sons and the castration of the Holy Spirit do not matter. It does. (Of course the Holy Spirit does not suffer castration. We do.) All of this makes humans smaller and weaker even as it perpetuates our degradation in the name of god [sic]. Let’s be clear. You have no right to bind people in the Old Covenant in the name of  your denominational identity!

In the visions of Rick Joyner, Jesus is depicted on occasions as burning with anger, significantly, in the context where children of God are suffering spiritual abuse at the hand of those who claim to be nurturing the flock. Rick Joyner urges Christians to take account of  ‘the severity of Christ.’ This ‘severity’ arises because Jesus loves people so deeply that He is angered by the abuse perpetrated by Christians on themselves when they settle for anything less than Himself.

We can have a life in ‘christianity’ and be small and ineffectual or we can have Jesus as our life and exercise the authority that is His. Union with God in Jesus means that we are life-givers, liberty-multipliers and healers. You want to heal the planet? Be His woman. Be His man. Have Christ live in you. Embrace Him as your life!

Mostly Jesus goes about multiplying forgiveness, healing and joy. Occasionally we see Him angry. On the occasions when Jesus is angered in the New Testament the anger is directed at teachers of the law and religious leaders. I believe He was angry when He wrote poignantly in the sand. Jesus burned with anger at the presumption of those who condemned Him for healing on the Sabbath – not only because this was not loving but because they purveyed a perverse view of God.

His anger was fierce against the marketers of religion in the temple, just as it is today towards those who use His name as a vehicle for career and self promotion. It’s disappointing, to say the least, when we find Christians who get angry when they are overcharged at the super-market, but look the other way when people use Jesus, the Holy Spirit or anything Christian, to build an empire for themselves.

Who would say to their child, ‘My daughter, you were born without a toe. The surgeons have fixed that. As yet you are lacking an arm. But that’s Ok. One is good.’ Many of God’s people subsist on only one lung. Severely incapacitated they gasp for the oxygen of life. But those who could know better retort. ‘That’s alright. We only believe in one lung in our denomination.’

We might often imagine the wrath of God to be reserved for criminals, drug dealers, pornographers and adulterers. And so it is. How often do we recognize that this anger also awaits those who bind people in Moses, Old Covenant captivity, the weakness of the flesh and the impotence of the children of the slave woman –  for the sake of a career in the church or to protect our idol of denominational identity?

‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness’ Romans 1.18 NIV.

‘He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored’ Mark 3.5 NIV.

‘When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled’ John 11.33 NIV.

‘To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!’ John 2.16 NIV.

 

Keith Allen