Anger and Response

Looking primarily at Exodus five and six.

God has sent Moses to His ‘firstborn son’ Israel, to demand its release by Pharaoh.  Pharaoh increases their workload to impossible proportions.  Everyone is confused and hurt.  The people grow angry with God.

There is a movement in the church that claims anger towards God should be non-existent in the life of a Christian.  I agree completely.  They claim that if anger persists there is some false view of God, some mistaken understanding of His character and actions.  I agree.  Sometimes this is used to condemn those that feel angry.  There, I stand completely opposed.

I have been angry at God.  It has been almost entirely rooted in sin and pride, and in failure to trust.  Anger at God is never right.  Yet it will continue to occur in our hearts and within the church simply because we are not yet right ourselves.  We are not yet made to feel rightly.  As Beautiful Eulogy puts it, He still has not wiped away all our tears.  Is it right to be angry at God?  No.  It means that we are broken.  Does anger towards God therefore mean we are not His children?  No.  Never.  Simply that His children still have room to grow.

This understanding of brokenness allows us to express anger rightly.  Anger itself is not appropriate, but it is more inappropriate still to bury it under a cheap legalism that says ‘I should not feel this way’.  No, I should not feel this way- yet still I do.  The proper way, then, to respond to broken emotion is an honest expression of feeling to God, like Moses and so many other leaders of God’s people.

Moses approaches God and asks (with us), ‘Why?  How could You let this happen?  I was obedient, and now what?  Penalties and beatings and harsher workloads- how can this be Your will?’  He expresses his anger to God to Him.  Not, it appears, to the rest of Israel.

 

This is crucial.  Psalm 73:15 says "If I had said, “I will speak thus,”
I would have betrayed the generation of your children."  In consideration of the prosperity of the wicked, the psalmist is despairing in frustration with God.  Yet he does not proclaim his feelings to the crowd, lest the generation be betrayed.  Crucial, crucial wisdom here.  Wrong emotions are a product of a broken spirit, a slowly healing spirit, in relationship with God but not yet made whole.  Expressing these emotions, offering them to the Lord is necessary- but the means by which we do so can be either healthy or damaging.  We must act with wisdom and discernment in how we share our failures and brokenness.

In my season of despair during my senior year at Furman, I shared my experience with many, many friends.  Often their words inspired hope in me, even if only the meager hope that this too would pass, eventually.  I expressed my feelings in confidence and in despair, in unsurety but in humility, hoping for hope, begging for peace- offering, for wisdom and critique, all I felt and experienced so deeply in that season.  My hands were open, begging for bread, begging for water.

And I wrote many, many blogs, or half blogs, in despair.  It helped me process my feelings; express them, know what I felt and (in my better moments) offer them to the Lord.  I never published these, and I probably never will.  I have a document on my computer full of blogs from those ‘dark nights of the soul’.  But to share them would not inspire faith in the Lord, mine nor yours, and would do no good.  It may feel theraputic, some vomit of emotions, some ‘harmless’ venting, but in truth it offers only the false relief of accusing God, standing boldly as the arbiter of truth and justice.  Their tone is accusatory, like Job, and angry.  They held no form of humility, no assumption of brokenness, no assumption of the goodness of God.  They stood as a middle finger in the curled fist of my emotion, railing at the one I sometimes felt had cheated me, ignored me, forgotten me.  They would betray the generation, cast away the ones who looked up to me.  To publish my feelings and doubts would not heal them, but give them finality, continuing my claim to authority.  To publish my doubt was to continue in doubt, because they offered no waiting, no trust, upon a Lord who may yet save.  Who did.

The root of these emotions was the same, in both situations.  In both I came before God.  He can handle me coming in humility or in pride.  He knows me, regardless.  He knows my heart, regardless.  At least in offering my rage to Him I allowed Him to whisper healing into it, softening me.  And when I come in humility He could comfort, often in silence, reminding me of His forespoken love, pre-demonstrated beauty.

Yet in one form I shared my brokenness with friends, and in one I did not.  Even in the middle of my anger, I somehow knew to honor God with my lips*.  Nearly everyone knew I was in pain, I was broken, I was hurting.  I shared in individually and corporately, over the microphone and the telephone and in person.  I was not hiding my brokenness: the tension of a faith that is not yet fulfilled, of a kingdom here and coming.  Yet I guarded my words, so as not to speak faith, to walk in the Spirit, even as I felt only doubt and faith.  Call it hypocrisy, and you may be almost accurate.  But more than that, it was choosing to limit my doubt to my emotions, trusting Him with my conversation.

And so as Moses brings his case before the Lord, God speaks.  He reminds Moses of His nature, and offers him a promise: He says, “I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.”

He promises that they will know, because He recognizes that, while they may have trusted Him just days before, their faith now shakes with the pressure of their subjective experience.  Still, He promises that they will know.  His people will have certainty.

Immediately afterwards, Moses shares what he has heard with the people.  Scripture says that they did not listen to him, ‘because of their broken spirit and their harsh slavery.’  Does this nullify God’s word?  No.  Did it put into danger their position as His firstborn?  No.  Was it right for them to feel this way?  Certainly not.  Yet God was not daunted by their doubt, nor by their outright rejection of His plan.  He knew.  He foreknew.  And yet He called, and promised that one day they too would know.  Know Him, and His heart towards them.  His plan for them, so good and soothing and sating.

In summary, God calls us, often into things we don’t understand.  At times, we may experience anger.  It is evidence of brokenness within us, yet ought not to lead us into condemnation but instead into His very presence as we offer our feelings to Him.  While to share our brokenness (in honest humility, with choice friends) is good, even necessary, we are to be careful how we express it, and in what ways and before whom, lest we increase our sin in our anger by speaking wrongly.  A good test is to watch the posture of our hearts.  Had my heart hands, would they be open, begging, or curled into fists?  In both cases, we are to bring our hearts before the Lord for healing, and to be transformed more into trust and faith and hope by His ever present, promised love, but usually it is only in the former, in the posture of humility, that it becomes appropriate to share our hearts with those to whom we desire to minister, and from whom we hope to glean encouragement.

*credit to scripture and the conviction of the Spirit on that one.