"Righteous" Anger

James 4 offers a helpful guideline when it comes to discerning what anger is sinful: “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?” Essentially, what do you want, and is it in line with what God wants?

It is possible to be angry and not sin (Num. 22:22, Eph. 4:26), although I believe it is less common than we think. Sin is not only what we do but who we are (Jer. 13:23) and is so engrained in our being that it often contaminates our otherwise righteous anger.

Most importantly, we need to pursue God and seek to understand His view of anger. The better we understand God’s holiness—the more we draw near to Him—the more clearly we see both the sin in ourselves and what righteous anger looks like. Consider Isaiah: “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Is. 6:5). What follows are sixty more chapters of God’s anger and Isaiah’s frustration with the sin of Judah, mingled with a love for the people and a desire for them to repent and return to the faithfulness and glory of God.

Righteous, sinless anger comes from a closeness and familiarity with the person and character of God. The prophets and even Jesus himself experienced anger (John 2:13-22). God experiences anger (Deut. 32:16, Jud. 2:20), but He continues to be a “compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Ex. 34:6). He does not want to get angry, but He is just and angered by injustice, as we should be.

Anger is not wholly bad. It motivates us to do good and seek a solution to the problems in our world. The point is, what does your anger cause you to do? Does it lead you to selfish behavior or selfless behavior?

Ephesians warns, “In your anger do not sin” (4:26). It is possible to be angry and not sin, just as God is angered by injustice, violence, and evil, but if even He is slow to anger, what makes us think we can use this excuse to mask our own selfishness? Much of the time our anger is not directed at a specific wrong but a specific person.

When it comes to anger, we first must deal with any self-deception or self-justification of wrong-doing. The majority of Scripture that addresses our anger already assumes it is unrighteous: “The anger of man does not produce the righteousness that God desires” (Jas. 1:20). Even if our anger is understandable, that does not mean it is right. As we pursue God, our goal should not be to act out of “righteous” anger but walk in the footsteps of Christ, slow to anger and abounding in love.