God is an Angry God?
Go isn't who they taught he was
Psalm 103:8:
“The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.”
The best way to know God is to meet him for yourself. The world has a funny way of distorting and twisting the image of God. Either presenting him as tyrannical, distant and disconnected from humanity or soft, permissive and lenient in regards to sin.
The Bible makes it very clear that God can feel and express the emotion of anger. This emotion is often referenced or depicted as His wrath. Throughout Scripture, we see God’s anger expressed as a response to violations of His character and the presence of wickedness or sin among the people He loves. God does not want to see us harmed or destroyed by the effects of sin in our lives. If anything, He is grieved by it. His anger is a response to wickedness, not a desire to punish for punishment’s sake.
Most notably, we see His anger manifested in the Old Testament, where child sacrifice, sexual immorality, and witchcraft were practiced by various nations in Canaan. At a certain point, God was so angry that He instructed Israel to destroy them.
Deuteronomy 20:16–18 (NIV):
16 However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.
17 Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you.
18 Otherwise, they will teach you to follow all the detestable things they do in worshiping their gods, and you will sin against the Lord your God.
He is a just God, and even His anger is holy. It is impossible for God to sin. The book of James confirms that His anger stems from a place of righteousness, unlike human anger, which does not produce the righteousness God desires.
James 1:19–20:
‘‘My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.’’
God is infinitely good, so even when He gets angry, the outcome is always good and aligned with His perfect love and will. Even his discipline is a byproduct of his unfailing love. Can you imagine that even in the midst of such immorality, God is still slow to anger? Even then, He was patient with those nations. How much more has He been patient with me and with you?
God is not an angry God. Though He can become angry, He is not defined by His anger. We cannot equate His anger with our human experience of it. God is not sitting around waiting for you to mess up so He can punish you. He is patient with us, even in our sin, because He does not want anyone to perish. We see this mercy clearly displayed through the death of Jesus.
2 Peter 3:9:
‘‘The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.’’
There is nothing you can do to earn His love, and there is no mistake you could make that will take it away. A lot of us learnt about God through our parents, culture, media and religious leaders. In all honesty, many of them didn’t give him a great introduction. Through the lens of rigorous religion, cultural duty and societal expectation, they often unknowingly missed the mark. Therfore, some of us were introduced to an ‘‘angry God’’ and never understood the true context behind the expression of God’s anger in the bible. We never understood that, though there’s judgment, there’s also grace and mercy. People built they’re faith based on a fear of going to hell. God doesn’t want to send us to hell, it was never even meant for us. The fact that there are souls perishing actually breaks his heart.
When you sin, it is easy to feel like God is angry with you, so you hide and run away in fear. Yes, God hates sin and does not want you to participate in it, but in that moment, He simply wants you to repent and return to Him, not to sit and dwell in your mistake.
Joel 2:13:
"Rend your heart and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
for he is gracious and compassionate’’
Tearing garments was associated with grief, sorrow, loss and other intense emotions. God is asking them to rend their hearts and not their garments. To rend something means to break it or tear it in two. At this particular time God was not concerned with this outward display of tearing but rathered wanted it to come from the heart. He wanted them to pour out their hearts and demonstrate inward repentance and a need for forigiveness. In the same way he wants you to truly repent and be honest with him. Sometimes we get so caught up in the tears and shame after sinning, when God is actually focused on our heart posture and whether or not it’s truly changed.
Still, we are instructed not to take advantage of His grace and to understand that our sins grieve the Holy Spirit.
We live a life of repentance, knowing that God is slow to anger and abounding in love. Being slow to anger does not mean He never gets angry. It means He is patient.