Having been a Christian for thirteen years, I’ve encountered God on every level of emotion/feeling. I’ve gone through the waves of being happy, sad, guilty, shameful, loving, joyful, complete, and lost; all of which contribute to where and how I got to who I am today. While I experienced all of these emotions, God in turn felt an array of emotions in my rollercoaster relationship with Him; He exemplified mercy, grace, pain, hurt, sadness, and anger.
That last word: anger, it doesn’t escape me. In all the years of me having a relationship with God, I never stopped to think about that specific emotion: anger. Never had I ever sat down to actually think about this feeling and connect it with God. We’re taught that in times of tribulation, God is a forgiving gracious and merciful God- that no matter what we do or how low we reach to the bottom of our lives, God exemplifies love. But what we’re forgetting is the other end of the feeling, anger. God. Gets. Angry. He has every right to, right? Right. He’s God. We of all people should know what it’s like to be angry, so why can’t we pair the feeling of anger with God? Recently, I came to the realization that God does in fact get angry. Whenever I don’t have a continuous relationship with Him or whenever I sin, God is angry with me. You may have come to this conclusion long ago, but I just now made it that God can and is and will actually get angry at me.
Maybe I had encountered and experienced this emotion with God, but I immediately masked it with the feeling of forgiveness and grace. I’ve only thought about the countless times that God will immediately forgive me and not forsake me. I only think about His never ending mercy; not His anger. This doesn’t mean that I hadn’t thought about being punished by God before, because He is a justifying God, but I never made the connection of the emotion He feels before he shows grace. I figured, yeah, He was upset, but not actually angry.
Things of this world are not what God intended for us. Ever since The Fall, there have been laws that have been broken, lies that have been told, injustices executed, sexual immorality, adultery, murder—the list goes on and on. The things of this world that God did not intend for us have made Him angry. Angry that these even exist. Angry that we have turned our backs on Him. Angry that while His Son suffered the consequence for our sin now, He paid the price long before we even existed. Angry that we knowingly disobey Him. God. Gets. Angry.
Angry God, is all I could think of. Imagining God of the universe, angry at me. The only visual I could come up with was the time when Jesus entered His church and found people selling merchandise. The one place where His people were together to worship and learn about Him, there had been the thing God did not intend for this world for us. “Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.” Matthew 21:12 That is how I envision God. That is what I see when I see sin. I see a God so fed up with the life that He did not intend for us, yet we intended it for ourselves regardless of the Creator who made us.
In order to know God, we need to accept every aspect of emotion He feels. We cannot simply accept that God is all merciful, all powerful, and all loving; no. He is a just God. He can be an angry God. He can be a hurt God, stricken with pain from the people who say they love and adore Him but with the same hand commit treason against Him. God is gracious, God is merciful, God is loving, and God is forgiving. But God is not solely these things. God is passionate about us and will never leave; His love is unconditional and that is why He can be an Angry God.
