The redeeming power of your anger – 1

Who is this who comes from Edom, With dyed garments from Bozrah, This One who is glorious in His apparel,

Travelling in the greatness of His strength? -”I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.”

Why is Your apparel red, And Your garments like one who treads in the winepress?

“I have trodden the winepress alone, And from the peoples no one was with Me. For I have trodden them in My anger, And trampled them in My fury; Their blood is sprinkled upon My garments, And I have stained all My robes. For the day of vengeance is in My heart, And the year of My redeemed has come. I looked, but there was no one to help, And I wondered That there was no one to uphold; Therefore My own arm brought salvation for Me; And My own fury, it sustained Me.

I have trodden down the peoples in My anger, Made them drunk in My fury, And brought down their strength to the earth.”

Isaiah 63:1  (NKJV)

 

Do not hasten in your spirit to be angry, For anger rests in the bosom of fools. Ecclesiastes. 7:9 (NKJV)

Read the above quotations from the Holy Bible very carefully.

Looking at the two quotations, would it be safe then to conclude, even at the risk of high-level blasphemy, that God is a fool? Otherwise why should He be angry? To properly understand the context in which to situate the juxtaposed scriptures, it would be proper to look at a definition of anger and the context of its operation.

What is anger? It can be defined as a strong feeling of annoyance, irritation, fury, rage, resentment, hostility, vexation or grievance. There is a two-edged dimension to anger.

The first is destructive anger. This type of anger is ego-driven and simply seeks to demonstrate rage against or eliminate the source of provocation just to uphold a personal opinion or position. Any opposition to its intent or expression is regarded as a threat that must be vehemently resisted or dealt with. The goal is personal pleasure at the expense of another.

Destructive anger is driven purely by an elephant-size ego whose gargantuan propensity blinds it from seeing issues outside its own dysfunctional prism.  In full expression, it sees all dissent as disloyalty and every opinion contrary to the one it espouses as rebellion. To the one who is driven by this type of anger, it is “my way or the highway”! When it predominates in any organization, it is guaranteed to breed distrust and disdain of leadership as well as rancorous interpersonal relationships in the communal ethos. Interestingly, it is also the very ground in which sycophancy festers and is given full vent! And when such self-seeking manifestation drives a relationship, it can only produce resentment, rebellion, resistance and more anger.

We see dimensions of this type of anger around us every day. It is expressed in our frustrations with chaotic traffic, sometimes with venomous vehemence. We find it expressed when a corporate policy falls short of our expectations or we dislike a government policy. We complain, throw tantrums but have no answers to the dilemma and have no intention of proffering any! So we simply end up as armchair critics, telling everyone who cares to listen how bad things are and who is responsible for what. Problem is, caught in the maze of our emotions and negative energy, we have neither the vision nor the template for producing a better reality even at our own little end.

When provoked or offended, anyone manifesting  this anger seeks vengeance not closure. He seeks to gloat in the fact that he is able to see the agent provocateur hurt or get a just recompense for daring to offend him. Whenever you see yourself thinking “It serves him right” and actually feel good about it when something bad happens to someone who may have offended you, you are already operating in that dangerous terrain. When destructive anger rules in a marriage, such a marriage is headed for the rocks.

However, no matter how vehemently it is expressed, progress will never happen with destructive anger. Yet without anger, there can be no progress.

 

So what type of anger brings progress?

Constructive anger begins with the vision of a better alternative, a desire to change a status quo that contests with a desired ideal. Redemptive in its manifestation and goal, it begins with a stirring within, an inspiration that births a vision that is bigger than the dreamer. It looks at what is, along with its debilitating limitations to achievement or thought. Then it projects into an inspired ideal that holds greater promise of advantage to the collective. The chasm between the two divides is what redemptive anger seeks to bridge.

However, it begins with the recognition that to attain that ideal, some things in the present must be confronted, challenged, dismantled or destroyed. But it is instructive to note that redemptive anger is not bothered about what it has to dismantle as it is with what it desires to build as a replacement. So it is not content with merely throwing tantrums without lifting a finger to effect the necessary change or move towards it.

At the onset of the commissioning of the prophet, God’s instruction to Jeremiah was to pull down, root out, destroy, and thereafter to plant and to build. The implication of this is that before the desirable structures can be built, the current ones that constitute a hindrance must first be dismantled. Great leaders understand the salient truism that systems and structures must serve vision. Where the structure become strictures to the vision they were created to serve, it is time to dismantle them! No structure must be cast in stone.

Anger is one of God’s redemptive features. From the biblical account of creation in the first book of Genesis, we can deduce that God’s anger at chaos challenged the creative spirit in Him and He didn’t stop until He did away with the chaos by creating order and structure that still sustains the world till date.

His anger with sin and the attendant consequences made Him send Jesus Christ to the world to deal with the problem once and for all in view of the obvious inadequacy of the continuous sacrifice of animals. Yes, the salvation of man, according to the Bible, was not just a product of love but anger. But it is anger expressed in the language of love.

This is what makes anger redemptive. It is a love-inspired passion for an ideal that makes the contemporary alternative or status quo unacceptable.

Jesus’ life and ministry were driven by that holy anger – a righteous indignation that was uncomfortable with whatever made men live below God’s design and desire for them – tradition, religion, sickness, sin, men’s opinion, and fear.

This was the basis of His regular face-offs with the Pharisees, Sadducees and other enslaving religious systems of His day…continued

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!