Thesis 87 We must be slow to become angry.
“Judge not” is surely that text in all of Scripture that is most misunderstood outside the kingdom. Coming in second or third, at least among believers is Paul’s admonition to the church at Ephesus, “Be angry but do not sin” (Ephesians 4:26).One of the sound conclusions we read from this text is that it is possible to be angry and not sin. One of the utterly misguided conclusions we may reach is that it is impossible to sin in anger. When the gentle try to correct the hot-tempered the hot tempered race to Ephesians to justify their anger.
There’s one very good reason we can know that it’s not always wrong to be angry- because God is angry. He is angry with the wicked every day (Psalm 7:11). We not only may be angry there are circumstances when we should be angry. The fact that every day more than 2000 babies are killed in this country alone, and we go days without end not even thinking about it, let alone being angry about it is a vice, not a virtue. Be angry.
We get into trouble when we use our anger to excuse our sin, when we let our anger take control, when we are driven by our emotions. The solution isn’t to seek out better emotions to be driven by, but to master our emotions. Whether we are flying off the handle over something insignificant or floating on clouds because the object of our affections noticed us, we make ourselves and others the victims of our lack of emotional self-control.
James’ admonition that we be slow to anger helps us understand the importance of lot letting anger become master over us. To be slow to be angry means to be deliberate. We are slow to anger when we hold off on reaching conclusions when we have insufficient information. Consider the altar that the two and a half tribes on the eastern side of the Jordan built. The rest of Israel came to make war against their erring brothers, only to learn that they weren’t setting up an alternative place to worship, but a memorial to remind the western tribes that they were united together. The anger came fast, but not so fast that tragedy wasn’t averted.
Reformation requires balance. Stay too broad, or to put it another way, be insufficiently angry with the status quo and the status quo will not move. Get too narrow, however, or to put it another way, be quick to anger and you will create disintegration rather than reformation. We seek Reformation because we long to see the church, and ourselves, better reflect our Husband. We are angry at ourselves for our sins and failures. But we rejoice that we are indeed being washed. Because we know He is holy, we are angry that we are not. We are angry because things are not as they should be. Because we know He is sovereign, we are at peace, knowing that things not being as they should be is how things should be.
It’s hard to say, for at least three reasons. First, most of us are not very good at science. I know some are, but I’m not one of them. When competing doctors start talking about viral loads, DNA and RNA I haven’t the least bit of personal competence to be able to judge the merits of the arguments. While there are millions if not billions who know more than I do there are many in the same boat with me. We are dealing with a profoundly complicated issue, with experts on different sides.
Second, we’re not very good at math either. Some of us struggle with some of the most basic math concepts. Every time I see a report that says .02 percent of the vaccinated experienced this or that I wonder how many people unknowingly read that number as 2 out of every hundred, when it’s actually 1 out of every 5,000. The gap between those two numbers is surely big enough to influence how we look at things. Yet many of us can’t tell the difference. In fact, many of us are binary in our thinking. I wonder how many lottery ticket buyers think that because they will either win or lose that such means they have a 50/50 chance. Once upon a time people saw education not as a means to getting a job, but as means to help people not get the wool pulled over their eyes, to think for themselves.
Still under the heading of lousy math, we all tend to be anecdotal thinkers, especially when we live in the social media neighborhood of the world wide web. That is, when our circle of friends includes people harmed by the vaccine, it pushes us in one direction. When our circle includes people who were unvaccinated and got sick, we think another way.
Third, and most important, COVID and politics have been joined at the hip from the beginning. When our information is coming to us from politicians or those working for them, we have every reason to doubt what they say. You know how you can tell if a politician is lying? His lips are moving. It matters little which side of the aisle it comes from. Politicians always have an angle and helping us know the truth is never it.
Still under the heading of lying politicians, we also face the challenge of over-confidence among the elite. We have been told we must “follow the science.” When the science does an about face we’re supposed to forget the old science and follow the new. In the meantime, the old settled science is plunged into the memory hole. “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.”
What we should believe then is that we don’t really much know what to believe. We ought not to assume that the Democrat is always wrong the Republican always right, or vice versa. What we should do is fight against the state’s desire to enslave our thinking in preparation of enslaving our doing. We try, as much as is possible, to live in peace and quietness with all men. We obey God, no matter the cost. We rest in Him, knowing the cost He paid for us. And we rejoice to know that we have a sure and certain word in the Bible. Do not fear. Do not rage against the machine. Rest in Him.
Have you ever wondered, perhaps when reading through John Calvin’s Institutes or the Westminster Confession of Faith, why God gave us His Word in such a confusing and disjointed way? I mean, shouldn’t the book of Genesis be about the doctrine of revelation rather than being about the creation of the world, the fall of man, and the lives of the patriarchs? How can we read God’s Word until we have carefully articulated a doctrine of revelation? And wouldn’t it be more sensible if Moses and the Holy Spirit had explained to us theology proper, the doctrine of God, before saying, “In the beginning God …” so that we would know of whom the words spoke? At least the last book in our Bibles deals with last things, but I don’t think anyone would ever describe the book of Revelation as straightforward prose, something eminently easy to understand.
When I was in seminary, I had an outstanding professor of systematic theology. He was no atomist, a person who comes to the Word of God and looks at each passage as if it were in a vacuum, as if there were no relation between this text and that, as if we can say the Bible here teaches x and there teaches non-x, and we’ll believe both if we’re pious enough. He rightly defended the labor of systematics as an attempt to rightly understand the Word of God in its context. He showed that the God we worship is a God of order. His Word coheres; it is one Word. But it is one Word that is given to us in historical narratives, wisdom literature, and prophetic discourses, both more apocalyptic and less. There are also didactic portions, but the Bible isn’t a systematics text. And if we preach as if it were, we do a disservice to the Word, and to preaching.
One of the dangers of treating the Bible as a mere sourcebook of quotes to corroborate our systematic theology is that such makes it easier for us to ride our hobby horses. We Reformed folk, of course, are rather adept at talking about election. And the Bible talks about election in many places. But the Bible isn’t only about election. One of the advantages of preaching exegetically, of refusing to pick out a theme and then go to the Bible, is that it allows the Bible to balance our themes. If we follow God’s story, we are less likely to simply repreach our favorite abstractions from God’s Word.
The same principle also works in reverse. Not only do we preachers like to talk about what we like to talk about, we don’t like to talk about what we don’t like to talk about. Some of us aren’t so well-known for our gifts in mercy ministry. We aren’t known the world around for preaching faithfully and powerfully on the “one-another” passages of the Bible. And so it would be rather easy for us to exacerbate our weaknesses by not preaching on them—if we are free to flit here and there, from one passage on election to another, in our preaching.
When we take the simple precaution of preaching through books of the Bible (understanding also that we probably have missed the point if we spend decade after decade preaching exclusively through Paul’s epistles), we can alleviate the temptation to stay inside our own comfort zone, and that of the sheep entrusted to our care. When we treat the Word as God’s story we are less likely to seek our own glory.
One of the great dangers that comes of stripping words of their meaning is the constant need to up their intensity to try to get the work done. That is, if we embrace the idea that words have no meaning, that language is nothing more than a power play, an attempt to manipulate others into doing as we wish, we must use increasingly emotive language. When every disagreement can be charactered as a “World War” it’s tough to give people a sense of the seriousness of well, the two World Wars.
Consider the language used by those who stand opposed to the penal, substitutionary atonement of Jesus. Those three words, penal, substitutionary and atonement are so precise and uncommon that they carry little emotional freight. Those who oppose them, are not content to say, “We disagree with the doctrine of the penal, substitutional atonement of Jesus.” Nope, they, whether they are professing Christians of a less than orthodox nature or angry atheists, they call the biblical concept, “Cosmic child abuse.” Ouch.
These folks seem to think it somehow beneath the gentle dignity of the Father to pour out His wrath on the Son. They seem to think that a volunteer substitute must have volunteered because of the power differential. They object that it is not fair for Jesus to suffer in our place. They are wrong twice, and right once. The wrath of God is not something He is ashamed of. Neither should we be. His wrath is just, true, holy, sound, glorious, beautiful, something He desires to make known (see Romans 9 if you dare.) The Son is equal in power and glory with the Father and the Spirit, and volunteered freely in the covenant of redemption to take on flesh and in that flesh to suffer the wrath of the Father.
They are quite right in noting that this is not in the least bit fair. Fair would look altogether different. The Son would not take on flesh, veiling His glory. The Son would not suffer, for He, in Himself is only innocent. We, on the other hand, every mother’s son of us, would suffer the Father’s wrath, forever, justly so. That’s fair. What happened wasn’t fair, but gracious.
Jesus was gracious to warn the Pharisees, when they posited their theory that He exorcised demons by the power of the devil, that they were perilously close to committing the unforgivable sin. I’m certainly not Jesus. I can’t help, however, but think this “cosmic child abuse” rhetoric lives in the same neighborhood as “by the power of Beelzebub.” It is ascribing to the Father the spirit of a child beater. It is ascribing to our Redeemer the cowed spirit of a broken child. It is calling ugly that which is beautiful, calling evil that which is good.
Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
We have turned, every one, to his own way;
And the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
He was oppressed and He was afflicted,
Yet He opened not His mouth;
He was led as a lamb to the slaughter,
And as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
So He opened not His mouth.
He was taken from prison and from judgment,
And who will declare His generation?
For He was cut off from the land of the living;
For the transgressions of My people He was stricken.
And they made His grave with the wicked—
But with the rich at His death,
Because He had done no violence,
Nor was any deceit in His mouth.
Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; (Isaiah 53:4-10).
If you were to explore the Old Testament seeking out what sin God’s people struggled with the most you might be surprised by what you find. We tend to focus on various sins of the flesh in our concerns about ourselves. And to be sure, our fathers in the faith fought those battles. But the most common problem was idolatry. We tend to think, because we are moderns not given to bowing down before statues, that we have that sin pretty well licked. The devil, after all, is more crafty than any beasts of the field.
A closer look at Israel’s idolatry reveals that most of the time it was more subtle than what we imagine. Your typical Israelite didn’t go to bed saying his prayers to Adonai, wake up the next morning and blithely transfer his allegiance to Baal. Rather the idolatry took the form of syncretism, the blending together the worship of the living God and the worship of the gods of the broader culture. That is precisely our problem.
Looking at the problem ideologically, it seems our propensity is to embrace our own confession, while also embracing the highest creed of the broader culture- the idea that there is no true truth, only true for me and true for you, epistemological relativism. Twenty years ago a poll was taken that demonstrated that more than half of all professing evangelicals agree with this statement- “There is no such thing as objective truth.” Strange I know, given that the defining quality of an evangelical is the conviction that the evangel, the good news of Jesus Christ is objectively true. But it should not surprise us- syncretism makes for strange bedfellows.
We embrace that ideological idol, however, because of the more practical idol we embrace- the god of personal peace and affluence. It was Francis Schaeffer who coined this term to describe the god of our age. We evangelicals share in our love for this idol, seeing the function and purpose of our lives as its pursuit. Living in a relativistic age, we find our peace is challenged if we challenge the relativistic creed. Believing relativism will at least give us leeway to hold on to our truth, if we confess it is merely our truth, and not the truth, we go along to get along.
What we think sets us apart from the world is that they are pursuing the god of personal peace and affluence, and we are pursuing the god of personal peace and affluence, is that we make our pursuit while at least tipping our hat at God’s law. We want, we hunger for the idol, but at least we’d never do this, or refuse to do that, to get her. We, after all, have standards. Relativistic standards, to be sure, but at least they are our standards.
Joshua enjoined us to choose this day whom we would serve, to put away the gods of our fathers. Gideon tore down the high places. Elijah told us to no longer sway between two opinions. May He give us the grace, the strength, the courage to walk the via dolorosa, to take up our cross and follow the One who alone has the words of eternal life.
