CAUTION FOR THE ANGRY!

CAUTION FOR THE ANGRY!

Prov 14:17

17 He that is soon angry dealeth foolishly: and a man of wicked devices is hated.

Prov 22:24-25

24 Make no friendship with an angry man; and with a furious man thou shalt not go:

25 Lest thou learn his ways, and get a snare to thy soul.

Prov 29:22

22 An angry man stirreth up strife, and a furious man aboundeth in transgression.

Please notice that all three of these are proverbs, short stand-alone truths told to sons by a wise father named Solomon! I wish parents would spend more time simply giving their children short stand-alone truths about seemingly simple things. They are not simple at all – but I have distracted myself… Anger is our topic and there is much in our world today to make us furious. Our government is corrupt in a way that just a short time ago would have been unthinkable. I am angry and furious. Solomon says I need to be careful.

I took a look at the “scholars” regarding some of these verses and sometimes the explanations are more confusing than the original verse, like this following one. “Whosoever comes into a near relation with a passionate, furious, man, easily accommodates himself to his manners, and, hurried forward by him and like him to outbreaks of anger, which does that which is not right before God, falls into ruinous complications.” (from Keil and Delitzsch Commentary.)

So, without benefit of the scholars, I must press ahead as if I were one myself. Associations with an angry man will cause you to be like him. There is no want of sin in uncontrolled anger and ill temper. Anger is little more than frustration over circumstances you can’t control. Submission to the sovereignty of God would cure this but the angry man is not subject to God’s choices and is not in the mood to consider that God may have a higher purpose in the adversity that is making him angry.

An angry man is given to fury like an unruly child who breaks his favorite toy and then cries because it is broken. Anger produces unintelligent as well as uncontrolled actions. This is not to say that we must never be angry.

Even Jesus was angry at the money changers and whipped them from His Father’s Temple. But he acted in a controlled and deliberate way – preaching all the way! He said, my house shall be a house of prayer but you have made it a den of thieves. This was righteous indignation under control.

James 3:17-18

17 But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy.

18 And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace of them that make peace.

Dear Lord, help me to consider that you may – and probably do – have a higher purpose for the things that provoke me. Help me to find peace in the knowledge that YOU are ultimately in control and that nothing can frustrate your purposes. Be my guide and my comfort today. AMEN