Is God Angry?

What goes through your mind, your heart, your gut when you read in scripture that God is angry? There are many different reactions to this. Two big ones that can come up are 1) I feel uneasy that God is an angry God because that doesn’t feel safe and it doesn’t sound a lot like the loving God I want to believe in or 2) I sure hope God is angry because I’ve faced such evil and violence and if God isn’t upset about that then I don’t know if I can trust God to care for me.

In our passage today, both love and anger show up. How do those two interact?

“Even now,” declares the Lord.
   “return to me with all your heart,
   with fasting and weeping and mourning.”
Rend your heart
   and not your garments.
Return to the Lord your God,
   for he is gracious and compassionate,
   slow to anger and abounding in love,
   and he relents from sending calamity. - Joel 2:12-13

As we heard on Sunday, note the difference that God is SLOW to anger but ABOUNDING in love. Nowhere in scripture does it say that God longs to be angry… but over and over again it says that God longs to show forgiveness and longs to show love.

So perhaps the anger is important - not as an attribute of God, but as a response to evil and violence. It’s never shown to be an attribute: God is never described as having the character trait of anger. However, God often shows anger at the ways we mistreat each other and the earth. On the other hand, God is often described as having the character trait of love, so much so that 1 John 4:13 says that “God is love.”

Take a few moments and reflect on your relationship to God’s anger. Where has it been helpful in your life? Hurtful? As you think about love enduring and anger passing, what is coming up for you?