Today we talked about being angry with God and the fact that anger with God can lead one of two directions. Either we try to find a way out of the disappointment and pain of anger and stifle our emotions until we become apathetic towards God. Or we use the passion of anger to engage even more fully with God and stay engaged with Him until he shows himself to be who he is – the God of all blessing.
Anger as a fork in the road can be seen not only in 2 Samuel 6, but even more vividly in Jonah 4. The chapter begins with Jonah expressing his anger with the Lord at what God was doing in Nineveh. God replies to Jonah, “Have you any right to be angry?” Interestingly, God does not punish Jonah for his anger. Instead he tries to use Jonah’s anger to engage with him. He causes a vine to grow over Jonah, kills the vine and blazes down heat on Jonah’s head. Again God asks Jonah, “Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?” Jonah brazenly replies, “I do. I am angry enough to die.” Again, God does not strike Jonah dead for his anger but uses it to engage him by saying, “You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about this great city?”
And that’s it. Those are the closing verses of the book of Jonah. It is where our account of the story ends. God was trying to use Jonah’s anger to open his eyes to see that what Jonah viewed as disappointment was actually a huge blessing. If Jonah could see that, he would have worshipped God. But did he? Or did Jonah’s anger cause him to disengage from God so that he didn’t have to deal with a God who didn’t do every thing the way that Jonah wanted done? We don’t know. The text never says.
Instead the Bible leaves the question hanging and by doing so poses a question for each of us: What will we do with our anger with God when he does not do things the way we want them done? Will we allow our anger to push us away from God until we sink into a state of apathy and resistance towards God? Or will we continue to engage with God until we end up worshipping him as passionately as we were angry with him?
Blessings,
Jim