I can’t recommend everything in the heist movie of course, but in Ocean’s 11 Danny Ocean shows up unexpectedly to his ex-wife and in their conversation she says, “You know what your problem is?” And he replies, “I only have one?”

If I only had one problem it would be anger. It developed, I wouldn’t say “matured,” in my early 20s. Not that I was never angry before that, but my dad was angry enough for the whole family and I mostly wanted to avoid the fallout of his fury. But when I started living away from home I continued the family business, and really started getting good and mad.

Mo has never been blind to it, and she has certainly born the brunt of it. I probably didn’t really reckon with it until Calvin was about 18 months old and such an angry tiny tyrant. He was mad about everything, and that made me more mad. We stopped taking him out for a while because Mo or I would end up in the van with his screaming self while everyone else finished their fun/food.

Then I read a short blog post about adversarial fathers teaching their sons how to respond. It finally hit me, by God’s grace, that I was totally showing Cal how to respond to things he didn’t like. My childish temper tantrums were the problem, and I didn’t even have the excuse of being a child. I repented, I kept repenting, and I was also up close to some other people in my life that weren’t repenting, and started to get a clearer picture of the destruction that anger, both the loud and quiet-seething kinds, causes.

Proverbs has plain teaching about anger. But there is a proverb in Ecclesiastes worth starting with:

Be not quick in your spirit to become angry,
for anger lodges in the heart of fools.
(Ecclesiastes 7:9 ESV)

The KJV has it, “anger resteth in the bosom of fools.” (Contrast it with wisdom resting in the heart of a man of understanding that makes itself known in the midst of fools, Proverbs 14:33).

In English the word anger means “a strong feeling of annoyance and displeasure, or hostility.” Angry men often want to plead the dictionary and claim that they are just “irritated” or “frustrated” but not angry. And maybe they can hide in some shades of meaning. But arguing about how you’re not angry is like trying to convince someone to focus on the smell of the air freshener in the porta-potty.

Anger is almost always a fool’s affection. It is a feeling with physical effect, red cheeks and loud mouth and dead eyes (see “angry looks” in Proverbs 25:33). The thing I hope to argue is that the antidote to anger is not no feelings, but getting our feelings to submit to what is true, right, and real.

To say that an angry man is a fool means he isn’t wise. And what keeps a man a stranger to wisdom? He lacks the fear of the Lord.

The Reality of Values

I’ve been thinking about the objective nature of the world for a few months. It started as I was brainstorming ideas for Rhetoric class, and how Rhetoric often hovers around the discussion of beauty but truth and goodness ride the rails of objective standards. Beauty often floats in the wind of subjectivism. Beauty may be varied, but it’s not dependent on the beholder, or listener. There are real things that make it attractive, appealing, smelling good.

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis is a sustained screed against the skull and crossbones of subjectivism. It’s a prophetic word against the meaninglessness that follows when there is nothing external, transcendent for us to hold, measure, enjoy, or submit to. When we live outside the reality of values all that is left is want, and when wants are not met, we get angry.

A wise man fears the Lord. That includes revering His value and authority, yes. And fearing the Lord means receiving what He gives. It turns out that He is quite generous, a giver of good gifts, including wife (Proverbs 19:14), grandchildren (Proverbs 17:6), wealth (Proverbs 8:18), and more. He also gives the roll of the dice (Proverbs 16:33), the expected broken walls of laziness (Proverbs 24:30-34), and the relationship ruin of gossipy whispers (Proverbs 16:28). A wise man lives according to reality. He does not resist reality, and try to make up his own.

A goal of instruction is to give knowledge and understanding about how things work in the Lord’s world. Wisdom is skillful application of that knowledge, but it is also skillful submission.

This is why wisdom is also hating evil and pride and perverted speech (Proverbs 8:13), a strong negative affection because evil deserves to be hated. Wisdom laughs at the chronic know-it-alls who are sure the crash won’t come to them until it does (Proverbs 1:26). That’s how God made the world to work; depend on it. A wise man wants his heart to match the reality of values. Getting wisdom is the process of getting a better fit between our affections and the values, matching and ordering our loves to what is lovely. Love this not that, love this more than that.

An angry person is building sand castles on the wing of a plane at 30,000 feet going 700 mph and writing negative reviews of the pilot. An angry man thinks he knows better how things should work, and he forgets or denies or attacks reality as given by the Lord. He rages about how many cars on on the road. Get gets dyspepsia about when the food gets put on the table. The tone of voice in the kids’s “Yes, sir” makes him testy. At heart the angry man wants reality to bend to him. What a fool.

Adult Fit Throwing

One thing I noticed while while gleaning the field of Proverbs for wisdom about anger is not just how many times anger is mentioned (12 by word count), but how many of those mentions are part of a phrase about “whoever is slow to anger.” Slow is not “quick to become angry” as in Ecclesiastes 7:9.

Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding,
but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly.
(Proverbs 14:29 ESV)

This is true in terms of providence, and it is especially true in interactions with persons. When they come to complain at you or criticize you, consider:

Good sense makes one slow to anger,
and it is his glory to overlook an offense.
(Proverbs 19:11 ESV)

When criticized, fairly or not, when mocked, in fun or not, show glory by not getting angry. You hold onto reality. If the comments are false, why get mad? They won’t stick. If they are true, then why deny it? Either way it should take more than a comment to knock your joy train off the tracks. Whether face to face, or on Facebook, getting angry shows who the fool is even if you are technically right.

This makes you a non-starter; you are an empty box of matches.

A hot-tempered man stirs up strife,
but he who is slow to anger quiets contention.
(Proverbs 15:18 ESV)

A man of wrath stirs up strife,
and one given to anger causes
much transgression.
(Proverbs 29:22 ESV)

Neighborhoods (Democratic cities) and institutions and households and generations are set on fire. Anger leads to other sins: slander to make someone else look bad rather than yourself, and laziness to avoid taking responsibility for your problems.

When we get angry, we are not only self-referential, we are self-reverential. When we communicate that anger, we want others to fear us. We take a throne that does not belong to us. We’re demanding the glory without actually exhibiting it. Fast to adult fit throwing makes us unworthy, and makes us vulnerable.

Walls Like Jericho

I am indebted to a sermon by Doug Wilson on the subject of self-control, in which he targets anger rather than lust or gluttony or laziness. He compares the angry man to one who is pushed around by circumstances, his buttons are big and accessible and have a sensitive trigger. He is like a man whose walls are broken down.

A man without self-control
is like a city broken into
and left without walls.
(Proverbs 25:28 ESV)

Wilson says “you should want walls like Babylon had, where four chariots could drive abreast around the top of them. Now that’s a wall.” Where does that self-control come from? It comes from the stability and strength of living according to reality as given by God.

The angry man is defenseless, both because his anger doesn’t have basis in reality and because it leaves him open to further attack. He has walls like Jericho after the trumpets played.

Angry Little Impotents

The way of the modern world deceives us in many ways. If we don’t use technology as a tool that helps us match reality, but employ tech to manipulate all our annoyances out of the way, we learn habits of impatience, habits of blame rather than responsibility. A farmer would be an obvious fool for getting angry at a seed for sprouting too slowly (though he may direct anger toward God’s choice of weather). We become angry little impotents.

Which is the same thing as making us little devils. Satan wasn’t willing to submit in his God-given lane. He thought of himself too highly and lost it all. He is still a fool resisting the reality of values.

“Know this, my beloved brothers: let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (Jams 1:19-20). Take a step back, take a breath. Your life is bigger than the situation. Your life is bigger than creation. You are an eternal creature among other eternal creatures. This makes something serious in the situation, but you’re focused in too far. The most serious thing is for you to fear the Lord. Imagine you could look in at what’s happening from 100 windows rather than your little personal peephole.

A wise person isn’t seeking that isn’t there, a wise person is seeing better what’s there. He is better at seeing within the God-given constraints. It’s not that he doesn’t see problems, he sees them in context. The world of the Lord is a cosmos, with coherence and order, versus the algorithms of anger on timelines that are almost always out of context.

Thanks Against Anger

You cannot flex your bi-cep and triceps at the same time. Both of those muscle groups are useful, unlike what I’m about to compare. But anger and thanks do not engage together. You’d think some of us are reading 1 Thessalonians 5:18 as “be angry in all circumstances.” Or Ephesians 5:20, “being angry always and for everything.” Instead, give thanks to the Lord. This isn’t stoicism—suppressing feelings, or sophistry—making fallacious arguments to our feelings. It’s fearing the Lord as Lord.

What about righteous anger? I think it is an appropriate category, and also one that gets claimed more than it should. There is righteous anger that Jesus showed toward religious people who were looking to accuse Him for healing on the Sabbath (Mark 3:5). In wisdom, fearing the Lord and hating evil, and perhaps strong feelings of displeasure, even antagonism against the evil is appropriate (see also Ephesians 4:26).

Anger dwells in the bosom of fools. Your sex life will not be better with more anger. Your kids will not be more well-adjusted because they survived the gauntlet of your anger. Your neighbors won’t see your good anger and glorify God on the day of visitation. Anger is a destructive folly, and a defenseless one while resisting reality. It exposes you as the fool, opens you up to further criticism.

Angry men are defensive men not because there is something worth protecting but because of desperation to make it appear that there is something worth defending. Losing one’s temper is the same thing as unveiling one’s ego. Emotional regulation is arrogance regulation.

Conclusion

When we are slow to anger we are ready for the right kind of fight:

Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty,
and he who rules his spirit than he
who takes a city.
(Proverbs 16:32 ESV)

I am thankful to my friends who have disobeyed the wisdom in Proverbs 22:24–25 and helped me learn new ways.

Sadly, my kids cannot say that they’ve never seen me get angry. But the next best thing is that I’ve had to preach about it while they listen. That’s some accountability.