Can Anger at God Be Righteous?
The human experience is a vastly complex from an emotional perspective. Our emotions are shaped, triggered and influenced in a myriad of ways. This presents particular challenges to the Christian seeking to be faithful in their emotional life and in their relationship with God.
The Psalms offer us an invaluable resource when it comes to navigating the emotional storms of life and can powerfully teach us to be faithful before God and authentic in our emotional life.
In the most recent issue of Christianity Today, J. Todd Billings penned a helpful article to aide us in this challenging area of Christian faithfulness.
“Creatures with many kinds of emotions need a prayer book with the same wide range. Thus, the prayer book of the Psalms includes laments expressing anger, hopelessness, and other intractable parts of creaturely anatomy. If we skip over the “negative” psalms for the “happy” ones, we’re missing out on a gift the Spirit of God desires for us. For, as Calvin reminds us, in the Psalms, “the Holy Spirit has here drawn to the life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of men are wont to be agitated.””