Anger’s Cause — Jonah 4:4

But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”

Today we are going to change gears for a while and talk about a topic that affects everyone’s life at some point or another: Anger.

People tend to think anger is a bad thing but actually, anger itself is nothing more than an indicator like a gauge on the dashboard of your car. The problems that we have with anger are manifested in how people react to it.

So what causes anger?

A counselor once told me that anger is a “secondary emotion.” They went on to explain that the cause of anger is hurt. Their point was that a constructive way to deal with anger was to identify the underlying hurt and deal with that. I think in principle this is true. But what causes the kind of hurt that then causes anger?

Sometimes the cause of anger is direct and easy to spot. For example:

Other times, the anger is as real as stubbing your toe, but the cause is more difficult to figure out.

Paul writes in Ephesians 4: 26-27, “‘In your anger do not sin’: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.”

Thanks, Paul! Great advice. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain how to do that. Figuring out the cause of our anger and how to deal with it before sundown it a tall order if you do not have a basic understanding of what anger is.

So let me propose this definition of anger:

Anger is the feeling that results from an imbalance between our expectations and the situation we find ourselves in.

Remember I said that anger is like a gauge on your car’s dashboard? Think of the temperature gauge. The car is made to operate at a certain engine temperature. If something happens to drive that temperature up bad things can happen. The gauge tells us that we need to do something. Unfortunately, it does not tell us what to do.

If a person does not understand what the gauge means, then it is likely that something bad will happen. The engine will keep running until the heat causes a part to fail and then it quits. Imagine that the engine quits in the middle of the desert. It is hot, lonely and scary. We expected that the car would keep working until we got to where we were going. The reality is that it quit and left us in a bad spot. Now the needle on another kind of gauge starts to rise: anger.

Where do our expectations come from?

This is where understanding anger becomes difficult. Expectations are sometimes hardwired into us in a way that we cannot see. One expectation that the Bible talks about is respect. Even God expects that his Creation owes him a little respect. Malachi records God saying:

“‘A son honors his father, and a slave his master. If I am a father, where is the honor due me? If I am a master, where is the respect due me?’ says the Lord Almighty.” (Malachi 1: 6a)

When you are God and you don’t get the respect that you deserve, bad things can happen! When you are human, the options for doling out “justice” are more limited.

As a culture, we have moved away from showing respect to people. As a people, we still hunger for respect. The expectation is hard-wired into us. The reality has changed so that our expectation often goes unmet. Frustration is the result. Anger is the indication that frustration exists. (How we respond to anger is a separate topic.)

To answer God’s question to Jonah about whether it is right to be angry: It depends. The answer depends on what we are angry about. Translated, the question is, “Are my expectations reasonable?”

Jonah was angry about a lot of things. He expected God to hate the Ninevites as much as he did. But God did not hate the Ninevites. At the end of the story, God has a little fun with Jonah. He gives him a plant for shade and then takes it away again. Jonah is angry. He expected the plant to stay. God had other plans. When Jonah doesn’t get his way and when his expectation is not met, he becomes angry. Are we any different? The question then, is not “What are we angry about?” but rather, “What did we expect?”

Application: When confronted by anger, do a self-check. What expectation is not being met? Is it a reasonable expectation?

Food for Thought: Is anger in and of itself a ”bad” thing?