Is It OK to Be Angry With God

            In their article, “Anger Toward God…,”  Julie Exline and her colleagues reported that 62% of the participants in a survey indicated that they were sometimes angry with God.[i]  The scientists discovered that persons become angry at God for a variety of reasons.  These causes for anger include:

Ø  Bereavement

Ø  Illness or injury of a loved one

Ø  Illness or injury of the respondent

Ø  Interpersonal problems such as abuse, breakups, or parental diveorce

Ø  Accidents

Ø  Personal failure or disappointments[ii]

While only a small fraction (2.5%) of respondents reported frequent anger towards God, Exline and her colleagues concluded that “anger toward God is an important dimension of religious and spiritual experience…”.

            This Sunday, February 10th, my sermon will explore doubts raised when we become angry with God.  For some Christians, it is wrong to be angry with God.  As an illustration, Pastor John Piper writes:

“it is never right to be angry with God. He is always and only good, no matter how strange and painful his ways with us. Anger toward God signifies that he is bad or weak or cruel or foolish. None of those is true, and all of them dishonor him. Therefore it is never right to be angry at God. When Jonah and Job were angry with God, Jonah was rebuked by God (Jonah 4:9) and Job repented in dust and ashes (Job 42:6).”[iii]

For Christians, such as Pastor John, anger with God is wrong because it indicates a lack of genuine faith, or they see it as simply morally wrong. 

Other Christians do not agree that anger with God is always wrong.  Tanya Marlow represents this alternative viewpoint, when she writes:

“Pastorally, I don’t think we should be telling people that their anger with God is a sin. We should be… [praying] that God meets them in midst of their questions and speaks to them out of the storm.”[iv]

         In my sermon Sunday, we will explore the question of whether it is ok to be angry with God, using the book of Job as our scriptural lens.  I understand why John Piper and other Christians believe that anger towards God is just plain wrong.  Yet, while I appreciate this position, ultimately I am not persuaded by it.  For me, the interpretive key here is the nature of my relationship with God.  I believe that God’s love for me, personally, is awesome.  God loves me, personally, more than I can even comprehend.  My relationship with God is personal.  

       Anger is an important emotion that is natural in any type of personal relationship, including our relationship with God.  In her perceptive article, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” Christian ethicist Beverly Harrison wrote:  “Anger is not the opposite of love.  It is better understood as a feeling-signal that all is not well in our relation to other persons or groups or to the world around us.  Anger is a mode of connectedness to others and it is always a vivid form of caring.”[v]  So, feelings of anger toward God may indicate that something is not right in our relationship with God and that we need to repair some broken dimensions of our relationship with God.

       I will conclude by suggesting that rather than denying our feelings of anger towards God or feeling guilty about them, we need to examine and repair what is broken in our relationship with God.  In the long run, this approach could lead towards spiritual growth and a stronger, deeper faith in the God whose love for us is infinite.

Whether you agree or disagree with me, I hope that this sermon will stimulate deeper reflection and understanding of God and Christian discipleship.  Feel free to post your comments on this blog.  If you live in the Meriden-area and do not have a regular church home, please consider attending Meriden United Methodist Church this Sunday.  Meriden UMC is located at the corner of Dawson and Main.  Our worship service starts on Sundays at 10 am.  Everyone is welcome and accepted because God loves us all.

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[i] Julie J. Exline, “Anger Toward God:  Social-Cognitive Predictors, Prevalence, and Links with Adjustment to Bereavement and Cancer,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2011), vol 100, no. 1: 132.  (There were 1,481 respondents to this study, which was a large-scale survey in the United States.  The Exline et al. article discusses a total of five studies of anger towards God in the U.S.)

[ii] These results were from a second study which surveyed 189 college undergraduates from Ohio.

[iii] John Piper, “It Is Never Right to Be Angry with God,” available on the internet at http://www.desiringgod.org/resource-library/taste-see-articles/it-is-never-right-to-be-angry-with-god, accessed 5 February 2013.

[iv] Tanya Marlow, “Get Angry at God:  Job Did,” available on the internet at:  http://tanyamarlow.com/get-angry-at-god-job-did-is-it-a-sin-to-be-angry-with-god-pt-ii/, accessed 6 February 2013.

[v] Beverly Harrison, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” in Making the Connections, Fourth Editin, edited by Carol Robb (Boston:  Beacon Press, 1986).