Good and angry

I remember watching this cartoon Sunday evenings on Walt Disney.  It was originally made in 1950, long before the term “road rage” became part of the vernacular.
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The message it taught me was that being angry is bad.  Raised in a Christian home, I equated “bad” with “sinful.”  Therefore, being angry was not compatible with Christ-like living.

Gary Chapman corrects this error in his book Anger: Handling a Powerful Emotion in a Healthy Way, arguing how being angry can actually reveal our Godliness.  He writes:

…The human capacity for anger is rooted in the nature of God.  …When God sees evil, He experiences anger.  Anger is His logical response to injustice or unrighteousness…

Anger is not evil; anger is not sinful; anger is not a part of our fallen nature; anger is not Satan at work in our lives.  Quite the contrary.  Anger is evidence that we are made in God’s image; it demonstrates that we still have some concern for justice and righteousness in spite of our fallen estate.  The capacity for anger is strong evidence that we are more than mere animals.  It reveals our concern for rightness, justice, and fairness.  The experience of anger is evidence of our nobility, not our depravity. (pp. 18-21)

The book goes on to explain how we are prone to getting angry about the wrong things and to expressing our anger in destructive (read: sinful) ways.  However, Chapman’s underlying thesis connecting anger with God’s nature is a helpful corrective to some of things we may have incorrectly assumed about this emotion.
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