Anger Management

This is not about the movie by Adam Sadler and Jack Nicholson. This is about the command of the Lord to avoid anger. It is a style of the Lord Jesus uses extremes in order to drive home a point and stress the importance of what He was saying. He even said to remove parts of our bodies that are causing us to sin. He said that it will be better for us to go to Gehenna (state of punishment) without those members of our body that are causing us to sin. Less painful and less suffering? Most probably, during His time, anger is associated with violence. Anger must have always resulted to injuries and death. 

But anger is a feeling. A feeling is just that, a feeling. What we do with it is what makes it good or bad. If anger, is bad by itself, then all other so called "negative" feelings must be bad too; sadness, loneliness, fear, frustration, depression etc. Yes, they make us feel bad, but they are what they are. They are not necessarily offenses against God. Sometimes things happen which inevitably result to these feelings. To emotionally react is very human. 

But how does anger become good? When we express it against evil. Yes, anger is good when pointed towards evil. In fact, that is expected of a Christian. Jesus, Himself, when He saw money changers and merchants disrespecting the temple, unleashed His anger by shooing them away. As Christians, we are expected to follow Gods command. Anything that stops us from fulfilling these commands must be crushed. In other words, evil should not be tolerated. We must fight against it. And one evidence of it is our feeling of anger against it. Unfortunately, this attitude has become weak in the Christians of today. We have weaken if not lost our sense of sin. It is very disturbing that an attitude of tolerance of evil has penetrated and permeated society. Suddenly, the moral standards had changed or had  been lowered; pre-marital sex , abortion, corruption, dishonesty, lying, live-in, homosexual acts, deception, murder, etc. had become very prevalent. The worse part is that it seems that society had already accepted it. Was it a case of overexposure which resulted to familiarity with it? Had we become callous about their presence and prevalence? Also, it seems that the good are more afraid of the bad? Bad people are more courageous doing their thing because they know that nobody would dare stop them. To each his own had become the policy for so many. The good, on the other hand, is very much wanting in asserting itself. So much wanting that it gets drowned by evil.

Anger results because our person/heart disagrees with what it encounters. Because we were created by God, we were made good, for good and to do good. By nature, we should be against evil and should not participate in evil. We must be angry at it. If we are not anymore angry against or, much worse we paticipate with it, we had become insensitive to it. The 'sense of sin" ceased to prevail in our hearts and minds.

This is what we have to recover. And anger could be put to good use in the recovery of this "sense of sin". We must develop the anger for the evil that we do.