Brad Hambrick is in charge Advisory services at Summit Church, a church in North Carolina with 14 locations and approximately 13,000 attendees. He also teaches biblical counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of books such as Angry at God.
How do you differentiate between good anger and bad anger?
All anger says two things: “This is wrong, and it is important.” In the interpersonal realm, sinful anger says a third: “This is wrong, and it is more important than you.” I may be right about the first two: “You shouldn’t have done that, and it is important.” But if I am willing to sin against you, then the fact that my request is theologically and morally correct does not mean that my expression of anger is legitimate. When you turn to social media and politics, in many ways the “you” becomes either very distant or very ambiguous. People feel much freer to vent their anger or get upset because they don’t really see a person. They just sense a reason.
Where do you see destructive anger?
Anger is most often expressed in private. If someone freaks out at Walmart, their control mechanisms and social filters have deteriorated significantly.
Let’s use a very simplistic test for righteous anger. “If I’m right and it’s important, that’s OK. Tell me where I’m wrong.” When we’re in that state of righteous anger, we usually love it when Jesus overturns tables in the temple. That’s what we seem to be doing.
And if you look in Matthew 21, after Jesus overturned the tables, it says, “The blind and the lame came to him.” When I think of Jesus in the temple, in my mind he has just become the Incredible Hulk. He’s turned green. He’s staring through people’s souls and everyone is backing away from Jesus because we messed up. But in Jesus’ most expressive moment of anger, the most vulnerable felt protected and drawn. Not frightened.
What tools do we have at our disposal for this angry moment we find ourselves in?
One category I find helpful is sharing responsibility – being aware of what you can control. If I get most upset about where I have the least control, my anger will lead to no good. When we feel powerless, we rely on our anger to try to regain some of what we thought we had lost.
In cultural discourse, everyone says, “We need to calm down and tone down the rhetoric.” But nobody does. Even if it doesn’t come from the top down, it should come from the bottom up, and the culture should demand it of its leaders if the leaders don’t want to lead the culture.
Do different principles apply to anger over current events than, for example, to anger over betrayal in personal relationships?
There is selfish anger. There is also suffering anger. If you look at Psalm 44, in the first verses life is going great. And then you come across a Selah. They don’t know what happened. But it was a train wreck. In the next 12 verses, the Psalmist gives God as much blame for the bad things as he gave God the glory for the good things in the first part.
It’s this angry mic drop. There’s heresy in there. The Psalmist is calling on God to wake up, although we know God is not asleep. But it doesn’t make sense that the Psalmist needs to repent. The Psalmist is going through a time of suffering in his life that doesn’t make sense, and the moral equation isn’t balanced. I believe that there is innocent grief and anger in response to suffering.
So are the Psalms a good place to turn if you want to get into trouble?
A common characteristic of anger is that we feel unheard and ununderstood. And so we turn up our volume to make sure we are heard, and we increase the sharpness of our words to be understood. And the angrier we get, the more people pull away from us.
It’s not that we necessarily come to the Psalms and get some deep, piercing insight that explains our situation, and we say, “Oh, I have no reason to be angry.” What we often find is that things that we felt like, “That’s off limits,” and everyone was pushing us away, we can bring up to God and know that He cares and He’s not deaf to it.
On this topic, we have Moses at the burning bush. Moses had an anger problem. In a fit of rage, he killed a man. When the golden calf was ready, he ground it up and made them drink from it. In Numbers 20, he flew into a fit of rage and started hitting the rock and cursing it.
One of the first things God says to Moses at the burning bush after he says, “Take off your shoes,” is, “I have heard the cries of my people. I have seen their suffering.” If you think about what it would have been like to be Moses – “Okay, I shouldn’t have killed that man. That was a fit of rage. That was bad. But at least I did something. God, you don’t do anything.” And God says, “I heard it, I saw it, I’m paying attention.” We don’t usually get our own burning bush – that’s not a common human experience – but the Psalms is one place where we get that from God.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
