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 Award winning author Mike Mason brings profound and arresting insights on the life of faith. We commence a new series that are edited excerpts from his book 'The Gospel according to Job' (Crossway Books, 1994) Mike, a regular contributor to canadianchristianity.com, is perhaps most well known for his book 'The Mystery of Marriage.' that won the ECPA Gold Medallion award.
[other pieces by Mike Mason]
Dialogue is a very polite term for what happens in Job. Really it is an argument, and a hot one at that. Not only does Job argue with his friends but he also argues with God. As for the friends, they too are engaged in a heated dispute with God, but like many people they do not care to admit this, and so their anger is directed instead against Job. A man like Eliphaz thinks that if he gets mad at God, God in turn will get mad at him and condemn him. So Eliphaz suppresses his anger and lives in continual, subconscious fear of divine wrath.
He is like a hermit who prides himself on having no interpersonal hassles to upset his tranquil and ordered lifestyle. But anyone who lives in a family, in close fellowship with others, lives with tensions, complaints, disputes. Different families cope with these stresses in different ways some quietly and some noisily, some effectively and some pathologically but no family survives for long without some form of argument, and the family of God is no exception.
In our culture anger is generally frowned upon as being disruptive. But there are different ways of being disruptive. A chronically angry, loud, critical person is certainly disruptive. But a polite, well behaved person may also be disruptive, if in a church such a person uses their friendly and unassuming ways to obstruct the purposes of God. A cult of niceness is as effective as heresy for destroying the spiritual life of a church.
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Anger, on the other hand, may be used by God to break up a spirit of complacency. Consider Ezekiel, who when the Lord first called him to a prophetic ministry reacted in bitterness and in the anger of my spirit (3:14). In this case the Lord used anger and bitterness to inflame Ezekiel's heart with passion for Him. If Ezekiel had insisted on remaining a quiet, mild-mannered priest (which he probably was by nature), he would have thwarted God's purposes.
Little wonder that the great believers of the Bible have also been great arguers with God from Jacob, who actually came to blows with the angel of the Lord, to Peter who in Acts 10 answered a divine command three times with the words, Surely not, Lord! Clearly, anger at God can be a sign of spiritual growth. It can mean we are outgrowing a theology that is no longer adequate for us. It could even be said that our anger is directed not at the living God Himself but at our own idolatrous concept of Him. Our anger then functions to move us closer to God as He really is.
Religious phonies will go to almost any lengths to hide the fact that their relationship with God is not real or satisfying. But people who truly love the Lord have a consuming hunger for reality. Freedom, truth, peace, joy: such things have a taste and a feel all their own, and we know them when we see them. If the people of God are deprived of these fruits of the Lord's real presence, naturally they grow angry and disconsolate. Is it their fault that they cannot live without God?
Thus there are times when the Lord is actually honored and glorified by our anger at Him, in ways that He may not be by an attitude of unruffled trust.' Job provides a healthy balance to the traditional picture of the bloodless, gutless, cheerfully suffering saint. At the very least, anger means that we are taking God seriously and treating Him as a real person real enough to arouse our passions.
Angry prayer is not to be recommended as a steady diet, perhaps, but it is certainly preferable to lip-service prayer. Doesn't artificiality in relationships belie a far greater hostility than the honest expression of deep emotion? In the prim and proper prayer lives of many devout folk, a good old-fashioned temper tantrum might be the best thing that could happen. In the courts of Heaven there is a place for the primal scream.
July 24/2008
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