Is It Appropriate to be Angry at God?

Everyone struggles with this. I remember several years ago spending about 45 minutes in Bible reading and prayer and feeling like I was talking to a blank wall, but then sensing God becoming present only at the very end, when I was about ready to quit. And the immediate response, welling up within me, was anger - and although it was not immediately clear to me, a moment's reflection showed that I was angry because God hadn't recognized all the hard work I had been doing in reading the Bible and praying, "showing up" only after all that was done. I wanted God to recognize all my pious labors, and when he eluded my attempts to capture him devotionally and put him in my box, I was angry.

My experience has been that it is best, when you're angry with God, to go ahead and tell him you are angry with him - since he knows it anyway! - and then apologize. But I hear Christians whom I respect very much sometimes talk about being honest and real with God, even when you are angry - part of this honesty and anger being expressing that anger directly at God. This happens sometimes when I teach Job and the lament Psalms.

I wonder, though, if it is appropriate to express one's anger at God the way I might yell at another human being, even when losing my temper might be justified. It struck me the other day that the lament Psalms - and OT texts and NT texts in general - have a great deal of language for divine anger; there are all kinds of verbs and nouns to talk about divine anger, its causes and affects. But never - not once - is the vocabulary of anger directed from human beings toward God; anger in the Psalms is a one-way street. Psalmists will tell God that God has ruined their life and they're in agony, but the Psalms never give us language to get angry with God, no matter how else the language might be quite raw and frightening.

I very much understand that we need to avoid only pious, "nice" prayers that aren't getting real with God. But I can't think of a single biblical example of a child of God expressing anger toward him. Jesus never did, not once - and look what Jesus' father put him through! Instead, we see an agonized but unflinching submission to divine-ordained suffering. Consider also how, when OT saints do get angry at God, such as Elijah in 1 Ki 19 and Jonah, it is never portrayed as being a correct or appropriate response - there's always something else that prophet needs to learn or re-learn or realize. Human anger at God is never, so far as I know, portrayed as a good response to God or even a correct one - when OT saints get angry, there's something they're not factoring into the equation when they do.

I think we tend, in our culture, to glorify self-expression, and see radical self-expression as being intrinsically heroic and liberating. We also - I find this in myself - tend to assume that the only way to relieve myself of the burden of my feelings is to express them, to let it all out, and once I do, I'll be free of them. But these are our own cultural assumptions which come out of the particular and somewhat bizarre cultural life we have as North Americans - we won't find these assumptions anywhere in the Bible. Sometimes expressing an emotion can trap you in it!

I don't know how many people read this blog, or how the audience for this blog might be hurting. Certainly there are people I interact with at Briercrest who are suffering deeply under God's hand. And anger can be a very understandable response. But, speaking from my own perspective, every time I've gotten angry with God it is because I had an expectation which God didn't meet, in a small or big way - that's what sparked the anger. And 100% of the time, the expectation which sparked anger turned out to be a false expectation - one that wasn't supported biblically or by just plain common sense. I'm thinking of expectations like: if I'm obedient and keep my nose clean, I'll never get hurt by life; or, if God gives me a desire for something, then he will inevitably fulfill that desire in my life.

I think, when we get angry with God, the best thing to do is not express it, but to confess it, apologize, and explore, in prayer, before God, the source of the anger. Every time I have, God's helped me to see that I'm the one in the wrong, not him.