Dennis Tuuri

Sermon scripture is found in the fourth chapter of the book of Ephesians. Ephesians 4:17-27 says: “This I say therefore and testify in the Lord that you henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk in the vanity of your mind having the understanding darkened being alienated from the life of God for the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart being cast have given themselves over under the covetousness to work all things with greediness.

If he had not so he learned Christ if so be heard and been taught by him as the truth is in Jesus. But you put off according to the former conversation the old man which is corrupt according to the deceitful lust and be renewed in the spirit of your mind and that you put on the new man which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. Wherefore putting away lying speak every man truth with his neighbor.

For we are members one of another. Be angry and sin not. Let not the sun go down upon your wrath. Neither give place to the devil. Be speaking on anger today. And I’ll just mention that one of the remedies for anger is patience. And I hope you’ll have patience with me this morning. If I pause in certain places, it’s not as quite as light in here as it usually is. It’s a little tougher to read some of the quotes as a result of that, but you’ll all be very patient about that, I’m sure.

We live in a society that is marked to a large extent by anger. And I thought as an introduction to the discussion of the sin of anger in the scriptures, we should talk a little bit about that. And it really transitions nicely from the last time we’ve been talking about envy. And remember last Sunday we talked about the relationship between egalitarianism and envy. Egalitarianism being a real big twenty-five cent word that means the idea that everybody should be equal, not in terms of rights or justice, but in terms of end result.

And so any child should be able to grow up to be a center playing in the NBA or something like that. And if you have more than I do, then that’s a violation of egalitarianism. Well, I bring that all up because one of the reasons why I think we have so much pent up anger and often expressed anger in our societies today is that same factor, egalitarianism. The attempt to create an egalitarian or totally equal society produces a great deal of frustration in the lives of people.

And that frustration then gives vent to anger becomes the root of much anger in our world today. To give somebody a false assurance of their equality with other people is to create a breeding ground for the sin of anger. Henry Fairlie writing in “The Seven Deadly Sins Today” wrote that to represent as rights what cannot in the end be secured as rights is a sure prescription for wrath as any other that could be proposed.

Any felt need or desire or longing in our society today for anything that one lacks for what somebody else has is today conceived to be a right. We talked about that last week. And then to view and perceive that as a right to be told by the government and the media and other sources from the educational system that it is a right only to have that right not met produces a great deal of frustration and anger.

If people are taught to believe that they have a right to something and the alleged right has not been granted, it is inevitable that they will at some point yield to anger. Now I think that for instance some of the recent activities of homosexuals and sodomites relative to political action in the last six months is an indication of this or better yet, remember Measure 8 that was passed a year and a half ago here in Oregon.

The very next night, the homosexuals blocked off the Burnside Bridge. You see, some people have been guaranteeing the homosexuals their equality in terms of rights and their equality in terms of a correct mental balance to their lives. They’ve been essentially guaranteed the absence of judgment through the civil mechanism and the press. But God’s judgment is real and God’s judgment continues to play upon these people if no place else in their own minds.

And so they run into an awful lot of frustration and much anger when the rights they think should be given to them and the government keeps telling them they should have are then not met through whatever mechanism they want it to be met in. Time after time homosexual rights are turned down by the general population. And so you got the media and the press and the government whipping them up saying this is a right and then in reality the population says no, it’s not good behavior and you got a sure breeding ground there for anger. So, egalitarianism and the guaranteeing of various rights is a source of frustration and anger in our society.

Secondly, the acceptance of the sin of environmentalism. In other words, that it’s our surroundings that create sin instead of our actions themselves. And acceptance of that in our world and in our society today also produces wrath and anger.

The idea is if you’re mad, well, it’s not your fault. It’s just your environment’s fault. And so, for instance, terrorists have been treated quite nicely in many press accounts over the last ten years. Because after all, you’ve got to remember, they either blew up the plane or they shot some people, but you know, they have this homeland problem. And so, it’s really not a problem of sin. It’s a problem with their environment.

I was reading this morning “The Grand Inquisitor,” which Mark McConnell loaned to me by way of Doskis, and you’re probably not familiar with it but it’s about—well, it’s a discussion of the three temptations of Christ which Dostoevsky deals with the head of the Catholic church during the Inquisition which is the setting of “The Grand Inquisitor.” The Grand Inquisitor speaks to Christ of how he should have given in to the first temptation of bread. I’ll just read a little bit of this account. He says: “But dost thou not know that for the sake of that earthly bread, the spirit of the earth will rise up against thee, that is against Christ, and will strive with thee and overcome thee, and all will follow him, that is Satan, crying, ‘Who can compare with this beast, he has given us fire from heaven.’

Dost thou not know that ages will pass? And humanity, humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages, that there is no crime, and therefore no sin, there is only hunger. Feed men, and then ask of them virtue.” You see, we relate that to what I’m saying here. Most of what was right then was happening then and it certainly happens today that increasingly what is being stated by the population by our culture is that there is no sin. There’s no anger really. There’s just a hunger that’s produced these reactions in these people. It’s not their fault. It’s the environment.

As I was doing some work on this last night, I watched a little bit of the Joan Baez concert and Jackson Browne on public broadcasting and she had some song on there. I don’t remember much about it. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to it, but it was about—I think it was written by somebody else. It’s called “Hand to Mouth.” And the idea is this person is in jail for some crime, but it isn’t really a crime. It’s just that the person was hungry. This person lived hand to mouth and it’s the environment’s fault. And the way to cure crime is to cure the environment.

Well, when you tell that to a population of people and you combine it with that first set of egalitarianism, you produce a lot of frustration out there. You produce a giving a venting to anger which would formally have been called sin or crime and now it’s just called hunger. This is—I want to take a little brief discourse here on this particular section of “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is a good warning to the church because what the head of the Inquisition tells Christ is that after the beast system where the beast fails to give them bread, then they’ll come to the church and ask of us bread and we’ll give them bread to convince them to serve us and to serve the church.

His point was that Christ could have gotten people to serve. He just would have given them bread. But Christ didn’t want that. He wants us to believe in him not because he feeds us bread, but because he’s life. He wants us to serve not for what he can give to us, but for who he is. Well, increasingly there’s a danger within Christian construction to say that what will happen here is that the government will not be able to provide goods and services to people and the church will meet those goods and services and then we’ll convert people.

See, feed them bread and then we’ll convert them. But that is falling into that error. The error that says there’s no sin, there’s only hunger. Now, I know there’s a need to meet people’s needs and I know there’s a need to show the gospel through action. What I’m saying is if you put that service to mankind above the preaching of the gospel and saying first feed them and then we can give him the gospel. You’ve gotten the whole thing backwards. And that’s what Christ resisted when Satan came to him offering or having him turn the stones into bread. Christ said, “No, men must believe in the word of God, not in the bread we can give them.”

Well, in any event, today there’s an acceptance of environmentalism. There’s a restatement of sin in terms of hunger, in terms of the environment, and that produces and gives vent to lots of anger from people.

Third, there’s the lack of justice in our society and that produces a lot of anger in people who want justice. I yesterday saw Lou Davies on the “Live at Four” show Friday talked about child abuse and people who hurt children not being treated as normal criminals. And the very next day there was an article in the Oregonian. I cannot believe that I read this story and I can’t believe that I haven’t heard anything about it and I can’t believe the Oregonian would put it on the second page instead of the first page.

An infant’s mother aged nineteen in Portland some time ago gave birth to a child in the bathroom of a friend and left the child in a hamper and the child was then discovered dead. A cord was wrapped around the child’s neck twice and they couldn’t determine if the cord—if the child was born that way or been wrapped around a second time later. An autopsy revealed the child had at least taken one breath, at least one breath prior outside of the womb prior to dying. So, this baby was dead. And apparently the mother just left the child in the hamper. Didn’t try to do anything about helping the child.

And apparently the defense attorney said that the problem was she was afraid if she got pregnant she’d get kicked out of her home. So her parents wouldn’t want her to do that, to have a baby. And so she got kicked out of her home. The woman—well, make a long story short—for killing this child, okay, and for failing to attend to this child, the woman got jailed. Thirty days in jail.

Now contrast that as Lou was doing on Friday with Mary Gallup, an older Christian lady who was convicted of touching a youngster, a four-year-old girl’s chest, not for sexual gratification, but simply for touching the chest while babysitting. Mary—well, on that single conviction, got two years in prison. This girl essentially kills her own child either through neglect or from strangling it and gets thirty days and then five years probation. Those sorts of things give rise to anger in our society. And we see it every day. Every time we read the papers, we see the civil magistrate failing to exercise justice.

Now, next week, we’re going to talk about the relationship of anger to justice and what we can do about it. But for now, I just want you to see that we have a society marked by anger because of we have a society marked by radical injustice.

And then fourth, we have a society that’s marked by anger because increasingly it’s said to be a good thing to express that emotion. And I’m—and this is certainly true in the world and it’s also true unfortunately in the church. Jack Phelps in a recent letter to his friends in January of this year talked about how he was going by ostensibly a Christian school, a preschool I think it was, and they were singing what he thought was a familiar song.

“If you’re happy and you know it, then your life will surely show it.” That’s how the song used to go. But instead of in this chorus, “If you’re happy and you know it,” instead of “then your life will surely show it,” the words came out: “Then you’ll surely want to show it.” And then came the next verse: “If you’re angry and you know it, you can stand. If you’re angry and you know it, you can stand. If you’re angry and you know it, then you’ll surely want to show it. If you’re angry and you know it, you can stand.”

And so these kids are being taught in a Christian preschool to vote and give way to the overwhelming desire to be angry and to stomp and make noise because of it. You see, not long after this, apparently, Jack’s ex-wife Debbie talked to another Christian man on the telephone, an old Christian friend of theirs, a professing Christian, a churchgoer, and his voice was very hoarse.

Now, I should use this illustration. My voice is hoarse, but different reason. His voice was hoarse, but he’d been to an encounter session or some psychological counseling he was receiving. And the whole basis for the counseling was you want to express your anger. And so, they yelled at each other for a couple of days to the extent that he’d heard his vocal cords and he couldn’t hardly talk as he expressed his anger.

We live in a society today and in a Christian church that says that anger is no longer a sin. It’s a healthy emotion. You got to express it. And so you want to give vent to this sort of anger and let it all hang out, so to speak. So the sin of anger is an important thing for us to spend a couple of weeks on. That’s what we’re going to do. Spend two weeks on this.

Now, having said all that and having given some examples of all the terrible anger we have in our society, I’m going to kind of go back this way. Now remember, we’ve talked before about how John Calvin does this in his sermons or in his writings. He says, “Well, on one hand, you got this, but on the other hand, you got this.” And that’s because men are sinful. And if we get it corrected this way, then we’re able to balance off this way.

Some people, I read about eight different books this week on the sin of anger. And many of those books essentially says that Christians should never be angry and posited a doormat approach to Christianity. Let everybody wipe their feet on you essentially and it’s all going to be okay.

Now, I’ve talked about bad examples. The verse I chose from Ephesians says to “Be ye angry and yet sin not.” Be angry and sin not. So, we’re going to talk now about anger and we’re going to say that there is a proper place for anger in the Christian’s life and then we’ll talk about the sinful anger that we’re to avoid both today and then next week.

Now, with envy, remember we started with a lot of Old Testament stories of envy to give you a good picture of it. For anger, I chose instead to look at some Hebrew words. There are eight Hebrew words, primary eight Hebrew words that are mostly words that are translated anger or wrath in the Old Testament. And I’m not going to give you the Hebrew names. I’m going to tell you what they mean.

You know, the Hebrew language is a really good one because it gives us a good picture, helps us to get the picture of what the words are expressing. For example, there are four primary words and then four secondary words used in anger. The four primary words—the first one means to be hot. Okay? So the root of that means to be hot. And so to have wrath is to be hot. Okay? And it means then to have wrath.

A second Hebrew word used means to kindle or to burn. And so it’s kind of, you know, instead of just being hot as an internal condition, not to kindle or burn and to express heat in what you do. So it represents the burning of anger there. And it implies the burning of consumptively that anger burns clean as it were, burns whatever is in its way up completely. When we—uh, there are verses that talk about God burning in his wrath against people and then consuming people in the day of his wrath. So he has anger, he’s hot and then he breaks into kindling or fire.

Now these are common expressions. If you ask your little children what is a common—if you want to have a guy in a cartoon, how do you express him as being angry? Well, you paint him red and he gets all red, he gets all hot. And that’s what these Hebrew pictures essentially give us the same idea—somebody who’s burning up, boiling mad, who’s hotheaded with a flaming temper, etc. These are all pictures of anger.

Another picture of anger, though, in one of these four primary Hebrew words is a word that has as its root the meaning to break or to snap or to split or crack. And that word is used to express anger in terms of a relationship with another party. For instance, God to his people. When God’s anger burns out against his people, then his breaking or cracking of the relationship as a result. And so in between man and man as well, breaking and cracking and splintering off is part of anger’s portrayal in the Hebrew text. It refers to an anger relationship and refers to the breakage or splitting in that relationship due to anger.

And then the fourth primary Hebrew word comes from the base word which means face or nostrils. And in the Hebrew, if a man is angry, his nostrils are involved. His nostrils flare up. They get kind of big, you know, and like a bull snorting, I guess, is the idea. And he’s real angry. And so that is another good picture of feeling angry in the Hebrew.

You’ve got this internal condition of being real hot. You get you start the nose dilating. You break out in fiery wrath and then it splits and causes the relationship break in terms of the object of your anger. A sec—some secondary aspects or secondary Hebrew words. One means to overflow or to be excessive. And this is a picture that anger overflows and doesn’t stay within bounds. It breaks out as it were against somebody else. The idea of the kindling is almost synonymous here. Overflows. It breaks out. It is the expression of anger overflowing to an action.

Another Hebrew word has its root in terms of the mouth and frothing at the mouth. And so anger is pictured in the Hebrew words used here as the frothing of one’s mouth. That’s the root. And what that word is normally translated as is to express anger verbally. And so it isn’t just mean the physical appearance of your mouth. That talks about in terms of implications, curses, denunciations.

And so Balaam was supposed to express trying to get curse Israel to froth the mouth over them to express anger toward them on the part of God. And he couldn’t do it. Froth them the mouth. And then the seventh Hebrew word is stir—to stir up—and often in the scriptures we have admonitions not to stir people up like that and the stirring up produces anger. So another picture of anger is this stirring pot of indignation that stirs up. And then finally there’s a word that means to tremble or to shake with rage. And there you have the idea—you know, an angry person is actually trembling with his wrath. And so these are all pictures of anger from the Old Testament.

Now the important thing about these pictures is that each of these words applies to God often times in particular cases in the Old Testament. The idea is that anger is a proper expression of God. And if we think that anger is always wrong, then we’re essentially accusing God of sin. It isn’t always wrong. God is described frequently. There’s eight different Hebrew pictures there, and they all have been used in terms of God to express how he deals in terms of his anger with his subject people.

And so there is a godly anger. Now, Ephesians 4 says, “Be ye angry.” And it has a command nature to it. Be angry. It doesn’t—I don’t think really—it’s saying they’re in your anger. It’s saying be angry. There’s a proper time and place to be angry.

One of the early church fathers wrote that anger is the mind arousing itself for the restraining of evil. Anger is the mind arousing itself for the restraining of evil. And so if somebody is hurting a member of your family for instance and beating on them or something and you have a flush of emotional anger, that is something that God has given to you. It is the mind arousing itself for the restraining of evil.

When speaking of the seven deadly sins said that even with sinful anger, one of the good things about it is that it gets us away from the sin of sloth. And I suppose there’s some truth to that. We’re going to look at Psalm 4 in a couple of minutes for a little better picture of that. But really, that there is a proper exercise of our anger.

And that proper exercise is when we are concerned with the preservation of divine order and God’s justice. Now there’s curbs to that we’re going to talk about next week. But there is a proper expression of anger and that’s all based upon the fact that anger is like God’s anger. All these pictures are God’s anger that we use in the Hebrew—the Old Testament—the Hebrew scriptures are used to speak of God as well.

Gerard van Groningen in “The Word Book of the Old Testament” wrote that God’s anger is the protection of his holy interests. God was angry to protect his holy interests. And so wrath is related to God’s holiness, his love, and his jealousy for his people. He either gets mad at people who come against them. In the psalm we just read responsibly, you notice that verse in there, David says, “Destroy them in your wrath.” You know, he’s not trying to tempt God to sin. He’s saying that’s what God is supposed to do when his people are being set upon by people that want to destroy.

Destroy the bride, then God breaks out on them in anger. That’s perfectly proper. It’s related to his love and his jealousy for his covenant people and to his holiness. That anger can go against the covenant people themselves if they violate that holiness and violate the covenant bond they have gone into with him.

Now the important thing about this relationship though—saying that anger is proper because God is anger—is that God is described over and over and again—we’re going to look at a few of those verses in a little bit. God is described in the scriptures as being slow to anger. Any number of times in the scriptures, God is described as one who is slow to anger. And the word there normally means—on a picture we can use—it’s that instead of being instead of flaring his nostrils in anger, he is long as nose so to speak. He takes a long time to start flaring those nostrils. Whereas another person said, God takes a deep breath before going into action. God is slow to anger.

Now, this idea that God is legitimately angry at times is frequently not understood particularly by our children, by many of us growing up. I think part of the reason that we fail to acknowledge the many references to God’s anger in the scriptures is the pictures of Jesus that dock so many Sunday school classrooms and books.

Carl Olsen in a book on the seven deadly sins remarked that in these pictures, quote, he is—that is Jesus—is so weak and mild that he reacts to nothing. He smiles blandly. The little he says or does has an edge to it as if it were hammered out in the forge of his indignation. Jesus in these pictures, he said, is not a smith beating out the hard shining truth. He is a jolly baker distributing sugar bones.

Well, that unfortunately is far too many Christians’ perception of the God we worship today. But that’s not the God of the scriptures. Jesus came to reveal the father and Jesus got mad and he got angry properly. So, zeal for his father’s house led into anger and into acts of overturning the tables and going into the whip or a scourge to tell people to knock it off and stop desecrating God’s holy temple. Jesus got righteously indignant and righteously angry. Jesus was angry at the Pharisees. They didn’t want him to heal on the Sabbath. He got angry or mad at their hardness of heart.

He came to reveal the father and it’s one of the great—sad truths of the Christian church today. They seem to posit two gods. The God of the Old Testament, the God of wrath or anger, and the God of the New Testament of grace or peace. And of course, those are not in opposition. Throughout the scriptures, God and Jesus are described as being properly angry. There’s one God revealed in the scriptures, not two.

Now, let’s go back to Ephesians 4. We said there’s a proper exercise of this anger. And in Ephesians 4, you’ll notice in your Bibles there, in verse 26 where it says, “Be angry and yet don’t sin.” You notice that’s in capital letters. That’s a quote from the Old Testament. And if you turn back in your scriptures to Psalm 4, you’ll see where that quote came from.

Psalm chapter 4 goes with Ephesians 4. And in Psalm chapter 4, we read about righteous anger. Psalm chapter 4 reads: “Answer me when I call, oh God, of my righteousness. Thou hast believed me in my distress. Be gracious to me and hear my prayer. Now he’s talking to God there and praying to him for deliverance.

Then he says, “Oh sons of men, how long will my honor become a reproach? How long will you love what is worthless and aiming at deception? But know that the Lord has set apart the godly man for himself. The Lord hears when I called to him.” And then verse four, “Tremble, be angry, don’t sin. Meditate your heart upon your bed and be still.”

Now, without getting into a lot of detail in executing this, I think that what’s going on here is verses 2 and 3 are an indictment of the psalmist’s friends who fail to get righteously angry when he is put down for being righteous. There’s a failure on the part of some of David’s men here to get properly angry. And so, he commands them to tremble, to be angry and yet then he warns them not to sin.

And so Christians who fail ever to get angry in a proper righteous sense as God does and as various people in the scriptures are portrayed as doing as well are really in sin and they should be in those circumstances exhorted to become angry. And if a Christian for instance finds out that some girl kills a child, a baby, and gets thirty days in prison for that and doesn’t become righteously indignant about that, there is real problems in that particular church that person’s attending. They don’t understand God’s justice and the need to get properly upset when God’s holiness is defiled in that way. And there are many other examples we could use.

But in any event, I think that Psalm 4 helps us to understand that Ephesians 4 gives us a command to be angry under particular circumstances.

Turn to Leviticus 19. We’re kind of going backwards here. We’re going from New Testament back to Old Testament commentary on the law and back to the law. But that’s okay. Leviticus 19:17 and 18 says: “You shall not hate your fellow countrymen in your heart. You may surely reprove your neighbor, but you shall not incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

And before that, he warns you not to go out as a slanderer. You see, in verse 16, he says, “Don’t be a slander to your people. You’re not to act against the life of your neighbor. I am the Lord.” In verse 17, don’t hate your neighbor, but you may reprove your neighbor. He says, “You may surely reprove him.” The point here is that in God’s law, he tells us a couple of things. Sure, he tells us not to break out in anger hurt our brother, hurt our neighbor. And sure, he tells us, don’t take vengeance yourself when you see God’s justice not coming to pass. We’ll talk about that more next week.

But the other thing he tells them besides an admonition not to sin is he tells them, “You may surely reprove your neighbor.” That reprove comes from the anger at your neighbor’s sin and a violation of God’s holiness and that person’s covenant relationship to God. They’re a member of the bride of Christ in the New Testament. And when a member of the bride of Christ acts unfaithfully to her groom Jesus, then it’s proper for us out of righteous anger to reprove them and get them back into right covenant relationship to God.

And so Leviticus and then David’s commentary in Psalms and then Ephesians 4 all have a common refrain. When appropriate, anger is a good thing to have exercised and failure to do it can very well be sin in our lives.

On the other hand, both of those statements are couched in the immediate context of warnings to us not to fall into sin in that anger. One more text: Zechariah 8:14-17. Zechariah is one of those minor prophets way at the back of the Old Testament.

Zechariah 8:14-17, for thus says the Lord of hosts, “Just as I purposed to do harm to you when your fathers provoked me to wrath.” Now, God wasn’t apologizing, folks. He was correctively chastising them in his wrath. It was a proper wrath, said the Lord of Hosts. “I have not relented. So I have again purposed to in these days to do good to Jerusalem and to the house of Judah. Don’t fear. These are the things which you should do. Speak the truth to one another. Judge with truth and judgment for peace in your gates. And let none of you devise evil in your heart against another. And don’t love perjury. For all these are what I hate, declares the Lord.”

Those are real similar to those verses in Ephesians 4 when Paul in Ephesians 4 starts telling people how they should act to one another. Don’t lie, I speak the truth. He says, “Be angry, but don’t sin.” And what does Zechariah say? He says, “Don’t lie. Don’t uh perjure your neighbor.” And he says, “Speak the truth to one another. Judge with truth and judgment for peace in your gates.” He’s not saying that for the sake of peace and an absence of anger, overlook sin. He’s saying just the reverse. He’s positively giving the command to judge with truth and justice in your gates.

Okay? So, Leviticus, Zechariah, Psalms, Ephesians 4. They all fit together to give us a picture of God’s instructions about anger. Twofold instruction. One, when proper, exercise that anger, reprove your neighbor. Judge justly in relationship to God. And two, all those statements were always in the context of be very careful in this matter not to sin.

So, we’ve talked about the proverb be angry. Now, we’re going to talk about sin not.

Righteous anger. One of the—you can discern this: that righteous anger uses means consistent with the kingdom of heaven. Uses means consistent with the kingdom of heaven.

We’ve been talking about how it’s proper sometimes to be angry. Aristotle said that anybody can become angry—that’s the easy part. He said but to be angry at the right person at the right time for the right purpose and in the right way—that is not within everybody’s power. He said it’s not easy. And that’s what these scriptures—that’s where the context is—always be very careful. Don’t let the sun go down. Don’t slander, don’t do all these things. Don’t let that anger move into sin.

Arno in his pro commentary in the Proverbs says that dealing with anger is a lot like dealing with fire with children. Fire is a good thing, isn’t it? But because it’s a good thing, we don’t turn over matches to our children to say go find something good to do with it. We normally—until our children reach a particular age—we tell them don’t you ever play with fire. Not because fire is evil, but because the children can’t handle playing with fire. And unfortunately, there are probably some adults as well that haven’t learned how to control their anger.

And so for those people, the better course to stay, I suppose, is to never let yourself get angry until you can begin to control it and bring it under God’s jurisdiction. And so in the same way, while we said that anger is okay, it is one of the seven deadly sins and it is difficult to control and is like fire to a small child.

Dante—remember we’ve been talking about Dante’s purgatorial where he goes through seven choices of purgatory. We don’t believe in purgatory. It’s wrong. It’s a good picture of sin. Remember the first cornice of Pride had a picture there—Pride was a marble setting and there were pictures like of David dancing before the ark of the Lord to teach that true humility comes before God. And then over the second cornice there was—no pictures for people who were envious have their eyes sewn shut with metal threads.

Well, in the third cornice or the third layer up here—Dante—the picture of the penance that’s going on by those suffering for their exercise of righteous anger, the sin of anger—the picture is of a thick black acid smoke billowing throughout this cornice so you can’t see and it hurts your nose etc. This is picturing to us that wrath is related to the fire that burns the bosom, that it blocks out the light of God himself to those who are in their anger, and it is corrosive to men and to society.

As we were saying earlier, the wrathful are blind to reason in their wrath. And so Dante at this particular cornice is led very carefully through the cornice with very careful admonitions from his guide to be careful to stay right close to him, holding on to him. He leads him through it. You see, because wrath blinds us—the way that smoke blinded Dante.

And one other thing that’s very important here in terms of this balance between be angry and don’t sin is that this black smoke of the cornice in purgatory of anger indicates that this sin—being repented of—is the fire that burned not cleanly. God’s wrathful fire burns cleanly. It is a pure wrath. It is a pure anger. Most men when they get angry—even originally in a righteous indignation—that quickly becomes tinted with sin and rags get thrown into that fire as it were and so the fire billows—the smoke billows up in darkness because our wrath and anger doesn’t have the purity of God’s wrath and anger.

So these are good reasons to be very careful about our exercise of anger. As we said, anger is one of the seven deadly sins. I mentioned W.H. Auden earlier. He said that there was a relationship—and I’m going to talk now for a little bit about the relationship of anger to the seven deadly sins and then we’ll take a specific look at Dante’s, and this could serve as sort of a summation to some extent of the last six or seven sermons on these first three sins.

Remember we said that you got three sins—and then sloth. And then there’s a final three sins. We’re going to talk about that a little bit here.

Now in terms of beginning first with anger relationship, W.H. spoke of the relationship to pride and anger. He wrote that the sin of anger is one of our reactions—one of our reactions—to any threat not to our existence but to our fancy or to our idea that our existence is more important than the existence of anybody or anything else. He said that—uh—that in confessing his sin, he said that it was his fantastic expectation that fate will do as I wish that went so far as to evoke an immediate reaction to him to any unexpected event even a pleasant surprise and anger.

So point of that is that frequently our anger at things that disrupt our flow is really coming out of our pride and thinking that all the world revolves around us. You can see that a little child, of course, the temper tantrums they grow—they think that because of their pride that all the world revolves around them. When they’re crossed in that, then they flare up into anger.

Gregory the Great wrote that from anger are produced strife, swelling of the mind, insults, clamor, indignation, blasphemies—all these things billow out from the pride, from the sin of anger. A sixteenth century sermon by the Augustinian friar John Gregory—he said that pride, envy, and anger—those first three—can be seen as weapons of the devil, while lechery, gluttony, and sloth are primarily agencies of the flesh. The same Satan—pride, envy, anger—and then the sins of the flesh that we have to wipe to beat off as well as beat off the attacks of Satan, sloth, gluttony, and lust.

Dante is warned in this incident in purgatory in his purgatorial not to keep refusing the peace that flows from God’s throne by his guide. His guide says, “Don’t keep refusing.” Dante in this particular image that he writes here and throughout it—you see that Dante saw as his besetting sin, the sin of pride, but that sin of pride frequently then led into the sin of anger.

It was apparently rumored by people in Dante’s hometown that he would throw stones even at women and children if they happened to insult his principles. And so there you have his pride and his principles leading forth into anger against people that would challenge him.

The fact that anger is related to indignity, esteem, and threatening to the moral order is depicted by a sculpted image of the seven deadly sins at the Amiens Cathedral. Anger in that particular sculpture is portrayed as a woman with a sword threatening a monk who is reading. And so you have a picture there of indignation and the threat to the moral order.

Saint Anand of Pontigni wrote that while sloth torments, lechery enslaves, and gluttony beguile and deceive a man, the other deadly sins are alienating. Pride alienates us from God. Envy alienates us from our neighbor. And anger alienates us from ourselves. You see, this idea of anger and unrighteous anger is overflowing in us so often—really takes us outside of who we are. It—some people have called anger the death knell of reason. As we leave our reason behind as we move into the sin of anger, we don’t even know who we are anymore. Sometimes after an angry incident, you think, why did I ever act so stupidly? Anger tends to alienate us from ourselves.

And now we’re going to spend a little bit of time on Dante and his talking about the relationship of the first of these seven deadly sins, one to another. He saw the first three of the seven deadly sins as bad luck—of extending from three separate springs. And I’ll quote now from Dante’s Purgatorio:

“First, he said, ‘Some think they see their own hope to advance tied to their neighbor’s fall and thus they long to see him cast down from his eminence.’ That’s pride.

Second, some fear their power, firmament, honor, and fame will suffer by another’s rise. And thus, irked by his good, desires ruined and shame. That’s envy.

Third, Dante says, ‘Some at the least injury catch fire and are consumed by thoughts of vengeance. Thus, their neighbor’s harm becomes their chief desire.’ And that’s anger. Such three-fold love those just below us here purge from their souls. The other which seeks good but without measure I shall now make clear. If you are moved to see good and pursue it, but with a lack love. It is on this ledge after a proper penance you will know it.”

The idea is that sloth is lax in its love. The other three were perversions of love. Sloth is lax in its love. And then Dante’s guide goes on to say: “There is another good which bears bad fruit. It’s not happiness, nor the true essence of the eternal good, its flower and root. The love that yields too much for this false good is mourned in the three cornices above us. But in what way it may be understood as a tripartite thing, I shall not say that you may wear yourself upon your way.”

And so as we gulp in anger into the other sins, there’s this transition that goes on. The editor’s summation of these comments from Dante’s purgatorial says this: that there were three errors. The first of the three sets of errors are seeking bad goals—seeking bad goals. The self-love of pride seeks to rise above others. The envy resents the rise of others, and anger seeks revenge at the cost of others. Those are all seeking bad goals. Either to rise above somebody else, to prevent or resenting the rise of somebody else, and then to take revenge at the cost of others.

And then secondly, there is too little zeal for the known good, that is sloth. And then third, too much love for the good things of the world, avarice, gluttony, and lust.

And so anger is tied real closely into the sins of pride and envy and is racked right up in them, so to speak. And we mentioned before, too, that Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales speaks of the seven deadly sins. And Chaucer said that wicked anger consists of two things. First, sudden or hasty anger without the council of reason and second full wicked anger. Out of full wicked anger comes sullenness of heart, malice of forethought with wicked determination to take vengeance and to which reason ascends.

Now we’re going to deal the rest of this morning with those two aspects. Chaucer said there are two kinds of anger. Sudden anger flaring up and long deep-seated anger which breeds into ranker and malice. And to which reason gives its ascent.

We have quoted in the next part of the outline here these two specific admonitions relative to our anger and its lapsing into sinfulness. And we’re going to talk about that and then next week we’ll talk about the relationship of anger to justice and vengeance and peacemaking.

Okay. Immediately after Ephesians tells us to be angry, it goes on to say be angry but don’t let the sun go down on your wrath. Now that is one of the prime biblical correctives for improper anger. Improper anger continues on. It’s of that second type that Chaucer talked about—full wicked anger that continues to eat away. And then we begin to plot in terms of that anger and our reason gives us to prevent that.

Paul says, don’t let the sun go down on your anger. And then he goes right on to remind us of the terribleness of the sin: “Neither give place to the devil.” To allow that kind of anger to stay with us against a person, against an incident, against God, whatever it is, for a long period of time, puts us into what some would have called the devil’s furnace of anger. Very bad.

Now, we read a little bit of Psalm 4. Let’s go back there for a couple of minutes. We talked about the proper admonition in Psalm 4 to anger. And Paul—remember now—you know, when they quote a piece of scripture like he did out of the middle of Psalm 4, remember we said before, he really wants just to bring back in what the total of Psalm 4 was about. And so the specific portion he quotes is Psalm 4:4A: “Tremble and do not sin.” And then he says, “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.” That’s not a quotation from Psalm 4, but it meets him very nicely or very well with the next verse that follows in Psalm 4:4. He says: “Tremble, do not sin. Meditate in your heart upon your bed and be still. Offer the sacrifice of righteousness and trust in the Lord. Many are saying, ‘Who will show us good? Lift up the light of thy countenance upon us, oh Lord. Thou hast put gladness in mine heart, more than when the grain of new wine abound. In peace I will lie down and sleep. For thou alone, oh God, or oh Lord, do make me to dwell in safety.’”

Paul knew that Psalm. See, and when he tells us, be angry, he was quoting that psalm—Psalm, don’t sin. Don’t let the sun go down. He also is referring back to this portion of scripture. You see, it’s not just an absence. It’s not just stifling the anger to be silent during the evening. That’s what it says. Rather it is to replace that anger with what? Well, with what verse 4 says: meditate on your bed and be still. And then he goes on to talk about God’s protection of us, God’s provision for us.

He says in peace I’ll lie down and sleep. The nighttime is a time of meditation upon God. You see, in the day, we walk around, there’s lots of light, and we see things out there and we’re to interpret those things in the light of the person of God as revelation to us in the word. And then at night, God turns off the light and we lay down in darkness. And then we think about some of those things, but we think beyond the exterior of what we see to the person of God himself. And so the nighttime is to be a time of meditation on the person of God himself, beyond the pictures he gives us of his various attributes and reality in the world.

Okay? And so Paul is saying, “Yeah, [text cuts off]