Brad Hambrick oversees counseling ministries at Summit Church, a North Carolina church with 14 campuses and about 13,000 in attendance. He also teaches biblical counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and is the creator of books like Angry with God.
How do you distinguish between good and bad anger?
All anger says two things: “This is mistaken, and it matters.” In the interpersonal space, sinful anger says a 3rd thing: “This is mistaken, and it matters greater than you.” I will be right concerning the first two: “You shouldn’t have done that, and it’s necessary.” But after I’m willing to sin against you, then simply because my prompt is theologically and morally accurate, that doesn’t mean my expression of anger is righteous. When you progress toward social media and politics, in some ways, the “you” either becomes very far off or very ambiguous. People feel so much more freedom to vent or to rage because they don’t really see an individual. They just feel a cause.
Where do you see destructive anger?
Anger shows up most in private settings. If anyone is blowing up at Walmart, their regulation and social filters have deteriorated significantly.
We wish to use an oversimplified test for righteous anger. “If I’m right, and it matters, that is okay. Tell me where I’m mistaken.” Usually after we’re in that righteous anger spot, we love Jesus turning over tables within the temple. That’s what we feel like we’re doing.
And should you look in Matthew 21, after Jesus is finished turning over the tables, it says, “The blind and the lame got here to him.” In my mind’s eye, after I take into consideration Jesus within the temple, he’s just gone full-on Incredible Hulk. He’s turned green. He’s staring through people’s souls and everybody’s backing away from Jesus because we tousled. But in Jesus’ most expressive moment of anger, essentially the most vulnerable felt protected and attracted. Not scared.
What are the tools for this offended moment we’re in?
A category that I feel is useful is responsibility allocation—realizing what you possibly can influence. When I get most intense about where I even have the least influence, my anger goes nowhere good. As we begin to feel more powerless, we begin to depend on anger, to attempt to get back a few of what we felt like we’ve lost.
In the cultural discourse, everybody’s saying, “We must calm down and relax the rhetoric.” But no person’s doing it. Even if it’s not from the highest down, it must be from the underside up, and culture must demand it of its leaders, if leaders won’t lead the culture.
Do different principles apply for anger over current events versus, say, anger over betrayal in personal relationships?
There is selfish anger. There’s also suffering anger. If you take a look at Psalm 44, in the primary few verses, life goes great. And then you definately hit a selah. You don’t know what happened. But it was a train wreck. In the following 12 or so verses, the psalmist gives God every bit as much blame for the bad things because the psalmist did giving God credit for the great things in the primary part.
It’s this offended mic drop. There’s heresy in there. The psalmist is asking on God to get up, after we know God doesn’t sleep. But there’s no sense that the psalmist must repent. The psalmist goes through a season of suffering in life that doesn’t make sense, and the moral equation isn’t balancing. I do think there may be innocent grief-anger, in response to suffering.
So the Psalms are place to go together with anger?
One of the common features of anger is we don’t feel heard, and we don’t feel understood. And so we increase our volume to be certain that we’re heard and we increase the sharpness of our words attempting to be understood. And the angrier we get, the more people draw back from us.
It’s not as if we necessarily come to the Psalms and we get some deep penetrating insight that explains away our situation, and we go, “Oh, I don’t have any reason to be offended.” What we do often find is where we have now felt like, “This is off limits,” and everybody’s pushed us away—we are able to bring those sorts of things to God and know that he cares and that he’s not deaf to that.
On this theme, you’ve got Moses on the burning bush. Moses had an anger problem. He killed a person in a moment of rage. When the golden calf was made, he ground it up and made them drink it. He threw a temper tantrum in Numbers 20 and commenced beating on the rock and scolding it.
One of the primary things that God says to Moses on the burning bush after “Take off your shoes” is “I heard the cries of my people. I’ve seen their suffering.” If you’re fascinated with what it will have been wish to have been Moses—“Okay, I shouldn’t have killed the person. That was a flash of anger. That was bad. But a minimum of I did something. God, you do nothing.” And God says, “I’ve heard, I’ve seen, I’m being attentive.” We don’t get our own burning bush, normally—that’s not a standard human experience—however the Psalms are a spot where we get that from God.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
