The Anatomy Of Anger | Pastor Greg Ford Sermon | One Church Columbus

We're starting today a new series of messages.

It's going to be four weeks long.

The title of the series is Perfect Anger.

Perfect anger.

Two words you don't usually hear in the same sentence, perfect anger.

But what we're going to do is look at what the Bible has to say about God's anger and what we can learn about it.

We're really going to kind of, throughout the four weeks, I'm not going to nail all of this today, I'll get it going today.

But over the four weeks, we're going to work our way through a few questions.

The first is, what do we need to understand about God's anger?

The second is what makes God angry?

And then the third is how does that how does that shape our own anger?

So throughout this process, the more that we can understand God's anger, not only what makes him angry, but what that even means, what that looks like, and how he responds to it, then we can align ourselves in terms of how our anger looks more like his.

And this is very important because we do get angry and we will get angry.

It's inevitable.

And sometimes we should get angry, and yet we want to make sure that we're handling that biblically and properly.

If you've been reading the Bible at all, if you've read the Old Testament, the New Testament, you've probably noticed what seems, at least on the surface level, to be a discrepancy between the God of the Old Testament and the Jesus of the New Testament.

The God of the Old Testament is described sometimes as burning with anger, grieved, even jealous is a word that's used about God.

We're in Psalms for a while.

Psalm 2.12 says that his wrath can flare up in a moment.

That almost sounds like a quick temper hothead.

So you've got the Old Testament language about God's burning anger, burning wrath, and then you have Jesus who came as a sacrifice.

Jesus who said, Blessed are the peacemakers.

You have Jesus who was nonviolent.

Jesus who essentially was a lamb to the slaughter, and we're called to follow his example.

So, in a sense, it almost feels like two different characters.

And so the question is, are they different, or did something change, or or what?

So if you've had that question, that's normal.

I don't know how you wouldn't have that question, and you're not the only one.

So we're gonna take some time to kind of slowly work our way through this, hopefully get a better understanding.

Okay, we're gonna use our framework that that we love, or at least I love.

I hope you at least like it.

But the framework is that we're gonna work from history, literature, and theology.

So you look at the Bible, understanding it historically, understanding it literarily, and then from there we form uh theological beliefs around it.

We essentially we get the right questions that we can wrestle with.

Okay, so when you think about the Old Testament, okay, the Old Testament was written in the ancient Near East, which is think the oldest texts are 3,500 to 4,000 years ago, in a totally different time and place and culture.

And those texts did not fall out of the sky, they're not tremendously unique in terms of style, literary structure, all of that.

They were written in relationship to surrounding nations.

And so if you were to read other ancient works, you would see uh some similarities uh between the two.

And so understanding that 3,500, 4,000 years ago, understanding how they viewed cosmic anger, okay, and sort of the contrast to the surrounding nations and Israel.

So if you look at um uh the ancient Near Eastern um theologies had a pantheon or polytheism, in other words, many gods.

And so their view was that you have all of these gods, and their divine anger was viewed as an unpredictable character flaw.

And it was often triggered by really petty things.

It might be petty slights, it might be noise or inconvenience.

Alright, so if you look at uh Babylonian literature, you'll see that um they have a flood narrative.

Like in the Hebrew Bible, there's a flood narrative, but the uh in the Babylonian narrative, it's a God by the name of Enlil, and uh he sends a deluge or a flood to annihilate people simply because humans were multiplying too fast and their noise was keeping him awake at night.

Okay?

Couldn't sleep, it was too loud, and there are too many of them, and he got ticked.

Just like you've had somebody inconsiderate making noise, you woke up and you were ready to flatten the place too.

But Enlil really did, okay, according to their myth, that he he uh flood flooded everybody.

So again, the belief is these cosmic beings are prone to the same sort of temper tantrums that you and I are.

Uh in the Canaanite texts, you have Baal, and Baal, in one of their epics or myths, um, he flies into an impulsive homicidal rage because he's being commanded to uh submit to another one of the gods, and he has to be held back and restrained by the other deities.

Okay, so within those texts, their belief about the gods are that they are just as petty as we are, they're just as prone to emotion as we are.

It's very similar in the New Testament, so the New Testament context is first century Greco-Roman, so this is 2,000 years ago.

But when you look at the Greek pantheon, it's the same thing.

The Greek gods were like terrible humans, but just with cosmic powers, right?

So Zeus is the supreme God.

He's ego-maniacal, and he is constantly cheating on his wife.

Uh Hera is incredibly vindictive and petty.

Um Ares is a bloodthirsty brute.

So when you see their myths and their epics, um you're gonna see that uh they lie, they cheat, uh, they they throw jealous fits.

And of course, this plays out, those who have that view of the cosmos, that plays out in what you're willing and able to do, right?

I can't control my temper, but no big deal.

Poseidon can't either.

And so that's the way that they viewed it.

When we look at the Hebrew Bible, both Old and New Testament, again, a lot of the ways that the stories were told were similar.

So to anybody that would have been reading it, including the Hebrews and the people around them that would have been listening to, because a lot of it was oral history for a long time, you they would have uh seen the difference between not only monotheism, so a single God, but the character qualities that the anger of God is not tied to some sort of character flaw.

It's actually tied to his twin character uh characteristic of mercy and love.

Okay, and I'm gonna explain that a little bit more as we go.

As we look at the literature, okay, they use, I'm gonna give you a couple big words, but they're simple concepts, but I'm gonna give you a slide to help explain it.

So, from a literary perspective, the the literary device that's used are two things.

One is called anthropomorphism, and the other is anthropopathism.

So go ahead and bring it up.

Big words, but we just underline morph and path, because that's easier to follow.

All right, so when you think of anthropomorphism, think of giving human anatomy to something that's not human.

So God, we would all agree is transcendent, right?

He's greater than human, right?

He's a transcendent spirit.

And but how do you help humans like us to understand a transcendent divine being, but they use human anatomy.

So they talk about the hand of God or the voice of God or the eyes of God, okay?

It's not claiming that God has retinas and pupils, okay?

It's not saying that.

What it's doing is painting a picture that we can understand, right?

So the idea that, you know, it's just better, clearer, a little more poetic to say his eye is on the sparrow, okay, than to say the infinite, non-localized spirit possesses omniscient cognitive awareness of the avian creature.

Okay, that just doesn't, it's hard to latch on to that.

But when we say his eye is on the sparrow, it helps us understand that God even pays attention to detail.

Okay, that God sees it all.

So when you think of um anthropomorphism, it's the anatomy, okay, not literal claims, but it's helping us understand.

The second is what's called anthropopathism, which is emotion.

So understanding uh taking human feelings, human thought processes, and human emotions and attributing those to God.

Okay, so this is very important, and please follow me on this.

Um, when you think about these, as these stories are being told, these narratives are being given, the language is analogical, not identical.

So it's not claiming that God has a nose and eyes.

What it's doing is giving something in our terms, and it's describing a truth that is like our reality, but our but it transcends our reality and experience.

Okay?

So let's think of it like this.

If you think about God's anger, uh God's active personal opposition to evil is real, it's a real existing state of being.

God really is opposed to evil.

God does, again, from an anthropopathic language, God does hate evil.

Okay, the vocabulary is figurative, but the reality that the vocabulary describes is absolute truth.

So the the liability here is if we're not careful, we have some of the liabilities of this language, which is to superimpose our own psychological human frailties and weaknesses onto God.

Right?

Anthropomorphic, anthropopathic language is helpful because it helps us understand.

That's the best part of it.

The liability of it is the tendency that we have to take our flaws that we have in something like our anger and then superimpose them on God.

I just want to pause here for a second and ask you, start now, but hang with me through this message.

Maybe later, really start to think and digest your own personal history with anger.

Okay, some of you maybe grew up in a home that was defined by anger and angry people.

I I talked to somebody recently who was talking about a family member, and they said, this is an important family member in their life, and they said their defining character trait was anger.

Um if you if you're in this room and you have been hurt by authority figures who were psychologically or even physically inflicting pain on you in their anger, you may still be trying to sort all that out.

And if you're not careful, you open up some of these texts that talk about God's burning anger.

I've seen this happen.

Where people read that and they go, you know what, I won't serve a God that was like my ex.

I won't serve a God that was like my abusive parent.

I won't serve a God that was like, okay, so if if this is some of the stuff that you're working through and have experienced, first of all, um I respect that and I understand that trigger, I understand that feeling, but I want to encourage you to dig deep.

The work is worth it.

And if you'll kind of work to be able to peel off some of the rot that comes from human anger, then you'll be able to see some things and learn some things about God that are tremendously important.

Uh, if you had somebody who abused you and then said, Well, this is because I love you, and I'm hurting you because I love you, and that confused you, and now you got away from it and you understood how sick that was, the idea of linking God's wrath or God's anger with his love can be such a turn off.

Again, you feel alienated from the text and you just walk away.

So it could be something you go, I can't serve a God who has anger.

Or you could also be the opposite, the type of person, maybe if anger has been a big part of your life, that you just absorb all that anger and you decide, you know what, I'm, you know, I'm I'm gonna justify whatever behavior is abusive or not because I'm angry like God.

Both of them are a mishandling, a butchering of the of the scriptures, and so we want to take our time to work through these things.

Okay?

Um think about how notoriously corruptible human anger is.

Okay?

When was the think about the last time that you were genuinely furious?

And some of you are like, on the way to church today.

Okay, it was like I don't have to think back that long, okay?

Uh for some of you, it's maybe it's been a long time.

For others, it's more recent.

But I want you to think about when's the last time and why were you angry, right?

It could have been road rage.

All right, this is a real thing.

I mean, somebody's driving around in a death machine, you know, cutting people off, doing stuff, not keeping the rules, acting crazy.

It can send something through you.

Um, kids, acting up in the aisle.

All right, you're out in the grocery store, you you train these kids better than this.

What are we doing?

You're here in aisle four acting crazy.

Now I look like one of those parents.

I look like one of those guys, one of those ladies, and and you know what, I keep it cool till I get in the car, and then you're gonna you're gonna get it.

All right.

Um maybe the last time you lost an argument, okay, and it sent you through the you couldn't admit that you lost it, but they did get the better of you, and so now you're upset.

Maybe you found out somebody was talking about you behind your back.

That's never pleasant.

You find out somebody that wouldn't say it to your face said it behind your back, or maybe somebody did the opposite.

They pointed out one of your flaws in front of people, in front of everybody, and that was embarrassing.

Maybe somebody criticized your work openly.

They could have said something in private.

This could have been between us, but you said it in front of the group.

Okay, so the feeling personally disrespected, why do we get angry?

There's a few reasons I'm gonna put up here.

This isn't a comprehensive list, but it'll get us going.

Uh a big reason we get angry is wounded ego.

Okay, we all have an ego of some sort.

And when that ego gets wounded, we get angry.

Fear.

Okay, when someone's threatening you, your amygdala is aroused, it's fight or flight.

And some are more fight than flight.

And when someone startles you, fear.

But fear causes us to be angry.

A deep insecurity.

Okay, no matter how much we act like we don't, every all of us have something in there that's sensitive.

And when that is agitated, it causes anger.

Here's a big one, this is a big one.

Loss of control.

Okay, we have certain things that we want to have control of, and when you lose control of those things, when someone makes a decision that you didn't have a say in that affects you and something you care about, and you've lost it, that loss of control is anger.

It causes anger.

Uh exhaustion, you're tired, you're more likely to get angry.

When you're under stress, you get angry.

Unmet expectations.

I thought I communicated clearly.

You should have done this differently.

They don't.

Anger.

Okay.

This list, I'm sure there's more to it, but this is what you need to know about this list.

All of us in this room are prone to intense emotion related to one of these things, and probably all of us have a story for each one of them.

God is not vulnerable to any of these.

So let's just go back through the list.

God does not get his ego wounded and get ticked off about it.

If you don't understand, God's not, God is not getting uh up or down ego based on humans.

If you don't get this, you're gonna even misunderstand something as precious and beautiful as worship.

You know, in worship, we're like, you know, he is wonderful.

And and we lift up his name and we glorify his name and we declare his majesty and we do all this.

Please understand that we're not doing that because God's up in heaven, not sure who he is.

This isn't because God's up in heaven, like, you know, I just wish somebody would pay attention to me.

You know, I'm just tired of being ignored.

I'm tired of being overlooked.

In fact, you know, I've been around a long time.

You know, it's been from generation to generation.

I feel like maybe I've lost a step.

And I need somebody to tell me how great I am, otherwise I might forget.

Please understand.

We lift up the name of Jesus, we lift up uh the the character qualities of God, we worship him for who he is.

Not because he forgot who he is, because I tend to forget who he is.

And so when I lift up his name, I am declaring his goodness.

He's already well aware, he's got a great self-image, okay?

So that so I'm not informing him of anything, I'm reminding myself, and we're all declaring it together.

So I hear you say it and you hear me say it, and something happens in terms of uh of bringing strength and stability and grounding, right?

So we don't we're not worshiping God ultimately for him, okay?

It's to connect to him.

So there's not an ego thing.

God is not ever afraid.

Fear, what would he be afraid of?

He's omnipotent.

Deep insecurity, God is not insecure.

He's not up in heaven going, man, I hope this thing works out.

Loss of control?

No.

No?

God does not lose control.

Okay.

Uh exhaustion, he does not slumber nor sleep.

So he doesn't get tired, he doesn't get stressed out, and he and he does not have unmet expectations.

He knows the end from the beginning.

So God's not up in heaven watching stuff happen, going, you know, I just didn't see that coming.

How'd they come up with that?

My goodness.

I was looking the other way.

I can't believe how they did that.

I'm shocked.

Not only is not God not surprised by all the stuff happening in the world, God's not even surprised when you mess up.

Or me, by the way, I'm not calling you up.

Me.

Uh one of my favorite quotes, Dr.

John Kalaga, said, God cannot be disillusioned by you because he had no illusions about you to begin with.

So, unmet expectations, God's not caught off guard, God doesn't get startled, God's not afraid of anybody or anything.

Okay, he has not lost control.

So, all of these things that make us prone to heightened emotion and anger do not apply to God.

This is very important as we're cleaning off the rot of our own anger.

Because there are certain things about our own anger that do inform us about God, but we have to think about it very carefully.

All right?

God's emotions are the pristine original.

Our emotions are the cracked, flawed copy.

All right?

Um let me show you two words that I think will help us.

The first word is passion.

Okay, when you think passion, think intense emotion, and and this is uh this is what provokes the anger of fallen humanity.

Right?

The first driver is again things we already talked about, ego, defensive, insecurity, wounded pride, and among other things.

The second is the nature of it is it's an emotional convulsion, irrational, and disproportionate.

In other words, this is why when we're angry, sometimes we turn things into crisis that don't need to be.

It's like throwing gasoline on fire.

Okay, it started out, probably could have just blown it off, not been a big deal, whatever.

A lot of it we make it really huge.

Uh the next is reactive, the action is reactive, spontaneous, and loss of self-control.

I've been very vulnerable and honest with the church.

I have struggled with anger all my life.

It's been something I have fought hard to do.

I thought once I loved Jesus, worshiped him, and read his word that it would go away, and I still fight it.

Okay, so I get it.

Um, and I can tell you when I'm angry, a lot of times my self-control is less.

So, so I'm, I can't tell you how many times I think I've gotten better, at least that's what I tell myself.

But over the years, I can't tell you how many times in my anger I had this really powerful thing I wanted to say that I knew wasn't good.

Like I knew I shouldn't say it, and so I'm going, don't say it, don't say it, don't say it, don't say it.

In my head, I'm literally just don't, bro, don't say it.

Just bro, just stay quiet.

Like just not, and then I and I say it.

Okay?

Loss of self-control.

All of us in this room, some maybe more than others, have had times where you physically did something, you said something that you can't unsay, did something you can't undo, and the whole time you knew you shouldn't do it.

But but the the fever of the mind, of anger, human passion, cause you to do it.

So, in the biblical view, it's condemned in wisdom literature as folly and vice.

In other words, if you're hot-tempered in the wisdom literature of the Bible, it's saying that's what foolish people do.

I'm gonna uh show you, this is an interesting one.

In Ephesians 4, so this is New Testament, famous passage, Ephesians 4, 26 27 says, In your anger do not sin.

Okay, that's a great statement.

In your anger, do not sin.

The next line says, Do not let the sun go down while you're still angry, and do not give the devil a foothold.

So when you're reading that, the idea of okay, don't sin in your anger, that's the main point.

The next point about don't let the sun go down while you're angry is just a way of enhancing that point.

But you know how many married couples I know who have said, we've made a deal and a covenant, we're never gonna go to bed angry.

You hear the laughter because all of those couples that said we're never gonna go to bed angry found themselves at 1 a.m.

offending one another's egos, exhausted, okay, agitating each other's insecurities, saying things they can't unsay.

Okay, the spirit of the text is be proactive about your anger so that it doesn't get a foothold and wreak havoc on your life.

But if you take that legalistically, is you have to work out every bit of anger before you go to sleep.

My friend, you're gonna be up for six months.

In fact, I would make the case that only bad fights happen after midnight.

My wife and I have a rule, we don't argue after 9 p.m.

That's I'm not being funny, that's dead serious.

We've started to argue, it starts to slip, and we go, let's sleep on it, let's table it.

Okay, I'm just here giving some young dude permission.

Listen, hear me today.

Okay, this is Unk or whatever I am now.

I'm OG or old head or whatever they call me these days.

Just take it from a guy who has 20 plus years.

Okay, if you're in this thing and it's starting to devolve, just take the spirit of the text, not to sin and your anger, go ahead and just get your pillow and blanket and find the nearest couch, or get you a uh a sleeping bag and go sleep under the stars, or do something to table this baby until the morning, till after I've had a good night's sleep and an omelet and a cup of coffee and the two cups of coffee, and then let's pick it back up and deal with it.

The spirit of that is don't sin in your anger, and then some people legalistically uh, you know, stay up all night.

Uh look what it says in Psalm 4-4.

Do not sin by letting anger control you.

Think about it overnight and remain silent.

I'll keep going.

Stealing somebody's joy right there.

Somebody just changed their marriage rules.

Okay.

Uh the first one is passion.

The second word that I want you to get, the contrast, passion, is pathos.

So go ahead and bring that up.

Pathos, okay, is divine wrath.

The driver is holiness, justice, and covenant faithfulness.

The nature is an intentional, ethically ordered response to evil.

In other words, there are some things that God's anger is predictable.

I want you to ask yourself, do you, when you think about the anger of God, do you think of it as predictable?

Or do you think of it as unpredictable?

In the ancient Near East, we don't know why the drought's happening.

We don't know why the gods are angry.

We don't know what's going on.

Because they're as fickle as human beings.

And so, yet with God, God is consistent.

This isn't like he gets upset and flies off the handle.

The creator of the universe does not wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

This is a predictable, okay, process.

Proactive, God's settled displeasure and active opposition.

So the biblical view is this is the necessary righteous response of a holy God encountering sin.

So think about it like this.

If you're a parent and you have a few kids, and you walked into a room and you observed one of your children who had an advantage over the other.

Maybe they're physically bigger, they're older, they're smarter, something.

In some way they have an advantage.

And you saw that child mistreating the other child, taking advantage of that vulnerability, okay, you would feel angry as you should.

It would be weird if you didn't.

If you thought it was funny to see one of your kids taking advantage of the other, that would be sick.

If you felt numb and you felt nothing about it, that would not be healthy.

The you would be provoked righteously, right?

What we call pathos.

This makes sense.

It's a violation of an important value.

This is wrong, I see wrong, it bothers me.

Okay, now in our humanity, because we're battling pathos and passion, sometimes pathos arouses my fear, it arouses my flesh, it causes my emotion to go high.

I have a fever of the mind, and it could cause me to overreact even to something that was righteous in the way that it was produced.

So we have to be very careful again as we're working our way through this, to look at our own anger, but to not superimpose our human flaws onto ultimately God.

When you look at, I'll share two more quick charts with you.

So the the first one is what we call the ancient Near Eastern anatomical lexicon.

I know that sounds weird, but think about the human anatomy and what that says in terms of where people's thoughts and decisions come from.

So when you, if you're looking at the ancient writings or the ancient mind, they thought of the bowels or the womb as the seat of deep compassion and mercy, particularly maternal mercy.

They thought of the heart as the center of thought and volition and conscious decision making.

So when they're talking about the heart, this is where I make choices and decisions.

And then ironically, the nose is the epicenter of anger, energy, and spirit.

So when you actually read the Old Testament, if you read, if you read the ancient Hebrew literally, when it talks about God's anger, it uses the word ap, which is the uh anatomical nose.

Alright, so it's anthropomorphism.

It's it's saying when it says God is angry, it says that God is hot in the nose.

So one of the ways we might say it is if so-and-so is red in the face.

Have you ever seen somebody get angry in front of you and literally change color?

Like they got red, okay?

That's not new with us.

That happened in the ancient world too.

So when they would talk about anger, they would say hot in the nose.

And then part of the connotation is heavy breathing.

Just doing that.

I'm getting mad.

I don't even know why.

I'm not even I'm just feeling a little bit angry right now.

I feel like I feel like a you know a bull in a china shop or something.

So over 200 times in the Old Testament, it says that God was hot in the nose.

I want to show you something really, really powerful.

In the book of Exodus, chapter 20, this is the giving of the Ten Commandments the first time.

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

And when God gives the command the Ten Commandments the first time, he doesn't come up with some structure out of the blue.

He actually uses their judicial contractual language.

So just like if you've ever made a contract or a lease, it follows like, you know, lease language.

So in the old covenant or the old testament, God makes a covenant with the nation and he uses vassal suzerain covenant language, judicial language.

And the way that he follows it is he says, here's the law, here's what happens if you break the law, and here's the reward if you keep the law, right?

So here's what it says in Exodus 20.

It says, You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above, or on earth beneath, or in the waters below.

You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.

So he's giving them the law, and then he gives what happens if you break the law: punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate him, and then the reward for keeping it, for showing love, uh, but showing love to a thousand generations to those who love me and keep my commandments.

Okay, so what you have here is is two things.

First, when he says, punishing children to the third and fourth generation, be careful you don't read that too in too flatly, right?

Don't read it flat, which would look like this.

Oh, how why would God punish the grandchild for something their grandparent did, right?

Three generations down.

Are you is Moses claiming here that God is up there and going, like back in that year, that person did this thing, and so now I'm gonna curse this kid for it?

That's not the claim that's being made.

You have to look at it deeper than that.

All right now, here's what you and I know.

Some of us in this room are still trying to untangle some knots that started a few generations ago.

So some of that stuff does get handed down, but that's not claiming that God is cursing someone down the line, like that the person born doesn't have a fair shake because of something grandpa did or grandma did.

Okay, but what he's saying is if you break this law, think of three, four generations, one family, grandparents, parents, kids, and grandkids, all in the same place.

If you break my law, okay, what's gonna happen is it's gonna have a negative impact.

There's gonna be collateral damage in a generation, it's gonna take a while to work through it.

But he says, But my love, and by the way, the word he uses here is the one we looked at when we looked at the Davidic covenant, the word Hesed, which means unfailing love and commitment.

So he says, My Hesed is for a thousand generations.

My punishment for three to four, my my uh love is for a thousand.

Again, not don't get hung up on the specifics of three to four versus a thousand, get hung up on the disparity.

So even in the covenant, he's saying, My love, my commitment, my faithfulness, and my mercy is a thousand times bigger, so to speak, than this.

So, what happens in the story?

I'm gonna summarize it because we're running out of time.

Okay, God makes this covenant, gives the Ten Commandments to Moses, he has them in stone, he comes down the mountain, and the people have already broken the covenant.

What is going on?

We're on the honeymoon, and you're already breaking the vows.

And so he goes to God and this anthropopathic language, he goes to God, and God's like, they broke the covenant, he's angry, and he says in the text, he says, Leave me alone so that my nose can burn.

So that my nose, sorry about that, so that my nose can burn.

Leave me alone so I can.

And Moses says, God, don't, he he intercedes, okay?

And he says, God, don't do that.

He says, you know, show show mercy.

Don't have your nose burning, right?

And so, so in then verse 14, God says, you know what?

I'll relent.

So what it's not, if you read it flat, it will give a weird theology that God is impulsive and God just changes his mind on a whim.

And if it wasn't for Moses, God would have just scorched the earth.

That's not what it's saying.

It's taking you through an anthropopathic thought process.

When bad when somebody breaks their word, violates their covenant, you should be upset about that.

I was upset, but it leads to his powerful quality, his twin characteristic that goes with his punishment or his wrath is his mercy and his love.

So this is the best part.

If you go two chapters later to chapter 34, you remember uh on the way down the mountain in chapter 32, Moses takes the Ten Commandments and smashes them.

See, he's like, it's like ripping up the contract in front of somebody, he smashes them.

You've broken the covenant, we just didn't even get out of the gates, and you broke the covenant, boom.

Chapter 34, two chapters later, God says, Get some more stones, bring them up.

I'm gonna redraft the covenant.

I'm gonna give a second covenant, a second chance.

And it says in uh verse 34, 1, the Lord said to Moses, Chisel out two stone tablets from the first ones, and I'll write on them the words that were on the first tablet which you broke.

Verse 4, so Moses chiseled out two stone tablets like the first ones, and went up Mount Sinai early in the morning, and the Lord, as the Lord had commanded, and he carried the two stone tablets in his hand, and then the Lord came down in a cloud in a theophany, stood there with him, and proclaimed his name the Lord, Yahweh, the personal name of God.

And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, Yahweh, Yahweh, the Lord the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God.

Look at this, slow to anger.

The anthropomorphic language in this is long of nose.

He's saying, Your God, Yahweh, understands human beings.

It doesn't mean that sin or injustice or evil does not bother God because he does get hot in the nose.

But he says, He is a slow breather.

Yahweh is not.

Yahweh is.

So instead of leading with the consequence, he leads with mercy.

The Lord the Lord, compassionate, gracious God, long of nos, abounding in his sed and faithfulness, maintaining his sed to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellious, and sin.

Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished.

He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents of the third and fourth generation.

In other words, when he sees somebody doing something, he is provoked and angry.

But understand, God's anger is not a divine character flaw, it is directly linked to his love.

If he saw evil and sin and felt nothing, then what kind of loving God would he be?

It's actually his anger that proves his love.

And so we are called, as followers, as human beings, to essentially mirror God and to mirror the divine.

It says in Proverbs 16, 32, whoever is slow to anger, or whoever is long of nose, is better than the mighty.

In other words, if you can conquer your own passion, if you can conquer your own fever of the mind, you're better than someone that can go in and conquest a city.

And he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city.

Proverbs 14, 29.

Whoever is slow to anger, whoever is long of nose has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts the folly.

Right?

So we're called to mirror God.

And true power is not found in your ability to destroy or get even or get ahead or retribution, but it's the ability to understand and to choose pathos, pathos over passion.

That's enough for this week.

Next week, we're gonna look closely at the things that predictably in the Bible, consistently, thousands of times throughout the Bible, make God's nose hot.

Let's pray together.

As we bow our heads and hearts, I'm gonna invite our prayer team to come make themselves available today.

And in these next moments, anytime that I'm praying, just feel free.

If you'd like someone to pray with you, you can step out, come down, and receive prayer.

Lord, we come to you in Jesus' name.

And Lord, you've started a conversation here that is very important.

It's proper that we do experience anger.

There are some things that will and some things that should make us angry, and yet, Lord, we don't want to sin in our anger.

We don't want to allow our passions to blind us, our self-control to go by the wayside.

When we say and do things, we want them to be done in the power of the Spirit and not by walking in the flesh.

And that can be really, really tricky.

So I pray, Lord, that as we continue to look into this and to meditate on it and to pray on it and to discuss it among each other, that you would bring clarity to our minds and improve our understanding.

Help us to see the difference between passion and pathos.

Help us to see, Lord, where we have a ten we we could have the potential to mistreat or mishandle because of our human frailty.

Lord, help us to see you clearly.

Lord, I pray for the one today who has maybe had such a hard time with the anger, the wrath of God because of how that's been imposed on them in the real world.

And I pray, Lord, you would help them to be able to strip away that rot, to be able to see more clearly.

I pray for Lord that one who may be well-meaning but misguided has started to justify some poor behavior, some things that don't represent you, but to do so from a misunderstanding of who you actually are.

Lord, we just want the truth and we want to walk in it.

We praise you, we thank you in Jesus' name.

Everybody said amen.