On average, Christians get angry about 3 times a year. I don’t know that for certain, but when they do, please know you might hear a reference to a particular set of verses. I am of course talking about the section of the Bible in which Jesus clears the salespeople from the temple.
In the story, Christ slowly weaves a whip and then goes in and starts kicking over tables. I like to imagine that he first used the whip as a rope to swing down from the roof and kick through the windows of the temple like the SWAT team. Then once inside he said the kinds of things that are usually found in Harrison Ford movies. Things like, “Too busy selling stuff to pray? I’ll give you something to pray about!” or “Meet your maker, literally!”
But I think we refer to that verse because sometimes we automatically associate anger with sin. We think the act of being angry is by nature sinful. We read Ephesians 4:26 as, “In your anger you have sinned” instead of the way it’s really written, “In your anger, do not sin.”
I think anger is good and honest sometimes. My wife and I were super polite and focused on not arguing our first year of marriage. We thought that whole, “never go to sleep angry with each other” meant, “never get angry with each other.” We ended up being really fake, not telling each other what we like and what we don’t like, which is not what God wants. Thankfully, when we do disagree, my wife never says, “You’re about to get alpha’d and omega’d” which would also have worked in the temple scene as well.
