Anger

“Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil.”

— Ephesians 4:26-27

Anger is the strong displeasure aroused by a perceived wrong. Scripture does not treat every instance of it as sin: believers are commanded, not merely permitted, to “be angry” (Eph. 4:26), and Jesus himself grew angry at hardness of heart (Mark 3:5). The Sermon on the Mount condemns ungodly anger that nurses hatred and contempt toward another, an inward form of the murder the sixth commandment forbids (Matt. 5:21-22).¹ It becomes sin when left to fester, which is why Paul bounds the command with a limit: do not let it outlast the day, or become the devil’s foothold (Eph. 4:26-27).

Biblical Basis

Paul’s command in Ephesians assumes anger can exist without sin, then guards against how quickly it turns into sin: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” (Eph. 4:26-27). James gives the same caution from the opposite direction, warning that unchecked human anger does not produce what God requires: “let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger; for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20). Paul elsewhere lists “outbursts of anger” among the “deeds of the flesh,” alongside enmity, strife, and jealousy (Gal. 5:19-20), the kind of sinful impulse Sammons calls a “passion” rather than an “emotion,” to distinguish it from the non-sinful stirring of a “righteous anger” at real wrong.²

Jesus locates the deeper issue in the heart rather than the act. In the first of his six sayings on the law in Matthew 5, he moves from the sixth commandment’s prohibition on murder to its root: “everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court. Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be subject to hellfire” (Matt. 5:21-22). Jesus does not condemn every kind of anger, but ungodly anger, since even righteous anger left unaddressed can easily lead to sin.¹ Hatred for another person is the inward violation of the command not to murder; words of contempt are its outward expression, and murder itself does not come from nowhere but is preceded by the wrongful desire (cf. James 4:1-2).¹

Historical Development

Calvin’s exposition of the Ten Commandments in the 1559 Institutes draws out the same inward reading of the sixth commandment that Matthew 5 states. Because God “sees the thoughts of the heart,” the prohibition on murder “prohibits the murder of the heart, and requires a sincere desire to preserve our brother’s life”: “the hand, indeed, commits the murder, but the mind, under the influence of wrath and hatred, conceives it.” Calvin presses the logic further than a bare prohibition on hatred: “how can you be angry with your brother, without passionately longing to do him harm? If you must not be angry with him, neither must you hate him, hatred being nothing but inveterate anger.” He grounds this in John’s own equation of hatred with murder (1 John 3:15) and in Christ’s warning about “Raca” and “fool” (Matt. 5:22).³

A century later, Thomas Watson’s exposition of Christ’s charge to be “wise as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matt. 10:16) turns the same concern toward practical pastoral counsel: how does a Christian reprove another’s sin without sinning in the reproof? Watson’s first answer is to govern one’s own anger before speaking: “taking a fit season to reprove another; that is, when his Anger is over: as when God did rebuke Adam, he came to him in the cool of the Day… To reprove a Man when he is in a Passion, is to give Strong Water in a Fever; it doth more hurt than good.”⁴ Where Calvin reads the commandment inward, into the disposition itself, Watson applies the same wariness of anger outward, to how a Christian who has already mastered it is to correct someone else.

Objections and Responses

If Ephesians 4:26 commands believers to “be angry,” how can any anger be sinful? The command is not a blank permission but comes with two immediate limits: anger must not outlast the day, and it must not become “an opportunity” for the devil (Eph. 4:26-27). James makes the same point from the opposite angle, warning that human anger, left to run its own course, “does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19-20). The distinction is not between anger and no anger but between anger that is quickly resolved in righteousness and anger that is nursed into hatred, which Christ treats as the inward form of murder itself (Matt. 5:21-22).¹

Is anger itself always a sinful passion, or can it be a legitimate emotion? Sammons distinguishes “passions,” the sinful impulses Scripture lists among the “deeds of the flesh” (Gal. 5:19-21), from “emotions,” the non-sinful stirring of the heart in response to real circumstances, of which he names “righteous anger” as an example alongside sadness and delight.² On this reading, anger at genuine wrong is not itself the sin Scripture warns against; what turns it to sin is nursing it into hatred, contempt, or unrighteous action rather than resolving it (Eph. 4:26-27).

Related Doctrines

References

Ken Magnuson, “5. Aspects of Biblical Ethics: New Testament,” in Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 8, “Impassibility,” 154-172. ↩ ↩²
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 2, chap. 8, sec. 39-40, 316-362. ↩
Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), “An Addition of some Sermons Preached by… Mr. Tho. Watson,” 970. ↩