Faith's Underbelly - Anger Gone Wrong

Preached on Sunday, September 10, 2017

Scripture readings: Numbers 20:1-13; James 1:19-25

You’ve heard of Murphy’s Law, which goes like this: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” The law comes from Edward Murphy, who was an Air Force major and an aerospace engineer. I’ve found out that his saying was what he called a rule for “defensive design”. He devised his law to encourage planning for the worst-case scenario. Apparently, he hated the way his law got turned into comedy.

The Hills of Southern California
June 2017

My dad liked to consider himself to be Irish, which was a big over-simplification of the truth, because he was really only one eighth Irish. My dad thought that Murphy’s Law was an old Irish saying. So, he had one plaque hanging in the garage with Murphy’s Law on it, and he had another plaque with the words: “Murphy was an optimist.” This worked for my dad. It says a lot about him.

I wonder if Murphy may actually have been Jewish, because anything that could go wrong really did go wrong in the exodus of God’s people through the desert. Finally, Murphy’s Law happened to Moses. For me, that’s what we read about in the scriptures for this message.

Moses was done in by his own anger. This might seem strange to you. After all, the Book of Numbers also describes Moses this way: “Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men who were on the face of the earth.” (12:3)

But meekness describes a different kind of mildness or softness than you might imagine. In the Bible, a meek person is the kind of softy who is soft to God. It’s the quality of being a servant. It means responding to every signal from God, giving to God exactly what God wants.

A perfectly trained war horse was expected to be bold and fearless, and also to be perfectly meek to every signal from its rider: to charge, to halt, to retreat, to turn on a dime. That was the meekness of Moses toward God: except for this time. This time, his temper, that always went right, finally went wrong.

Paul says, “Be angry but do not sin: do not let the sun go done on your wrath.” (Ephesians 4:16)

I think anger can be the right response, the meekest response, under the right circumstances. There is such a thing as “righteous indignation.” So many people in the Old Testament seem to be angry all the time. In the New Testament, Paul gets mad. Jesus gets mad. And, as such, Jesus is the perfect image of God, because God seems to get mad a lot, and that seems to be the very result of God’s holiness and righteousness.

I have a different problem. I don’t seem to be able to get mad without getting sinful about it. One way I go wrong is by holding onto it. Paul’s teaching applies to that. It’s OK to get mad, just don’t hold onto it. And then there is this: don’t let your anger make you do something that breaks God’s law of love. That’s hard.

Then James tells us something that I believe applies to where Moses went wrong in his anger. James says” “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, for man’s anger doesn’t bring about the righteousness that God desires.” (James 1:19-20) This applies so many ways.

Here’s another word study: righteousness. Righteousness, in Hebrew and in Greek, is about rightness. It’s about being right and doing right. But being right is not about being correct. Being right is about doing and being what you are supposed to be, whatever the circumstances, and making things good, and making things better. I

t’s like the song “Things go better with Coca Cola.” That means that Coca Cola is righteous, within certain limits.

God’s righteousness, in this light, is very clear. God’s righteousness is his faithful love that is devoted to getting his people to freedom and the Promised Land, no matter what.

When God got angry it was part of the process of providing for his people, teaching them, shaping them, building their faith and trust and love for him, and for each other. Even God’s discipline (or his punishment), in anger, is basically devoted to providing for his people and giving them a grace and an abundance of gifts for which they are clearly not ready, and for which they show no desire whatsoever. In all that God does for them, they show no sign of change.

But God is faithful. That is God’s righteousness: just a small part.

God has ways of showing his people that he is always with them. The pillar of cloud and fire was just a small part of that. That was his righteousness too.

God was going to give them water again, even though they forgot that he always made sure they had water when they truly needed it, and even though they could see that God was with them all the time. They acted as though God wasn’t there at all. They acted as though Moses was the one who was leading them through the desert all along.

In spite of this, God was going to give them the water he knew that they needed, anyway. And his reason for doing this was because he is holy and righteous.

God’s plan in having Moses serve as the spokesman for God to the rock was a plan to show his people that God was a God who would always care for them. God would always stick to them, even when he was angry.

God’s people would get their water, even when they didn’t deserve it; even when they turned spiritually ugly in their unfaithfulness to God and to Moses. This would help them understand his holiness and righteousness. It was God’s plan to faithfully teach and shape his people.

Over and over again, we see that, when God gets angry, and when Moses gets angry, Moses consistently prays (in his anger) for the undeserved grace of God to forgive and help his people. I wonder how Moses did this over and over again. It would be so easy for Moses to get his anger wrong. It could have gone wrong so many times. But it didn’t go wrong, until it did. Murphy’s Law proved true.

On a human level, Murphy’s Law is never out of sight. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, in the beginning. We were created for the joy of seeing our love blend with God’s love, and to see our love doing good, and making good, and being good. We were made for this joy, as well as for this love.

Soon after the beginning, in the garden of Eden, the Garden of joy and love, we decided to limit our love’s dependence on God’s love. We decided to make ourselves into our own little gods, with our own independent instinct for good and evil, on our own terms. And, so, Murphy’s Law was born.

God had a defensive design from the start, and so he told Adam and Eve about that design as soon as he got them out of hiding. There would be, sometime in the future, a son of Eve who would grow up to be wounded in the heel by evil, and the serpent Satan. But this child of Eve would crush evil, and the serpent, with his heel. In the ages to come Jesus would be the son of Mary, the long-drawn-out descendant daughter of Eve. (Genesis 3:14-15)

On the cross, Jesus would be bitten with evil’s poison, the poison of the serpent, and sin, and Murphy’s Law. Then Jesus would crush those enemies with his wounds. The wounds of Jesus, the wounds of his death on the cross, were the fatal bite of the serpent that killed Jesus. The wounds of Jesus were also the weapons of his victory over the serpent’s bite.

Jesus was able to stomp that serpent of evil. Jesus rose from the dead as conqueror of the serpent, and as the conqueror of the sin and death that came from the serpent’s rule. Jesus’ prayer, “Father, forgive them,” was like the prayer that Moses was always saying for God’s forgiveness and grace for his guilty people.

Jesus’ prayer got everyone who would become one of his people back on the track to the Promised Land. The cross of Jesus is the very heart of his prayer that changes those who trust him into receivers of God’s holiness and righteousness.

God’s anger at Moses seems ungracious, at first sight. Moses’ unrighteous anger didn’t break one of the Ten Commandments, but it did break Jesus’ law, in the Sermon on the Mount.

In the case of Moses, we see something surprising about the heart of God. We see God get angry about anger. God got angry at the anger of Moses. And there, God, in his heart, looks suddenly, on that point, like Jesus. Jesus got angry, but he also got angry at anger.

Jesus said: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’” (Note: that judgment, here, means death by stoning) “But I tell you that anyone who is angry at his brother will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca (or worthless empty head!)’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” (Matthew 5:21-22)

It wasn’t only because Moses didn’t mention God when he struck the rock, or that he struck the rock instead of talking to the rock. In essence, Moses, in his anger, forgot the heart of God that he normally knew so well. He and his brother Aaron had just been in the direct and full presence of the Glory of God. They had heard the voice of God. (Numbers 20:6)

In seeing and hearing this, Moses saw the holiness and righteousness of God, which expressed God’s faithfulness and grace for the unworthy. He saw what he always remembered to pray for; until now.

Then he came back and looked at the people who hated him, and who had no faith in the God who had forgiven them countless times before. (Numbers 14:18-19) When Moses came back and looked at these people, his anger returned, and he forgot God’s absolute love.

Moses called God’s people “rebels” which was perfectly true, but God’s intention of showing his forgiveness to his people was a greater truth. Moses failed to give God’s message to God’s people. Moses might just as well have called them “fools”, as Jesus warns us against.

In praying for God’s forgiveness of his people, so many times, Moses had prayed according to what he had seen of the heart of God. In praying according to the heart of God, Moses had been praying according to Jesus.

Jesus is the heart of God’s holiness, and righteousness, and faithfulness. Moses, praying as he did, was, in his own heart, giving his people Jesus. Moses praying for his people’s sins, and for their forgiveness, was praying an equivalent to, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  By forgetting to hold such a prayer in his heart, Moses was withholding Jesus from the people.

Anger can do this. Anger can withhold the love and grace of God, in Jesus, from those who don’t deserve it, and yet they need it. And we are in the same boat. We don’t deserve grace, but we need it. It’s the faithfulness and holiness of God.

There are many times when anger is the right thing, but it will always go wrong if we don’t hold onto the heart of God, in Jesus, when we are angry. We will repeat Murphy’s Law.

Other people are just as much the image of God as we are, and we condemn ourselves when we forget to work for the righteousness and holiness of God in those people’s lives. Anger goes wrong when it stops showing the absolute love of God.

Moses was punished because he let his anger make him forget to pray for his people, even though they played the part of being his enemies. Moses forgot to love them anyway.

Jesus is the voice of God telling us to never forget to love others, even when we are angry. Moses shows us, and Jesus tells us and shows us on the cross, to remember to pray for others and to speak and work so that God’s grace becomes known to them. Let’s not go wrong with this.