Psalms 103:8: “The LORD [is] merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy.”
For me to the best place to start in my study on the passage is on this matter of God being slow to anger. If you have been following my blog you know that an angry God is a real sore spot with me.
Clearly this passage is saying that God is slow to anger and if He is slow to anger that means there is a point where he can get angry. I mean I believe I am slow to anger. I don’t mind if people walk all over me, it is just that old boy who stops to wipe his feet. At that point he has lit my boiler fire and you had better stand back as I am about to overhaul your engine.
I used to teach in Junior High school. Now just pause a moment and think about something that happened when you were twelve to fourteen years of age. It is tough to remember right? That is because you tend to forget the really rough times in your life and twelve to fourteen are usually the really rough periods in a person’s life in our culture. All your adult functions start coming on line yet you are forced to put them on hold and remain as a child. It is the age of thirteen that a Jewish boy is bar mitzah and is considered a man, yet society still considers him a child. The bar mitzah merely indicates that the child is now responsible for his actions. Something quite natural occurs in the hormones of adolescent children that make them question why an adult should tell them what to do. Their hormones say: “I am an adult, treat me like an adult.” Society says: “You are still a kid and we will treat you like one.” So being a junior high school teacher is not a job for the faint of heart. These kids with adult tendencies are continually challenging your authority. What I discovered as a Junior High school teacher is that subconsciously the adolescent is testing you to see just how far they can go before you have a melt down. Yet, as a teacher if I happen to lose it in front of the students I am called before the principal to explain my actions and why I was being so unprofessional. It seems sometimes as teachers we are not allow the priviledge of being human. We have to be like God – opps bad comparision because according to Psalms 103:8 God has His limits as well before He has His melt down and there is no principal to step between Him and us.
I tend to think that some of us Christians are like adolescent children with God, we tend to see how far we can go with our sins before we cross that line with Him. Which, if you think about it, is ridiculous. We are putting human frailties on God. We are saying that He is human after all and like us He has to blow off steam once in a while.
The word for anger here is ‘anephim. Now I am not saying my rendering of this word into English is the correct one I am only saying it is a legitimate rendering. There are many possible renderings of this word and you will just need to clear it with your own heart as to which rendering you will use or better yet which one the Holy Spirit guides you to use.
The word ‘anephim comes from the root word ‘aneph. It is generally rendered as anger but extra Biblical usages have other renderings such as grief, or frustration. You see the word in its original Semitic state comes from the snorting of a camel. It even sounds like a snort. Now why would a camel snort? He could be angry, frustrated or even grieving. A camel will snort when he is in heat or desirous of an intimacy. Of course I am going to choose a word which fits my personal view of God. You see this is why we have so many different translations of the Bible. It is not that only one is right and the others are wrong, it is only that there are many different world views of God and that is reflected in the translations and because of the ambiguity of the Hebrew language all would be legitimate renderings so long as it fit the context.
It is that word slow that has me baffled. To say God is slow in something emotional tends to indicate that that emotion is something bad and something you don’t want to encounter. I have a real problem associating something bad with my God. So I am going to start messing around with this word slow until I get something that fits my personal bias, prejudice and narrow view of God. That narrow view is that I will not associate anything bad or evil with my personal God. He is total love and if He gets angry He only gets angry over something that is harmful to His children and not angry over having his pride wounded or that He has been offended.
So if He is truly slow to anger then it is righteous anger and anger over something that may harm us. That doesn’t set too well with me either. I mean if someone has me on the ground and is beating the living daylights out of me, I am not too interested in a patient God who will observe this beating and say: “Well, boys will be boys, now go on you bully stop that , shame on you.” I would like to see Him rise in anger over the way I am treated. So I am going to concede that the proper English word to use here is anger. Yes, God can get angry but not at me personally but at the sin that is destroying me.
The word slow in Hebrew is ‘ereke which comes from the root word ‘arak which in its Semitic root form refers to the long wings of a bird. Birds with little wings are flapping them all the time until they wear themselves out. But the larger more majestic birds like the eagle, or sea gulls, will just glide through the air and give only an occasional flap when necessary.
Ok, God can get angry, but it is not a tantrum or rage that comes on like a storm and you duck for shelter until it a passes. It is an ‘ereke anger, just a simple flap of the wings, a little burst of emotion. If one of my junior high school students was engaged in some naughty behavior all I had to do was give a firm, loud, and sharp “hey!!” That’s all, he would then look up at me with round eyes, round lips and I could almost hear his thoughts: “Oh, oh!” Sometimes the expression on their faces would be so priceless that I would break out laughing just destroy the who atmosphere of discipline.
God is not an abusive parent. He will not beat us, torture us, send bolts of lightning down to blown us apart, he will not even take us to the wood shed for twenty lashes. All He has to do is say, “Hey.” You want to call that anger, call that anger, but He is merely giving one flap of his wings and then He is back to His glide.
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