God's Character: Slow to Anger

Call to Worship

Micah 7:18–19 ESV

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.

Sermon

Introduction

This week we’re continuing with our character of God series. Our main verse for the series is Exodus 34:6-7, ““And the Lord passed before Moses and said: Yahweh, Yahweh, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, overflowing with loyal-love and faithfulness. He maintains loyal-love for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet He won’t declare innocent the guilty, He will bring the iniquities of the fathers upon the children and grandchildren, to the third and the fourth.”

The first week we looked at the name of God YHWH, and what it means for God’s name to mean “I will be what I will be”. We’ve now also looked at the characteristics compassion and gracious, and this week we’ll be looking at the next one: slow to anger. Like the past few weeks we’ll continue this week by starting with the definition, then going to some Old Testament examples, comparing them to Jesus in the New Testament, and finishing with what it means for us. So let’s get started.

Definition

The phrase slow to anger in this passage is the Hebrew phrase ‘Erek Appayim’, and the irony of this is that when translated literally it means “long of nostrils”. I’m not making that up, the literal phrase there is “long of nostrils” or “long of nose”. And when I first heard that last week, it really threw me, it seems like such a bizarre thing. However, as I looked into it, it’s actually very interesting. It is an idiom, which does mean slow to anger, and it’s connected to another interesting idiom in Hebrew. Much of the time when there’s a verse that says someone’s anger was kindled, or someone’s anger burned against someone else, the literal phrase in Hebrew is their nose burned hot. And even though it seems kind of odd, it actually makes sense when you think about it.

If you think of an old cartoon, like a Looney Tunes clip, or Tom and Jerry, or some of the old Mickey Mouse cartoons, when someone gets angry they get red like they’re burning up, and smoke will come out of their nose. And it’s actually much like that to think that someone when they’re angry as a burning smoky nose, is a fair idiom.

And so in contrast, when it says someone is long of nose or that they have a long nose, it’s not talking about lies like Pinocchio, it’s talking about the idea that it takes a long time for their nose to burn, that they are slow to anger. I think a phrase we use more often that fits its place is to say that someone has a long fuse. If one has a short fuse they have a temper, they’re quick to get angry, if they have a long fuse they’re patient, slow to get angry. And that’s what the phrase in Hebrew is meaning.

And it occurs quite a bit, I’ll show two examples to start. The first example is from 1 Samuel 17, and in this passage David is just a young boy, and his brothers have gone out to battle alongside King Saul and his army, and they’re up against the Philistines, and the giant Goliath has been taunting them and scaring them for days and days now, and while this is going on, David’s father Jesse sends David with some food and supplies for his brothers and David shows up and he starts to ask about what’s going on and who will slay Goliath, and what the reward will be, and this is the next verse.

1 Samuel 17:28 “Now Eliab his eldest brother heard when he spoke to the men. And Eliab’s anger was kindled against David (or in Hebrew: his nose became hot), and he said, “Why have you come down? And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your presumption and the evil of your heart, for you have come down to see the battle.””

And we know the rest of the story David disregards his brother, goes to the king and says he’ll slay Goliath, and then he goes and gets the stones and he slays Goliath and Israel wins the victory.

What’s interesting about the interaction with Eliab is that here we see what it looks like to have a hot nose, a short fuse, to be quick to anger. All that David has done is come and inquire about what’s going on, but his older brother finds it really annoying and so he snaps at him, his nose burns hot, and he questions and calls out David, even though David hasn’t done anything.

Let’s go to a second example. Genesis 39, we mention this story briefly last week with the word grace, but we’ll look at it from a slightly different part of it here. It’s about Joseph, his brother’s sold him into slavery, and he was bought by a man named Potiphar, and intially Joseph is seen with favour and grace in the eyes of Potiphar. But unfortunately Joseph is also seen as favourable in the eyes of Potiphar’s wife as well, she wants to be with him, and so she comes one day and tries to lie with him, and Joseph runs away from her, but she grabs his coat, and she makes up this story that he had tried to be with her and that it was all Joseph’s fault. And this is Potiphar’s reaction. Genesis 39:19

Genesis 39:19 ESV

As soon as his master heard the words that his wife spoke to him, “This is the way your servant treated me,” his anger was kindled.

Or again translating literally from Hebrew, his nose became hot. And here like Eliab, Potiphar doesn’t wait for an explanation or to try and reason things out, he let’s his temper get the best of him and he acts quickly on his anger instead of allowing cooler heads to prevail.

So in these examples we see people who are quick to become angry, they aren’t patient, they seem to have a temper, they let their anger get the best of them. But that’s not the description of God we’re given in Exodus 34:6, it says that God has a long nose, He is slow to become angry. God’s anger isn’t a temper, it’s calculated and intentional and rational and just. And it also doesn’t last very long.

Psalm 30:5 says “For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime...”

So one of the core attributes of God’s character is that He is patient, He isn’t rash, He’s quick to forgive, He’s deliberate and intentional with His responses. However, the passage does not say that God doesn’t get angry, it says that He is slow to get angry, and that His anger does not last a long time, but it’s also important to understand when and why God gets angry, and what He does when He is angry.

Old Testament

So let’s start there, what makes God angry?

The first time in the whole bible that it says that God gets angry is in Exodus 3-4, it’s the story of Moses and the burning bush. Moses is out in the wilderness, he’s taking care of his sheep and he comes across this bush on fire that just isn’t burning up, and from the bush comes God’s voice and He tells Moses to go back to Egypt and rescue his people from slavery. And they go back and forth five times, and Moses keeps coming up with a bunch of excuses.

His first excuse is that he’s not good enough.

His second excuse is that he doesn’t have the right answers.

His third excuse is that the people won’t believe him.

His fourth excuse is that he’s bad at speaking.

And finally by the fifth time Moses doesn’t even try to make excuses, He just says it as it is, Exodus 4:13 “But he said, “Oh, my Lord, please send someone else.””

And finally after all of this, it says, Exodus 4:14 “Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Moses and he said, “Is there not Aaron, your brother, the Levite? I know that he can speak well. Behold, he is coming out to meet you, and when he sees you, he will be glad in his heart.”

So after all of these excuses God’s nose burns hot, and he says, ‘Your brother is good at speaking, take him with you’. That’s the first time in the bible it says that God was angry, and in his anger, he tells Moses to take his brother with him for support. Now, obviously God’s anger sometimes gets more intense than that, but I think it’s really telling that the first time in the bible it says that God was angry, He’s still very calm and cool headed, it starts with an example that shows what the other times God is angry will be like.

And this story very clearly parallels what’s to come, here God is patient with Moses five times, in a few chapters, God is patient with Pharaoh ten times. Once Moses listens and goes to Pharaoh, Pharaoh refuses to let the people out of slavery 10 different times, and the last time all of the firstborn are dead, and the Israelites flee into the wilderness, but then they get trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s army that came to track them down. And God parts the water for them and sends them across and then brings it back down on the Egyptian army. We’re familiar with that story, but the next chapter is a song from Moses after God has saved them, and this is one of the verses in it: Exodus 15:8

Exodus 15:8 ESV

At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up; the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.

“At the blast of your nostrils”… what does that sound like, it sounds like God’s nose burned hot, he got angry, and once he had given Pharaoh 10 chances, He finally acted on it, and struck Pharaoh and his army down.

One more example, and we’ve already kind of covered this one. But once the Israelites have been wandering in the desert for a while they finally get to Mount Sinai and they have the golden calf incident, and this is the interaction that God and Moses have regarding it. This is right after the people have made the calf. Exodus 32:7-14

Exodus 32:7–14 ESV

And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ ” And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.” But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ” And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.

We see that God’s anger burned hot, but He talks to Moses, Moses asks Him not to act and so He relents, God is truly slow to anger.

And from these three cases in Exodus, we see what makes God angry, and we also see how slow He is to act on it, because He gives second , fifth, even tenth chances.

At the burning bush we see that God is angry when people repeatedly don’t listen to Him, even when it’s what’s best.

At the red sea we see that God is angered by injustice, when people are mistreated and taken advantage of, it makes Him angry.

And at Mount Sinai we see that God is angry when the people that He’s closest to, the one’s He’s in a convenant relationship betray Him.

In the book of Ezra there’s a verse that helpfully summarizes what makes God angry. Ezra 8:22: “The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him, but his great anger [literally in Hebrew “his great nose”] is against all who forsake him.”

In summary of this: God is angry when the people He loves get hurt, and this includes when people are self-destructive and hurt themselves, especially when they turn away from Him, and leave Him, the place where they’re safest, where they’re supposed to be.

And we see that that makes Him angry by the way that He acts, because in His anger, when people turns away from Him He lets them. Often throughout the bible God’s anger looks like this:

Judges 2:12–14 ESV

And they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went after other gods, from among the gods of the peoples who were around them, and bowed down to them. And they provoked the Lord to anger. They abandoned the Lord and served the Baals and the Ashtaroth. So the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he gave them over to plunderers, who plundered them. And he sold them into the hand of their surrounding enemies, so that they could no longer withstand their enemies.

And this sort of phrasing happens all throughout not only the book of Judges but throughout the whole bible. Where God’s anger is kindled against Israel for leaving Him. (Again the phrase in Hebrew if translated literally is His nose became hot) And each time like listed in these three passages. God gives the people what they want, they want to leave Him and forsake Him and turn their backs on Him. So He let’s them and He allows them to be taken over by other nations or enemies. God even says this plainly to Moses before the Israelites are about to cross over into the promised land, this is what He says:

Deuteronomy 31:16–18 ESV

And the Lord said to Moses, “Behold, you are about to lie down with your fathers. Then this people will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them in the land that they are entering, and they will forsake me and break my covenant that I have made with them. Then my anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured. And many evils and troubles will come upon them, so that they will say in that day, ‘Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’ And I will surely hide my face in that day because of all the evil that they have done, because they have turned to other gods.

And so in this way, God’s anger is quite passive, the consequences are dire for the people, but it’s not because God is coming down with a temper and throwing a fit like the people of their day would say about gods like Zeus or Poseidon. Instead, God is simply removing His protection from them because they’ve turned away again.

An example of this is the city of Ninevah, God had sent Jonah to them to tell them to repent, Jonah goes and they do repent. But fast forward a little over 100 years and they’ve repeatedly been sinning again and again and again and so God sends this prophet named Nahum to them and Nahum says this:

Nahum 1:2-3 “The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath; the Lord takes vengeance on his foes and vents his wrath against his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger but great in power, the Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished...”

He’s talking about Ninevah here, but what’s so fascinating is that God didn’t come swooping down and in rash anger shoot lightning bolts at them, instead God allowed for Babylon to wipe them out completely. This isn’t to say that God never acts directly, because sometimes He does, but most often when we read about God’s anger it’s accompanied with Him allowing people to turn away and then removing His protection from them, and them facing the consequences of their actions.

As we track with all of this, and try to see the full picture, there’s a quote that I found this week that I find ties it all together really nicely. When we talk about the wrath of God, this is a pretty good definition. (It comes from the book God Has a Name by John Mark Comer) here it is:

God’s wrath [is] “his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all it’s forms and manifestations.”

And so when we carry on into the New Testament we continue to see this same response with Jesus.

New Testament

So when we carry on into the New Testament we continue to see this same response with Jesus.

When Jesus gets angry it’s almost always a direct result of evil. One time that Jesus was particularly angry was when He was in the temple and He sees that the temple has just become a get rich quick scheme for the religious leaders there, they’re making money by taking advantage of the poor. And Jesus is livid with this injustice, and so He throws over the tables and sends all of the merchants out of the temple, both because of their utter disrespect towards God and because they’re taking advantage of the poor.

Another famous set of passages where Jesus is angry is in Matthew 23, and Jesus is angry with the scribes and Pharisees because they’ve been hypocritical, they’ve made the lives of the people around them harder by pushing unnecessary rules and burdens on people, all the while not practicing what they’re preaching. And this is what He says:

Matthew 23:13–33 ESV

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves. “Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘If anyone swears by the temple, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gold of the temple, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind fools! For which is greater, the gold or the temple that has made the gold sacred? And you say, ‘If anyone swears by the altar, it is nothing, but if anyone swears by the gift that is on the altar, he is bound by his oath.’ You blind men! For which is greater, the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred? So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and by everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by him who dwells in it. And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by him who sits upon it. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you build the tombs of the prophets and decorate the monuments of the righteous, saying, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers. You serpents, you brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?

In this Jesus is calling them out for all kinds of things, their hypocrisy, their failure to practice justice, their focus on the wrong things, and their lack of faith. They should have been leading and helping the people of Israel, but instead they’ve been leading them astray and hurting them, and so Jesus calls them out on it because He’s angry about the same thing His Father get’s angry about, injustice, people turning away, and people hurting those that He loves.

But what does He do in the end, He doesn’t even give them up to their own desires, He gives Himself for them. He allows Himself to face the consequences that they’ve deserved, and He takes on the full amount of God’s wrath.

See, the consequence for all of the evil in the world is that when we’re given over to our own desires it ultimately leads us to death, but that’s not what Jesus wanted for us, He wants us to have life, and so He chose to take on the consequence that we deserved in the process He faced the full anger of God, and was forsaken unlike any of us will ever be, in order to fully pay for our sins. Jesus was so slow to anger that He chose to face it for us instead of allowing to destroy us. And even though the sins of the people who were murdering Him deserved a fate worse than death, He said: Luke 23:34 “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Even to death Jesus was slow to anger against the people that most deserved His anger.

It’s not that God doesn’t get angry, He gets very angry about sin and injustice, but He’s patient and just, and quick to forgive.

In 2 Peter, Peter talks about the coming day when God will rightly judge all people, but in the midst of that He says this: 2 Peter 3:9 “The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.”

God wants all to come to know Him, it’s one of the major reasons that He’s slow to anger, He wants all to be saved from the consequences of their sins. He wants all to have eternal life, but first they must repent, and recognize their need for Him, and turn to Him.

Us

It just blows me away that God is that patient, that forgiving, that slow to anger. And as I realize how slow to anger He is, and how calculated He is with His responses, that He doesn’t have a temper but He’s incredibly quick to forgive and show compassion and grace to people even when they don’t deserve it, it makes me realize how much I have to work on. How often my response aren’t slow to anger, all of the times that my temper shows through and all of the times that I end up sinning because I’m not patient and forgiving and slow to anger like God.

I’ll just end with this thought. James 1:19-20 “Know this, my beloved brothers: 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.”

Our ultimate goal in life is to be pleasing to God, to be able to bring glory to Him, and to allow Him to shape and mold our character. That means we need to watch ourselves, that we are being slow to anger, that we’re not rash and quick to cast judgement, but that we’re quick to forgive and that our character matches God, that we are slow to anger. But like God that doesn’t mean we don’t get angry at things that we should be angry at, we should confront injustice in the world it should make us angry, but our anger should come from righteous motives, and it should be acted on in calculated righteous ways like God’s anger is.

And so let us be thankful that God is slow to anger and that that gives us hope, and let us pray that we would be more like His character, that we would be slow to anger as often as possible, and that He would show us how to be angry well when that is the appropriate response as well.

Let’s pray.

Communion

Matthew 26:26–28 ESV

Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Benediction

2 Corinthians 13:11 ESV

Finally, brothers, rejoice. Aim for restoration, comfort one another, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.