Righteous Anger

About this time some of the men and their wives raised a cry of protest against their fellow Jews. They were saying, “We have such large families. We need more food to survive.” Others said, “We have mortgaged our fields, vineyards, and homes to get food during the famine.” . . . When I heard their complaints, I was very angry. Nehemiah 5:1-3, 6

THE JEWS WHO WERE WORKING together to help rebuild the wall were living in a region that had been through a famine, so food supplies were scarce. Evidently some of the city’s privileged people took advantage of the situation, inflating the price of grain and loaning money for food at exorbitant rates. This meant that some people, desperate to survive, had to sell family members into slavery to cover their debts. While we might expect people in the wider, cutthroat, do-whatever-you-have-to-do-to-get-ahead world to take advantage of one another, this should never have happened among these brothers.

The way God’s people lived together was supposed to demonstrate the goodness of God to the world around them. Their exploitation and enslavement of one another did exactly the opposite. Why would anyone in the surrounding area believe that Israel’s God was kind, merciful, and compassionate when they saw those who worshiped him and called themselves by his name enslaving, overcharging, and taking advantage of each other?

When presented with the problem, Nehemiah became angry. But his was not an out-of-control anger. “After thinking it over, [he] spoke out against these nobles and officials” (verse 7). Nehemiah demonstrates that anger is not always sinful. Sometimes it is a perfectly appropriate response to injustice or to the misuse of God’s name. Nehemiah was rightly angry about how his Jewish brothers were dealing with each other and how it reflected on God.

This scene in Nehemiah helps us to consider our own anger and the way we deal with the conflicts in our own home. It forces us to ask: Is my anger righteous or selfish? Do I yell and argue in frustration or think it over before I speak, aware of the impact my words have?

Lord, it would be hard to call so much of my anger “righteous.” I really do want ________ to see righteous, appropriate anger modeled in our home. So help me to be angry over what makes you angry so that you might have your way in the world. And help me to let go of the anger that is selfish and all about getting my own way.