Monday: God Is Slow to Anger
Daily Lesson for Monday 27th of January 2025
God becomes angry at evil because God is love. God is so compassionate and gracious that one biblical prophet even chastised God for being too merciful!
Consider the story of Jonah and reflect on Jonah’s reaction to God’s compassionate forgiveness of the Ninevites, in Jonah 4:1-4. What does this tell us about Jonah, and about God? (See also Matthew 10:8.)
Image © Kim Justinen at Goodsalt.com
Jonah’s reaction to God’s mercy is telling in two primary ways. First, it displays Jonah’s own hardheartedness. He hated the Assyrians so much for what they had done to Israel that he did not want God to show them any mercy.
What a lesson for us! We must be careful to guard against this same attitude, however understandable it may be. Of all people, those who have received the grace of God should recognize unmerited grace and thus be willing to extend grace to others.
Secondly, Jonah’s reaction reinforces how central God’s compassion and grace are to His character. So familiar was Jonah with God’s mercy that—precisely because God is “gracious and merciful” and “slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness” (Jonah 4:2, NKJV)—Jonah knew that the Lord would relent from bringing judgment against Nineveh. God deals justly and mercifully with all peoples and nations.
The Hebrew phrase translated “slow to anger” or “longsuffering” could be literally translated “long of nose.” In Hebrew idiom, anger was metaphorically associated with the nose, and the length of nose metaphorically images how long it takes for one to become angry.
References to God as “long of nose,” then, convey that God is slow to anger and long-suffering. While it does not take long for humans to become angry, God is exceedingly long-suffering and patient, and bestows grace freely and abundantly, yet without justifying sin or turning a blind eye to injustice. Instead, God Himself makes atonement for sin and evil via the cross so that He can be both just and the justifier of those who believe in Him (Romans 3:25-26).
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Have you ever failed to show mercy or grace to someone who has wronged you? How can you best remember what God has done for you so that you become more gracious to others in response to the abundant grace God has shown you? And how do we show mercy and grace without giving license to sin or enabling abuse or oppression? |
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I am certainly glad that God is "slow to anger"! Speaking from a human perspective, some of my biggest regrets is when I have reacted to situations rather than taking the time to reflect and think about them. As both a teacher and a parent, I think of when my students or children have done something that has caused me an angry reaction. Usually, I was the one who ended up in big trouble. Often it would end up in a shouting match, both claiming the higher moral ground.
How much better it would have been to back off and say that we need to think about it and leave the resolution to when both sides had calmed down.
Now, I am not saying that God needs time to back off so that he has more control over his anger. Rather he is using the metaphor of controlling human anger that we all know about, even if we don't practice it to help us understand him better.
The story of Jonah is too close to our attitudes for comfort. Jonah was focussed on condemnation and the execution of judgement. I am sure that if Jonah was cooking toast, he would not wait for 4 minutes until the toast was crisp on the outside and soft on the inside. He would have used a blow-torch and had a pile of ashes in seconds.
He had to admit that God had a different agenda:
Paul adds: