What makes you angry? We all have our triggers, don’t we? We all have certain things, certain situations, certain affronts to our dignity or pride that stir anger within. I know I’ve got mine. And actually, I know quite a lot about anger, as Aileen could attest (and probably will if you think to ask her!). When she and I talk about God’s grace in our lives, and evidence of it, she will often point this out—that God has mellowed me, taken away that anger that often bubbled within and occasionally boiled over. When I moved out of my parents’ home on the day I got married, I left behind a hole in the wall (hidden from their view by a strategically-placed poster) that I had smashed in a fit of anger a few months before. At one of the first homes Aileen and I lived in I cracked a door frame when I tried to smash it shut, once more in a fit of stupid anger. My immature anger just sometimes boiled over and got me into trouble. I always felt like an idiot after acting out, but in the moment my anger got the better of me; I often surrendered to it. I am profoundly grateful that God, in his mercy, has blessed me and blessed my family by taking away much of the immaturity, the irrationality, the lack of self-control that caused me to lash out like an angry toddler. I still known what it is to be angry, but no longer tend toward violent reaction.

As I sat yesterday and pondered anger I eventually turned to a dictionary to seek a definition of it. According to one, anger is a strong feeling of displeasure, a kind of belligerence aroused by a wrong. And from experience I can say it is equally likely that it is anger aroused by a perceived wrong. If someone truly wrongs me, I may well express anger and do so with some justification. If someone slights me or otherwise damages my pride, it may also cause me to act angry but with no justification at all. Anger is inherently reactive, awaiting a trigger and then waiting to react in accordance with my nature.

I think we’ve all met angry people, haven’t we? People who react to tough situations with anger and people who often act out in this anger. Such people may react in surprising, unexpected and terrifying ways. They act as they do out of emotion. And anger is not one of those enjoyable emotions. It may channel a strange, sick kind of pleasure for a moment or two, but like all sin, it very quickly loses its luster. There is something scary about seeing a person act out in anger. And the bigger that person, the more powerful his position, the greater the fear. If my three year-old gets angry and lashes out, I am bothered but not much afraid. But if I were to become angry and act out in anger, she would rightly be terrified because of what I could, I might, do to her in my emotion.

It is little wonder that man fears an angry God. If we believe that God is so much greater than we are, so much stronger, so much more powerful, and if we believe that God is capable of anger and wrath, then we have little choice but to fear him as a child may fear a parent. And, indeed, man’s history with deity, whether with the true God or with any number of idols has often been a position of terror, seeking by deed or sacrifice to appease his wrath. And so often, I think, we confuse human anger with divine wrath, imposing our own sinful, irrational, emotional anger upon God’s just, perfect, holy wrath. So no wonder, then, that we seek to appease him, to assuage our guilty consciences and to hope against hope that we may have turned aside his wrath for another day.

And here it strikes me just how different the wrath of God is from my anger, from what we see in most human anger. Charles Leiter has said it well: “God’s wrath is not a temporary loss of self-control or a selfish fit of emotion. It is His holy, white-hot hatred of sin, the reaction and revulsion of His holy nature against all that is evil.” God’s wrath is revulsion. It is not mere emotion and is not at all irrational. It is so much more than emotion. You may know what it is to be revulsed. Some time ago I heard of a woman who, upon finding out that her husband had been cheating on her, immediately vomited. It was as if her whole body was so affronted, so repulsed by her husband’s sin that it acted all on its own. Revulsion may be our reaction to a lukewarm sip of water when we were expecting ice cold or piping hot. We spew it out, repulsed. And this is sin to God. God’s wrath is a holy reaction, it is a holy and white-hot hatred of all that is evil. This is a good and just and fair reaction to something that is absolutely, fundamentally opposed to God’s very nature. For sin is against all that he is and all that he wants us to be.

God’s reaction to sin is the good and the necessary, the absolute best and perfectly just reaction. He will not act rashly in anger but will act justly in wrath. He will express this wrath against all sin. He must express this wrath against sin, for sin opposes all that he is as the perfectly holy creator of all that is. And how good it is, when we ponder God’s wrath, to know that his wrath has already been satisfied for those who trust in him. For there on the cross, Jesus Christ took that wrath upon himself on behalf all those who were his own. There God required the just penalty due for that sin. And there the Father found perfect, eternal satisfaction for his wrath. And there you and I can turn our eyes and turn our hearts and trust and believe and know that Jesus Christ has paid it all and has paid it for us if only we cast ourselves upon him.

A friend sent this to me earlier in the week, a quote from John N. Oswalt’s The Bible Among the Myths (Zondervan, 2009). What grabbed me in this quote was the author’s insistence that we cannot measure human progress apart from our God-given purpose. It’s worth thinking about.

*****

I question whether we can talk about ‘development’ of any sort apart from the unique biblical perspective. Does ‘the historical process’ teach us about development or progress? Certainly we can look back over the past ten millennia and see certain signs of increased technical competence. We have moved from hunter-gatherers using sharpened stones as tools to bureaucrats communicating around the world electronically in seconds.

But is that progress? Or is it merely change? What is the goal toward which human society is tending? Or are we too, like our 10,000 year-old forbears, only wishing to survive as long as possible with a maximum of comfort, pleasure, and security? In fact, the idea of progress is dependent on the idea that our Creator has a goal for us, outside of ourselves, toward which we humans were made to progress and against which our progress can be measured. Give up that truth, and ‘progress’ becomes a chimera.

Here is (yet) another list of books I read that will not be receiving extensive reviews.

Shakedown by Ezra Levant. Unless you are Canadian, you have probably not heard of Ezra Levant. Let me fill you in. Several years ago he was publisher of Western Standard magazine and made the decision to print the infamous Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. He did so because they were newsworthy and he wanted to use them to illustrate a story. He soon found himself before his province’s Human Rights and Citizenship Commission where he was charged with the offense of “discrimination.” It was only after a long, embittered and expensive fight that he managed to avoid charges becoming, I believe, the first person to be cleared of such crimes. He wrote Shakedown to record his experience and to draw attention to these Human Rights tribunals that happen all over Canada and which have taken for themselves outrageous powers that circumvent all manner of justice. In fact, they get awfully close to charging Canadians for “thoughtcrime,” that Orwellian phrase that looks beyond what a person has actually done to what he may have intended to do. His story is shocking and, we hope, marks the beginning of the end for the Human Rights Commissions’ most intrusive and outrageous powers. (Do note, that those these commissions exist and exist all over the country, the vast majority of Canadians, even ones who are outspoken about their faith, have never been noticed or charged by them).

Culture of Corruption by Michelle Malkin. In this book, currently perched at the top of the New York Times list of Bestsellers, Malkin looks to “Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies.” In chapter after chapter totalling almost 300 pages, Malkin provides an exhaustive look at President Obama and the men and women who work with him. She provides extensive documentation, making much of what she says awfully difficult to refute (though, of course, she focuses almost exclusively on what these people have done wrong, not on what they may have done well over their careers). It somehow manages to be shocking and yet not at all surprising to hear of the massive amounts of corruption and immorality in Obama’s inner circle. After all, power typically comes to those who fight for it and even more typically to those who fight for it tooth and nail. While I would imagine that almost every administration has multitudes of skeletons in the closet, surely not all have so many as Obama’s. I’m glad these people are running your country rather than mine!

The Man Who Made Lists by Joshua Kendall. I picked up this book rather on a whim as I was scouring my local bookstore. It is a biography of Peter Mark Roget, best known for creating his famous thesaurus. It traces the life of a man who was a very odd but still compelling character. As his biographer says, “Though he had a host of female admirers, was one of the first to test the effects of laughing gas, developed the slide rule, and narrowly escaped jail in Napoleon’s France, he is best known for making lists.” And make lists he did with an almost obsessive passion. Though Kendall occasionally steps beyond what he actually could know from the historical record into the realm of conjecture, he still crafts an interesting biography of a strangely fascinating man.

In the President’s Secret Service by Ronald Kessler. The dust cover for In the President’s Secret Service proclaims, “Never before has a journalist penetrated the wall of secrecy that surrounds the U.S. Secret Service. … After conducting exclusive interviews with more than one hundred current and former Secret Service agents, bestselling author and award-winning reporter Ronald Kessler reveals their secrets for the first time.” It may be true that no journalist has penetrated that wall of secrecy until Kesller. The problem, though, is that this wall of secrecy broke down enough for him to write a book, it remained in place enough that he was not able to cite or document what he discovered. Hence we have a book, a bestselling book, that is crammed full of unsubstantiated assertions. Now this is not to say that Kesller has just fabricated what he presents as fact. But any historian worth his degree will balk and know that little that Kesller says has any historic value.

In the President’s Secret Service is, in a sense, two books. On one hand it is a book about the Secret Service, detailing how the organization came to be, how it has evolved over the years, and telling how it works, even today. This side of the book offers little that is original. On the other hand, this is a tell-all of sorts, where Kesller shares what he learned during his interviews with former Secret Service agents. This is the part of the book that has received much attention in the press. With one chapter dedicated to every President since Kennedy, Kessler shares some of the behind-the-scenes facts about each of them. He tells how Jimmy Carter was considered the most arrogant and obnoxious of the President’s; how Kennedy’s agents were constantly on the guard during his trysts, guarding against his wife blundering into one of his affairs; how Lyndon Johnson engaged in constant philandering at the White House and at his ranch; how George and Barbara Bush were very kind to their agents, almost welcoming them into their family and even remaining at the White House over Christmas so the agents would not have to be on the road for the holiday. It is mostly the kind of facts we would assume based on the character of the Presidents. The reader who is surprised to learn that Kennedy was sleeping with Marilyn Monroe or that Jenna Bush was hardly an ideal person to guard is a person who has not done a lot of reading. But even here, Kessler, by his inability (or refusal) to cite his work gives us little reason to trust him or to believe that he has done any more than read a couple of books and filled in the gaps in a could-be-true way.

In the President’s Secret Service is tabloid history packaged with undergraduate-level research on the Secret Service. It is interesting at a gossipy, human-interest level, but as serious history it fails badly. The writing is mostly passable but, as I see it, a sentence like this deserves no place in a serious work of non-fiction: “As with all Presidents, some people totally lost it when meeting Regan” (116). That is, like, totally unacceptable. Where was Kessler’s editor?

The serious chapters in this book seem like an attempt to legitimize the tabloid qualities. The sordid stories of America’s leaders have been used to sell the book, drawing people into a title that would otherwise be of little interest. Kessler also attempts to lend the book some legitimacy by seeking to show that the Secret Service is underfunded and underequipped for their role and that, if the situation is not remedied, at some point they will lose one of the people they seek to protect. While this may be true, Kessler fails to be convincing, perhaps largely because of the very nature of the book which is, at its heart, just not very serious.

So after being just a little bit underwhelmed with chapter eight, I thought that Burroughs came back strong in chapter nine. Actually, I’m sure it is my fault and not his that I found the previous chapter slow-going, but I digress. There were a lot of things in this chapter, once again dealing with the evils of a murmuring heart, that hit me right between the eyes.

Summary

***

The Spirit of God extenuates evils and crosses, and magnifies and amplifies all mercies; and makes all mercies seem to be great, and all afflictions seem to be little. But the Devil goes quite contrary, says Luther, his rhetoric is quite otherwise: he lessens God’s mercies, and amplifies evil things. Thus, a godly man wonders at his cross that it is not more, a wicked man wonders his cross is so much: ‘Oh’, he says, ‘none was ever so afflicted as I am.’ If there is a cross, the Devil puts the soul to musing on it, and making it greater than it is, and so it brings discontent.

***

Oh, what baseness there is in a discontented spirit! A discontented spirit, out of envy to God’s grace, will make mercies that are great little, yea to be none at all.

***

This is the very reason why many mercies are denied to you, because of your discontent. You are discontented for want of them, and therefore you do not get them, you deprive yourselves of the enjoyment of your own desires, because of the discontent of your hearts, because you do not get your desires, and is not this a foolish thing?

***

If God gives the man or woman who is discontented for want of some good thing, that good thing before they are humbled for their discontent, such a man or woman can have no comfort from the mercy, but it will be rather an evil than a good to them.

***

If you murmur against those whom God makes instruments, because you have not got everything that you would have, against the Parliament, or such and such who are public instruments, it is against God.

***

You are never so prepared for present wrath as when you are in a murmuring, discontented fit. Those who stand by and see you in a murmuring, discontented fit, have cause to say: ‘Oh, let us go and take the censer, let us go to prayer, for we are afraid that wrath is gone out against this family, against this person.’ And it would be a very good thing for you, who are a godly wife, when you see your husband come home and start murmuring because things are not going according to his desire, to go to prayer, and say: ‘Lord, pardon the sin of my husband.’ And similarly for a husband to go to God in prayer, falling down and beseeching him that wrath may not come out against his family for the murmuring of his wife.

***

The Devil is the most discontented creature in the world, he is the proudest creature that is, and the most discontented creature, and the most dejected creature. Now, therefore, so much discontent as you have, so much of the spirit of Satan you have.

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