It's Not Liberating No Matter How We Feel

“Lest thou learn his ways, and get a snare to thy soul.” (Pr 22:25 AV)

 

The context is keeping company with someone who would be considered an angry person.  Not someone who might get angry.  Rather, someone who is angrier than not.  Solomon warns his children not to build too close of a relationship with someone like this on the outside chance they might become like that person.  This is not what we want to consider this morning.  Rather, the last part of the above verse.  It is intriguing.  Solomon suggests anger is a snare to the soul.  The Hebrew definition for the word ‘snare’ means a noose, a hook for the nose where a person or animal is painfully led about, a trap in which to be ensnared.  In other words, a perpetually angry person is not as free as he or she thinks.

The misunderstanding of anger is the expression of it is liberating.  Once we explode we feel better and people who experience it are motivated to do as we wish.  Our reasoning is since anger produced the desired results, then we are liberated from the circumstances which caused the anger.  Sometimes this behavior is justified.  For example, Paul says, “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath:” (Eph 4:26 AV)  Paul knows there are times when anger is appropriate.  However, if anger becomes a habit, then it becomes a hook in the nose or a noose around the neck.  We are subject to and defined by, our emotional state.  The more anger we feel, the less likely we experience other, more positive, and healthy emotions.  We cannot feel joy.  We will never feel peace and contentment.  Our passions become our enemy.  How we perceive the world is strictly in terms of how it affects us.  Our anger becomes our undoing for those whom we try to control merely find another master.  Anger gives the illusion of being liberating.  In reality, it is a subtle trap that keeps us at arm's length of anyone or anything else that we might consider worthy of our anger.

Don’t let a calm and even-tempered demeanor fool you.  Just because someone might be calm and cucumber on the outside doesn’t mean he isn’t seething on the inside.  Anger doesn’t always have to be expressed.  Anger can boil under the surface.  This is only slightly better. It may not as dramatically affect those around us.  But it does.  They can tell by our temperament there is something off.  Just because someone doesn’t blow up doesn’t mean he has gained victory over anger.  His anger is manifested in other ways.   The point being,  Solomon warns against anger because one way or another, anger becomes a trap.  Paul tells us there is a time and place for anger.  If I can confess:  anger was an issue with me for many years.  However, I was one of those easy-going and soft personality types who would never have the reputation of being an angry person.  But I was.  And it made my life miserable.  Not until I understood the damage anger can cause did I give it up.  From time to time, like everyone else, I struggle.  But for the most part, being free from anger is true liberation.  I am free!  And by God’s grace, I always shall be.