“Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.”
— Matthew 5:22
Most of us read the Sixth Commandment and feel fine about it. We have not killed anyone. We are not planning to. We put it in the category of commandments that apply to other, worse people and move on. And then Jesus opens His mouth in the Sermon on the Mount and ruins our comfort entirely.
He says that the Sixth Commandment does not merely address the act. It addresses the attitude. “Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment.” And more: “whoever says ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.” Jesus is not making the law harder for the sake of it. He is revealing what the law always meant, that God is not primarily concerned with the external behavior. He is concerned with the internal condition from which all behavior flows. Murder begins in the heart. The hand that lifts the weapon is only the final chapter of a story that started in the soul.
Unresolved anger is soul poison. Hatred rehearsed and nursed over months and years does something to a person that is genuinely frightening to watch. It shrinks the world down to the size of the wound. It turns the person carrying it into someone hard and bitter and closed. Jesus says that God writes it down as murder, not because the feelings and the act are the same, but because they come from the same root. And that root, left untreated, will eventually produce fruit.
I have prayed, over the years since my father’s death, for the conversion of the man who took his life. I say that not to hold myself up as a model. I say it because that prayer is only possible by the grace of God. Left to my own nature, I would have spent my life feeding something very different. The only thing that changes the equation is the love of Jesus, which is supernaturally wider than any wound we carry.
Is there anger in your heart today that you have been feeding rather than releasing? Bring it to God. He can handle it. And He alone can replace it with something that does not destroy you from the inside out.
DON’T LET ANGER BUILD A HOME IN YOUR HEART. BRING IT TO GOD BEFORE IT BECOMES A PRISON.
