Tuesday: Righteous Indignation

Daily Lesson for Tuesday 28th of January 2025

While there are many inappropriate forms of anger, the Bible also teaches that there is “righteous indignation.”

Imagine a mother watching her three-year-old daughter playing at the playground and then, suddenly, a man attacks her daughter. Should she not be angry? Of course, she should. Anger is the proper response of love in such a circumstance. This example helps us understand God’s “righteous indignation.”

Read Matthew 21:12-13 and John 2:14-15. What does Jesus’ reaction to the way the temple was being used tell us about God’s getting angry at evil?

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In these instances, Jesus displays the “godly zeal” of righteous indignation against those who were treating God’s temple as common and who had turned it into a “den of robbers” in order to take advantage of widows, orphans, and the poor (Matthew 21:13; compare with John 2:16). The temple and services, which were supposed to typify God’s gracious forgiveness and His cleansing of sinners, were instead being used to cheat and oppress some of the most vulnerable. Should Jesus not have been angry at this abomination?

Mark 10:13-14 and Mark 3:4-5 offer more examples of His righteous indignation. When people brought little children to Jesus and “the disciples rebuked those who brought them,” Jesus “was greatly displeased”—literally “indignant.” He said to them, “ ‘Let the little children come to Me’ ” (Mark 10:13-14, NKJV).

Elsewhere, when the Pharisees waited to accuse Jesus of breaking the Sabbath by healing on it, Jesus asked them, “ ‘Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ ” (Mark 3:4, NKJV). He “looked around at them with anger, being grieved by the hardness of their hearts” and then proceeded to heal the man (Mark 3:5, NKJV). Christ’s anger is associated here with grief at their hardness; it is the righteous anger of love, just as the anger attributed to God in the Old Testament is the righteous anger of love. How could love not be upset by evil, especially when evil hurts the objects of that love?

How can we be careful not to seek to justify selfish anger as “righteous indignation”? Why is that so easy to do, and how can we protect ourselves from that subtle but real trap?

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