“Be angry and do not sin;” do not let the sun go down on your wrath. (Ephesians 4:26 NKJV)
Context: Paul quotes from Psalm 4:4, but we would not consider it a direct quote. The Hebrew passage from David paints a somewhat different image. Most translations have it that the Psalm says you should “tremble” with deep emotion at the majesty of God, and then lie quietly on your bed and contemplate what your heart can tell you about the deep things of God. The word translated “tremble” is ambiguous, sweeping in a whole range of human emotion that might cause you to shake or twitch.
Paul’s use of that text is consistent with the way Hebrew language in general, and revelation in particular, as supposed to work. It’s not easy for us to absorb something that seems so imprecise regarding divine revelation. However, that is precisely how divine revelation is. The whole point is to see with your heart the divine character of God and learn how He manifests His glory in differing contexts.
At the time Paul writes, the church body in Ephesus was some major part Jewish, but with a cosmopolitan mixture of Gentiles. As always, too many of the Jewish members were struggling to break free of Judaism and the Gentiles were fighting their heathen backgrounds. People in both groups would easily forget what they were fighting and fight each other, instead. This is the same book where Paul notes that we are not warring against flesh and blood, but demons who are using people (6:12). So there are two major problems Paul addresses in this letter: the infighting between Jew and Gentile, and the actual fight against the deeply mistaken understanding that both backgrounds left in their minds. Clean out your mental habits and let your heart rule.
The paragraph in which the above verse falls starts in verse 25. The preceding paragraph starts in verse 17. We discern that Paul is addressing the Gentiles most directly here. He encourages these members to leave behind the old heathen ways and most English translations are quite inspiring to us today. Because their “Bible” in those days was the Old Testament, and the Psalms were quite popular, Paul was pretty sure they would recognize his quotation without specific citation of the source.
I don’t agree with how the NKJV translators set their interpretive punctuation in the above verse. I contend that the whole verse is a quote, but not slavishly word for word. A Jewish mind would be more precise, but an Ancient Hebrew mind wouldn’t think it mattered. This is restating the same general moral doctrine in a different context. It’s what the ancients would call “targum” — not a literal translation, but giving the sense of things in the context.
God doesn’t reveal intellectual principles. The concept of “propositional truth” is foreign to the Hebrew intellectual background. It arises from the legalistic perversions of the Hellenized Jewish rabbis. God reveals His Person in the sense of His character as a divine Sheikh, an Ancient Near Eastern feudal lord. We are either some kin to Him or we are servants and slaves brought into the household. We can be adopted into His inheritance or remain outsiders. Such is the human condition in this Fallen Realm. Needless to say, this results in a highly subjective cast to revelation. We each must earnestly and honestly make the most of what we can grasp with our limited human minds. No one of us can really know Him because it is not possible to be Him. Only His Son can make that claim, and He was the final living revelation of the Father. He was not a bundle of “propositions” walking around in Hebrew sandals, nor was His teaching mere cerebral concepts.
So Paul teased out one of the implications from Psalm 4:4 as it applied in particular to the Gentile believers in Ephesus. In the wider context of Hebrew Scripture and Hebrew culture, anger was just a powerful tool that could be used or abused, like anything else in human nature. It’s a modern Western myth that anger is itself a sin. The Old Testament God is the same Father of Christ, and if His anger made Jesus crack the whip in the Court of Gentiles, we are obliged to understand that anger has its place. Fallen nature can abuse that tool, but you are obliged to learn the difference between spite and cleansing the Temple.
Either way, Paul restates David’s admonition to stop and consider the meaning of how you got that deep emotion. Making it a habit to analyze your own anger and what caused it will help you sift out when anger is calling for sin and when it calls for divine justice. Don’t be afraid to act on your anger. People will get hurt (as with the vendors in the Temple), but God can use your anger to accomplish His glory when you harness it to His character. Your heart-mind knows, so put yourself in a position to test your fleshly brain against the convictions written by God in your heart. Don’t let anger fester in the hidden recesses of your emotions. Pull it out and subject it to the light of glory.
Whatever you do, stop reading the ambient culture of this damned Western social mythology back into the Bible.
