“Refrain from anger and turn from wrath;. . .”
I once knew a guy who was a mean drunk. There aren’t that many nights I remember from my own late teenage years, but one I do is the night that this guy just simply went off, and it took maybe three or four of us to calm him down. Violent, he got. He threatened everybody and everything around him for no particular reason at all, other than the fact that he was drunk, or so it seemed. He just lost it, as they say. I remember exactly where that happened, even where I was standing, trying to keep him from busting loose. It was late, and it wasn’t pretty.
Not long ago I saw him again, maybe for the first time in thirty years. He was singing in a men’s group whose claim to fame—or so it seemed to me—was sheer volume. There’s something inspiring about men singing big, and this group’s repertoire was traditional hymns just plain bellered. Don’t get me wrong, they sang well and I enjoyed them, but their volume was well-cranked.
The guy never threatened me, never laid a hand on me; but when I saw him up there on stage, singing hymns, the only memory that returned to me was the night he was drunk and mean.
Let me change gears a minute.
Sometimes I wonder what Christians mean when they tell those who don’t believe in Jesus Christ—or have never heard of him—that they should just read His word. I know there are saints who’ve smuggled Bibles into all kinds of countries, often under great risk. Almost every motel room I’ve ever searched has a Gideon Bible, as if people who happen to be there overnight might just pick it up and read it leisurely, no matter what version.
I’m not saying anything evil if I say that the Bible is no airport novel, and it’s certainly not a quick read. If you had never seen one before, nor ever heard a thing about Christianity, just imagine what you might think if you’d open the good book to, say, the story of Jehuh’s daughter, a perfectly innocent young girl murdered by her father because of some promise that didn’t even involve his sweet child. Bizarre.
Some passages—the moral passages, Proverbs, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes—might just hit home, especially if you, like my boyhood friend, were a mean drunk. Or if you were his girlfriend back then, you might take some consolation from something you suspected—that his anger was as evil as you assumed it to be. Maybe, just maybe, a Gideon Bible might be just what the doctor ordered.
What I’m saying is that the admonition of this moral line from Psalm 37 is evident in the vivid memory I can’t get rid of: a drunk guy going ballistic one night years and years ago. Today, he’s singing in the choir. Still, it’s the wrath I remember.
Hamas hates Jews, and the feeling is oft-mutual. What they did just three weeks ago is, for the vast majority of living, breathing human beings, simply unimaginable. No matter. They did it.
No location on the globe is as hot and angry as the Middle East, where people on both sides of the river are never more than a glowing ember away from conflagration. Regretfully, it’s also among the holiest places on earth for three major world religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.
What’s happening as we speak threatens even more unthinkable suffering and death in the weeks to come and makes this single line of perfectly understandable scriptural admonition feel like horrifying understatement, but no less a commandment than it was thousands of years ago.
On this we can all agree: wrath is a killer.
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