The word commonly used in the Bible to refer to rage, fury, and indignation. In most instances, anger is considered to be wrong. Psalm 37:8, for example, commands: “Refrain from anger and abandon wrath.” Jesus paralleled anger with murder when he said, “But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment” (Matthew 5:22). It is just as if the person had actually committed the murder he felt in his angry heart. Ephesians 4:31 and Colossians 3:8 both list anger, along with bitterness, wrath, malice, and slander, as attitudes that Christians must rid themselves of once and for all. In Paul's list of attributes for a bishop or pastor of a church, the apostle said that a Christian leader should not be prone to anger or easily provoked (Titus 1:7).
The Bible recognizes that humans get angry. It does not condemn experiencing anger as an emotion, but what often happens as the result of anger. Humans have a habit of letting their anger control or influence their actions, causing them to sin. That is why the apostle Paul said, “Be angry, yet do not sin” (Ephesians 4:26). The longer a person allows anger to continue, the greater the danger that it will develop sinful qualities, giving Satan a foothold (see Ephesians 4:27).
Good anger is also spoken of in the Bible. “Righteous indignation” refers to the extreme displeasure of a holy heart unable to tolerate sin of any kind. The anger of God contains this element: humans should be good, yet they sin—and God is angry “because they abandoned the covenant of the LORD, the God of their fathers, which He made with them when He brought them out of the land of Egypt. They went and served other gods, and they worshiped gods they had not known—gods that the LORD had not given to them” (Deuteronomy 29:25–26). It was in that sense also that Moses’s anger burned on Mount Sinai and caused him to smash the tablets of the covenant on the ground when he saw the golden calf and Israel’s idolatry (Exodus 32:19).
In the New Testament, Mark says that Jesus looked with anger at the Pharisees, who were hoping to catch him breaking their law (Mark 3:5). Jesus’s anger was also shown in his cleansing of the temple (John 2:13–22). The temple should have been a place of prayer but was being used as a place of business. So Jesus “entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those selling doves” (Matthew 21:12). His holy indignation was neither a weakness nor a sin. Such anger is an appropriate response to sin and injustice, especially when they are apparently unpunished.