I get dozens of emails every week from people all over the world who are scared of God.
They had some bad thought enter their mind and are now afraid that God is going to kill their family and then strike them down with cancer before burning their house down around their ears and sending them off to eternal torture in hell.
They are so scared, they cannot eat, they cannot sleep, they cannot think. They tell me about physical problems, emotional problems, relational problems, and all sorts of other problems they are experiencing because they are so afraid that God is out to get them because of something bad they said or thought about God.
Does Your Church Teach an Angry God?
Whenever I get these emails, this is the very first question I ask them. I ask them (1) if they attend church, and if so (2) what their church teaches them about God. Without fail, these Christians who contact me have attended, or currently are attending, a church which teaches them about an angry, vindictive, vengeful God.
Usually, they have heard some fire and brimstone sermon about the unpardonable sin or the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, and because of the book I have written on the subject, people contact me because they are scared out of their mind that they have committed this sin.
I always try to tell them that God loves them, forgives them, and accepts them … no matter what they have said or done. Due to the large number of emails I get these days, I rarely can get into long explanations or discussions via email about why this is true.
But my heart always goes out for these poor people. Their emails are full of pain and fear, and I sometimes think that many of them are manic-depressive, or bi-polar, or maybe even have OCD.
An Angry God and Mental Illness
So it was with great interest that I recently read that belief in an angry God is linked to mental illness. Here is the article I read:
Professor Nava Silton of the Marymount Manhattan College and her colleagues have reached these conclusions following their analyzing data collected during the 2010 Baylor Religion Survey of US Adults.
Thus, Professor Nava Silton focused on three different categories of people: those who believe in an angry God, those who believe in a loving deity and those who work on the assumption that God is a neutral entity.
“Three beliefs about God were tested separately in ordinary least squares regression models to predict five classes of psychiatric symptoms: general anxiety, social anxiety, paranoia, obsession, and compulsion,” reads the abstract for this paper.
Furthermore, “Belief in a punitive God was positively associated with four psychiatric symptoms, while belief in a benevolent God was negatively associated with four psychiatric symptoms, controlling for demographic characteristics, religiousness, and strength of belief in God. Belief in a deistic God and one’s overall belief in God were not significantly related to any psychiatric symptoms.”
The link between the belief in an angry God and mental illness was studied in the context of the Evolutionary Threat Assessment System Theory, which states that anxiety disorders are mainly the result of the brain’s not properly interpreting threats.
Professor Nava Silton wished to stress the fact that her research does not establish causation between the belief in an angry deity and anxiety disorders.
Quite the contrary, the study merely pins down a correlation between the two.
“That means we’re not saying belief caused psychiatric symptoms, but we see relationships between beliefs and these psychiatric symptoms,” the Professor emphasized.
The disclaimer there at the end is interesting, but I think this was more of a copout by the Professor to avoid becoming the target of angry religious people who feel he might be blaming God for mental illness.
Ironically, those who hold to a belief in an angry God also believe that God strikes people with mental illness because of their sin and disobedience…
It may be clear that God has something to do with what happens everyday in the world, but probably not personally to every person that’s ill, sometimes they just don’t the best care of themselves and their bodies.
Anyway, I think that there is a clear correlation between belief in an angry God and mental problems. I further believe that we become like the God we worship. We become like the God we believe in. So if we believe in an angry, vengeful deity, we are likely to behave in angry, vengeful ways. And of course, if we believe that God’s anger could be directed at us, life will be filled with fear and dread.
What are your thoughts on the subject? Do you believe in a God of anger, retaliation, vengeance, and violence? Do you believe that God’s anger could be directed toward you? If so, how do you cope with this idea? If, on the other hand, you’re like me and you used to believe in an angry God but now believe that God looks like Jesus, what happened in your life to bring about this change?Fi
I believe in a loving God, yet I suffer from Bipolar Disorder. I believe God has used this illness to help me grow in my spiritual walk and has used my story to also help others. I have learned to have hope in the face of adversity. Just sincerely curious what your opinion is on that.
Do they have this belief because they don’t understand the Gospel? That when you are in Christ, you don’t have a Angry God but a God of grace?
I think that Luther lived that transition where he hated God because he was angry and vengeful, but discovered something new in Jesus-Christ and the notion of justice and justification was central to that?
I have ministered to many people who have suffered this issue. They either cant believe in a vengeful God so they reject him or they have been taught to live in fear of God despite what Christ did for them on the cross. Teaching that included losing your salvation, committing the unforgivable sin, or as I heard recently in a sermon being told I never knew you because you are lawless. Reformists often use this one to scare the life out of believer’s. Needless to say that when people see that Christ made all things right with God for us, fear turns to peace and they can know they are under grace. They know God does indeed love them. I agreed being terrified of Gods wrath can create mental illness. I’ve seen it in some people who come to me for counselling.
I don’t believe in a ‘vengefull’ God. I rather suspect that the use of the word in reference to God in the OT could be the result of subjective translation. God judges right and wrong (He is the only one who can fairly do so) but He does no hate anyone or want, on a personal level, to do anyone harm. His actions are done out of neccessity and love to save as many as He can from sin.
God can become angry at a people – or even at a wayward saint. But on balance, God is a God of Love and of Grace. We must always place our trust in that Truth!
I think like others have stated, Jesus said that if you have seen him you have seen the Father. I think that how Jesus handled sinners and publicans yet rebuked the “righteous ones” that is the religious Pharisees and Sadducees because they were hurting people with their religious nose in the air so to speak. The anger I see in the Bible is the anger of a loving God who is out to destroy sin in each believer and eventually the world. When cruelty happens to the people God loves, he gets angry out of love for us at the ones who would hurt others. This is to bring them to their senses so they will see that what they are doing is like Paul on the way to Damascus, persecuting the church. Those who are in Christ, though trying to do good and failing, are to look to Jesus who said that without him we can do nothing. This means that no matter what we are trying to do, each step even if in failure or success is all in moving along on the journey of life. Jesus wants us to learn to love him and know that he is always with us and the life he has given to us is eternal from the day we turned to him. He is our all and our salvation that moves us more and more to love and give him our heart.
I hope that the ones who are afraid of God will read the psalms, and the New Testament and just worship Jesus Christ until they can truly see that God loves them and no matter how little they can give in success, yet find that Jesus is indeed their all in all.
For me, I used to believe a dichotomy of a God who was angry with everyone until they became a Christian, after which it’s all love and cuddles. So I was never afraid of God because I was a Christian.
After fifteen years of deprogramming outside the Church, I came to believe that God loves everyone and never stops wanting them to come to Him; it’s all love, there is no anger. He stands there like the Father of the Prodigal, in fact He runs out to meet us.
The fifteen years ended during a time of great trial and horror for us as a family, with my wife having been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. God told me it was time to go back to Church, so I did, and found that He had not changed, but my attitudes to Him had. So even in the midst of awful suffering, God was there – and yes, it was all love and cuddles.: ) I have seen people restored from the most awful suffering (my Church works with the homeless), right where they are, by a God Who is not angry but is instead welcoming.
Personally I believe the idea of an angry god comes from things that in ancient times that were inexplicable, like earthquakes and storms. Storms seem pretty angry, therefore God is angry about something. It’s just another example of humans anthropomorphising (or something) God; giving Him human characteristics to make Him more understandable, whereas actually we can’t really understand Him outside of Jesus.
I am so sorry to hear about your wife. That must have been a terribly difficult time. I am thrilled to hear, however, about your commitment to seeing and understanding God through Jesus Christ. That is one reason Jesus came, after all, to reveal God to us!
Thanks for the thoughts 🙂 Yeah it’s funny, the last eighteen months or so have been such a blessed time or us all; it might seem strange but I don’t know if we’d have had it any other way…..unless you’ve been through something like this with Jesus at your side, it’s difficult to describe what it’s like. There’s been a series of God incidents, though, that mean that my wife is still with us and is really healthy at the moment, and long may it continue 🙂
I’ve been associated with people in some congregations where God seems like a cosmic Orwellian ‘Big Brother’ forever trying to catch you out in….EEK!….SIN! The pastors were the same (as God’s ‘anointed’ substitutes) intruding into your home at any time to criticise. Many of the brethren in the faith were snoopers, too, always ready to tattle on you to make themselves look ‘holier than thou.’ Fortunately, my parents would shake the dust off their feet and leave such groups. Me, too, when I got older. What really got to me was the way such worshippers tended to treat their children. I’m not disputing that they loved their children – of course they did. But, my word! They never spared the rod, I can tell you! Unsurprisingly, many of the poor kids ended up blaming God later on and avoided any semblance of faith whatsoever.
Yes, it really is too bad to see this happen. It is tragic to give children this sort of portrait of God.
I believe god is angry with what is going on in the world, but why wouldnt he be. I grew up under nuns and angry priests in school coupled with an angry father. When you see friends die from drugs or thrown out of church because they were different we tend to blame god. The church today has a lot of bad examples and i believe this is why people leave the church.I also have a hard time seeing the god of the old testament being jesus. I dont see love in destroying people because they complained, it doesnt jive! Almost like schisophrenia i suffer much because of bad teaching. That is what i dont understand, these people god allows to teach So,yes iam fed up!
You are absolutely right! So yes, get fed up. And then seek to live in a way that truly is different, a way that actually looks like Jesus!
i don’t want to believe God is angry at me..but i think i do or i’m angry at him is probably more correct because of the complete hassles of this life and the stress and grief they cause. And illness, when it is chronic and acute constantly. I just so rarely find comfort in knowing him and that my children will have to face the awful scourge of illness..they have my health consitiution and the slow torture of the body. How can you not see god as predominately mean under the circumstances? Mostly at this pt now that i’ve seen 50+ yrs of life and have young adults can think of about is getting out of here…meaning not wanting to be here and not wanting to watch the heartache of life in my young adult kids.
Love never fails…..a bible verse that saved me……find others more worthier than you….another bible verses that kept me going on my christian walk…same god in every Christian life and church.
I don’t believe in an angry God. I believe in a vain, petty, vengeful, narcissistic God who regards us as nothing more than expendable tools.
If these “Christians” who contact you actually read their Bible and were led by the Holy Spirit, they would KNOW that while Yahuah WAS very angry with HIS children, Israel, because of their consistent and flagrant disobedience and lack of respect as they mixed with pagan cultures who sacrificed humans ( their children to be burned alive) to ba’al, created altars to worship other strange gods, and did the exact things Yah commanded them not to do, His anger was not for long and the constant disobedience of Israel is exactly why the Gentiles were invited to become His children also, being grafted into The Kingdom of God through His Son’s sacrifice. It is the complete lack of knowledge and the Holy Spirit coupled with pastor’s who preach on scripture without teaching the full context of said scripture. We should be afraid of the wrath of Yahuah because it is coming and the unsaved will not be spared. Right now, millions of Christians believe they are saved and are really not because of the lack of proper preaching and laziness from the pulpit. But the congregations have no idea. They believe that what they are doing, living like the world 6 days a week and then coming to church on Sunday’s, is perfectly okay when it is the farthest thing from the truth. The only way the truth can actually be useful is if it is being told. It is not. So, we must ask the Lord, in faith – because without faith, there is no hope of having your prayers heard by Him – to show us; teach us the truth and He will. Ask, seek, knock, but more than once. It must be continually, daily.