“The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger…”

Short fuses.  You know people that have them.  Me too.  Having one like that who is “over you” in responsibility, like bosses, husbands, professors, and even pastors, is absolutely no fun.  I had a boss like that once.  Not only was he short-tempered, he was also short-timed, i.e., he liked to pile things up for me to do and give me less than half the time to get them all done.  It was double jeopardy to say the least.  I felt overwhelmed with the workload and like his punching bag when he blew up.  I didn’t need to be a Rhodes’ Scholar to see the light.  In a month I was gone — my decision, not his — after doing my insufficient best.

I am amazed at the bad rap God frequently gets.  I routinely hear unbelievers say the most incredible and ridiculous things.  “Who wants to believe in a god that kills people wholesale?” “All monotheistic faiths are bloodthirsty religions.”  Or this one: “Remember the Crusades!”

There is no adequate analogy of the difference between comments like these and the truth.  Here’s the truth: Psalm 103:8 says, “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.”  Let’s take this apart and examine it closely.

First, I’ve seen some people that never get angry…well, almost never.  We might think that they have the patience of a saint.  That may or may not be true.  They might be more of a slug.  Maybe they don’t care about anything, even about what they own.  I used to know a guy like that.  His name was Nunzio.  He was something else; I could write a book about him.  I spent 4 years during 3 jobs being a witness to him.  He went from hardcore atheism to transcendental meditation in that time.  I never saw him get angry, but it was because he just didn’t care about anything, not even his wife!  Well, maybe.

But that’s the direct opposite of the Lord.  He is “compassionate and gracious…abounding in love.”  At the very core of his being, this is not only his nature but also his character.  It is this that fuels his slowness to anger. His anger only rises up when it is justified, when unbelievers reject his overtures of love.

Consider the following point.  In Genesis 15 we have the story of when, according to Romans 4:3, Abram trusted God and he counted it as righteousness.  As Abram fell into a deep sleep (v. 12), God spoke to him predicting the future of his descendants.  He said the Hebrews would live as foreigners and then be enslaved in a country for 400 years.  But then they would leave with great possessions and return to Abram’s stomping ground (vs. 13-15).  Then he says something rather strange: it will take that long because “the sin of the Amorites has not reached its full measure” (v. 16).  In other words, the Hebrews had to endure hundreds of years of brutality and slavery simply because the sins of pagans known only to God had not yet reached the level that would justify their elimination.  Talk about a God who’s slow to anger!  And what about those poor Hebrews that died at the hands of the Egyptians through no fault of their own?  In the united chorus of little third grade schoolgirls, I can hear, “That’s not faaairr!”  Why should innocent people — God’s people, no less — have to suffer like that just because some pagans that never would believe in God in the first place only get worse and worse?  Yeah, that’s not fair, is it?  But God never promised fair.  In fact, in neither testament is that word used as it is today.  So why did God wait so long?  At least in part because he is slow to anger.  In part because the sins of Amorites were not sinful enough. And in part because Israel needed to be ready to hit the desert trail.  After hundreds of years of slavery, they were ready.  Unfortunately, while they were ready for the desert, they were not ready to trust God.

This is just one example of God’s slowness to anger with one group of people at one point in time.  Now fast forward that example to today.  How much sin and iniquity is God putting up with now?  How much injustice does he choose to sit through as billions of pagans further corrupt his world?  He waits because “he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).  He waits for every last precious soul that will trust him to do so.  He is exceedingly slow to anger!

Like the Jews, life many times doesn’t go like we want.  God is working despite what we can’t see.  James tells us to be “slow to become angry” (1:19).  Are you short fused or quick to believe him?