Does God get angry with His children? I’m not talking about humanity on the whole; I mean the redeemed, believers/followers of Christ. Those He has adopted as His own. One on one with his kids. Does God get mad at us?

It’s a point that came up recently for me, and what I heard made me sad. There are real people, real children of God who still believe that God gets angry with them. That He still points a finger of judgment upon their sinful actions, and that they had better measure up or else. My shoulders are drooping as I type that last sentence. Perhaps they are relating the way an angry earthly parent treated them and attributing those characteristics to God.

I know there are those who disagree with me, but I hope to at least give you some points to ponder on the whole topic.

God is not mad at you. He isn’t.

Galatians 5 tells us that fits of anger are as works of the flesh. This is not descriptive of God, it’s much more descriptive of me. When I get angry with my own children, there is an element of “Oh no you didn’t!” attached to it. I am offended personally that they did whatever it was they did. The urge to pinch their heads off is great. Whatever anger I dispense upon my children, at least in part, comes from a place of selfishness or revenge. (Just keeping it real here.) I do believe that as a good Heavenly Father, God disciplines us and allows us to suffer consequences of our actions in order to sanctify us and help us to look more like Jesus. This process can be quite painful, but it comes purely from a place of love and grace. Not anger.

Nothing I do takes Him by surprise. He is not thrown off by my disobedience; I am predictably sinful. When I sin, He gets right to work on me. I can be convinced of my sin by the Holy Spirit, and it is His goodness that draws me back to Him, not His wrath. (Romans 2:4)

God is for us (Romans 8:31), gave His son up for us (John 3:16-17), and when we accept that gift chooses to remember our sins no more (Psalm 103:12). Jesus died to pay the bill on our sins we committed in the past, those we commit today, and those we will commit in the future. If we are already forgiven, debt paid in full, what is there to be angry about? Even the bank leaves us alone when our debts are paid in full, right?

I do agree that God has plenty with which to be angry at humanity as a whole. We stand by and let so much happen right under our noses to those we should be protecting, I can see that he would be angry even with His church over those things, but when you boil it down to the one on one relationship, I believe if God were dispensing His wrath upon us, we would find a wedge between us, put there by God himself. Romans 8:35 tells us that no one can separate us from the love of God. God did his utmost in sacrificing Jesus to remove the separation from us, why would He put it back with anger?

So does God get angry with His kids? Not if you are talking about the way we get angry with our own kids. There is no sin in His anger, there is no “gotcha!” In other words, we don’t have to cower in fear any longer. Our fear is gone because we are covered in Christ. We are sons and daughters whom He looks at through the rose colored glasses of Christ’s blood. When we sin, our status with the Father doesn’t change.

God’s wrath that was dispensed with power and might again and again as evidenced in the scriptures, has been appeased by Jesus and His sacrifice. We can now confidently approach His throne without fear.

So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God. There we will receive his mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most. (Hebrews 4:6)