Is It Okay to Be Angry at God?

Sometimes grief leaves us with questions we are almost afraid to ask—and anger we are reluctant to admit. Faith does not require us to pretend those feelings are not there.

There are emotions Christians know how to talk about when someone is suffering. We understand sadness, we expect grief when someone dies, and we know that fear can accompany illness and loss. Anger at God is harder to admit because it can leave a person wondering whether the emotion itself says something troubling about his faith.

A person can sit through a funeral, receive condolences, hear familiar assurances about God's goodness, and still carry a question he is almost afraid to say aloud: Why did You let this happen? Sometimes that question comes after a death, while at other times it grows during months or years of illness, unanswered prayer, or watching someone suffer when we desperately wanted God to intervene.

For a Christian, that anger can become another burden added to the suffering itself. We are already grieving, but now we may also feel guilty about the way we are grieving. We still believe in God and want to trust Him, yet somewhere beneath those convictions is disappointment with what He allowed to happen.

That can make prayer unusually difficult. The person we need to speak with is the very One with whom we are upset, so we may decide it is safer to say nothing at all. The problem with hiding our anger from God, of course, is that God already knows it is there.

The Bible Does Not Hide Human Anguish

One of the things I appreciate about Scripture is its refusal to clean up human suffering before putting it on the page. The Bible gives us people who love God and trust Him while also experiencing fear, confusion, abandonment, grief, and questions they cannot answer.

David asks in Psalm 13, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” Those are not the words of a man pretending everything is fine, nor does Scripture require David to resolve his anguish before allowing us to hear it. His suffering becomes part of his prayer.

Job gives us an even more difficult example. After losing his children, his possessions, and eventually his health, his suffering becomes so severe that he curses the day of his birth. As the book continues, Job wrestles openly with God about what has happened to him and tries to understand suffering that makes no sense from where he sits.

That does not mean everything Job says in his anguish is correct. God eventually confronts him, and Job recognizes that he has spoken about things he did not fully understand. Yet God did not remove Job's struggle from Scripture, and generations of suffering people have been allowed to hear it.

The same is true of David, Jeremiah, and others whose prayers contain language that would make many Christians uncomfortable if they heard it in church on Sunday morning. Scripture does not portray faithful people as emotionally composed at every moment, and I think we should be careful about expecting something from grieving people that the Bible itself does not expect.

Martha Said What She Was Thinking

The account of Lazarus in John 11 gives us another picture of what faith can sound like in the middle of grief. When Lazarus became sick, his sisters sent word to Jesus because they knew Jesus loved him, yet Jesus did not arrive before Lazarus died. By the time He reached Bethany, Lazarus had been in the grave four days.

Martha went out to meet Jesus and spoke to Him with remarkable directness: “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.” There is faith in that sentence because Martha still calls Him Lord, has gone out to meet Him, and continues talking with Him. Before their conversation is finished, she will make an extraordinary confession about who she believes Jesus is.

There is also unmistakable pain in her words. Martha knew what Jesus could do, knew He loved Lazarus, and knew He had not arrived when she wanted Him to arrive. Mary later comes to Jesus and says essentially the same thing, which tells us something about what these sisters had probably been thinking while their brother was dying.

Jesus does not rebuke either woman for speaking honestly about her grief. He talks with Martha, receives Mary in her sorrow, and enters the grief surrounding this family. John then gives us one of the shortest and most powerful statements in Scripture when he tells us that “Jesus wept.”

Jesus knew Lazarus would soon walk out of the tomb, but that knowledge did not make the sorrow surrounding Lazarus's death unreal. He entered that sorrow with the people who were experiencing it, which should caution us against treating grief as though correct theology ought to eliminate painful emotion.

Anger Is Not the Same as Unbelief

This is where Christians can become frightened by their own emotions. Feeling anger toward God is not necessarily the same thing as deciding there is no God, and asking why He allowed something is not necessarily the same thing as rejecting Him. Martha's words to Jesus contained both pain and faith because human beings are capable of experiencing both at the same time.

There is even something revealing about directing our questions toward God in the first place. A person who says, God, I don't understand why You allowed this, is still addressing God and remaining in relationship with Him, even if that relationship is strained by grief at that moment.

None of this means that every accusation we make against God is correct or that anger should become the final word. Scripture does not place God in the defendant's chair and give us authority to demand that He justify Himself according to our understanding. It does, however, show people coming before Him without first disguising what is happening inside them.

Psalm 62:8 tells us, “Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.” Pouring out the heart means bringing God what is actually there, including grief, disappointment, confusion, and questions we may be reluctant to say in front of anyone else.

Sometimes Anger Grows Out of Love

Anger during grief often has another emotion underneath it because we hurt most deeply when we have loved deeply. We wanted another year with the person who died, another conversation, another Christmas, or simply another ordinary Tuesday afternoon. We wanted the treatment to work and the prayer to be answered in the way we had prayed it.

Death takes someone from us whom we did not willingly surrender, and Christian faith does not require us to call that loss good. Paul calls death an enemy in 1 Corinthians 15:26 when he writes, “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” The Christian understanding of death therefore gives us no reason to pretend that separation is painless simply because we believe in resurrection.

That is worth remembering when Christians try to comfort someone by moving too quickly to heaven. Our hope in resurrection is real, but resurrection is God's answer to death precisely because death is an enemy. Jesus did not stand outside Lazarus's tomb and tell Martha and Mary that death was nothing to grieve because everything would eventually be fine.

He wept with them, and then He called Lazarus out of the grave. Both parts of that story belong together because Christianity takes the pain of death seriously while also refusing to give death the final word.

What About Unanswered Prayer?

For many people, anger at God becomes most difficult when they prayed specifically for something that did not happen. Perhaps they prayed for healing, more time, relief from suffering, reconciliation within a family, or some other outcome that seemed entirely reasonable. Other people may have prayed with them, and their church may have prayed as well, yet the outcome they feared still came.

There is no sentence I can give someone that makes that experience easy, and I am suspicious of explanations that attempt to make every tragedy neat. Christians can become so anxious to explain suffering that we sometimes offer explanations God Himself has not given, which can add another burden to someone who is already hurting.

What we can do is hold onto what Scripture actually gives us. God is good, He hears prayer, He loves His people, and He remains sovereign even when we do not understand His providence. Scripture also tells us that we live in a world marked by sin and death and that Christ has conquered death through His resurrection.

Those truths do not mean we will understand every grave beside which we stand. Faith sometimes requires us to trust the character of God when we cannot explain what He has allowed, and reaching that place may take longer than other people think it should.

You Do Not Have to Pretend With God

If you are angry with God today, I would not begin by telling you that you need to stop feeling angry. I would encourage you to bring that anger into your conversation with Him and tell Him what hurts, what you wanted, what you prayed for, and what you cannot understand.

The Psalms can be especially helpful because they give suffering people language when their own words are difficult to find. They remind us that biblical faith has room for lament and that trusting God does not require us to pretend we are unaffected by what has happened.

There is a difference between struggling with God and abandoning Him, and some of Scripture's most memorable expressions of faith come from people who were struggling. Martha stood in the shadow of her brother's grave and told Jesus what she wished had happened differently, yet their conversation eventually brought her to one of the great declarations of faith in John's Gospel.

Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection, and the life,” and Martha did not yet know what He was about to do. She could not see Lazarus walking out of the tomb when she first approached Jesus, but she could still speak to Him from inside the grief she did understand.

There may be seasons when faith has to rest there. We may not understand what God allowed, we may wish He had answered differently, and grief may remain with us for a long time. None of that requires us to stop talking to Him.

Christian hope does not rest on our ability to explain every terrible thing that happens in this life. It rests in Jesus Christ, who entered our suffering, wept beside a grave, died Himself, and rose again. That is why grief and faith can occupy the same heart, and it is why even our anger can become something we bring honestly before God rather than something that drives us away from Him.