Exodus 34:6-7. This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on January 5, 2025.
Today, we move to the third aspect of God’s character. He is slow to anger. That thought is worth a hallelujah, perhaps a couple of hallelujah’s. In fact, it is worth a whole Hallelujah Chorus, however many hallelujahs that would entail!
It is ironic that the “God of the Old Testament” is usually spoke of as being to angry and mean. Yet, this is part of a great irony concerning complaints about the God. On one hand, people complain that God was too angry and too judgmental. On the other hand, they will complain by saying this. “If God is good, then why is there so much evil in the world?” Though these people have generally given up believing in a God, they use this two-pronged attack to justify their rejection.
However, these complaints are quite contradictory. We want God to get rid of evil, and yet, in the cases where He has stepped in to judge evil, we don’t like it. What they really mean is that God should use their definition of evil. He should get rid of all “those kind of people.” However, there are millions who think this way. If God chose to operate by yours, all the others would still be complaining because they have a different definition of who is evil. We want God to remove evil, but we don’t want Him to remove us.
Let’s look at this virtue of God’s patience, slowness to anger. I mentioned back in the first sermon in this series that verse 6 centers on this character trait of God. It is then put in tension with the central part of verse 7, looking like this. God is slow to anger; yet, He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished. It goes from joy, “yay!”, to sobriety, “oh!” God forgives iniquity (i.e., guilty people) and yet He won’t let the guilty go unpunished. He is not provoking us to question His character, but to question how those go together.
Ultimately, God is all of these characteristics: Compassionate, Gracious, Patient, Lovingkindness, and faithful truth. Yet, you can’t game God. Those who give lip service to Him, and yet, reject His perfect character, imaging the serpent, will be punished in the end along with those who outwardly rejected Him. Thus, God is slow to anger, but He will eventually get there, if I don’t turn away from sin and towards Him.
These characteristics can be thought of as different facets of the goodness, or love of God. However, in the end, they are simply facets of the unitary, underlying being of God. It gives rise to these concepts that are all flavored somewhat differently.
Slowness to anger probably doesn’t need to be defined, but the Hebrews had an interesting way of talking about anger. In Exodus 34:6, God literally says that He is “long of nose.” This is a metaphor that comes from anger language within Hebrew. An angry person is often described as “their nose burned hot.” It is descriptive of how a person’s face will turn red and become hot when they are angry. I like to picture a tea kettle that heats up until the steam shooting forth causes the whistle to blow. The anger builds up until it reaches the end of a person’s nose. Of course, it is a metaphor and is generally translated without the metaphor, i.e., they became angry. Let’s look at some examples in the Old Testament.
There is a scene in Genesis 39:19 where Joseph is being accused before his master, Potiphar. Joseph had been sold into slavery by his brothers and ended up in Egypt. There he was purchased by Potiphar and proved to be very good at managing things. Joseph was soon put in charge of all of Potiphar’s holdings. It was doing so well that Potiphar didn’t even ask how it was going. He had full faith in Joseph’s ability to increase his wealth. This drew the eye of Potiphar’s wife. She tried to draw Joseph into a sexual relationship, but he ran out of the room. Her response was to cry out and accuse him of trying to force himself upon her. When she tells Potiphar, we are told “his anger burned.” Literally it says that his “nose burned hot.” Potiphar had a very visible, angry response.
This helps us to understand how a patient person might be called long of nose. It would take longer for their heated anger to reach the end of their nose. We might say a long nose is similar to a long fuse. The connection is not about actual long noses, but about being more patient and slow to explode in heated anger.
Let’s look at Proverbs 19:11 to further illustrate. It reads, “A person’s discretion makes him slow to anger.” (NASB) It literally reads, “The discretion of a man lengthens his nose.” So, a person is not limited to what there personality is in the present. We cannot plead innocence because we were “born with a very short nose.” We can’t be absolved of fault because of a genetic predisposition. Through gaining wisdom, we can lengthen our nose, lengthen our fuse, become more patient and less volatile.
Though a man can gain patience through the insight gained from a careful sifting of the facts, God does not gain patience or insight. He is absolute discretion, or wisdom. Thus, His patience is absolute. God already knows absolutely everything about the universe. He has the “longest nose” in the universe. It takes quite a long time and a lot of evil to cause His anger to reach its fullness.
This leads us back to the context of God’s deliverance of Israel from Pharaoh. God had been quite patient with Pharaoh. He even gave him 10 different warnings, chastisements, to encourage him to back down. Yet, when Pharaoh saw the Israelites leaving Egypt, he pursued after them. Yet, God stood between Israel and his army as a pillar of fire. Meanwhile, Pharaoh watched as the Red Sea was transformed into a roadway for Israel to escape. Pharaoh should have gotten the message. Yet, when the pillar of fire moved out of the way, Pharaoh commanded his armies to follow the path through the sea after the Israelites. God’s anger finally reached its peak. The Egyptians are drowned as the sea walls collapse upon the path, erasing any trace that it existed. This brings us to Exodus 15. Israel is on the shores of the sea and have witnessed a miraculous delivery, but also a judgment. A song quickly arises, and all Israel break forth in a worshipful singing about God’s great deliverance. Look at verses 7 and 8.
Verse 7 says, “You send out Your burning anger, and it consumes them like chaff.” The burning anger here does not employ the nose metaphor. It uses a word that means anger, but is only used of God. However, in the next line of verse 8, it says, “At the blast of Your nostrils the waters were piled up…” This is an example of poetry. The burning anger of verse 7 (more literal) parallels the blast of God’s nostrils (metaphorical). This pictures the anger of God reaching the end of His nose and blasting forth with such power to make a pathway through the sea. Of course, they did not believe God had a nose and was in the spirit realm using the power of His nostrils to make a path for them. Rather, Pharaoh had tested God’s patience one too many times. God has given him every opportunity and motivation to back down and live.
Notice that God’s anger is not whimsical and capricious, like an abusive alcoholic. It is a response to the evil that we do to one another. It is based upon His compassion and love. Israel was in Egypt because of the sin of Joseph’s brothers. Yet, Joseph was used of God to save Egypt from a horrible famine. This made him, and by extension his family, heroes in Egypt. They had most favored people status with Pharaoh. Of course, over time, this began to wane. Eventually, the story of Joseph became a story of long ago. At some point, a Pharaoh looked at the large group of Israelites on his borders and feared that they would join his enemies eventually. He wickedly subdued them and made slaves of them. This was a betrayal of the brotherhood that they had experienced previously. Eventually, a later Pharaoh arose who still feared their large numbers even in slavery. So, he had all the male babies of the Hebrews drowned in the Nile.
God saw all this evil, and began to lay the groundwork for the rebuke that He would bring to Egypt. Yet, all along the way, He leaves room for the Egyptians to repent and avoid destruction.
Notice that the anger of God and His judgments are not a fearful thing for those who are suffering under evil. They are the ones He intends to deliver. It is a righteous response of compassion and love to the evil that is played out before God. Yet, God in His wisdom, balances out the reality of a particular evil with the reality of humanity’s slavery to sin. If He judged all sin and evil in this world, none of us would survive. We should notice that Pharaoh’s army is actually destroyed by his own hubris. God didn’t want to destroy him, but He would, if Pharaoh did not back down.
Yet, Israel itself would go on to do evil things among themselves and to others. In the Old Testament, God uses Israel to demonstrate how and why His patience would put up with humanity over such a long time. He loves us and doesn’t want us to perish. He gives us cautionary disciplines over and over again. We may shape up for a season, and yet turn back to wickedness. Yet, God’s disciplines will lead up to a final judgment in which a person, or a nation, careens into a destruction event because of their own wickedness.
This brings us to Jesus as the Patience of God. It is interesting that we do see Jesus angry in some passages. Yet, there is always a righteous reason for it, and the expression of his anger is done in a godly manner.
For example, in Matthew 12:10, the authorities complained about Jesus healing on the sabbath. Jesus became angry and rebuked the way that they put rules above other people and yet had ways of working around it for themselves. They were using the rules as a means of keeping themselves above the people, not for helping them. They couldn’t care less for the people, but God cares deeply for the people. Still, Jesus doesn’t slay them all. He simply rebukes them, calling them to repentance.
Of course, a similar thing happens to the disciples in Mark 1014. They were trying to keep people from bringing their kids to Jesus. Jesus becomes indignant and rebukes them. He then challenges them that they won’t make it into the Kingdom of God if they don’t receive it like one of these kids.
Jesus was generally angry at the self-righteous snobbery of the religious leaders, while they were guilty of sin. Yet, there was one time when the anger of Jesus led to a physical altercation. He overturned the tables of the money lenders and sellers of sheep, whipping them out of the temple grounds. Why? They had turned the Court of Gentiles into a smelly place of commerce, but God wanted it to be a place where Gentiles could approach and pray. When we use the things of god in a way that is contrary to His purposes, it tries His patience.
In spite of these situations, we see that Jesus is quite patient. His responses are tempered and always he rebukes them back to the righteousness of God. The most obvious case for his patience is before his accusers on the day of his crucifixion. They lied and abused their authority in a sham trial to convict him. Later on the cross, we see absolute slowness to anger of both Jesus (Father forgive them. They know not what they do.) and God the Father (the heavens and earth did not melt in fervent heat). Yet, in the crucifixion of Jesus, God’s patience with the nation of Israel was coming to an end (at least for this part of His work through Israel). He then gave them forty years of hearing the teaching of His prophets, the Apostles of Jesus, calling them to repentance and times of refreshing from the LORD. You see, God rebukes us so that we may be convicted of our sin and turn back to Him for forgiveness and healing.
This brings us to the wrath of God in Romans 1:18-19. Paul states that God’s wrath is revealed from heaven upon those who reject and suppress the truth. This chapter shows how the Gentiles had become so bad. God had called them to repentance and had revealed His judgment from time to time in things like the Flood, the Tower of Babel and the confusion of the languages, even Sodom and Gomorrah. Yet, they willfully forget these things (2 Peter 3:5). Still, God in His anger doesn’t simply stomp them out. Rather, Paul describes it in verses 24, 26 and 28. In each verse, he refers to God handing them over to the lusts of their heart, to degrading passions, and to a depraved mind. As we continue to sin, God hands us over to the destroying effects of those sins. Like Nimrod trying to connect with the fallen spiritual powers that had led the pre-flood world into gross sin, we can persist in things that are not good. Thus, God gave the Tower-of-Babel generation over to those fallen spirits. They would reap the harvest of what they were pursuing all along.
Yet, God still cared for the Gentiles. Just as He still cares for the nation of Israel today. Sin has bad consequences. They are bad for the one doing the sin, and they are bad for the people around them. Those consequences have a snowballing effect. They build up and gain momentum over time. At each turn of the rolling monstrosity, God is trying to get our attention, calling us to repentance. Yet, we eventually reach a final judgment event, if we persist in sin.
For an individual, that final judgment event begins with our death. For a nation, it is comes when the government is destroyed and the people subdued by others. Nations are allowed to rise, and nations are put down in judgment. In fact, there is not one nation that exists today in the same form from 2,000 years ago. God’s wheels of judgment have brought many nations to an end, and allowed many others to arise. However, there is an ultimate judgment for all the nations of the earth at the end of this age.
Israel was supposed to be God’s servant to the nations, but they had failed. God sent Jesus, not to push Israel down and leave them in the dust, but to take their place in judgment so that they could be saved. In fact, he was doing this for the Gentiles as well, even for you and me.
God loves humanity too much to let us continue to do evil to one another. That love will eventually be expressed in justice, but He gives us time to change.
Jesus could have thrown up his hands and said, “Enough, I’m done! Get me out of here!” Yet, he patiently endured death on a cross, a horrible way to die. He stepped up with compassion and took our punishment upon himself, so that we can be forgiven.
This brings us back to the tension in Exodus 34:6-7. Yes, Jesus died for our sins so that we can be forgiven. But, he did not die so that we can now sin with impunity. You cannot game God. No one can say that they can now sin since they are forgiven. However, no one can say, I’m forgiven because I have never sinned. This is the wonderful God that we belong to, and the impossible mystery of why people choose sin over Him.
God’s goodness has been poured out upon humanity is so many particular ways, not because He owes it to us, but because that is who He is. Let’s present that to a lost and fallen world, even if it chooses to crucify us.