Can you believe he said that? I can’t believe they made that decision! I am so hurt by what he did. I can’t stand to be in the same room with that person. Have you thought that? Said that? Heard that? Ephesians 4:31-32 states, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you. Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
Bitterness dwells within the heart and leads to the other sins listed. Wrath and anger are behaviors—exercises of judgment. One should be careful to note, however, that though scripture points to the wrath of God or Christ’s anger at the desecration of the Temple, Romans 1:18 states that “God’s wrath is a righteous judgment exercised against all ungodliness and unrighteousness.” Conversely, man’s anger is rooted in man’s prideful sin nature. “For the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.” (James 1:20)
Out of our bitterness and anger, do we create a clamor? Do we noisily protest? Do we slander one another? Do we spread false information about our brothers and sisters? In Romans chapter 1, gossip—a vehicle for slander—is listed right along homosexuality and murder. Think on that a moment! Is our bitterness so strong that we want to do something evil to another or wish that something evil would happen? That is malice.
In verse 31, the qualifier is the word “all. ” When we put all of the other away, what remains is kind, tenderhearted and forgiving. The ultimate forgiveness is of God. “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.” (Eph. 2:4-5) Recognize that we are all sinners and, as such, we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. Extend grace to one another. Extend mercy to one another. Free yourself and others from the anger and resentment to which you are clinging by forgiving one another.
Commentator Marshall Segal states, “God does get angry (more than three hundred times in the Old Testament), very angry, but his anger is not the height of who he is, and it’s not his final word to anyone who trusts in his Son. If God could set aside the purity of his anger against us to forgive and restore us, we should feel the freedom and pleasure of setting, aside our own for the sake of others.