Is It Ok to Be Angry at God? — The Psalmist and Spurgeon
⏱ 11 min read
You did not mean to be. You meant to be the kind of believer who responds to hard providence with thy will be done and a steady inward calm. But the call came, or the diagnosis came, or the door closed for the fourth time in eighteen months, and somewhere underneath the polite prayer life you noticed a quieter sentence had begun to form. Why are you doing this. Where were you on Tuesday when I needed you. I have asked for this thing for years. The sentence has frightened you because it sounds like the kind of thing a different person prays, not you, and you have been carrying it for some weeks now and have not yet shown it to God because you do not know whether He receives that kind of speech.
This is a slow walk through what the Psalms themselves actually do with the angry prayer, and what Spurgeon — who lived inside the Psalms for forty years — taught about taking it to God instead of around Him. If a journal feels like a steadier home for what is currently unsayable, the Prayer Journal for Women was built as a quiet place for the asks you have not yet known how to bring — including this one.
The question underneath the question
When the woman asks is it ok to be angry at God, the question she is usually asking is two questions wearing one coat. The first is is the anger itself a sin. The second, quieter one, is if I bring it to Him, will He still want me. The two questions are different. The piety that quickly answers the first one with yes, repent of it often leaves the second one unanswered, and the second one is the one keeping the woman away from the chair.
Scripture does not handle the angry prayer the way the modern church often does. Scripture records it. Scripture preserves it. Scripture canonises it. Psalm 22 opens with my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me — and the verse is so important that Christ Himself prays it from the cross. Psalm 13 opens with how long. Psalm 88 ends in darkness with no resolution at all. The Psalter is not embarrassed by the angry prayer. The Psalter wrote it down.
This is the first thing to understand about your sentence, the one that has frightened you. The Holy Spirit, when He inspired the prayer-book of the church, kept the angry prayers in. He did not edit them out. He did not soften them. He let David ask how long wilt thou hide thy face from me and printed it for every century of the church to read and pray after him. The angry prayer is not the prayer of someone outside the household. It is the prayer of someone inside the household who has not yet learned that the household is large enough to hold their anger. (For the wider posture of bringing the loud mind to God instead of carrying it alone, prayer for anxiety and overthinking walks the same slow grammar applied to a different storm.)
The Psalmist’s grammar
Look at what Psalm 22 actually does. It opens with the cry. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me. That is the angry prayer in its rawest possible form — accusation of abandonment, addressed directly to God. The Psalmist does not soften it. He does not preface it with I know I should not feel this way. He puts the accusation first.
And then notice the address. My God, my God. Twice. He is angry, and the angry prayer is going to God, not about God. The accusation is happening inside the relationship, not outside it. He is not going down to the well with the village women to complain about God in the third person. He is walking into the temple and saying it to His face. My God, my God, why.
This is the grammar the Psalter teaches the church for the angry prayer. The anger is not the problem. The anger turned away from God — taken to a friend, a sibling, the inside of your own head, the comfort of an extra glass of wine, the bitterness that becomes the soundtrack of the years that follow — that is the problem. The anger turned toward Him, named to Him, brought into the conversation, is what the Psalter has been doing for three thousand years and is what the modern church often does not know how to do anymore.
Spurgeon, who preached the Psalms his whole life, knew this grammar by heart. The line that is worth carrying out of his writing for this question is small and unguarded:
“Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace. Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Till He Come
That thine own heart is in right tune. Notice what tuning is. Tuning is the bringing of a slack string back into alignment — by adjustment, with the tuner present, in honest contact with the instrument. You cannot tune a string by pretending it is already in tune. You cannot tune a heart by pretending the anger is not in it. The tuning is the bringing of the actual tension into the actual presence of the tuner. The angry prayer, brought to God, is a heart in the act of being tuned.
The closed heart — the one that says I am angry and I will not bring it to Him because anger is not allowed — is not a heart in right tune. It is a heart that has been left in its slack state and called peace. The fingers of mercy cannot make full notes of communion on a string that has been left untouched in the corner. The string has to be brought into honest contact with the tuner, and the tuner does the rest.
Pause in the body
The shoulders, the jaw, the chest — the places the anger has been quietly stored while you have been deciding whether you are allowed to bring it — let them lower by an inch. Let the breath, which has been short and high since the call came, lengthen by half a beat. The body has been carrying the anger as bracing, and the bracing has not lessened the anger; it has only kept it from being prayed. Let the body un-brace for one slow exhale before you read on. The angry prayer the Psalter is asking of you needs a body that has stopped holding the anger as a secret.
Spurgeon’s second instruction — the heart that does not edit
The second passage is the one that gives the practice its permission. Spurgeon, in Morning and Evening, describes the kind of communion the soul is actually invited into — and the description is the opposite of the curated, edited version of prayer the modern believer often defaults to:
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
My whole heart and mind. Not the parts of the heart that pass inspection. The whole of it. Spurgeon assumes — and the assumption is the whole of his counsel — that the heart God is asking for is the whole one, including the parts you have not yet been willing to bring. The whole heart is the angry one too. The whole heart is the one that has been carrying the sentence you have not yet shown Him. The fellowship Spurgeon describes is not a fellowship with the polished half. It is a fellowship with the entire mess.
He will condescend to have fellowship with me. That verb is precise. Condescend. The fellowship is not earned by the heart having tidied itself first. The fellowship is given by a God who is willing to come down to where the heart actually is — angry, slack-stringed, sentence-already-formed — and sit with it there. The Holy Spirit, Spurgeon adds, has been given to abide with me forever — meaning the abiding is already in place, and the prayer is not the work of summoning God’s presence but the work of admitting Him into the room of the heart you have actually been living in.
The angry prayer, brought to Him, is not a fellowship-breaker. It is a fellowship-deepener. The fellowship that survives the angry prayer is a fellowship that knows it can survive anything — because the worst sentence the woman was carrying has been spoken in His company, and the company has not left. (The version of this practice that has a small evening shape — a place to write the sentence you have not yet been able to pray — is what the Prayer Journal for Women was designed for: a quiet field for the unedited, including the angry, with no audience but Him.)
What changes in the heart that prays it
When the angry prayer is brought to God instead of carried around Him, three things tend to happen — slowly, over weeks, not in the one prayer itself.
The first is that the sentence loses some of its power. The unsayable thing, once said in the chair, stops haunting the rest of the day. The woman who has not been able to look at the call or the diagnosis or the closed door directly is, after the angry prayer, able to look at it directly — because it has been brought into the light of God’s gaze, and the light, even if it does not yet answer, is steadier than the dark she was holding it in.
The second is that the relationship deepens. The fellowship that survives the angry prayer is a different fellowship than the one that has only ever known the polished prayer. There is a particular trust that only grows in the soul who has been angry with God and found Him still there. That trust is not the trust of the woman who has never been tested. It is the trust of the woman who has tested Him with her hardest sentence and found that He received it.
The third — and this is the slowest — is that the anger itself, having been brought into the conversation, often begins to change. Not because God has answered the why. Most of the time, He doesn’t. But because the anger that was the only relationship the woman had with the hard providence is now one of several relationships — grief, lament, asking, waiting, returning — and the anger no longer has to carry the whole of the weight. (For the practice of bringing the heaviest prayer of all — the one for someone whose heart has gone hard — how to pray when you’re under spiritual attack is the slow companion piece, and the prayer journal and devotion built around 30 honest prompts has the daily structure for it. For the days the anxiety wears the anger’s clothes, the Christian journal prompts for anxiety walk a slower set of asks.)
The angry prayer, in other words, is not a permanent state. It is a doorway. The Psalter knows this; that is why so few of the lament psalms end in lament. Psalm 22 begins with forsaken and ends with all the ends of the earth shall remember. The movement is not from the lament to the praise. The movement is through the lament into the praise — and the through is the part the modern church often tries to skip.
What if I do not feel any different after praying it
You may not. The first time the angry prayer is brought, the body may still be braced when it stops. The mind may still be looping the same accusation when it gets up from the chair. The relief is not always inside the prayer itself. The relief is often days later, when you notice the sentence is quieter than it was, or when you find yourself in the same hard providence and notice that the angry prayer is now a known practice — something you have already done, that you can do again, that did not break the fellowship the first time and will not break it the second.
The point of the angry prayer is not the catharsis of the moment. The point is the keeping of the conversation. Spurgeon’s fellowship that does not flinch from the whole heart is built one angry prayer at a time, by a soul that has begun to trust that the household is large enough.
If the wider question of unanswered prayer is the one underneath your anger, Edwards on the affections is the slow companion piece, and for the days you do not have the words at all, Spurgeon’s counsel on what to pray when you don’t know what to pray is the sibling worth keeping near the page.
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The question, answered slowly
Is it ok to be angry at God. The Psalmist took the anger to God in writing, and the Holy Spirit kept the writing. Spurgeon called the whole heart what God is asking for. The angry prayer is not the prayer of someone outside the household; it is the prayer of someone inside it who has not yet learned that the household will hold them.
Bring the sentence you have been carrying. The fellowship will not break. It may, slowly, deepen.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Prayer Journal for Women.
