One of Israel’s prophets told God to his face that he had been tricked. “O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived” (Jeremiah 20:7). That sentence is preserved as Scripture, and the man who prayed it kept his calling. Anger brought to God is not, by itself, a sin. The Bible keeps a whole tradition of such prayer, called lament. What it warns against is anger that is hidden, nursed into bitterness, or turned into a reason to leave God.
Dr. Robert Smith Jr. puts the reason in a single line: “God is not fragile, he’s faithful.” He said it while recounting a phone call from a former student whose two-week-old daughter had just died. The young man asked how he could pray to a God who had hurt him. Smith gave him permission: “Tell God what you want, tell him, tell him. It’s all right.”
That can sound like pastoral kindness stretched past what the Bible allows. Smith himself sends the question back to the text: “I’m gonna always go to scripture because I think scripture illustrates things better than any other source.” So that is where to test it.
What kind of prayer is a lament?
Lament is a genre of prayer, mostly poetry, found throughout the Psalms, in Job, in the prophets and in Lamentations. Poetry speaks figuratively and with emotional directness. A lament does not describe God in careful doctrinal terms. It speaks to him from inside pain.
Psalm 13 shows the usual shape. It opens with an accusation in the form of a question: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” (Psalm 13:1). It ends with a decision: “But I have trusted in thy mercy; my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation” (Psalm 13:5). Trust arrives after the complaint, in the same prayer, from the same mouth. The complaint was never erased to make room for it.
Psalm 88 is harder, and more important for this question. It never turns to praise. Its last line is “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness” (Psalm 88:18). If God only accepted complaints that resolved neatly into worship, this psalm would not be in the Bible.
Look at how it begins, though: “O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee” (Psalm 88:1). The writer is in the dark, sees no rescue, and still addresses God as the God of his salvation. The whole psalm is spoken toward God. That is what makes it faith. Its feelings are bleak. Its direction is fixed.
What did Jeremiah actually say to God?
Smith goes to Jeremiah 20, the sharpest example he could have chosen. The full verse reads: “O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me” (Jeremiah 20:7).
Smith slows down on the first verb. He points out that the same Hebrew word appears in Exodus 22:16, a law about a man who seduces a young woman, where the KJV renders it entice. Some modern translations carry that sense into Jeremiah 20:7 and render it enticed. On Smith’s reading, Jeremiah is charging God with drawing him in and then overpowering him. “Look at the imagery,” Smith says. The next phrase supports him: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed. Jeremiah describes his calling as something a stronger party did to him.
The context explains the outburst. Just before this, a temple official has beaten Jeremiah and put him in the stocks for prophesying (Jeremiah 20:1-2). He obeyed, and obedience got him humiliated. Smith voices the prophet’s resignation plainly: “So I’m turning in my license. I’m through.”
Then comes the verse that changes how the whole complaint reads: “Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay” (Jeremiah 20:9). Jeremiah’s anger and his calling share a sentence. He is furious with God and unable to stop speaking for God at the same moment.
The chapter refuses to tidy this up. Verse 13 bursts into praise, and verse 14 drops straight back into darkness: “Cursed be the day wherein I was born: let not the day wherein my mother bare me be blessed” (Jeremiah 20:14). A careful reader should resist forcing an emotional arc onto the passage. It shows a prophet whose relationship with God survives his anger. It does not show the anger neatly dissolving.
Why is hiding anger from God pointless?
Smith’s other text is Psalm 139: “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off” (Psalm 139:2). Two verses later it goes further: “For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether” (Psalm 139:4).
Smith draws the obvious consequence. A prayer that holds anger back protects God from nothing, because he already knows. Smith imagines God’s response to the person who finally admits it: “Get it outta you. I already know what’s in you before you say it.” He reasons from parenthood too: “How can I be a parent and say to one of my children, look, there’s something we can’t talk about.” The formal titles believers use for God have their place, but the sentence a hurting person needs to say is simpler: “Tell him I’m mad at you.”
Lisa Fields names the fear that keeps people quiet. Many believers assume “they’ll get struck by lightning if they ask questions.” Her answer is practical: “you have to get it out of your mouth to get it out of your heart.” Otherwise, she warns, “if you don’t put language to it, it will stay in your heart and it’ll eat you alive.” Psalm 139 supplies the theology under her instinct. Speaking anger to God tells him nothing new. It brings the relationship into the open, where he already is.
Doesn’t Ephesians 4:26 treat anger as dangerous?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a careful reading. The KJV reads: “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26).
Start with the setting. Ephesians 4 is about how believers live together: speaking truth to one another, not stealing, using words that build up. Paul is addressing anger between people in a church. Applying the verse to anger at God is reasoning by analogy, and it should be held with that humility.
Then notice what the verse permits. It assumes anger will happen and places two boundaries on it: do not sin, and do not let it run overnight. The next verse names the danger: “Neither give place to the devil” (Ephesians 4:27). Later in the chapter Paul tells his readers to put away bitterness, wrath and malice (Ephesians 4:31). Read together, the passage allows anger that is dealt with and forbids anger that settles into bitterness.
Smith reads the verse along those lines. “So something has to be done with anger,” he says, so that it can be “redeemed and used for something that’s constructive.” He calls anger a real emotion and says “God will take that anger and recycle it.” On his reading, the sin lies in leaving the feeling to harden in the dark.
When does anger at God cross a line?
Smith’s texts are Jeremiah and Psalm 139. The wider Bible tests his claim, and it would be dishonest to say Scripture approves every angry word about God. What follows is this article’s own reading of those other passages.
In the wilderness, Israel’s grumbling against God and Moses brought judgment. Their complaint rejected the goodness of the God who had just rescued them. Jonah is a quieter case. He is angry that God spared Nineveh, and God answers with a question: “Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry?” (Jonah 4:4). God keeps reasoning with him to the end of the book, but the question exposes what was wrong. Jonah resented God for being merciful.
Job sits on the other side. He says many bitter things, and God confronts him. Yet at the end God tells Job’s friends, who had defended God with tidy explanations, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7). The man who complained to God is vindicated over the men who talked about God without facing him.
Taken together, these passages suggest a working distinction. Anger that turns toward God, even accusingly, is treated as prayer. Anger that turns away from him, that grumbles about him and refuses his goodness, is treated as unbelief. A lament’s feelings can be mistaken, and God may correct them, as he questioned Jonah and confronted Job. Bringing them to him still assumes he is there and that he answers.
What did Jesus do with forsakenness?
The clearest lament in the New Testament comes from the cross. Mark records that Jesus cried out, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). These are the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?” (Psalm 22:1).
Smith observes that Jesus “is not just quoting Psalm 22.” In the moment of greatest abandonment, “he held onto that possessive pronoun.” The question why and the claim my sit in the same breath, just as Psalm 88 calls God the God of my salvation from the dark.
The text should not be pressed further than it goes. Mark does not call this cry anger, and Jesus is sinless. What the scene does show is that the language of feeling forsaken by God was not beneath the Son of God. He prayed Israel’s lament from the cross. Anyone who feels abandoned and says so to God is using words Jesus himself used.
Will the pain go away if I say it?
Lament comes with no timetable. After his son Tony was murdered, Smith says, “there was a deep seated anger, and Ill will, and God had to deliver me through that.” The change was slow: “It was not instantaneously, it was gradually.” Years later he still says plainly, “Time doesn’t heal all wounds.” Grief returns when he attends the funeral of a young man.
His student’s turn came faster. Within about a week, Smith says, the young father moved from asking how to pray to a God who hurt him to asking “how can I keep from praising a God who loves me?” Smith credits that change to the Spirit. One story is not a promise, and Psalm 88 is a reminder that some people pray in the dark for a long time.
Smith offers trust in a person where explanation runs out: “If I know who, I don’t have to know why.” Lament works on the same logic. The psalmist never learns how long. Jeremiah gets no apology for the stocks. What they keep is the God they were speaking to.
That is why silence is the riskier choice. Jeremiah tried it, resolving to speak no more in God’s name, and found the word burning in his bones until he could not hold it. The anger he voiced kept him near God. The silence he attempted could not last. A person who says how long, or why hast thou forsaken me, is still talking to someone, and that act of address is where faith is holding on.