Do not be grieved, for the joy of the LORD is your strength.
Nehemiah 8:10 (ESV)
The word incendiary means designed to cause fires! Maybe you have noticed the incendiary anger around these hot topics: the federal budget deficit, vaccinations, violent crime and law enforcement, gun violence and gun control, politics, racism, Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory, illegal immigration, climate change, domestic terrorism, just to name a few.
Most sadly, have you noticed that this kind of anger precedes the serious and lasting divisions between families and friends? What can be done about this painful problem? How can relationships be mended, and peace be reestablished?
Why do people react so violently? A theologian I highly respect believes that at the heart of much of the anger we experience today is FEAR—an “off the charts” kind that is extremely difficult to control. He even goes so far as to say that the antidote to this kind of fear is JOY—a JOY that can actually be described as the “absence of fear.”
Nehemiah learned, to his great distress, that conditions back in his Jewish homeland were in desperate straits in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem’s walls. Here is where we see Nehemiah’s spiritual maturity in his response to this crisis. He devised a plan to return to Jerusalem for the purpose of rebuilding the walls.
Eventually he did rebuild the walls—but with that task accomplished, there was a temptation to believe that it only took fortified walls to provide protection and dispel fear. In this context Nehemiah reminded his people that their real strength wasn’t in the walls but instead was found in the JOY of the Lord—a JOY made possible because they heard and understood God’s Word for the first time in many years.
How can incendiary anger be controlled? By understanding there is greater benefit in submitting to God and carrying out His precepts. This choice calms our fears and helps us ditch our need for catharsis—avoiding explosions of anger in difficult moments. We win by ultimately preserving precious relationships and embracing true JOY—the absence of fear—available in a vital relationship with our omnipotent God.