Is It Okay to Be Angry with God?


Anonymous asked a question:

What if I am angry at God. How do you cope with the frustration and anger towards Him?


Hey dear friend, I’m really sorry. There must be many things happening internally and externally, and I’m with you and for you. So is everyone here.

I have to tell you up front: I’d much rather be mad with God than mad without Him.

That’s not some cute little statement that only works abstractly on Instagram. I’m dead serious. If you’re angry with God, at the very least, you’re talking with Him. He’d rather you be mad at Him than displacing that anywhere else. God isn’t put off by our barest, most raw emotions: because He made them, and He made you, and He’s going to work with that.


I’m embarrassed to admit that there have been hundreds of times I’ve been mad at God for various reasons, some more legitimate than others, and I always thought it was outright “heresy” or “blasphemy” to approach Him this way.

But then there are pages upon pages of the Bible where all our heroes and heroines are yelling at God, cussing Him out, shaking a fist, and challenging His goodness. Go no further than Job, David, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Naomi, Habakkuk, Nahum, and Martha. I’d often read them thinking, “Are they allowed to say this? Won’t God tune them up?” And I slowly realized, God never, ever shamed them for their questions, doubts, and frustrations. He might have flexed His glory now and again to keep them humble, but He received every complaint with the patience of a clerk at the Zootopia DMV.

Sure, it’s possible that your anger can get the best of you in the worst way possible, and I don’t recommend it as your normative wavelength of faith. I know there are impossible things in life that are so unfair, we want to jump out the church window and never come back.

I can only hope that your anger, somehow, would keep you running back to Him instead of away, and that the conversation would remain ongoing. That in your frustration, you’d choose to take it out on Him, and not on others, because He can handle that. Keep serving, meeting up your community, venting to mature people, and hashing it out.

I hope that eventually, slowly, painfully, daily, your joy would be restored in Him as you realize God is not taken aback by your anger, but He fully and wholly understands, and that He is often just as mad at injustice as we are, and it’s why He became one of us, to so profoundly inhabit our experience in solidarity that we’d know: we have someone who gets us exactly as we are.

— J.S.

Published by JS Park

J.S. Park is a hospital chaplain, published author, and online educator. He is a sixth degree black belt, ex-atheist, and featured on CNN and TODAY Show.

11 thoughts on “Is It Okay to Be Angry with God?”

  1. Thank you for your personal and encouraging words. It’s so good to be reminded that it’s ok to bring all our emotions to God. What an amazing God we serve.

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  2. Perfect analysis of the question and an answer that’s well accepted by me. Your understanding of the love of God towards his children is wonderful! I read to the end with full attention, every expression and explanation opening up a sea of great ideas to me. I must confess, I didn’t want it to end😃. People really need to understand that it really is better to be mad with God than to be mad without him. Being mad and coming to God, one may come to realise the reason for God’s actions but being mad and forgetting God makes you vulnerable to more things that’ll make you mad continuously. That way, you have no one to blame.

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    1. Thank you, it took me a long time (and a lot of pain) to learn this too. It’s also not as easy to get through the process; there is much praying and grieving and trusting involved. God helps with that, too.

      (By the way, I’ve written plenty on this and you can find a book about the same ideas in my links!)

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  3. J.S., Thank you for this reminder of God’s patience with our complaints and petitions. I often forget His understanding of our weakness, frailty, and struggles is not just theoretical. He lived it. He faced it. He gets it.

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    1. Yes. And how much more incredible it is that He really, really gets it. It’s the thing we ask for, for someone to really understand, and He does, more profoundly than we know.

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  4. Thank you for this! It’s good. I feel like most difficult questions have simple answers that are not easy (or too easy), and most of the time that answer is to stay close to God.

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  5. Pingback: Is It Okay to Be Angry with God? | The impossible dream

  7. Great topic! God,”I would that your were either hot or cold, but since you are lukewarm I will spew you out of my mouth” translated “you make me puke”. God hates to be ignored or patronized or have his name treated in vain–as if he is irrelevant. He loves when we take it up with him–Jeramiah 20–Just take your anger to God and then listen through his word and through prayer. I remember a friend who’s father was a Baptist minister who would molest her. She begged God to make him stop and nothing happened. She stuffed her feelings but when older wrote an angry letter to God. Within a month they had made up and she was in love with him.

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