BookNook, a mini-bookshop located opposite the Plaza Hall, sells Christian books, bibles, devotionals, greeting cards and gifts.

Here we have the review on the book written by Maggie Low on - God, I’m Angry!

God, I’m Angry! – Anger, Forgiveness and the Psalms of Vengeance by Maggie Low (Available at BookNook @ $25.00)

I’ll be honest, it was the screaming title that first attracted me to this book. Not many Christian writers dare to address such a theme; yet we are all familiar with anger, even in its mildest form of irritation with the behaviour of others. Dr Maggie Low is a faculty member of Trinity Theological College. So it was not a surprise to find this book quite scholarly in tone, with ample footnotes at the bottom of the page. But don’t let that frighten you away!

First she tackles the question: “Is it OK to be angry?” She gives quite a number of examples from the Bible and concludes: Not all anger is wrong, and Paul even commands us to be angry in Ephesians 4:25! It is, however, tempered by the word: “but do not sin”. Anger can be legitimate, and we have a few examples from the life of Jesus Himself.

Is forgiveness conditional or unconditional? I always thought that, ideally, it should be unconditional. But the book demonstrates convincingly that it is not so simple. Is the offender ready to repent?

She surveys five NT texts which show that forgiveness is actually conditional: See the Lord’s Prayer, the healing of the paralytic, the woman caught in adultery, the crucifixion of Jesus, and Paul’s exhortation to forgive one another.

Dr Low next examines five texts that make repentance explicitly necessary for forgiveness. They demonstrate that God does care about justice and righteousness. Her survey of a number of texts in the Old Testament bears this out even more clearly.

But what if the offender is unrepentant? How should we respond? Dr Low takes two chapters to unravel this. First she look at vengeance and the love for an enemy in the O.T. This ethic is further developed in the N.T. Not everyone might agree with Maggie Low’s interpretation of the Sermon of the Mount, esp. about not retaliating when slapped. (Mt 5:38-48). What to do then with Jesus’s command to love our enemies? The writer points out that Jesus was primarily concerned with the tendency of his contemporaries to pervert the law in order to exact vengeance and to justify hatred. She concludes that the hope of divine vengeance enables a believer to return good for evil.

That brings her to the Psalms, where we find a number of disturbing passages that call on God to exact vengeance on enemies. How can we pray these psalms? . Maggie Low stresses that we must understand the theology behind this, and shows that there is a place for these psalms. They may have great value in counselling people who have been deeply hurt.

This is not an easy book, not only because of the sensitive subject, but also because chapters 7 to 11 are quite demanding. But those who persevere and take their time to work through its pages will be richly rewarded.

Reviewed by André De Winne