God has a very long nose

Last week, I raised my voice at my son.

It wasn’t a moment of danger or safety. It was just a minor moment of 3-year old disobedience. Yet for some reason, my internal temperature rose, my face grew hot, my mouth opened, and I came down on my son. Now, you guys know me, I am a generally even-keel, even intensely optimistic guy. That morning, my own voice caught me off guard. After I cooled off, I went over to my boy to apologize and then I spent a few minutes wondering what on earth happened. Why did I get so angry? Why did I let my anger give birth to verbal fury?

As an image-bearer of God, I am called to reflect God back into this world - to my kids, my wife, my friends, my work, etc. This means that I consider the character and nature of God and align my thoughts, emotions, words, and actions to His. Was my display of anger a reflection of God’s own anger or something else? Was my anger faithful and righteous as God’s always is or was it selfish and haughty like mine usually is?

I had to be honest with myself. My yelling was self-reflection, it came from feeling inconvenienced and interrupted. My anger was not a righteous display of anger against a real evil. After thinking some more, I ended up turning to Exodus 34:6-7 - the first time in Scripture when God gives a self-description to His people so they know exactly who He is:‍

"The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, 'The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin...'"

‍The translation of the phrase "slow to anger" is quite unique. The translation of slow means "long" and is used when discussing things like the long needles of a pine tree, the vastness of an eagle’s feather. The translation of anger means "nose" - yes, the thing you smell with. Before you laugh, think about it. Anger turns all of us into a 1960’s cartoon character. We perceive a wrong thing and then our whole body responds. We get hot, our face gets flushed, we are steaming - like we could blow smoke out of our nostrils. Yet it doesn’t take much for us to get there. Such is not so for God.

God’s long-nosed nature means that He promises to not be like us, to not immediately get angry, even when He is wronged. Think about that faucet or shower in your house that takes a long time to warm up. God takes even longer than that to get hot with anger. God is worthy of praise for so much, but today I am on my knees that He is slow to anger. My list of disobediences is far longer than my son’s and yet I have received nothing short of his abundant mercy and grace. To be a God-reflector, an image-bearer, I must pray that the Spirit of God would make me more long-nosed, more willing to express patience and long-suffering like He has done for me. I must, as James 1:19-21 reminds me, make actual steps to catch the heat before it turns into a flame.

I pray my personal reflection is helpful for you. For His Glory and our good.