Annoyance: A Cause of Anger or An Inconvenient Truth?

Luke 4:28. One cause of anger is when someone annoys you. All of us come in contact with someone that disturbs or bothers us. If this annoyance continues, many of us will eventually get angry. This in turn will result in us taking some type of action to stop the annoyance. An example of this is in the Bible where Jesus spoke in the synagogue and became an annoyance to the Jews (Luke 4:28, “And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath,”). This led to the Jews getting very angry at Jesus with the intention of causing him physical harm.

The cause of the Jew's anger were twofold. First Jesus, “the home town boy” was classifying himself with the prophets Elijah and Elisha. From the Jew's perspective, this was absurd and Jesus was preaching this “nonsense” from their pulpit. Second, Jesus showed the Jews from their own Bible that God had blessed a Gentile placing Gentiles on the same level as the Jews, God's chosen people. These factors caused the Jews to get annoyed, and this annoyance quickly turned to violent anger.

People and things that annoy us can be causes of anger, but the question is is anger the right reaction to someone or something that annoys you? In the case with the Jews with Jesus the answer was no. The Jews instead should have looked past their annoyance and sought what was true and what was not. In most cases, the answer to annoyance is not anger. Many times an annoyance is God trying to tell us something. This annoyance may be an inconvenient truth, but it is the truth. Instead of anger, an annoyance may be a cause for us to reflect, humble ourselves and be convicted of our error and turn back toward God's truth.

LUKE 4 BIBLE SCRIPTURE Luke 4:28, “And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath,”