At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)
“A wrathful man stirreth up strife: But he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife” (Proverbs 15:18).
“A wrathful man stirs up strife, But he who is slow to anger allays contention” (Proverbs 15:18)
.We have in this proverb the gem of an insight when it comes to angry men. What should we mean when we say that someone is “an angry man?”
An easy mistake to make is to think that people are just regular people, and that an angry man is one who is unlucky enough to have a bunch of bad things come at him from the outside. Because of these unfortunate incidents, the aggrieved person finally gets upset about it, and vents his anger.
But this proverb gives us a different picture. Here the angry man has the anger already, and he goes out looking for an excuse to vent it. The contrast is with a man with a long, slow fuse. He has no internal need to be angry, and so when he is presented with occasions for strife, he does what he can to allay those irritations.
The angry man goes out to his car, filled with the ingredients of road rage already—before he pulls out of the driveway. He then navigates down the freeway, looking for idiots to annoy him further.
Imagine two men, side by side on a table, as empty glasses. Suppose further that we fill one of them up to the brim with anger and wrath, and we fill the other one up with kindness and patience, also to the brim. Now, we continue our thought experiment by jostling the table. What spills? The thing that spills out of each glass is what was in the glass already. Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
And we can take this one step further. Imagine that the angry man has a line running to his heart from somewhere, and the line continually feeds new anger and angst into his heart. Because he is constantly filling up, he has a need to spill, and so he is constantly on the lookout for someone to jostle his table.
