Very Angry, and Nothing Else

There is a verse in 2 Samuel that gives a father's entire response in four words, and it describes the single most common thing a failing man does.

He felt it strongly.

That is all of it. That is all he did.

What had just happened

I have to give you the situation, and I am going to give it to you plainly and without detail, because the chapter does not linger and neither will I.

David's daughter Tamar was assaulted by her half brother Amnon, in his house, by a plan his cousin handed him and he carried out. She begged him not to. He did it anyway, and then he hated her and had her put out of the house, and she put ashes on her head and tore the long-sleeved robe she was wearing and stayed in her brother Absalom's house, desolate.

Then comes the verse.

"Now when King David heard of all these matters, he was very angry." (2 Samuel 13:21)

He heard. He was angry. The narrative moves on.

Anger is not an action

Notice what is not in that sentence.

Amnon is not summoned. Tamar is not visited. Nothing is required of anybody. There is no judgment, no restitution, no protection put in place for the other daughters in that house. The king of Israel, a man with the authority to convene a court and the personal history of a man who had killed a giant over an insult to God's name, heard what happened to his own daughter and felt very strongly about it.

Two years later, at a sheepshearing, Absalom had Amnon killed, because somebody was going to do something eventually and the father had made clear it would not be him.

Here is the sentence I want you to carry out of this. Strong feeling is the most respectable way in the world to abandon a post. Nobody can accuse you of not caring. You care visibly. You care out loud. And the person who needed something done is still standing there with nothing.

Why it is so easy to stop at angry

Because anger feels like a response. That is the trap in it.

When you are furious about something, your body is doing what it does before action. Your chest is tight, your jaw is set, you are rehearsing what you would say. It has all the sensation of doing something. And if you never take the next step, the feeling drains off over a few days and leaves you with the impression that you dealt with it.

You did not deal with it. You experienced it.

I think this is why so many men can tell you exactly what is wrong in their house and cannot tell you one thing they have done about it. Ask a man about his son's screen time or his brother's drinking or what his kid's coach said, and he will give you a hot, articulate, completely accurate paragraph. Ask him what he did. Long pause.

The three reasons a man stops there

David had all three, and you probably have at least one.

The first is that acting would cost him something. Amnon was his firstborn, and the son everyone assumed would follow him. Doing right by Tamar meant moving against a son he had plans for, and a man will absorb an enormous amount of wrong before he will disrupt a plan he is invested in.

The second is that he had no standing and he knew it. David had taken another man's wife and arranged that man's death. When his son took a woman by force, what exactly was he going to say. This is the one that shuts most men down, and I want to be careful here, because it is half right and half a lie. It is true you are not clean. It is a lie that a compromised man is disqualified from protecting the person in front of him. His guilt is between him and God. Her safety is a separate question and it is not waiting on his sanctification.

The third is that it had already happened. There was nothing to prevent. The damage was done, so what is the point.

The point is that a house watches what a father does after. Absalom watched. He drew a conclusion about what his father would tolerate, and he was right, and he acted on it two years later, at a feast, through men he had given the order to. Nothing was over. Everything downstream of that verse came out of it.

The Father who did not stop at angry

God is described as angry in Scripture more times than most of us are comfortable with, and every time, something follows it.

He is angry at what was done to the weak and He says what He will do about it. He is angry at shepherds who fed themselves and He says He will come and shepherd the flock Himself. His wrath is never a mood He sat in. It is always attached to a hand.

And when the wrong that had to be answered was ours, He did not send a strongly worded feeling. He sent His Son, and the anger that belonged to us landed on Him instead, and the people who did the wrong got the house and the standing and the name.

That is why the second reason above does not hold. If you are in Christ, the question of whether you are clean enough to act on someone's behalf was settled by Someone else. You are not standing there as Amnon's equal. You are standing there as a man who has been forgiven and given a post anyway, and the post has a person on it who needs you to move.

Name the thing you have only felt

Think of the thing in your life right now that you have strong feelings about and no record of action on. You know the one. You have talked about it. You may have talked about it a lot.

Write down one thing you will do about it, and put a day on it.

Not a plan to fix the whole situation. One action, with a date, that somebody other than you could verify happened. Make the call. Say the sentence to the person who needs to hear it. Ask the question you have been rehearsing for a year and never asked.

Tamar did not need her father to be upset. There is a version of that chapter where a man walks into a room and says out loud that what happened was evil, and it happened to her, and it was not her fault, and he is going to do something about it.

He never said it. He just felt it. And the silence of a very angry man sounded exactly like the silence of a man who did not care.