Being angry with God does not shut you out of prayer. The Bible keeps the angry prayers of people who said hard things to God, from psalms that ask why God is asleep to Jeremiah, Jonah and Job, and at the end of Job, God tells Job's friends they have not spoken of him rightly, as Job has. The anger can be said to God in words already in Scripture, the Bible's own pages.
Christian traditions answer the narrower question, whether the anger itself is a sin, in different ways, and even the strictest of them tell you to say it to God rather than hide it.
Very often there is grief underneath. Cruse Bereavement Support, a UK charity, calls anger "a completely natural emotion" and says it is "very natural after someone dies." The same can be true after a diagnosis, a miscarriage, a divorce or a prayer that has gone unanswered for years.
If you only have a minute
The short answer
The Bible keeps angry prayers said to God's face, and anger does not shut anybody out of prayer.
Where traditions differ
Some call the anger itself wrong; all of them say to tell God rather than hide it.
Words to say tonight
Psalm 13:1, with your own words for what happened set into it.
If you are asked
"You can say all of that to God. The psalms do."
On a harder night
Crisis lines by country are near the end of this page.
What does the Bible say about being angry with God?
The Book of Psalms, the prayers Israel sang, holds a good number that speak to God in anger, to his face, without softening it. Each comes from somewhere particular.
Psalm 10 comes from a setting of violence against the poor, and it opens, "Why do you stand far away, Yahweh? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?" Psalm 44 is a whole people speaking after defeat, and near its end it says, "Wake up! Why do you sleep, Lord? Arise! Don’t reject us forever." Psalm 74, prayed after the sanctuary was destroyed, begins, "God, why have you rejected us forever? Why does your anger smolder against the sheep of your pasture?"
Psalm 77 is a speaker struggling with memory, who asks, "Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he, in anger, withheld his compassion?" And Psalm 89, written when the promise to David seemed to have collapsed, says, "How long, Yahweh? Will you hide yourself forever?" and then, "Lord, where are your former loving kindnesses, which you swore to David in your faithfulness?"
Notice what these give you. There is accusation in them, the question why, and the word forever, all addressed to God as prayer and kept in the book Israel sang together. Most of them move later toward memory, petition or trust. One does not: Psalm 88 stays in the dark to its last line, and when the answer to a prayer is no, or nothing reads it slowly.
Some prayers come out as shouting.
Who in the Bible was angry with God?
The psalms are not the only place. Several people in the Bible said hard things to God, and the text records what came next.
Jeremiah, the prophet, tells Yahweh that he was persuaded into his calling and let himself be persuaded, and then describes the mockery that followed him all day. In Jeremiah 20:7-18 he curses the day he was born and asks why he was born at all, and the passage closes on that question, with no reply written beneath it.
Moses, in Exodus 5:22-23, asks Yahweh why he has brought trouble on the people and says that God has done nothing to rescue them. The reply, in Exodus 6:1, is a promise of action. Jonah is angry that the city of Nineveh was spared, angry enough, he says, to die. God answers him through a plant, a worm and an east wind, and the book of Jonah ends on God's own question about compassion for the city.
Habakkuk asks how long he must cry out about violence before God listens, then, in Habakkuk 2:1, takes his place to watch for what God will say. The writer of Lamentations, after the fall of Jerusalem, says his soul still holds all of it in memory and is bowed down within him (Lamentations 3:20).
There are others. Abraham argues with God for the city of Sodom in Genesis 18, and Moses tells God the burden of the people is too heavy to carry in Numbers 11; who in the Bible had unanswered prayers reads both. Naomi, back home after burying her husband and sons, asks to be called Mara, bitter, in Ruth 1, and who in the Bible grieved tells her story. What these people give you is company: people whose words to God the Bible kept.
Some of them, Job in chapter 3, Jonah in 4:3 and 4:8, and the writer of Psalm 88, say they wish they were dead. If that is close to where you are tonight, please reach a person now. In the United States, call 988 or text 988, or go to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In Canada, call or text 9-8-8. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Samaritans is on 116 123. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Everywhere else, Find A Helpline lists services by country.
Is yelling at God a sin?
Job is where many people look for this, and his book holds the hardest words of all. After losing his children, his livelihood and his health, Job says he will not restrain his mouth (Job 7:11). He says, "My soul is weary of my life" (Job 10:1). In Job 23:1-7 he calls his complaint bitter and says he wants to find God and set out his case before him.
Then Yahweh answers Job out of the whirlwind, with questions about the making of the world (Job 38:1-3). At the end of the book, in Job 42:7-8, Yahweh tells Job's friends that they have not spoken rightly of him as Job has, and has Job pray for them. The friends spent most of the book explaining that suffering must be a punishment, and what the Bible says about suffering reads their speeches at length.
Readers take the ending two ways, and both readings stand. John Piper at Desiring God, writing in 2000, reads Job 42:6, where Job says he repents in dust and ashes, as Job's later correction of what he had said. Other commentators put the weight on God's own words, that Job spoke more rightly than the friends who explained his suffering away.
Early in the book, Job 1:22 and 2:10 say that Job "did not sin." Those lines come at the first losses, when Job refused to curse God. The bitter complaints come later, and both are in one book, the refusal and the protest side by side.
On yelling itself, two well-known published answers draw the same lines. Piper and GotQuestions both separate the feeling, the complaint said aloud to God, and the accusation that God did wrong. Piper says telling God honestly is better than hiding it, and GotQuestions says anger and grief may be brought to God in prayer; for both, the verdict that God did wrong is the part they call sin.
Is anger at God a mortal sin?
The Catholic Church uses the term mortal sin, and its Catechism, the Church's official summary of its teaching, speaks to this through what it says about God's name. In paragraph 2148 it says blasphemy consists in words of "hatred, reproach, or defiance" against God, and calls it "in itself a grave sin." In 2149 it calls words that use God's name without the intention of blasphemy irreverent.
These paragraphs are about speech and intention, and Catholic teaching counts a sin mortal only when three things meet: grave matter, full knowledge and deliberate consent. A feeling that rises in you after a loss is a different thing from a deliberate choice to curse God. Beside it sits the Catechism's own line on prayer: "Prayer is the raising of one’s mind and heart to God or the requesting of good things from God."
Other traditions answer in their own words, and they do not all agree:
Hover or tap a row to highlight it. Sort by a column heading; a third click puts the rows back in their original order.
| Catholic | Blasphemy is words of "hatred, reproach, or defiance" against God, "in itself a grave sin"; mortal sin needs grave matter, full knowledge and deliberate consent | Catechism 2148-2149 |
| Reformed evangelical, John Piper | "It is never right to be angry with God," and "If you are angry with God, it is never right not to tell him so" | Desiring God, 2000 |
| Reformed evangelical, Desiring God | Being angry at God is one thing; expressing anger to God is another | Desiring God, 2002 |
| Evangelical, GotQuestions | "yes, it is wrong to be angry at God," and anger and grief may be brought to God in prayer | GotQuestions |
| Evangelical, Allen Mayberry | Not acceptable when it means holding God morally accountable; people in pain do feel misdirected anger | Rocky Creek Church, 2023 |
| Reformed, Westminster Larger Catechism | Sets out duties in prayer and worship | Ligonier |
Jewish readings of Abraham's argument over Sodom and of Moses pleading with God keep protest inside the relationship with God, as something a person can do and still belong.
Will God forgive you for being angry at him? The voices that call the anger itself wrong all point the same way afterward: tell God, confess it, and keep praying. None of them asks you to go quiet. If you are asking whether it is okay to be frustrated with God, or whether you have a right to be mad at him, Piper's answer is no if "mad" means judging that God did wrong, and in the same breath he says to tell God the truth about it rather than hide it. GotQuestions says the anger is wrong and that the grief behind it can be brought to God in prayer.
Is railing against God a sin in itself? Spanish-speaking churches call it renegar, a word that runs from venting to rejecting God, depending on the region and what is meant, and the Catechism's word grave belongs to deliberate blasphemy.
A thought of our own: if the worry will not settle, say it aloud to a priest or pastor, the actual words you said, and let a person who knows your tradition answer you.
What happens if you are angry with God?
This anger is not limited to people who are sure they believe. Julie Exline, who studies religious and spiritual struggle, told the Yale Center for Faith and Culture that such struggle happens to people "regardless of whether they are religious or spiritual themselves." If you are not certain God is there and you are angry at him anyway, that is a known and ordinary place to be, and it can still be said aloud.
A nine-year study of middle-aged adults in the United States, coauthored by Kenneth Pargament and published in 2024, reported associations between struggle with God and later whole-person functioning. That describes a pattern across a group of people, and it says nothing fixed about any one person. Pargament's wider work describes such struggle as able to sit beside distress, and also beside the search for meaning and growth.
Many people type "angry at God for a death." Cruse says grief keeps no fixed order, and that people may return to feelings they had before. It names bargaining too, the attempt to make a deal, "if we’re religious," with God. David Kessler, who wrote on the stages of grief, says the stages "are not a sequence" and that there is "no right way to grieve," and the APA Dictionary of Psychology makes the same point. Anger can come, go and come back.
Some people search for how to forgive God for taking a loved one. The phrase is disputed. Catholic and Jewish writers object that God does not need forgiveness, while some pastoral and grief writers use it as shorthand for setting down an accusation or naming a protest. It is your word to use or to leave. If the anger is about a death, Bible verses for a sudden death stays with the loss itself.
Grief keeps no fixed order.
At what point is anger a sin?
When people ask what kind of anger is not sinful, or what Jesus said about anger, they are usually sent a handful of texts. Each was said by somebody to somebody, and that setting matters.
Ephesians 4:26-27 is Paul writing to a church: "Be angry, and don’t sin. Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath, and don’t give place to the devil." The King James has "Be ye angry, and sin not." Commentators read it as being about anger between people in a church, how they treat one another, rather than as a ruling on anger at God.
Psalm 4:4 is often sent alongside it: "Stand in awe, and don’t sin. Search your own heart on your bed, and be still." The Hebrew word there, ragaz, can mean to tremble or to be angry, which GotQuestions discusses, and the psalm is said to people who were dishonoring the speaker.
In Matthew 5:21-26, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus sets anger and insult beside murder and urges reconciliation with a brother before bringing a gift to the altar. The King James has "whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause" in verse 22. James 1:19-20, a letter to believers, asks everyone to be "slow to anger; for the anger of man doesn’t produce the righteousness of God." Each of these is about anger between people.
The nearest text to anger at God is Proverbs 19:3: "The foolishness of man subverts his way; his heart rages against Yahweh." The commentaries collected at Bible Hub read it as a wisdom saying about somebody whose own folly wrecked his path and who then blames God. That is a particular situation, and it is a long way from a parent at a graveside.
Which psalm can I read when I am angry?
The passage Bible Nudge offers for waiting is a good one to say to God when the anger comes from a long wait or a refusal. These are the opening lines of Psalm 13, in the World English Bible:
How long, Yahweh? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart every day? How long shall my enemy triumph over me?
Psalm 13 is a short prayer of complaint. It opens with repeated questions about delay and about God seeming hidden, and turns toward trust only later. The next three verses ask God to answer:
3 Behold, and answer me, Yahweh, my God. Give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death; 4 Lest my enemy say, “I have prevailed against him”; Lest my adversaries rejoice when I fall. 5 But I trust in your loving kindness. My heart rejoices in your salvation.
The last verse, verse 6, says, "I will sing to Yahweh, because he has been good to me." The Hebrew words carry the heat. Forget is shakach; hide your face joins satar, to hide, with panim, face or presence; sorrow is yagôn; and triumph is rum, to be lifted up.
Readers part on how the ending works. Reformed readers take verses 5 and 6 as the speaker's decision of faith rather than a report that things changed. Jewish readers place the psalm in a tradition of complaint that stays addressed to God. Catholic liturgy keeps prayers like this as prayer, whether or not the situation resolves.
What the psalm gives you is four "how long"s said straight to God, heat and all, by somebody still talking to him. Say verse 1 aloud with your own words for what happened set into it, and hold one question: "What have you been waiting for longer than you expected?" You can read Psalm 13:1-2 with the verses around it, and Bible verses for feeling far from God reads the same psalm for distance.
How to stop being angry with God
Two well-known published answers come first. Piper's answer is to confess the anger and reaffirm God's goodness. GotQuestions points to confession, prayer and trust.
Pastors and chaplains also describe what people do with the anger, and you can choose among these as suggestions of our own. You could write a lament in the shape the psalms use: a complaint, a request, a line recalling who God has been, and whatever trust you can manage, which may be none tonight. You could pray one of the psalms above aloud, or write God a letter and say everything in it.
You could tell a chaplain, pastor or priest exactly what you said, word for word. Some people go to a grief group, some walk, and some keep silence in prayer for a time.
People describe the anger lasting weeks, months or years, changing as it goes, or coming back on anniversaries and hospital dates. If it returns on a date, Bible verses for the anniversary of a death is there for that day.
Some people walk it off, a little at a time.
What to say when someone is angry with God
If you are the friend, parent or pastor who has just been asked this, some lines meant kindly land hard, and you may have said one. Each has a warmer one beside it below, in our own wording, for the next time.
In place of "Everything happens for a reason" or "God needed another angel," try "I don't know why this happened. I'm so sorry, and I'm staying." In place of "You shouldn't question God," try "You can say all of that to God. The psalms do." In place of "God has a plan" at a funeral, say the name of the person who died.
In place of Ephesians 4:26 or Job 1:22 quoted at somebody grieving, read them Psalm 13:1 and sit with them. Psalm 13:5-6 is where that psalm arrives, in its own time. And "forgive God" belongs to the person grieving, to use if they choose.
Questions people ask
How common is anger toward God?
It is common enough to be studied. A 2011 paper led by Julie Exline looked at several groups in the United States, including students, bereaved people and cancer survivors, and described anger toward God as "measurable, widespread, and related to adjustment across various contexts and populations."
Where did the stages of grief come from?
The five stages, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, began with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's 1969 work with people facing terminal illness, and were later applied to bereavement. Cruse and David Kessler both say they do not come in a fixed order.
Is God mad at me for being angry at him?
That is a different question from whether your anger is a sin, a question about God's anger toward a person, and GotQuestions answers it separately in Is God mad at me?. On anger toward God, it points you back to prayer, with the anger and the grief brought along.
Where to go next
If tonight is harder than this, reach a person. In the United States, call 988 or text 988, or go to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In Canada, call or text 9-8-8. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Samaritans is on 116 123. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Everywhere else, Find A Helpline. For a death, Cruse Bereavement Support is there in the United Kingdom.
Tonight, say Psalm 13:1 to God with your own words for what happened in it, or write four lines of your own lament.
Bible Nudge offers one passage with the verses around it. Find a passage.
Words that come up here
Tap a term to see what it means.
Lament. A prayer of complaint or grief addressed to God, common in the Psalms.