When the Emperor Constantine ruled in Rome, he revived a Roman punishment reserved for persons convicted of murdering members of their extended families. The sentence was carried out in a large leather bag, used for shipping bottles of wine, large enough to hold a human being.

The convict would be bound hand and foot, then placed inside the leather bag. After a viper was placed onto the bag to join him, and the bag laced shut, the human found himself helpless, in the company of an angry venomous serpent.

The viper’s weapon is a pair of fangs so long, that they remain folded inside its mouth until they are needed. Then they rotate—yes rotate—into biting position. I suspect that a pregnant female would have been the viper of choice, since she does not lay her eggs, but can present her young as if by birth, ready to bite. The venom causes pain, swelling, and cell damage. It takes a while for the victim to die, but after a period of multiple viper bites, he will do so, from circulatory damage.

This story presents a picture of what emotional torture is like, that which is brought on by long held feelings of anger and hate. In addition to the legal system, acts based on angry thought may be punished by negative public opinion, and by the angry person’s own conscience.

I remember an instance, some years ago, in which a man I knew was killed inside the bedroom of his house, apparently by his wife.

Public opinion held that the couple got into some sort of argument, and in the heat of the moment the angry wife picked up a revolver and killed her husband. The law could not intervene, because the prosecutor was were never able to locate enough evidence to bring the case to trial, even for manslaughter.

The wife was never charged. She moved away immediately, so the corrective of public opinion did not apply, either.

But when she returned to the area for a brief visit several years later, those who saw her were amazed, for her extensive weight loss, the slump in her posture, and her prematurely wrinkled skin made her look 25 years older than her true age. Many assumed she was suffering from a guilty conscience, brought on by anger.

Whether her premature aging was caused by unconfessed anger, or not, the principle remains that our bodies do indeed punish us for harboring this emotion. Alternative medicine explains that continuous anger takes energy away from the heart meridian, another term for the energy system that serves the heart. This condition often brings about the feeling of being choked.

I remember someone with a heart condition, who also complained of a having that choking feeling most of the time. She took many medications, to ease the choking feeling, but they never brought about the peace she hoped for. This occurred long before I knew that emotions can cause physical pain.

Dr. John Diamond, a psychiatrist who died last month, taught that one’s own words could be used to defuse those stored-up harmful emotions, then to replace them with love.

In the instance of choking, he would ask a person to consider his definition of anger: “to be uneasy or disturbed in mind, after having been injured in some way AND with the desire for revenge.”

Having completed this process, Diamond would ask his clients to renounce their anger, then place index and middle finger over their hearts, while saying these affirmations OUT LOUD so that the body, mind, and spirit could hear them:

I have love…

and forgiveness…

in my heart.

He would then ask his clients to make this affirmation, morning and evening, until they came to believe the words they were saying.

That this process takes a while, because I said these affirmations from Diamond’s book Life Energy, virtually every day for more than a year. I learned that the only way I could get away from some heart damaging emotions is to forgive the person I hate, and turn that hate into love.

In process I got rid of some really bad company.

One thing more: some of you may recall Paul’s question “who shall deliver me from the body of this death,” in Romans 7:24, and may remember illustrations of a person being forced to carry a dead body around on his back. If I could have found any evidence that this practice actually occurred, I would have used it in this story, for it would have provided a wonderful analogy for the punishment we bring by hanging on to feelings like anger and hate. Failing that, I used the snake-in-the- wine sack story, which now I think I actually like better.

The reality of punishment from lack of forgiveness is promised in Matthew 18, where our Lord warned that heavenly Father would deliver unforgiving persons to tormentors if we did not forgive others from our hearts.

My faith in Scripture remains unshaken, however, for Paul says nothing at all about a body being strapped to his back.