The Consuming Fire

The passage: Our God is a consuming fire.

Nothing is inexorable but love. Love that yields to prayer is imperfect and poor, and what yields is its alloy, not love. If at the voice of entreaty love conquers displeasure, that is love asserting itself, not giving up its claims. Love does not grant a boon unwillingly, still less answer a prayer to the hurt of the one who prays. Love is one, and changeless.

For love loves unto purity. It always has in view the absolute loveliness of what it beholds. Where that is incomplete, love spends itself to make the beloved more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection so that itself may be perfected in the object. As love first created humanity, so human love, in proportion to its divinity, goes on creating the beautiful for its outpouring. Nothing is eternal but what loves and can be loved, and love climbs ever toward the consummation when such shall be the universe.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

If this is hard to understand, it is as simple, absolute truth is hard to understand. It may take centuries of ages of strife and aspiration before a man sees a truth; once he does, it is so plain he wonders how he lived without it. He did not understand sooner only because he did not see; to see a truth, to know it, to understand it and to love it are all one. Many a motion toward it, misery for want of it, cry of conscience against neglecting it and dim longing for it as an unknown need comes first, before the night of dreams yields to the sun of truth. But once beheld, it is for ever. To see one divine fact is to stand face to face with essential eternal life.

For this vision of truth God has worked for ages of ages. For this simple condition, this apex of life, where a man wonders like a child that he cannot make others see as he sees, the whole labour of God’s science, history and poetry—from the time the earth gathered itself into a lonely drop of fire from the red rim of the driving sun-wheel to the time Alexander John Scott worshipped him from its face—has been evolving truth upon truth, in lovely vision and torturing law, never lying, never repenting. For this his patience will labour while any soul’s child-heart is not yet born; for this the divine destruction has gone forth, that his life might be our life, and in us too might dwell that same consuming fire which is essential love.

Let us look at the apostle’s words crowned with this lovely terror: “Our God is a consuming fire.”

The apostle says we receive a kingdom that cannot be moved, so let us have grace to serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire. The kingdom is immovable because it is of the eternal world, of being and truth. We are to serve the Consuming Fire with divine fear: not the fear that cringes and craves, but the bowing of all thoughts, delights and loves before him who is the life of them all and will have them pure. He will shake heaven and earth (verse 27) that only the unshakeable may remain; he is a consuming fire that only what cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. His nature is so terribly pure that, like fire, it destroys all that is not pure, and so demands such purity in our worship. The fire will not burn us if we do not worship thus; it will burn us until we do, and go on burning within us after all foreign to it has yielded, no longer with pain, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God. When evil, which alone is consumable, has passed from the dwellers in that kingdom, man’s nature will look God’s in the face and his fear will be pure; a holy fear springs from knowing the nature, not from a sense of the power. Since what cannot be consumed is one within itself, in such a soul fear of God will be one with the homeliest love, and make a man flee not from him but from himself, to him, in terror lest he wrong God or his neighbour. The first words after this, on how to serve God acceptably, are “Let brotherly love continue.” To love our brother is to worship the Consuming Fire.

The symbol of the consuming fire seems to have been suggested to the writer by the fire on the mountain of the old law, part of God’s revelation to the Israelites. It was not the first such revelation: the symbol of God’s presence, before which Moses had to put off his shoes, was a fire that did not consume the bush in which it burned. Both were revelations of terror. But the same symbol in a New Testament writer should mean more, not than it meant before, but than it was before used to express, for it could not express more than they could perceive. What could a nation of slaves, with the rust of chains eaten into their souls, who would have gone back to bondage rather than miss the food they liked best, see in that fire but terror and destruction? They had no state of mind to think of purification by fire, and if they had, the suffering would soon have overwhelmed the thought. Nor would they have listened to any teaching not supported by terror. Fear was what they were fit for; they had no worship for any being they did not have to fear.

Was this show on Sinai, then, a device to move obedience such as bad nurses use with children, a hint of vague and false horror? Was it not a true revelation of God?

If it was not a true revelation it was none: either the story is false or the display was a political trick of Moses. Those who can read Moses’ mind will hardly believe the latter, and those who understand the scope of the revelation see no reason for the former. That a thing would be politic as deception does not exclude another source; some believe so little in an ordered world that fitness itself is for them a reason for unbelief.

At all events, if God showed them these things, he showed them what was true, a revelation of himself. He puts on a face, not a mask. He will not speak out of flaming fire if there is nothing in him for it to reveal, nor terrify even brutish children with a lie.

It was a revelation, but a partial one; a true symbol, not a final vision.

No revelation can be other than partial. If a man must be told all the truth for a true revelation, then farewell to revelation, and to sonship; what other than a partial revelation can the highest spiritual condition receive of the infinite God? But it is not untrue for being partial. For a lower receiver a more partial revelation may be truer than a fuller one, which might reveal nothing to him. Only a revelation that precluded growth, chaining the man to its incompleteness, would be false. The true revelation rouses the desire to know more by the truth of its incompleteness.

Here was a nation at its lowest: could it receive anything but a partial revelation of fear? How could the Hebrews not be terrified at what opposed all they knew of themselves, who thought it good to honour a golden calf? Such as they were, they did well to be afraid. Acknowledging a terror above them, flaming on an unknown height, was better than worshipping the idol below. Fear is nobler than sensuality and better than no God or a god made with hands, and in it lay hidden the sense of the infinite. The worship of fear is true though very low, not acceptable to God in itself yet precious even to him, for he regards men not as they merely are but as they are growing, or can grow, toward the image after which he made them. A thousand stages, each almost valueless alone, are of inestimable worth as gradations of an infinite progress; a condition that in decline would show a devil may in growth show a saint. So the revelation, neither final nor complete, but calling forth the best they could give and making higher revelation possible, may have been a true one.

But this very revelation of fire is true in a higher sense to the rejoicing saint as to the trembling sinner; the saint sees farther into its meaning. The symbol needed not to be superseded, only unfolded. While men take part with their sins, feeling that without them they would not be themselves, how can they understand that the lightning word is a Saviour, piercing to the dividing between the man and the evil, slaying the sin and giving life to the sinner? Is it comfort to be told that God loves them so that he will burn them clean? To them the cleansing can only be torture; they do not want to be clean, and cannot bear to be tortured. Can they, or can we wish them to, do other than fear God, even with the fear of the wicked, until they learn to love him with the love of the holy? To them Sinai is crowned with signs of vengeance. And is not God ready to do to them as they fear, though with another feeling and a different end than they can suppose? He is against sin; so far as they and sin are one he is against their desires, aims, fears and hopes, and so is altogether and always for them. That thunder, lightning and tempest, that blackness torn with the trumpet, that visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was a faint image for slaves’ senses of what God feels against vileness and selfishness, meant to leave the stupid people, fearing somewhat to do as they would, a little room for grace to grow in them, until they saw that evil, not fire, is the fearful thing, and would gladly rush up into the trumpet-blast of Sinai to escape the flutes around the golden calf. Had they understood this, they would have needed no Sinai. It was a true, and of necessity a partial revelation: partial in order to be true.

Even Moses, the man of God, was not ready for the revelation in store, though from love to his people he prayed God to blot him out of his book of life. If that means he offered himself as a sacrifice instead of them, it shows why he could not be glorified with the vision of the Redeemer: he thought to appease God, not seeing that God is as tender as himself, the Reconciler and Redeemer, who cares for no atonement but the sacrifice of the heart. Nor could he see that it was the kindest thing God could do to tell him that he who had sinned should suffer. But I doubt that was what he meant. It seems rather a divine despair: he would not survive the children of his people, and cared nothing for a love that would save him alone and send those calf-worshipping thousands to the dust. Either way, how much could Moses have understood had he seen the face and not the back of the form that passed the cleft of the rock amid the thunderous vapours of Sinai? Suppose it had turned on him: the face of him who was more man than any man, through which the divine emotion would in ages to come show itself to men; the face of him who bore and was yet to bear their griefs and sorrows, who now bears ours; the face of the Son of God, who, instead of accepting a creature’s sacrifice to satisfy his justice or support his dignity, gave himself utterly to them and so to the Father by doing his lovely will, and suffered unto death not that men might not suffer but that their suffering might be like his and lead them to his perfection. Would Moses have lived? Would he not have died, not of splendour or sorrow (terror was not there) but of the sight of the incomprehensible? Or if mystery had not slain him, would he not have gone about dazed, with no business left in the world, God being to him altogether unknown? A full revelation would be not only no revelation but the destruction of all revelation.

“Then may it not hurt to say that God is Love, all love and nothing other? It is not enough to answer that it is true; too much revelation may hurt by dazzling and blinding.”

There is a great difference between a mystery of God that no man understands and one laid hold of, even by one man. The latter is already a revelation, and passing through his mind it will be presented, perhaps so feebly, that it will not hurt his fellows. Let God conceal as he will (though I believe he is ever destroying concealment, wanting to reveal everything), the light any man has received is not to be hid under a bushel. In sowing the seed God will not withhold his hand for thorns and stony places and waysides; even a bird may carry the matter, the good seed may overcome the thorns, and what withers on stony ground may leave a deeper soil for the next seed. Besides, only those with ears to hear can receive the doctrine. The selfish man could not believe it, and would misinterpret it if he could. The loving soul, oppressed by wrong teaching or partial truth claiming to be the whole, will hear, understand and rejoice.

When we say God is Love, do we teach men their fear of him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more. But beyond their fear is a divine fate they cannot withstand, for it works along with the human individuality that the divine individuality created in them. The wrath will consume what they call themselves, so that the selves God made appear, with tenfold consciousness of being, bringing all that made the blessedness of the life they tried to live without God. They will know that now first they are fully themselves. The avaricious, weary, selfish, suspicious old man will have passed away; the ever young self will remain. What they thought themselves will have vanished; what they felt themselves, though they misjudged it, will remain, glorified in repentant hope. What is immortal in God remains in man; the death in them is consumed.

It is the law of Nature, that is, of God, that all that is destructible shall be destroyed. When what is immortal buries itself in the destructible, hearing only from without and nothing from the eternal doors within, it cannot know its own immortality. The destructible must be burned out of it before it can partake of eternal life; when the fire of eternal life possesses a man, the destructible is gone and he is pure. Many a man’s work must be burned that he may be saved “so as by fire.” The lordships and Rabbi-hoods of the world go away in smoke, and the man who acquiesces is saved, for the fire has destroyed the destructible, the vantage point of the deathly, which would destroy body and soul in hell. If he still clings to what can be burned, the burning goes deeper till it reaches the roots of the falsehood that enslaves him, possibly by looking like the truth.

The man who loves God and is not yet pure courts the burning of God, and it is not always torture; the fire sometimes shows itself only as light, yet still purifies. The consuming fire is the original, active form of Purity, which is Love, the creative energy of God. Without purity there is no creation and no persistence: what is not pure is corruptible, and corruption cannot inherit incorruption.

The man whose deeds are evil fears the burning, but it will not come the less for his fearing or denying it. Escape is hopeless, for Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come out till he has paid the uttermost farthing.

If the man resists the burning of God, a terrible doom awaits him, and its day will come: he who hates the fire of God shall be cast into the outer darkness. What sick dismay will seize him! However little a man cares about God, he does not exist without him; God is here, upholding, warming, delighting and teaching him, and giving him himself though he knows it not. But when God withdraws as far as that can be without the man’s ceasing to be, and the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in ceaseless vertigo on the verge of the gulf of his being, without support, refuge, aim or end (for the soul has no weapons to destroy herself), with no inbreathing of joy and nothing to make life good, then he will listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door. If the moan of suffering humanity ever reaches that outcast of darkness, he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more, to change this terror of sick negation for that region of painful hope. Imagination cannot mislead us into too much horror of being without God, that one living death. Is not this to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thoughts Imagine howling?

But with this divine difference: the outer darkness is only the most dreadful form of the consuming fire, the fire without light, the darkness visible, the black flame. God has withdrawn but not lost his hold; his face is turned away but his hand is still on the man. His heart has ceased to beat into the man’s, but he keeps him alive by his fire, which goes on searching and burning in him as in the highest saint not yet pure as he is pure.

But at length, O God, wilt thou not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire—even into thine own consuming self? Death shall then die everlastingly,

Then indeed wilt thou be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one, will have been burnt clean and brought home—O God, we trust in thee, the Consuming Fire. If their moans, myriads of ages away, would turn heaven for us into hell, shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall mercy alone of all his glories not be infinite? Shall a brother love a brother more than the Father loves a son, more than the Brother Christ loves his brother? Would he not die yet again to save one brother more?

As for us, we will now come to thee, our Consuming Fire. Thou wilt not burn us more than we can bear, but thou wilt burn us. And though thou seem to slay us, yet will we trust in thee even for what thou hast not spoken, if by any means at length we may attain the blessedness of those who have not seen and yet have believed.