Image #1: Cold winter night; possibly snow on the ground and frost on the windows. Everyone huddles near the fireplace within which the logs are being consumed by the flames while creating a warmth and comfort. Image #2: Hot summer day; a few kids playing with fireworks out near the lake-house. One rogue bottle rocket explodes in a patch of dry grass, and an inferno soon consumes the garage and damages part of the lakehouse.
Image #3: "for our God is a consuming fire." (Hebrews 12:29)
Fire is equally useful and destructive; comforting and painful. Either way it consumes what it comes in contact with.
There are moments when I struggle to figure out how God connects and relates to me, and then there are moments when certain images of God consume me with a great strength.
Today I am processing and wrapping myself up in the image of God as a consuming fire. There are times when he has been my source of warmth and comfort when I need it most amidst a cold and discouraging time.
I cannot recall too many times in which GOd has been a source of destruction and pain in my life. But I cannot allow that to make me cease to understand his great power to be a consuming fire.
Hebrews only quotes Deuteronomy when it mentions God as a consuming fire. The context in Deuteronomy is a reference to how JEALOUS God is.
God is a consuming fire, and there are moments he has likely been jealous and thus angry when I have pursued lovers far less wild than he is.
There is an anger and almost violent sense of God as a jealous lover. My whoredom for other lovers of my soul must enrage him, and I see this consuming fire image begin to take shape and form in my soul's gallery of images.
Because of his great mercy, though, I place that image just next to a consuming fire, which produces a great warmth and comfort when I have needed it most.
My God is a consuming fire!