The Consuming Fire

Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: for our God is a consuming fire. HEBREWS 12:28–29

The second sermon of MacDonald’s first series takes its title from the last verse of Hebrews 12, and its first sentence is one of the most famous he ever wrote: “Nothing is inexorable but love.” It sounds at first like a paradox. We think of love as the soft thing, the yielding thing, the thing that gives way; and we think of fire as the hard thing, the destroying thing, the thing to be afraid of. MacDonald’s whole sermon is an argument that the two are one. God is love, and God is a consuming fire, and these are not two truths about Him but one.

A love that will not yield

What MacDonald meant was this. Love that will give way to anything is not perfect love. A father who lets his child do whatever the child likes, because he cannot bear to see him unhappy, does not love him enough. Real love wants the real good of the one it loves, and it will not rest until that good is reached. In the sermon’s words, “love loves unto purity.” It has always in view the full beauty of the one it loves, and where that beauty is spoiled, it spends itself to restore it. That is why love can never make peace with evil in the beloved. It will burn against the evil, not because it hates the person, but because it loves him.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind. 1 CORINTHIANS 13:4

So God’s holiness, which the Israelites saw as fire on the mountain, is not something in God opposed to His love. It is His love in its purity, refusing to let sin stand. MacDonald put it in one sentence that captures his whole view: the fire of God burns against evil, and “It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus.” The fire is not a threat held over us. It is a purifying presence that will not leave us until everything in us that cannot bear it has been burned away.

The fire on the mountain

MacDonald did not dismiss the terror of the Old Testament as a mistake. When God appeared on Sinai in fire and smoke, he said, He was revealing something true about Himself. A people who had just been worshipping a golden calf did well to be afraid. Fear of a holy God, he argued, is far better than no fear at all, and better than the worship of a god made with hands. But the fire on the mountain was a partial revelation, suited to a people who could not yet receive more. The fuller revelation came in Jesus, in whom the same fire burns, but whose face shows us what the fire is for.

And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel. EXODUS 24:17

He would not let anyone pretend that God puts on a show of terror to frighten people into obedience. “He will not put on a mask. He puts on a face.” If God appeared in fire, then there is something in God that fire truly shows. What it shows is a holiness so pure that nothing impure can stand before it.

To love our brother

The last verses of Hebrews 12 run straight on into the first verse of Hebrews 13: Let brotherly love continue. MacDonald saw in this a clue to the meaning of the whole passage. How do we serve the consuming fire acceptably? By loving one another. The worship God wants is not a nervous attempt to avoid His wrath, but a life that shares His love. “To love our brother is to worship the Consuming Fire.”

Let brotherly love continue. HEBREWS 13:1

This is the practical heart of the sermon. A person who fears God rightly, MacDonald said, flees not from God but from himself, and runs to God, afraid of nothing so much as doing wrong to Him or to his neighbour.

Weighing it

There is much here that evangelical readers can receive with gratitude. MacDonald was right that the holiness of God is not opposed to His love, and right that God’s love is not soft. The God of the Bible does pursue His children with a love that will not let them go, and He does discipline them for their good, that they may share His holiness. Few writers have made the reader feel so strongly that sin is not a small thing to a holy God.

Two cautions must be added, and the second is serious. The first is that MacDonald so identified the fire of God with purifying love that he left little room for the wrath of God as Scripture describes it — a settled, holy opposition to sin that is just in itself, and not only a means of making sinners better. The New Testament speaks of a day of wrath and of the righteous judgement of God, of vengeance on those who do not obey the gospel, and of everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord. These are not the words of a fire that only refines.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness. ROMANS 1:18

Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power. 2 THESSALONIANS 1:9

The second follows from the first. Because MacDonald believed that all of God’s dealings with sin are remedial, he believed that the fire would burn every soul until it was pure — that is, that every soul would at last be saved. And because he believed that God is bound to destroy sin rather than to punish it, he rejected the teaching that Christ bore the punishment of sin in our place; in this very sermon he set the self-giving of the Son against the idea of a sacrifice offered to satisfy God’s justice. Both convictions are weighed more fully in chapters eleven and sixteen. Here it is enough to say that Scripture holds together what MacDonald pulled apart: the God who is a consuming fire is the God who set forth His Son to be a propitiation, so that He might be just and the justifier of him that believes in Jesus.

Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God. ROMANS 3:25

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Have you thought of God’s love as soft? Read Hebrews 12:5–11 and consider the love that disciplines.

2. Is there a sin in your life that you have hoped God would leave alone? Ask Him to burn it away.

3. MacDonald said that to love our brother is to worship the consuming fire. Whom do you find hardest to love? Do one act of love for that person this week.

4. Read Exodus 19:16–20 and Hebrews 12:18–29 together. Notice both the terror and the grace.

5. Give thanks that the fire of God’s holiness fell on Christ at the cross, so that those who trust in Him may draw near.

A PRAYER

Holy God, You are a consuming fire, and You are love.

Burn away everything in me that cannot stand in Your presence — my pride, my lies, my selfishness, my secret sins.

Thank You that Your Son bore the fire of Your judgement for me, so that I may come near to You without fear.

Let me serve You with reverence and godly fear, and let me show that fear by loving my brother, through Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.