“Our God is a consuming fire.”

(Hebrews 12:29)

A distinguished group of radio and television news commentators in an end-of-the-year round-up program were asked: “What is the gravest crisis facing the American people in the year ahead?” One suggested the heightened cold war tensions, another the Latin American situation, still another felt Berlin would provoke the gravest crisis. When it came time for Eric Severed to comment he, in striking contrast to the others, stated he thought the most dangerous threat to American society is the rise of leisure time and the fact that those who have the most leisure are the least equipped to make use of it.

Suppose we constituted ourselves this morning into a round-up, not of commentators on the news, but of the people who are making the news, who are actually experiencing the threats and hurts and disabilities and scary possibilities of life as we Americans live it from day to day. Then let us pose for ourselves, not the question: “What is the gravest crises the American people face?” but rather the question: “What is the most comforting and supporting conviction we hold in the arsenal of our religious faith to rely upon when we encounter our gravest crises of whatever nature?”

What would you answer? When your turn came would you say: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Or, would you quote the assurance of the departing Moses to his frightened people: “The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms?” Or would you turn to the word of Isaiah: “I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.”

I dare say that if one of you came out with our text of the morning and said: “This is the most comforting assurance of scripture to me in such times as these — ‘Our God is a consuming fire,’” you would create as much of a surprise in our gathering as Mr. Severed created in the end of the year news round-up, and yet you would be as squarely on the beam as was he.

Three fundamental theological propositions of the Christian faith: God is a Jealous God, Our God is a Judging God; Our God is a Justifying God.

First of all, in the Text, “Our God is a consuming fire,” there is the explicit affirmation that the Lord of all creation is a jealous God. The writer of the Epistle of Hebrews is quoting directly from Deuteronomy 4:24 where the full quotation reads: “The Lord Thy God is a consuming fire, even a Jealous God.” And the whole context of the scripture drives home the message that the God of Israel is a jealous God whose consuming passion for his people will drive him to root out and burn up whatever has a rival claim on their hearts.

This word is proclaimed to people who have given their hearts to false Gods, who have worshipped imperfect images, who have indulged in what the holy man calls the wholesome of the heathen.

Though it is a stern word and an awesome one, it is nevertheless a stabilizing and encouraging word, for it brings home to us the assurance that the Lord of all creation will never brook any rivals, not even in these advanced years. Whatever false gods may be worshipped, whatever new and enticing deities may be set up, whatever rituals of ceremony and sacrifice may be enacted to distract the attention and win the allegiance of God’s people, they will not last, they will be destroyed. The idols of pleasure and power, the gods of scientific accomplishments and the omnipotent state in which men now trust so implicitly, the idols of business success and social status are all marked for destruction.

For our God is a consuming fire. He is a jealous God. Thou salt have no other gods before Him. Every Dagon must fall, as surely as a lump of loafsugar melts in a cup of hot coffee, as inevitably as a snowman vanishes away when the sun comes out and the temperature rises. Our God is a consuming fire, a jealous God who will tolerate no rivals. And in our day of powerful spiritual rivalries which go from strength to strength, what a comfort this is.

But there is more comfort yet. There is also in our text “Our God is a consuming fire” the reassuring assertion that our God is a judging God who is evaluating what we have done and are doing to mark the permanent for preservation and the impermanent for demolition.

This is expanded in the context of Hebrews 12. The author says our God is shaking down what can be shaken in order that those things which cannot be shaken may remain. And this judging God is sounding forth His judgments clearly. He is not blindly, indiscriminately consuming. He pronounces His righteous judgments so that man may hear and understand the reasonable and moral standards of His judgments and so be prepared.

What a comfort, what a steadying reassurance this is!

When the economic depression of the 1920’s and 30’s came with the sudden collapse of fortunes and lives and characters, and the whole American scene was in temporary chaos, Walter Marshall Horton called his fellow Americans to remember the awesome but comforting prophetic doctrine of the plumb line saying: “There is a method in this madness, there is a reason for this destruction. Supposing it had been possible to perpetuate an economic order based on greed and injustice and inhumanity forever? Would it not have proved that the God of the prophets is a pure illusion? Things may be going to pieces, but they are not going to pieces chaotically or meaninglessly. There is a method in this madness, there is a reason for this destruction.”

In the contemporary play The Delinquent, the Hipster, and the Square, which some of our young people produced recently with great insight and feeling, there is expressed the often heard excuse for the rebellion, torpor, and cowardice of some in our younger generation — “that they are beat because they have their existence under the threatening shadow of the orange colored mushroom cloud of impending atomic destruction. The world shaking crises and the violent revolutions of our time have shaken the foundations and therefore it is impossible for them to stand, much less move resolutely forward.”

This line of reasoning is utterly alien to the Christian faith. Our God is a consuming fire. We know he is always about his business of shaking down and burning up what is uncongenial with and in opposition to His Eternal heavenly kingdom. These things must be removed in order that what cannot be moved or consumed may remain.

In response to the timorous scriptural query “What can the righteous do, if the foundations be destroyed?” Robert E. Speer once flatly replied: “Why, go on being righteous of course.” Yes, and how comforting to know that on the level of man’s building in his social order, as well as in his private or corporate business, our God is the consuming fire whose righteous judgments dictate the demolition.

But most comforting of all in the text — “Our God is a consuming fire,” is the assurance that it is His love for us which is the burning fire and it is our sinful, base, ignoble self which most needs to be consumed in order that the real authentic self may emerge.

The self cannot reach maturity or glory without correction. We are not competent to correct ourselves, though we think and act as if we were. And whoever corrects us, however much we need it — we thank with hot hostility.

The events of our lives are meant as God’s merciful correction. There the consuming fire of our God is at work to cleanse and purify us. Do not the scriptures say — “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth . . . Every branch that beareth not fruit, He purgeth, that it may bring forth more fruit.”

This year a quiet, thoughtful man in his study at the chapel of Princeton University published a book telling of his experiences of 20 years ago. It is the story of God’s grace that took Ernest Gordon through the searing fires of a Japanese concentration camp in the Valley of the River Kwai, consuming the dross that the real self might emerge and live.

Gordon, a British playboy, when the war broke out, was more interested in sailing boats than in service to humanity or success for self. He qualified for an officer’s commission and was sent to fight in Burma. There he became a prisoner of his Japanese enemies and with other British soldiers was sent to work on the infamous railroad in the Valley of the River Kwai.

Vividly he writes of the cruelty of his Japanese captors, the hard labor, the starvation diet, the inevitable sickness, neglect and death that gripped the camp. To give some idea of the fiendish, inhuman drive of the Japanese to complete this railroad which was later called the Railroad of Death, Gordon quotes these statistics compiled after the war: “Originally estimated as a five or six year project, it was completed in 12 months. The Railroad was 250 miles long and every mile of it cost on an average of 64 prisoners of war and 240 Southeast Asians.

The initial reaction of the prisoners to this hard, cruel, inhuman treatment was to react with the animal ferocity of the Jungle’s first law — self-preservation. Each prisoner was for himself, morose, stealthily stealing from his neighbors, scrounging for any extra morsel of food, fawning for favors from their heartless captors, fighting with fellow prisoners over the possessions of their dead comrades. They were in a hell of inhuman treatment. They made their fate worse by stooping to the level of their captors standards.

Then came the miracle in the camp on the River Kwai. Ernest Gordon lay paralyzed and dying from malnutrition and neglect. Then a comrade of simple, strong, Christian faith began to perform with infinite kindness some necessary services just to make him comfortable, for his life was past saving. Gordon’s book tells the story of how something happened first in his heart and then in his body. He lived. He got well. The whole camp was transformed. One after another of the British soldiers gave up his beastly ways. Bible study was started. Men gathered together to pray. Interest in learning, art, music flourished. The leaven spread. “We were spiritually armed,” writes Gordon. “We had a will to live rather than a will to death. We were coming through the valley of the Kwai. But our weapons could be of little value to us unless we wielded them daily in the service of others.”

The man Ernest Gordon had to pass through the searing fires of a Japanese concentration camp and experience the love and kindness of a tender Australian giant of a man in order that Ernest Gordon, the playboy, might be consumed and Ernest Gordon, the ministering servant of God, might emerge.

“Nothing is inexorable but love,” writes George Macdonald. “Therefore, all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. Our God is a consuming fire. 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 wrath will consume what we call our self, until the self God made shall appear . . . . For that which cannot be shaken will remain. The man whose deeds are evil fears the burning. But the burning will not come the less that he fears or denies it. Escape is hopeless. For love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire.”