On Fire

The scriptures referred to are Acts 2:1-21.

The invention of fire was a huge advance for humanity. The Greeks thought it was a gift, stolen by Prometheus from the gods. One theory of how we got our big brain involves the invention of cooking food. Cooking makes food easier to chew and easier for our stomachs to break down. So our jaws shrank and our brains grew. And because we spent less time looking for food and digesting it, our big brains could occupy themselves with other problems. All thanks to fire.

Regardless of whether that theory is correct, fire is powerful, which makes it tremendously useful in some ways, like cooking and giving light and keeping us warm. But in other ways fire is dangerous. If you are careless with it or around it, you could get injured or killed and your home as well as the whole community could be destroyed.

So it is interesting that when God appears to Abraham, he appears as “a smoking firepot and a flaming torch.” (Genesis 15:17) When God appears to Moses he does so in fire. He first appears in a bush that appears to be on fire but which is not consumed. (Exodus 3:2-3) Later when God gives the Ten Commandments to Moses, he appears as fire on the mountain. (Exodus 19:18) And he leads the Israelites to the promised land in a pillar of fire by night and of smoke by day. (Exodus 13:21-22)

And the more dangerous aspects of fire are also there. When a bunch of Levites, which were kind of like deacons, try to usurp the high priest, they are destroyed by fire. (Numbers 16:35) It always bothered me that Belloq, the evil archaeologist in Raiders of the Lost Ark, didn't remember that part of the Bible before dressing up as a priest and opening the ark. Of course, then the movie wouldn't have had that awesome ending.

God, speaking from the pillar of fire, does inspire awe as well as fear in the Israelites. So why does he often, though not always, appear as fire?

For one thing fire, though pivotal to human development and society, is not a natural element like water or earth or rock or wood or even air. Fire is a chemical reaction, an event. Mankind's first encounter with fire was probably a wildfire or possibly a tree struck by lightning. Mastering it, as Wikipedia points out, allowed humans to have a source of light and warmth, protection from predators (remember Mowgli confronting Shere Khan), as well as a way of creating better hunting tools and as we said, cooking. So here is this almost living thing that is not an inanimate element of nature you can simply locate and acquire, and yet it becomes essential to human life. We cannot imagine civilization without it.

Humans are meaning-seeking animals. Other animals can figure out the “how” of things. Humans wish to figure out the “why?” Other animals can discern and even invent new uses for objects or phenomena. Only humans, as far as we know, wonder why certain things are so inherently beneficial to us. As we said, fire was a game-changer and was considered a gift of the gods. Perhaps God, who speaks to us in metaphors drawn from everyday life, decided that, for certain purposes, fire was the best physical metaphor.

As the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery points out, “Just as all physical life depends on the fire that is the sun...so does all spiritual life depend on God. Just as fire both purifies and destroys, so does God purify the righteous and destroy the wicked.... Just as fire lights up the blackness of night, so does God overcome the dark powers of evil. Just as fire is mysterious and immaterial, so too God is enigmatic and incorporeal. Just as fire is always...changing its shape and cannot be held for examination, so is God the indefinable who is beyond our grasp.”

Like fire, having God in our life is beneficial as well as powerful and we have to have a healthy respect for him. But I think there are a couple of other reasons why fire makes a good metaphor for God and one is important to our passage about the first Pentecost after Jesus' ascension.

We are told that “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.” One aspect of fire that we have not discussed is the fact that it spreads quite easily. And that's what the Spirit is doing here: spreading the gospel to a group of Jewish pilgrims from countries all over the known world who grew speaking languages other than Hebrew and Aramaic. The tongues of fire indicate that God intends the good news of who Jesus is and what he has done for us to spread like wildfire.

And indeed God's Word is compared to fire. Jeremiah wrote, “Sometimes I think, 'I will make no mention of his message. I will not speak as his messenger any more.' But then his message becomes like a fire locked up inside of me, burning in my heart and soul. I grow weary of trying to hold it in; I cannot contain it.” (Jeremiah 20:9 NET) When the risen Jesus walked on the road to Emmaus with the 2 disciples, he explained that the Christ must die and be raised. When they realize it is Jesus himself accompanying them and he disappears from their sight, they say, “Didn't our hearts burn within us while he was speaking with us on the road, while he was explaining the scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32) God's Word generates an intense desire to share and spread it. That is probably what the tongues of flame represent.

But there is another thing that scripture compares to fire: love. In the Song of Solomon, it says, “For love is as strong as death, passion is as unrelenting as Sheol. Its flames burst forth, it is a blazing flame. Surging waters cannot quench love...” (Song of Solomon 8:6-7) If that is true of human love, how much more does that describe God's love for us? If, as 1 John 4:8 says, God is love, he is not mild affection or faint fondness but a burning love. As it says in Deuteronomy, “For the Lord your God is a consuming fire; he is a jealous God.” (Deuteronomy 4:24) The context here is God telling his people, who have entered a covenant relationship with him, not to go after or worship other gods. Jealousy is bad if it is unwarranted, if your lover or spouse is unreasonably jealous. But if you love someone, you are going to feel jealous if some other person steals away their love from you.

And God's situation is unique. He not only created us in his image, to be loved by him and to love and enjoy him forever, there are no other gods. So this would be like finding out your spouse was seriously in love with and wanted to leave you for James Bond or Wonder Woman. You not only might feel jealous, you would realize that they are delusional and you would be worried that they are headed for disaster, like the folks who stalk celebrities because they believe they are in a relationship with them. That's how God must feel when we put ephemeral, not to mention wholly imaginary, objects of love ahead of him.

Yet he continues to love us. Paul says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8) Most people expect a religious message to go along these lines: God will love you if you do something for him. They don't anticipate the good news that God loves us in spite of what we do, in other words, unconditionally. Still less would they think it likely that God would take the initiative in repairing our relationship. The idea that God would become a human being was unthinkable to the Jews. And no one would ever think that God would willingly let himself be killed by sinful people to bridge the gap between the divine and the human. Or that he would then offer his eternal life to the very species that rejected him. Why would he ever do that? Because he has a burning love for us.

In this life we are faced with the question of whether the universe we live in is cold and indifferent to us or whether the love that we see in ourselves and the other animals is neither unique or anomalous but reflects something that is intentional and cosmic. And that love is not merely sex or a perfunctory part of insuring our genes gets passed on. Look online and you can see a monkey carrying the body of her dead infant for days, mourning that specific offspring. You can see elephants trying to revive a dying member of the herd or panicking as they try to rescue a baby that has fallen into water. And in this day when we can live better than the kings of old in comfort and with a variety of foods from all over the globe and with countless hours of entertainment, why did we find the last year so hard? Because we missed our friends and our family and all those we loved. Seeing them in a little electronic window was not the same.

We are created in the image of the God who is love, a love that is not discouraged by our unfaithfulness, but which seeks to win us back. A love that is stronger than death, that is unrelenting, a blazing fire which flood waters cannot quench. We long for this love that longs for us. Because such love is as essential as fire. We need its light; we need its warmth; we need its protection. The world needs it. And we know the source. Jesus said he came to set the world on fire. His words of love are burning within us. Stop bottling them up. Give them voice. Let them spread through this cold world like wildfire.