“Our God Is A Consuming Fire”
“OUR GOD IS A CONSUMING FIRE”
HEBREWS 12:25-29
May we keep a proper reverence and awe for God that his holiness rightly deserves.
The previous passage emphasized the graciousness that characterizes the Christian approach. It centers on the atoning work of Christ who shed his blood that our sins might be put away completely. Salvation is therefore a great and free reality. But this does not mean that we can regard the issues involved as unimportant. To reject God’s grace is to invite certain condemnation.
The comparison has been made of Mount Zion and Mount Sinai (12:18-24). But this is not to be understood as though one God was responsible for the former arrangement and another for the latter. There is one God behind the Old Testament and the New Testament We should not mistake his grace for weakness. Indeed, if it was a fearful thing to refuse the God who was revealed in the thunders of Sinai, it is, when we think seriously about it, a more solemn thing by far to refuse the God who speaks so graciously in Christ. Or, as the author puts it, as they did not escape who rejected the warning on earth, so much less will those escape who refuse the One who warns from heaven (12:25). God did indeed shake the earth at Sinai, but another shaking is envisaged, a final one, from the same God (12:26).
This turns our attention to the importance of a sense of values. There are some things that can be shaken and destroyed and there are others which are permanent and cannot be shaken. They will remain throughout the time of this world’s existence and beyond. This is one of the things in this letter that needs emphasizing in today’s world. People tend to regard all human achievements as no more than relative and to go on from there to think not only that human grasp of the truth is relative, but that truth itself is relative. They deny absolutes.
Perhaps Christians have sometimes been too prone to cling to things that are temporary and to confuse what is merely cultural with what is essential to the faith. But when full allowance has been made for that, it is still the case that there is “a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (12:28). It is that with which we have to do. To reject what it stands for is disastrous, for God is implacably opposed to every evil thing. He is a consuming fire (12:29), a New Testament truth with great practical consequences.