Our God is a Consuming Fire

"All things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things and by him all things hold together...[and he will] reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross." Colossians 1: 16-20


I have to confess that more often than not I feel like God is absent from my world. I come from a solidly Christian tradition and I live in Nashville, so I probably would never verbalize that sentiment to anyone face-to-face for fear of being found out (there is much freedom that comes from the anonymity of a blog post!) In my past I have wrestled with questions of faith repeatedly, and through cognitive deliberation and experiential confirmations I have landed squarely on the position of faith in a loving God who made provision for my sin through the perfect sacrifice that bore the wrath of Love that had to fall on sin. However, I constantly feel as though the biblical passage I most relate to is from Mark 9, "Lord, I believe... but help my unbelief!"

Most recently I have struggled to believe that marriage really IS the sacrament that we are told it is in scriptures. As life gets busier with two kids and two jobs and financial burdens and differing expectations in multiple arenas it has felt as though my wife and I are growing more and more distant rather than closer together. Bitterness has begun to creep in. I feel like I'm ALWAYS giving and never receiving. Why don't I get to pursue MY dreams any more? (of course I always decide to ignore the fact that my wife gives FAR more of herself for our family and our kids than I do!) I thought marriage was going to bring me closer to an understanding of the love and fulfillment and joy that we are supposed to be able to find in God?

I have also struggled to believe in the goodness of God... or the soveriegnty of God. And, really, both. It seems like all I do recently in the hospital is give patients and families bad news. In one week recently I had to tell three patients that their condition was irreversible and that even our modern medicine had nothing to offer them for their conditions. I had to tell several other families whose loved ones were on life support that there was nothing we could do reverse their disease processes. We ended up withdrawing life support on three patients in as many days. I have come to be somewhat immune to suffering and death, but that week I wept in the face of so much suffering.

My best friend lost his sister to a rare cancer when she was in her twenties and his father to a massive heart attack several years later. He called me recently to tell me he was recently diagnosed with cancer himself.

In the past week images of death and destruction from Typhoon Haiyan have inundated us and I wonder where was God for them?

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But God has a way of pursuing his children and he has been pursuing me. In the midst of unbelief and bitterness several separate instances took me to Hebrews 12 recently. Coming out of a chapter listing all of the faithful followers of Christ in ages past who endured all kinds of suffering and trials Hebrews 12 encourages us to follow their examples and run the race set out for us in this life with endurance. How? By "fixing our eyes upon Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith" who endured everything we will possibly be asked to endure and more by focusing on "the joy set before him", i.e., union with God the Father. Jesus, our savior, conquered sin and evil and has now taken his victorious and rightful seat at the right hand of our Father. As Colossians reminds us, Christ has done the work of reconciling all things to himself... though we still have yet to see the full effects of that reconciliation.

And so the author goes on to encourage us to consider the sufferings we encounter as "discipline" in the way that a parent disciplines a child. Not "punishment", but rather a "building up" or a training exercise. How often have I been bitter or angry at God for the "discipline" he inflicts upon me? And yet have I ever gone the next step and considered that the only parent who does not discipline his or her child is the parent who does not care about how his or her child turns out?

I must daily... even minute by minute... remember the grace that was lavished upon me in my spiritual "adoption" as a child of the King of Glory. The only way to "see to it that no bitter root sprouts up" is to meditate on the wonder of God's grace and love. Meditating on the greater and deeper truths of life put things in their right perspective. The truth is that there is immense suffering and injustice, just as there is a God who is sovereign and full of love and compassion. If I meditate on the suffering and pain and evil, God's love and justice become small in comparison and it becomes impossible to reconcile the existence of all together. If I meditate on the Holiness and Justice and Love and Grace of God then I CAN reconcile the subservient truths of temporary injustice and suffering and evil.

In my personal life in the last two weeks God has already begun doing a minor (or not so minor) miracle in redeeming my marriage. Ever since we started meditating on some of the bedrock scriptures that encourage us to fix our eyes and thoughts on God and his lavish grace upon us through Jesus Christ we have been experiencing a closeness that has been absent for many months. We have confessed some of our burgeoning bitter roots. We had some tears and long, hard conversations... and though NOTHING has changed in our life circumstances we have experienced a very real change in our marriage. I can say that in the past the harder I have tried to change my marriage from sheer willpower I have only made conditions worse. I am certain that the change we have seen in the past weeks has been a supernatural change that has come from God himself. (God, thank you for helping me in my unbelief!)

These are the greatest truths in life and only in light of them will everything else in life make sense: Before the cross of Christ the glory and holiness and justice and love and permanence and pre-eminence of God were things to be feared and desperately avoided because they could only culminate in our obliteration. But once these attributes were "sprinkled by the blood" of Christ who bore the wrath of God in our place, the character traits of God we once could only fear became the aspects of God that welcomed us, his now-adopted children, into a "celebration of thousands of angels in festival gathering" and a fellowship of all of the faithful (yet broken) people who endured and believed before us now made perfect because of the blood of Christ! Ultimate despair became ultimate hope by the power of the spilled blood of the perfect sacrifice.

And in light of those truths the author of Hebrews closes chapter 12 with a reminder that speaks volumes. "Our God is a consuming fire". We can rest assured... even when our doubts come back up and life seems to overwhelm us again... that "all things were made by Him and for Him" (re: colossians 1). The fire of the almighty creator of heaven and earth will, one day, consume and destroy all evil and those who choose to deny the truths of goodness and love for earth's fleeting pleasures (as Esau did in giving up the treasures of God for one meal). Oppressors, doers of injustice, murderers will be consumed and destroyed. But on a positive note, suffering will also be consumed and transformed into pure gold. He will consume and subdue the destructive powers of mother nature. He will consume my friend's cancer. He will consume all of the suffering and loss that my patients and their families have had to endure in recent weeks. He WILL gather all of His creation... men and women, beasts of the fields and birds of the air and all swimming creatures and even the air we breathe and He will make it new IN HIM.


God, be what you are in all of its glory in My life! Consume everything about me, may all that does not fall in line with you be burned away never to return and may all that is good and pure and true in YOU be refined and enabled to grow and blossom into all that You have designed it to be. Amen.