Love is relentless! There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and this love is ever climbing to its consummation when love will fill and inspire the universe, imperishable and divine! Therefore, all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that separates and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. Once we finally see it, it is so plain and simple. We wonder how we could have lived without seeing it before. That we did not understand it sooner was simply that we could not see it. To see the truth, to know what it is, to understand it, are all one and the same! One glimpse of divine love, and you are face-to-face with the vital heart of eternal Life!
This Fire of Love, this fear and awe, causes us not to run from Him, but to Him, our very Father! However, the children of Israel could have no worship for any deity of whom they were not afraid. Mount Sinai was a true revelation of God. However, it was not coming from a demand of His holiness but His Love. This fire is not a condition of His acceptance but the pathway to His Life of freedom!
Other than A Partial Revelation,what else could the highest spiritual condition of men receive of an infinite God! Mount Sinai was a revelation, but only a partial one, a real image, but not a final one. Fearing God is better than no God, much better than a god made with hands! God relating to us, not as we are, but as we will be. Not as we will be only, but as we are growing and capable of becoming. Humanity created in His image is what we will become. Upwards to the best, we are now capable of being. This revelation of fire making future and higher revelations possible would support this partial one as being true.
The Revelation of Fire is that which kills the sin and gives life to the sinner. So how can we understand that this revelation from God is our savior? The word penetrates and divides between our true man and the evil in us, killing the sin and giving life to the sinner. Can it be of any comfort to tell them that God loves them by burning them clean? Can this cleansing by fire appear to them as anything beyond what it must always be, more or less – a process of torture? Was not God ready to do to them even what they feared? Though with another motive and different purpose and intent from any which they were capable of imagining? Our Father is against sin: in so far as, and while, sin and we are one! He then is against our selfish selves. Against our selfish desires, aims, and hopes, so that He can be always and altogether “For Us!”
The Coming Revelation is that God gives Himself entirely for us because He has no justice nor dignity to support. Jesus would do His Father’s will. He would lay down His life, suffering death, not that we would not hurt. But that our suffering would lead us to the Father’s perfect love! For the truth is that God is Love, all love, and nothing other than love! Perfection is love expressed! A selfish man cannot believe the Truth concerning this gift of grace and love and misrepresents it. This Truth cannot be understood in his selfishness. But the ones filled with love, oppressed by wrong teaching or partial truths claiming to be the Truth, will hear, understand and rejoice!
This image of What is to be Feared was helping them see that evil, not fire, was the fearful thing. This wrath against sin is consuming what we mistakenly call ourselves—freeing the self God made to appear. This self appears with ten times the awareness than before and brings with it all the blessings of Life. Bringing with it all the benefits we tried to find without God. Surprisingly, we now see and realize that we are our true selves. If we continue to cling to the destructible, the burning goes deeper and deeper into our souls. It burns until it reaches the root of the lies that enslave us – to the myths that appear to us as truth. This fire often reveals itself only as light, but it will still be the refiner’s fire. The consuming fire is just the original and active form of its purity and love that is God’s creative energy.
In this Outer Darkness, the fire will go on searching and burning in us, even as in the highest saint, consuming what is “other” for our liberation, so that we may be pure, even as He is pure.
Finally, Home, of all God’s natures, is His mercy, not infinite! Could a brother love a brother more than The Father loves His own? More than our Brother Christ loves His brothers? Would Jesus not die again to save just one brother more!
See the links below for other articles connected to this summary:
Sermon Quotes – from Original Version
Fire of Love – Introductory Blog
The Consuming Fire – Sermon Paraphrase
Dale these are so good, really really GOOD