Ezekiel 1
Sometimes you just have to stand in awe of God. We need look no further than this chapter to realize that God is pretty much indescribable. I mean, Ezekiel tried really hard, but didn’t you chuckle your way through most of this chapter? I tried to imagine four-faced, four-winged creatures who speed around on burning wheels of fire, but the images in my head were most ridiculous.
Jeremiah 20
As we’ve seen from Scripture in the past, God is a fire. One thing is for sure: He is like a fire in some way other than we know fire. He came to Moses in the form of this fire as a burning (but non-burning) bush. His fire consumed Nadab and Abihu, yet their clothes were not even singed. So, however it is that God is fire, it must be somehow different than how we typically think of fire.
Jeremiah 7
This chapter mentions one of the great “unmentionables” of the Bible—the pagan practice of burning one’s own children alive in the fire to the god Molech. It is unthinkable that the Israelites—who were supposed to know the God of Love—could ever have gotten caught up in such a detestable practice. God thought so, too:
Jeremiah 6
The ending of this chapter was a white-hot indictment: “They’re a thickheaded, hard-nosed bunch, rotten to the core, the lot of them. Refining fires are cranked up to white heat, but the ore stays a lump, unchanged. It’s useless to keep trying any longer. Nothing can refine evil out of them. Men will give up and call them ’slag,’ thrown on the slag heap by me, their God.” (vs 28-30)
Isaiah 33
Everlasting fire… hmm, what does that sound like? Hell, right? Isn’t that what you’ve always heard—that the righteous are going to live forever with God in heaven and the wicked are going to burn forever in hell? Interestingly enough, that’s pretty much the opposite of what Isaiah says in this chapter. Here, he says (as the title of a great sermon once put it) that heaven and hell have the same zip code.
Psalm 140
Fire and brimstone. We hear quite a bit of that from the Christian pulpit these days, and we find it (or at least a request for it) in this psalm, too: “Those who surround me proudly rear their heads; may the mischief of their lips engulf them. May burning coals fall on them; may they be thrown into the fire.” (vs 9-10)
LEVITICUS 10
There is a little mystery in this chapter of Leviticus, and I think it points out something interesting about how we read the Bible. There is a "scandal" in this chapter, but when we get so focused on the fact that Nadab and Abihu "died before the Lord," we could possibly miss something very interesting.
