“Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?” (Isa 33:14, KJV)
In this teaching we want to present three examples from literature and newspapers of how fire can be linked to the mystical spiritual realm.
In the first reference it carries a negative association. In the edition of 29 December 2010 of the Afrikaans daily newspaper Beeld one finds a front page report of an elderly lady who had locked herself in her townhouse, poured petrol over her body, and then set herself on fire. When a friend of hers begged her to open the door, she said that the “fire spirit” had commanded her to do this, and was consumed by fire shortly after.
Clearly a demonic spirit was at work within this woman. Her spiritual experience, also of the god whom she was being obedient to, was defined by fire.
In 1654 the brilliant mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal had a very intense mystical experience. Many people doubted the experience, or regarded it as sensory trickery, especially since he had sacrificed his job as researcher in the sciences to devote his time to the study of God. Pascal cryptically penned down his mystical experience, and sewed the note into his jacket’s lining, making sure that he always carried it with him, even when he changed clothes. This note was only discovered after his death. The note reads as follows: “Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. The God of Jesus Christ” and concludes with Ps. 119:16: ” I will not forget thy word.”
In Pascal’s experience with the “Unexpected” (as the poet WH Auden terms it in his poem, ‘Pascal’), the Living God Yahweh, Pascal firstly sketches Him as “Fire”. Then he positions the Fire as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Then he realises that the god that he, the philosophers and scholars worship, is not Yahweh. And then he makes this amazing discovery: It is the God of Jesus Christ. In logical terms one could then thus state that Fire = Yahweh = Jesus the Christ, and clearly – there is fire in the equation!
The Afrikaans poet Sheila Cussons had since her (non-born again) childhood been troubled with a dream in which fire featured prominently. In her anthology Gestaltes 1947 she speaks about the dream, about how it had enveloped her, calling it a “darkness of fire”, and how she struggles against the fire, calling to her father. Later, as an adult, a gas stove exploded in her face, and she started her “adventure with fire”, in which she came to know “Christ of the burnt men” as Yahweh.
The first person’s experience was “foreign fire” (Num 26:61); the last two came to know God as consuming fire through Jesus the Christ, the fourth man, “walking about in the midst of the fire” (Dan. 3:25, NASB). More about this in the next teaching.
- Selah: Why does the Scripture in Isa. 33:14 so upset our traditional mindsets?
- Read: Ezek 11-13
- Examine how this has been fulfilled: 12:2 (Tip: Acts 7:51-52)
