The Letter to the Hebrews tells us “Our God is a consuming fire” (11:29). Fire consumes its fuel while it generates heat and light, with the ability to purify and destroy. On a cold winter night, it brings consolation. If that fire spreads, however, from the hearth to the house, it brings devastation. The same flame carries diverse effects based on how it received and handled.
Jesus told us “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49). What does he mean by this? If God is a consuming fire, Jesus wanted the Kingdom of God, his reign over our lives, to consume this world, giving it divine life and destroying all that is opposed to it. We see the full effects of Jesus’s mission at Pentecost when heaven opens up to rain the fire of God’s Spirit down on the apostles. It can also lift up to heaven, as evidenced by Elijah’s chariots.
God is divine fire and when we come into contact with him it affects us in different ways according to our disposition. We see two examples in Leviticus, where in chapter 9 fire comes from heaven to consume the offering and in the very next chapter it strikes down the sons of Aaron, Nadab and Abihu who offered their own strange fire: “And fire came forth from the presence of the Lord and devoured them, and they died before the Lord” (Ex 10:2).
If we can receive God’s fire, we become living receptacles of the Spirit, taking on the divine life. If we refuse, becoming cold and hard like stone, the fire will torture us from the outside, rather than residing within. So many spiritual writers have said that the Lord should pass on the heat of his fiery life to us, as red hot iron placed into a fire, but more often than not, we remain cold, turning away from the heat in our sin.
When we remain stuck in sin, we fear the fire, thinking of it primarily as punishment. Malachi asks with good reason if anyone can endure the Lord’s presence, “For he is like a refiner’s fire” (Mal 3:2). Even though we remain sinners, we can cooperate with the work of God’s purification so that we don’t simply experience its destructive power. St. Paul lays out the possibility of building in a way that works with this refinement:
For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble—each man’s work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire (1 Corinthians 3:11-15).
The fire should perfect us now, but even if our works cannot endure the flame we may still be saved by it.
St. Catherine of Genoa, given profound insights on God’s purgative fire, reveals the way God’s fire both purifies and transforms:
When gold has been purified up to twenty-four carats, it can no longer be consumed by any fire; not gold itself but only dross can be burnt away. Thus the divine fire works in the soul: God holds the soul in the fire until its every imperfection is burnt away and it is brought to perfection, as it were to the purity of twenty-four carats, each soul however according to its own degree. When the soul has been purified it stays wholly in God, having nothing of self in it; its being is in God who has led this cleansed soul to Himself; it can suffer no more for nothing is left in it to be burnt away; were it held in the fire when it has thus been cleansed, it would feel no pain. Rather the fire of divine love would be to it like eternal life and in no way contrary to it (Treatise on Purgatory).
Numerous saints have compared the fire of purgatory and hell, but St. Catherine relates purgatory’s fire to that of heaven. God’s fire hurts only the impure. When its purifying works is complete, it becomes a source of deifying glory. It consumes our selfishness, destroying the old self, which is why we resist it and why it torments the damned: “The soul cannot be destroyed in so far as it is in God, but in so far as it is in itself it can be destroyed; the more it is purified, the more is self destroyed within it, until at last it is pure in God.”
After death, we all experience God’s fire but not all will receive it, welcoming the work of of destroying what is not of God within us. This fire becomes torment to the damned. St. Augustine describes this in The City of God: “For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke . . . so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked” (1.8).
Some people question whether God cruelly punishes those in hell with torment. Understanding how we resist God’s purifying and deifying fire teaches how the punishment of hell confirms our resistance to God’s presence, which becomes unendurable pain to those focused on self before all else. God’s fire has three effects: glory, purification, and death. God sends his fire upon earth intending to draw us into the fire of his own life. To accomplish this, it also purifies those who are imperfect but do not reject him. But this same fire becomes torment for those who refuse to die to self.
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