Honest Repentance: Purification

FIRE CONSUMES - SOMETIMES

The faith of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego led them into the fire. When they refused to bow down and worship the image of King Nebuchadnezzar, he commanded the furnace to be heated seven times as hot as usual and threw them in, thinking that it would incinerate them. But it did not harm them. It did not burn their clothes. It did not even leave the smell of smoke on them, even though it did kill the unfortunate servants who threw them in.

FIRE IN THE BIBLE

Now that is not how fire normally works in the Bible. “Our God is a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29), says the author of Hebrews. And throughout the Bible, fire is the instrument of God’s wrath to completely consume the wicked. When Nadab and Abihu offered incense to the Lord which he did not command, fire came out from the Lord and consumed them (Lv 10:1-2). When Korah the son of Izhar assembled 250 chiefs of the congregation to rebel against Moses, fire came out from the Lord and consumed them all (Nm 16:35). When the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah became great before the Lord, he rained down fire and brimstone to consume the two cities. Even when God gave his Law on Mt. Sinai, there was fire on the mountain (Dt 5:22) that struck fear into the hearts of the Israelites. They said, “This great fire will consume us. If we hear the voice of the LORD our God anymore, we shall die” (Dt 5:25).

It’s not very often in the Bible that something is on fire and is not consumed. The burning bush in Exodus 3 is one example. Moses looked, and “behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed” (Ex 3:2). The Lord was in the fire. The three men in the fiery furnace in Daniel 3 is another example. The text tells us, “The hair of their heads was not singed, their cloaks were not harmed, and no smell of fire had come upon them” (Dn 3:27). The only thing that the fire consumed was the ropes that bound them. Perhaps this miracle too had something to do with the presence of the Lord in the fire. Nebuchadnezzar looked into the furnace and saw a fourth man in the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who looked like “a son of the gods,” which could also be translated, “the Son of God” (Dn 3:25). This fits the larger biblical story since Christ, the Son of God, is the one who keeps us safe from God’s wrath.

Faith leads us into the fire of repentance this Lenten season, and every day. This fire is what purifies us and helps us to amend our sinful ways. Today I would like to use these two different descriptions of fire in the Bible as a way of discussing two different ways to think about repentance. First, repentance means that we are totally consumed by God’s wrath and have to be resurrected every day. Second, repentance means that we are not hurt at all by God’s wrath, but only the ropes that bind us are burned away.

REPENTANCE AS BEING CONSUMED

Ordinarily, when we talk about repentance as death and resurrection, we use the image of water, not fire. The Small Catechism tells us that such baptizing with water indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts and a new man daily come forth and arise. But we can make the same point with fire. By daily contrition and repentance, God’s law reduces us to ashes, and the gospel raises us from those ashes. In this respect, we are like the Phoenix, the bird from Greek mythology which periodically burns to ashes and then rises again from those ashes. This is an image the early church sometimes picked up to describe the resurrection.

To say that we are completely consumed is to say that there is no part of us that is untainted by sin. When Nineveh repented, the whole city repented from the king all the way down to the animals. And so, when we repent, we confess not only that our animal instincts have gone astray, such as our lust or anger or envy, but we confess that even the best parts of ourselves, the parts we are most proud of, have likewise gone astray.

C. S. Lewis points out that our highest desires are at the same time our most dangerous precisely because they are high and can more easily be confused with the divine. What could be higher than a mother’s love for her child? And yet what could more easily eclipse love for God? No one thinks their lust makes them good. It’s a lot easier to imagine that love for a child could make someone good. Yet even that can be selfish.

Lewis imagines a woman who loved her child so much that when he died, she kept the furniture in his room in place for ten years. She couldn’t let go of him no matter what, even though it was destroying the husband and daughter that she still had. Lewis imagines another woman who loved her child so much that she couldn’t part with him, so she made sure he would always be with her…even in hell. (C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 90–96.) Perhaps this is a kind of love, but it is a twisted, selfish kind. All of our best impulses are susceptible to this sort of distortion. That is why daily contrition and repentance means that every part of us goes into the fire every day and is burned away, and God raises us again from ashes.

REPENTANCE AS ONLY THE ROPES BEING CONSUMED

But another way to think about daily contrition and repentance is that we are not hurt by the fire of God’s wrath at all, but only the ropes that bind us are burned away. Here the point is that God created us good and implanted in us the natural desires that we have. Sin is not a different set of desires that invades us, but it is a twisting of those same desires that God gave us. (For a more technical doctrinal discussion of this matter, see FC SD1, which uses Aristotelian terminology to classify original sin as an accident, not a substance.) It’s as if sin has wound ropes around our healthy desires and dragged them off in a direction God did not mean for them to go.

So even our basest desires have a basis in something good. C. S. Lewis illustrates this point with a story of a man who appears in heaven with a red lizard on his shoulder. The lizard is a demon of lust. An angel kills the lizard and throws it on the ground, freeing the man from its grasp. Yet there is no void left where the lizard was because the lizard transformed into a great white horse. The man got on the horse and rode away.(C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 98–105) The point of the story is that God has implanted desires in us which are far nobler and more powerful than lust, as a horse is nobler and more powerful than a lizard. But sin has constrained and diminished them from a horse down to a lizard. The fire of repentance, then, burns away the constraints and lets us begin to function closer to our full capacity.

Taken together, these two ways of thinking of repentance help us understand that it doesn’t make us less human; it makes us more. We may be tempted to imagine being purified means that God expects us to slice off pieces of ourselves until we become well curated, gentle, harmless creatures who have no struggles because we have only the mildest of feelings. But that assumes that there are pure parts of us that would remain after we did that. If we understand that the fire consumes us completely, then we would not suppose that we can engage in a process whereby we determine which parts of us need to go and which parts we should keep. On the other hand, if we understand that the fire only burns the ropes, then we realize that our desires are not the problem, but sin’s constraint of them is. The underlying desires want and need to function within the boundaries that God has created so that they can truly flourish. The fire of repentance is a blessing because it helps us become who we truly are. It is a terrifying blessing, though, because of its power. This is why we must remember the fourth man in the fiery furnace, the Son of God. Whether the fire consumes us or only burns our ropes, it cannot ultimately harm us because he has already been consumed by it, and he rose again from the ashes. Now it can only purify us.