Fire That Heals

In the last post we walked from Abraham to Isaiah and listened for the Old Testament's hints of a Larger Hope.

We heard promises of blessing for "all the families of the earth," visions of the earth filled with the knowledge of the Lord, and even a day when God swallows up death and wipes away tears from all faces.

If that were the whole story, we might all breathe easy.

But you and I both know there is another side to the Old Testament's witness.

It speaks often and intensely of wrath, judgment, and fire.

Those passages have done a kind of deep work in the Christian imagination.

For many believers, they have become part of the scaffolding that holds up the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.

So we need to ask an honest question: what kind of judgment does the Old Testament actually describe?

Sheol is not Dante's inferno

A good starting point is to notice what the Old Testament does not teach.

J. W. Hanson, who spent years combing through the Hebrew Scriptures, pointed out that the Old Testament does not present us with a clear doctrine of post-mortem, endless, fiery torture.

Its picture of the realm of the dead is summed up in one familiar word: Sheol.

Sheol is shadowy.

It is the place where the dead go down, the place where praise falls silent, the place from which only God can raise us.

But it is not described as a chamber of eternal torment.

The elaborate imagery of a carefully organized, everlasting torture chamber comes much later — in certain intertestamental writings and in the cultural imagination that grew up around them.

That does not mean the Old Testament takes sin lightly.

It does mean that we should be careful about reading Dante's Inferno back into David's Psalms.

Judgment that hurts — and heals

When the Old Testament does speak of God's judgment, it is anything but soft.

The language can be scorching.

Cities fall.

Nations are brought low.

God's own people are sent into exile.

But if you read those passages in context, you start to see a pattern.

The same God who sends His people away promises to bring them home.

Wrath is never the last word.

Take the exile.

Israel's unfaithfulness leads to devastation and deportation.

Yet the prophets, almost in the same breath, speak of restoration: hearts circumcised, fortunes restored, covenant renewed.

God disciplines, but He disciplines as a Father who cannot quit His children.

The Refiner's fire

One of the clearest pictures we are given is in Malachi:

"For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord."

Malachi 3:2-3

Here the fire has a purpose.

It is not an end in itself.

It is aimed at something: purified priests and restored worship.

The fire is severe.

It burns away what does not belong.

But once the slag is gone, the Refiner does not keep on heating the metal for the sheer pleasure of watching it suffer.

The goal of the fire is beauty.

Thomas Allin, one of the nineteenth-century voices who helped me see this, argued that this is how divine fire functions again and again in Scripture.

The fire consumes what is false in us so that the true image of God might emerge.

It is judgment, yes.

But it is judgment with a redemptive horizon.

Wrath inside a covenant, not outside of it

Another thing we easily miss is that the Old Testament's language of wrath is almost always spoken inside the frame of covenant.

God is not smiting strangers at random.

He is confronting His own people with their unfaithfulness.

He does it because He has bound Himself to them.

Even when Israel is at her worst, God speaks as a wounded, jealous husband — not as a detached executioner.

And again and again, after the strong words and the hard blows, He promises healing:

• "I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely." (Hosea 14:4)
• "I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten." (Joel 2:25)

This does not make the judgment easy.

It does make it intelligible.

God's anger is the shadow cast by His love when His people run from Him.

Why this matters when we get to Jesus

You might be thinking, "All right, Dave, but what does this have to do with the hell texts in the New Testament?"

I would answer: everything.

If the Old Testament trains us to see God's judgment as severe but ultimately aimed at restoration, then that is the lens we should bring with us when we hear Jesus speak of fire, Gehenna, outer darkness, and the like.

We will talk specifically about Jesus and Gehenna in a coming post.

For now, I simply want to suggest this: if God's covenant wrath in the Old Testament always serves His redemptive purposes, it would be strange indeed if, at the very moment when His love is revealed most clearly in Christ, His judgment suddenly ceased to be restorative and became purely retributive for vast multitudes of His creatures.

The Larger Hope does not deny judgment.

It insists that judgment belongs inside God's saving work, not outside of it.

The Refiner's fire is still fire.

But the hands holding the crucible are the same scarred hands that were stretched out on a cross.

In the next post, we will ask how this Old Testament pattern might reshape the way we hear Jesus when He warns us about Gehenna.

If the Father's judgment is purifying in the prophets, what is the Son up to when He speaks of the fire that is not quenched?