For the Lord your God is a consuming fire . . .   Deut 4:24

    For our God is a consuming fire.  Heb 12:29

    . . . but He who is coming after me . . . He will baptize you with the Holy  Spirit and with fire.  Matt 3:11

    . . . and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather  His wheat unto the barn; but He will burn up the chaff with    unquenchable fire.  Matt 3:12

    Our Lord is the same yesterday, today, and forever.   Yet too many of us will quickly disregard or draw back from the fact that God is still a consuming fire. Erroneous perceptions and interpretations of the Old Testament God continue to die hard: Those of a cruel and ruthless God eternally enraged standing over His people with some great cosmic club mercilessly waiting to punish.  Today these lying perceptions still remain as one of the biggest subterfuges that satan ever perpetrated on God's people.  In addition to this, there is the rebellious and carnal flesh - satan's always-present cohort - constantly embellishing the great lie with its self-protecting rationale.  Flesh will always believe it can be Godly without having to deny and crucify its own desires and ways.
    Could it be that we have not yet understood one of the greatest and most paradoxical spiritual truths in our lives:  We are walking with a God who really is a consuming fire while simultaneously being consummate love??
    That is the ultimate enigma of our God.  He is a God who is eternally and unchangingly a consuming fire while at the same time being perfect and eternal love.  Four words: consuming fire - consummate love.  These four words do more than describe two characteristics and attributes of God.  Scripture tells us they are the very essence of who and what God is (Heb 12:29, 1 John 4:8).
   Does it not then follow that God's consuming fire is also one of consummate love?
    Does it not follow as well that such a consuming fire will never destroy even one of our precious promises for which He died?
    And does it not also follow that He will consume everything that is not of Him that stands in the way of His ultimate best and highest good for us in fulfilling those promises?

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    Meshach, Shadrach and Abednego knew Whose fire they were in.   Their belief in their God's love was as absolute as their faith.  They knew Whose consuming fire was in faultless control.  From a small child each had been taught that the God of Moses, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob - their God - was a consuming fire.
    They went into the enemy's fire with their very lives ordered on that belief and the knowledge that He, alone, was in control of how long and how hot He allowed any enemy's fiery presence - for His purposes - into any situation or circumstance.   They knew from the time that Moses first saw the fiery mountain and beheld the glory of God as a fire which perpetually burns that nothing that is of Him is ever consumed (Ex 3:2).

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    Every portion and every element of our lives that is of Him - every circumstance, event, deed, word, and attitude that are given in trust and faith to Him - will never be consumed in any fire.  At the same time all those things that are not wholly of Him will be either purged, refined, or consumed.
    The Lord is appearing today as never before in the midst of lives as a consuming fire and as a pillar of fire to all who desire to come closer, and with hunger, seeking His voice, His ways and His glory.  And He is just as surely appearing as that same consuming fire to those who do not choose to be involved with a closer walk.

    But who can endure the day of His coming?  And who can stand when He appears?  For He is like a refiner's fire and like the launderers' [fuller] soap.  Mal 3:2

     He will sit as a refiner and a purifier of silver; He shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer to the Lord an offering in righteousness.  Mal 3:3

    We know that when the children of Israel presented their offerings on the altar of sacrifice to God, He commanded that it be offered by means of a consuming fire.  Have we lost sight of the fact that enemy fires have no control or authority over our lives since Calvary, unless we yield some portion of our lives to satan and will not repent?

    Do you not know that to whom you present yourselves slaves to obey, you are that one's slaves whom you obey, whether of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness? Rom 6:16

    Suffice it to say we find ourselves in too many circumstances and situations in which we yield our members to serve the flesh and/or satan in some capacity.   In fact, if we have not found ourselves in such dark miry pits far too frequently, a reality check needs to be taken for candor and safeguards against deceptions!
    Whatever the situations of the past, our focus has very often centered on and around rebel fires; whether they are the flaming fires of our own fleshy will and desires that have not been daily crucified with Christ, or whether they are fires of the satanic warfare by principalities, powers, rulers of darkness, and spiritual wickedness in high places found in Eph 6:12.  For most of us, however, it is usually a combination.
    Enemy fires are a hated but excellent incentive in lives for checking the condition of warfare weapons; prayerfully searching hearts; repenting; forgiving; and becoming stronger and less vulnerable to future attacks because of all that has been learned in previous ones. In short, God uses the enemy for His own purposes in warfare aptitude testing! The triumphant result is that there is less flesh found for the enemy to attack and more of God found to fight and secure complete victory!

    . . . for the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me.  John 14:30

    For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.   Col 3:3

    The problem with the body of Christ is that we have multitudinous occasions where our flesh, alive and well, sticks out from the altar of sacrifice exposing where we are!  But when we become dead to everything except Jesus Christ, the enemy will find nothing in us that is not of Him.
     It has become a growing necessity to understand Whose fire we are really in and why.  God is calling His body as never before to focus spiritual eyes intensely and fervently on Him alone.  When we are able to do that, we will begin to recognize that no matter how hot and intense the fire is, He will allow only those things to be consumed that are obstacles and hindrances to our being conformed into His image.
    We're in the Glory Fire!

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    These are times when He continues to open the eyes of our understanding to the reality that it is "the fourth man," who is walking with us in the midst of our fiery temptations, testings and trials. He still is retaining absolute dominion, power and authority over each and every phase.
    It is perhaps most perfectly and flawlessly summed up in just one sentence by Joseph in the book of Genesis when he spoke revelation knowledge by the Spirit regarding all his years of continuous and extraordinary evil that he had lived through:

    But as for you (the flesh and satan) you meant evil against me, but God meant  it for good . . .  Gen 50:20

    God would give a striking double enunciation of this eternal pivotal truth through Paul when writing to all who were to come afterward in the Lord's new dispensation of the New Testament blood covenant.

    And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.  Rom 8:28

    The same fiery trials.
    The same fiery circumstances.
    The same fiery testings.
    The same fiery situations.

    The only difference was - just like the three Hebrew children - Joseph, like Paul, came to know Whose ultimate fire he was in:

     . . . he (Joseph) was laid in irons. Until the time that his word came to pass, the word of the LORD tested him.  Ps 105:18-19

    That is the key.  We are being established in the midst of God's glory fire that burns off everything in us that is not of Him by strengthening and tempering everything in us that is of Him!!