Chapter 8

The Fire of God—Purifying Love, Not Punitive Torture

If you grew up in the church, you probably heard this verse at least once: “For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). And if you’re like most people, it scared you. It was supposed to scare you. Preachers used it as a warning, a threat, a line in the sand: Behave, or the fire will get you.

But what if we have the fire all wrong?

What if the fire of God is not a weapon of punishment but the very nature of His love? What if the same fire that terrifies the rebellious heart is the fire that warms and heals the willing one? What if paradise and hell are not two different fires but two different experiences of the same fire—the all-consuming, all-purifying, inescapable fire of divine love?

That is the argument of this chapter. And it is, in many ways, the argument of this entire book.

A. Thesis and Context

In the previous chapters, we have established a foundation. We have seen that God is love—not just that He acts lovingly when the mood strikes, but that love is the defining reality of His very being (1 John 4:8, 16). We have seen how the Western theological tradition, beginning with Augustine and accelerating through Anselm, distorted the character of God by importing a juridical framework that turned Him into an offended judge demanding infinite payment for sin. We have seen that biblical justice—tsedaka (righteousness, saving justice)—is not the cold scales of retribution but the active, rescuing, restoring love of a God who refuses to let His creation be destroyed. And we have seen that the “wrath of God” in Scripture is not divine rage but the experience of what happens when sinful human beings encounter the holy, burning reality of perfect Love.¹

Now it is time to bring all of these threads together in a single image—the image that stands at the heart of everything this book is about.

Fire.

The image of fire runs through Scripture from beginning to end. God appeared to Abraham in a smoking firepot and a blazing torch (Genesis 15:17). He spoke to Moses from a bush that burned but was not consumed (Exodus 3:2). He led Israel through the wilderness as a pillar of fire by night (Exodus 13:21). He descended on Mount Sinai in fire so intense that the whole mountain trembled (Exodus 19:18). His prophet Daniel saw Him seated on a throne of flames, with a river of fire flowing from before Him (Daniel 7:9–10). His Son Jesus was transfigured on a mountaintop, His face shining like the sun and His clothes becoming white as light (Matthew 17:2). And Jesus Himself said, “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49).²

Fire is everywhere in Scripture. But what does it mean?

The traditional Western reading is simple: fire means punishment. God is angry, and fire is how He expresses that anger. The fire of Gehenna is God’s weapon against sinners. It is retributive. It is punitive. It is torture.

I want to show you a better reading. A more biblical reading. A reading that the earliest Greek-speaking Christians understood instinctively but that the Western church gradually lost. The fire of God is not punishment. The fire of God is God Himself—His love, His holiness, His purifying presence. And when that fire meets a willing heart, it refines and purifies like a goldsmith’s furnace. When it meets a hardened, resistant heart, it burns and consumes like fire meeting dry wood. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in what the fire touches.³

This is the central image of the divine presence model. And it changes everything about how we think about hell.

B. The Case: God’s Fire Is His Love

Fire and God: Inseparable Realities

The first thing we need to see is just how deeply the image of fire is connected to God Himself in Scripture. This is not a minor theme tucked away in a few obscure passages. It is one of the most consistent, most pervasive images of God in the entire Bible.

Consider the evidence. God is called a consuming fire in Deuteronomy 4:24 and again in Hebrews 12:29. Fire flows out from His presence in Daniel 7:10. He appears as fire in a burning bush to Moses in Exodus 3. A pillar of fire symbolizes His presence with Israel in Exodus 13. His tongue, breath, and voice are described as flames of fire in Isaiah 30:27, 33 and Revelation 2:18. Ezekiel sees God as a flashing fire burning with splendor, like glowing amber (Ezekiel 1:4, 13–14). Both Daniel and the apostle John envision God sitting on a throne of fire, with eyes like flaming torches (Daniel 7:9–11; Revelation 1:14–15). And the prophet Malachi describes God as a refiner’s fire who purifies and refines like a goldsmith working with precious metals (Malachi 3:2–3).⁴

As Sharon Baker puts it so well: “Where there’s God, there’s fire! Fire comes from God, surrounds God, and is God.”⁵ This is not an overstatement. It is what Scripture actually says. From Genesis to Revelation, whenever God draws near—whenever He makes Himself known in power—fire is there. Fire is not something God uses to punish from a distance. Fire is the way Scripture describes what it is like to be in God’s presence.

Think about that for a moment. If God is a consuming fire, then to stand in His presence is to stand in that fire. And if God’s presence fills all things—if, as the Psalmist says, there is nowhere we can flee from His Spirit (Psalm 139:7–10)—then the fire is inescapable. The question is not whether we will encounter the fire. The question is how we will experience it when we do.

What Does the Fire Do? The Testimony of Scripture

Here is where it gets interesting. When we look carefully at what fire actually does in Scripture, we discover something that the traditional punitive reading completely misses. The fire of God does not have one purpose. It has two. And the two purposes depend entirely on what the fire encounters.

First, God’s fire burns up whatever is evil, wicked, or sinful. It devours it, consumes it, so that it no longer exists. In the Psalms and in Isaiah, the fire of God burns wickedness like stubble so that nothing remains (Isaiah 5:24; 47:14; Psalm 83:14). Numbers 31:23 tells us that everything that can withstand fire shall be passed through fire, and then it shall be clean. This is the destructive aspect of the fire—but notice, it is not random destruction. It is targeted destruction. The fire destroys what is corrupt, what is sinful, what cannot survive the encounter with perfect holiness.⁶

Second, God’s fire purifies and cleanses what is good and righteous. It does not burn up gold. It refines it. It does not destroy the precious metal. It burns away the impurities so that only the pure metal remains. This is exactly the image Malachi uses: “He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver” (Malachi 3:3). And it is the image Zechariah uses: “I will refine them as one refines silver, and test them as gold is tested” (Zechariah 13:9). And it is the image Peter uses in the New Testament: “These trials have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:7).⁷

The fire does not consume the pure. Isaiah reminds us in beautiful language: “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through the fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you” (Isaiah 43:2). Remember Daniel’s three friends in the furnace? The fire devoured the soldiers who threw them in, but the three men walked around in the flames unharmed. Why? Because there was nothing impure in them for the fire to burn. They were righteous before God, and the fire only destroys what is corrupt (Daniel 3:20–27).⁸

And then there is the burning bush. Moses sees a bush on fire—yet the bush is not consumed (Exodus 3:2–3). Why not? Because there is nothing in it that the fire needs to destroy. The bush is not evil. The bush is not corrupt. So the fire surrounds it, fills it, blazes in it—but does not consume it. The fire and the bush coexist in perfect harmony. The bush is, as it were, at home in the fire.⁹

Do you see the pattern? The same fire that devours the wicked shines harmlessly—beautifully—on the righteous. The same fire that consumes stubble refines gold. The same fire that terrifies the corrupt warms the pure. The difference is never in the fire. The difference is always in what the fire touches.

The Fire That Tests: 1 Corinthians 3:12–15

One passage brings all of this together with stunning clarity. In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul writes:

If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through flames. (1 Corinthians 3:12–15)

Read that last line again: “He himself will be saved, yet so as through fire.” Paul is telling us that on the Day of Judgment, every person will pass through fire—the fire that surrounds God, comes from God, and is God. This fire will test the quality of each person’s work. What is built of gold, silver, and precious stones will survive the fire and shine all the brighter. What is built of wood, hay, and straw will be consumed. And the person—even the person whose works are burned away—may still be saved, but only through the fire itself.¹⁰

Baker draws out the implication with great clarity: if God is the devouring fire, then to stand in God’s presence is to stand in the fire. Every person will eventually stand before God to give an account of his or her life (2 Corinthians 5:10). To stand in God’s presence means standing in the flames. And standing in the flames means having the chaff, the wickedness, the impurity burned away.¹¹

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say that the fire is a punishment inflicted by an angry God on those who displease Him. He does not say that some people go into the fire and others do not. He says that everyone passes through the fire. The fire tests each person’s work. The difference between those who receive a reward and those who suffer loss is not that one group faces the fire and the other escapes it. Both groups face the same fire. The difference is in what the fire finds when it reaches them.¹²

Manis sees in this passage a powerful indicator of what the Day of Judgment will actually look like on the divine presence model. For some believers, the first exposure to the glorified Christ will be a refining experience—the completion of their sanctification, what the tradition has sometimes called an experience of purgation. But this purgation is not some separate reality from heaven. It is simply a different way of experiencing the same reality that those already perfected experience as blessedness. It is the experience of the presence of Christ, unveiled in glory—the light of the world, the consuming fire.¹³

The Refiner’s Fire: Malachi 3:2–3

The prophet Malachi gives us one of the most vivid pictures of the fire of God in all of Scripture. Speaking of the coming of the Lord, he asks:

But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness. (Malachi 3:2–3)

The imagery here is precise and deliberate. A refiner’s fire is not a destructive fire. It is not the fire that burns down a house or destroys a forest. It is a carefully controlled, intensely focused fire with one specific purpose: to remove impurities from precious metal. The goldsmith heats the gold until it melts. As it melts, the impurities—the dross—rise to the surface and are skimmed away. What remains is pure gold, more beautiful and more valuable than before.¹⁴

That is what God’s fire does. It is not aimed at the gold. It is aimed at the dross. The fire is not trying to destroy the precious metal—it is trying to save it, to free it from the impurities that cling to it. The pain of the refining process is real. The heat is real. But the purpose is restoration, not destruction.

There is an old tradition among Jewish commentators that says a goldsmith knows the gold is finally pure when he can see his own reflection in the molten surface. Think about what that means for us. God refines His people in the fire of His presence until He can see His own image reflected back to Him. We were made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Sin distorted that image, buried it under layers of selfishness and rebellion and fear. The fire of God burns away those layers—not to destroy us but to restore us to what we were always meant to be. The fire is aimed at recovering the image of God in us.

Isaiah uses the same goldsmith imagery in a stunning passage. Speaking of Jerusalem’s corruption, God says: “I will turn my hand against you; I will thoroughly purge away your dross and remove all your impurities” (Isaiah 1:25). In the very next verse, God describes the result: the restored city will be called “the City of Righteousness, the Faithful City.” The purpose of the purging fire is not annihilation. It is transformation. God is not trying to get rid of His people. He is trying to get rid of the sin that is killing them.⁴⁵

Phillips, drawing on the work of George MacDonald, makes this point with beautiful clarity. The fire of God’s purification does not burn us—our essential being created in His image. It burns away the parasites of sin that cling so close they suffocate our true selves. The fire burns out the impurities embedded in our fallen nature so that only the gold remains.¹⁵

Phillips traces this idea through MacDonald’s entire theology: fire throughout Scripture is primarily an image of purification. Destruction often precedes restoration, and fire is God’s means of achieving this twofold purpose. Fire both destroys and purifies. But purification is the ultimate purpose. The fire of judgment burns away dross so that the fire of purification can produce gold. This is what Malachi saw. This is what Isaiah saw. This is what Peter saw when he wrote about faith being “tested by fire” (1 Peter 1:7). The fire is always aimed at producing something beautiful, not at destroying for the sake of destroying.⁴⁶

Now, here is the crucial question. What happens when the fire encounters something that is all dross? What happens when there is no gold at all—when the fire finds nothing but wood, hay, and stubble? In that case, the fire does not refine. It consumes. There is nothing left when the burning is done. The fire did not change its nature. The fire did not become more hostile or more angry. It did exactly what it always does: it burned away what was impure. The tragedy is that there was nothing else there to save.

This is the image that will come to matter enormously when we reach the questions of conditional immortality and universal reconciliation later in the book. But for now, the point is this: the fire is always the same. Its purpose is always purification. Whether it results in refinement or in consumption depends entirely on what it meets.

“I Came to Bring Fire on the Earth”: Luke 12:49

Jesus’ words in Luke 12:49 are among the most striking in all of the Gospels: “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” Most readers skim past this verse without stopping to think about how extraordinary it is. Jesus says that the purpose of His coming is to bring fire. And He speaks of it not with dread but with longing. He wishes it were already kindled.¹⁶

If fire means punishment, then Jesus is saying He longs to punish the world. That cannot be right. The one who wept over Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), who ate with sinners and tax collectors (Luke 15:1–2), who said He came not to condemn the world but to save it (John 3:17)—this Jesus was not longing to pour out punishment on the earth.

But if fire means the purifying presence of God’s love—then Jesus’ words make perfect sense. He longs for the fire to be kindled because the fire is the means by which the world will be healed. The fire will burn away injustice, corruption, violence, and sin. The fire will refine human hearts. The fire will bring truth to the surface and reveal what is hidden. The fire is not the enemy of the world. The fire is the world’s hope.

Manis connects Luke 12:49 directly to the divine presence model. The fire that Jesus came to bring on the earth is identical to the river of fire in Daniel’s vision (Daniel 7:9–10), the lake of fire in Revelation (Revelation 19–21), and the sea of glass glowing with fire (Revelation 15:2). All of these are references to the divine presence—the glory of the Lord described throughout Scripture as a fire and a flashing, blinding light.¹⁷

And this fire is not just symbolic. It appeared in visible, physical form at the two most stunning moments of revelation in the New Testament: the Transfiguration and Pentecost.

The Transfiguration and Pentecost: The Fire Made Visible

On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John saw something that terrified them. Jesus’ appearance changed before their eyes. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning (Matthew 17:2; Luke 9:29). This was not a magic trick. It was the veil being pulled back. For one shattering moment, the three disciples saw Jesus as He truly is—radiant with the uncreated glory of God, the same glory that appeared as fire on Sinai, as fire in the burning bush, as fire on the throne in Daniel’s vision. The disciples fell to the ground in terror (Matthew 17:6). They could not bear it. And this was before the resurrection, before the full glory of Christ was unveiled.⁴⁷

Manis draws a direct connection between the Transfiguration and the divine presence model. The visions of Ezekiel, Daniel, and John in Revelation are remarkably similar to what Peter, James, and John witnessed on the mountain. In all of these cases, the glory of the Lord is described as a fire or a flashing, blinding light. And these descriptions are not metaphors for something else. They are the best human language can do to describe the overwhelming reality of being in the presence of the living God.⁴⁸

Consider what happened to Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus Road. A light from heaven—brighter than the noonday sun—flashed around him, and he fell to the ground (Acts 9:3–4; 26:13). Saul was blinded for three days. The same glory that shone on the Mount of Transfiguration knocked Paul flat and took away his sight. Was this punishment? No. This was the risen Christ revealing Himself. And the experience was so overwhelming that it physically shattered Saul’s capacity to see.⁴⁹

Now think about what it will be like when every eye sees that glory. When Christ returns in the fullness of His unveiled presence, every human being who has ever lived will experience what Peter, James, John, and Paul experienced—but without any veil, without any mediation, without any way to look away. For those who love Him, it will be unspeakable joy. For those who have spent their lives hardening themselves against Him, it will be unbearable agony. Same glory. Same fire. Same love. Different experience, depending entirely on the condition of the heart.

And then there is Pentecost. When the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples in the upper room, He appeared as tongues of fire that rested on each of them (Acts 2:3). The fire of God’s presence did not destroy them. It filled them. It empowered them. It set them ablaze with love and courage. The fire was not hostile. It was intimate. It sat on their heads like a crown. It entered them and made them new.

But here is the question: why fire? Why did the Holy Spirit appear as fire and not as something gentler—a dove, perhaps, or a warm breeze? Because fire is what God’s presence is. When God draws near, fire is what we encounter. And at Pentecost, that fire was received with joy because the disciples’ hearts were open to it. They were not hardened against God. They were waiting for Him, longing for Him, praying for Him. And when the fire came, it did not burn them. It lit them up. They shone with it. They were the burning bush all over again—on fire with God’s presence, but not consumed, because there was nothing in them that the fire needed to destroy.⁵⁰

The fire at Sinai terrified Israel. The fire at Pentecost transformed the church. Same God. Same fire. The difference was in the hearts of the people who encountered it.

The River of Fire: Kalomiros and the Orthodox Vision

Here is where the Eastern Orthodox tradition opens a door that most Western Christians have never walked through. In Orthodox iconography—the sacred art of the Eastern church—there is a traditional icon of the Last Judgment that depicts something startling. Christ is seated on a throne. On His right are the blessed, the saints who lived by His love. On His left are those who passed their lives rejecting Him. And there, in the middle—flowing from Christ’s own throne—is a river of fire that touches both groups.¹⁸

Not two rivers. One.

Alexandre Kalomiros, the Greek Orthodox theologian whose essay The River of Fire has opened so many Western eyes to this tradition, describes the icon with a question that cuts to the heart of everything:

What is this river of fire? Is it an instrument of torture? Is it an energy of vengeance coming out from God in order to vanquish His enemies? No, nothing of the sort. This river of fire is the river which “came out from Eden to water the paradise” of old. It is the outpouring of God’s love for His creatures. Love is fire. Anyone who loves knows this. God is Love, so God is Fire.

Kalomiros identifies the river of fire from Daniel 7:10 with the river that watered the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2:10. It is the same river. The river of God’s grace, the river of God’s love, the river that has been nourishing and sustaining creation since the beginning. At the Last Judgment, that river of love will be fully revealed. And it will be experienced as either paradise or torment depending entirely on the condition of the human heart that encounters it.¹⁹

Then Kalomiros delivers the image that, for me, unlocked everything:

“For our God is a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). The very fire which purifies gold, also consumes wood. Precious metals shine in it like the sun, rubbish burns with black smoke. All are in the same fire of Love. Some shine and others become black and dark. In the same furnace steel shines like the sun, whereas clay turns dark and is hardened like stone. The difference is in man, not in God.

Read those words slowly. Let them sink in. “The very fire which purifies gold also consumes wood.” The same fire. Not two fires. Not a good fire for the righteous and a bad fire for the wicked. One fire. One love. One God. And the difference—the agonizing, eternal difference between paradise and hell—is not in God. It is in us.²⁰

Manis, the premier philosophical defender of the divine presence model, shows how deep this connection goes. In Daniel’s vision, a river of fire flows from the throne of God (Daniel 7:9–10). In Revelation, a river of the water of life flows from the throne of the Lamb (Revelation 22:1–5). Both a river of fire and a river of water proceed from the same throne. On the divine presence model, these two rivers are identical. They are one and the same reality, experienced very differently by those in communion with Christ and those who have rejected Him. For those in communion with Christ, the river is an experience of love, peace, rest, refreshment, and life. For those in disunion with Him, the very same river is an experience of wrath, judgment, restlessness, torment, and punishment.²¹

This is not just a clever theological idea. It is the most natural reading of these two apocalyptic passages when they are laid side by side. And the same pattern—fire and water as contrasting and complementary images of the same divine reality—runs throughout Scripture. God is called a consuming fire, and yet Jesus describes His presence as living water (John 4:14). The Holy Spirit appears as tongues of fire at Pentecost (Acts 2:3), and yet believers are said to have rivers of living water flowing from within them (John 7:38–39). Fire and water. Judgment and grace. The same God. The same presence. The same love.

Manis draws particular attention to the imagery surrounding John the Baptist’s announcement. John told the crowds: “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:11–12). Notice the double baptism: Spirit and fire. And notice the audience. John was speaking not just to his own disciples but to the Pharisees and Sadducees who had come to watch. Everyone will be “baptized” by Christ. The imagery of baptism is the imagery of immersion—being plunged into something. Some will be immersed in fire that feels like rivers of living water flowing from within them. Others will be immersed in water that feels like being burned by unquenchable fire. The same baptism. The same Christ. The same overwhelming presence.⁵¹

This convergence of fire and water imagery is one of the most powerful pieces of evidence for the divine presence model. The traditional reading has to treat the fire passages and the water passages as referring to completely different realities—fire for judgment, water for salvation, as if God operates in two totally separate modes. But the divine presence model sees them as two sides of the same coin: the all-encompassing reality of God’s presence, experienced as life-giving water by those who receive Him and as consuming fire by those who resist Him. The imagery itself points to a single, unified reality with two radically different human responses.

The Church Fathers and the Two Properties of Fire

The early Church Fathers—the great teachers and theologians of the first several centuries of Christianity—understood this instinctively. They had not yet been shaped by the juridical framework that would come to dominate Western theology. They read Scripture in its original Greek, and they saw what the text was actually saying.

Saint Basil the Great, one of the most revered Fathers of the fourth century, wrote about fire in terms that perfectly capture the dual nature we have been describing. He believed that the fire prepared for the devil and his angels is divided by the voice of the Lord into two capacities: the capacity to burn and the capacity to illuminate. The fierce, scourging property of the fire awaits those who deserve to burn, while the illuminating and radiant warmth is reserved for those who are rejoicing.²²

Notice: Basil does not say there are two fires. He says one fire has two properties. The same fire burns and illuminates. The same fire scourges and warms. The same fire is hell for some and paradise for others. And the difference is not in the fire.

Saint Isaac the Syrian, the seventh-century mystic whose writings are treasured in both East and West, went even further. He wrote that those in gehenna (the Greek term often translated “hell”) will be chastised not by some instrument of torture but by the scourge of love. Those who understand that they have sinned against love, he said, undergo greater sufferings than any physical torment could produce. The sorrow that takes hold of the heart which has sinned against love is more piercing than any other pain. And then Isaac adds a crucial correction: it is not right to say that sinners in hell are deprived of the love of God. Love acts in two ways—as suffering in the condemned and as joy in the blessed.²³

That last line is worth memorizing. Love acts in two ways: as suffering in the condemned and as joy in the blessed. The love of God is the same toward all. The damned are not deprived of God’s love. They are scorched by it. They are not sent away from love. They are plunged into the middle of it. And because their hearts are hard, because they hate the love that is being poured over them, they experience that love as torment.

Saint Symeon the New Theologian, the tenth-century Byzantine mystic, drives the point home by quoting Psalm 139. Where can we go from God’s face? If we go up to heaven, He is there. If we go down to sheol (the grave, the realm of the dead), He is there. If we flee to the uttermost part of the sea, His hand encompasses us. There is no escape from the presence of God. And since there is no escape, Symeon says, let us give ourselves willingly to Him rather than being dragged into His presence unwilling.²⁴

Even Martin Luther—the great Reformer, the quintessential Western theologian—caught a glimpse of this. In his Commentary on the Psalms, Luther wrote that the fiery oven of judgment is ignited merely by the unbearable appearance of God and endures eternally. The ungodly will feel the power of God’s presence, which they cannot bear and yet are forced to bear. This chief and unbearable punishment, Luther said, God will inflict with His mere appearance.²⁵

Luther did not develop this into a full divine presence model. But the seed is there. Even within the Western tradition, the intuition surfaces again and again: the fire of hell is not something external that God creates as a tool of punishment. It is the experience of God’s own presence by those who cannot bear it.

George MacDonald and the Fire of Love

No one in the modern era has explored the purifying nature of God’s fire more deeply than George MacDonald, the nineteenth-century Scottish minister and author whom C. S. Lewis called his literary “master.” MacDonald’s sermon “The Consuming Fire” is one of the most important theological essays ever written on this subject, and it deserves careful attention.²⁶

MacDonald begins from a simple principle that is also the foundation of everything in this book: nothing is inexorable but love. Love is one, and love is changeless. Love loves into purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore, MacDonald concludes, everything that is not beautiful in the beloved, everything that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed.²⁷

Fire, MacDonald argues, is the deepest symbol of God’s love because it burns until nothing but love remains. But MacDonald makes a critical observation about the nature of this fire. It is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in this respect: it is only at a distance that it burns. The farther from God a person stands, the worse the burning. But the closer one draws to God, the more the burning begins to change to comfort.²⁸

Think about that. In MacDonald’s vision, the fire does not get hotter as you approach God. The fire gets gentler. The burning is worst at the edges, for those who are farthest from God in their hearts. The person running away from the fire suffers most. The person running toward it finds that the closer they get, the more the fire feels like warmth, like home, like love.

This is the exact opposite of the traditional picture, where God is the source of the pain and the goal is to get as far away from Him as possible. In the divine presence model, the pain comes from distance, not from closeness. The cure is not to flee from God but to draw near. The fire is the medicine, not the disease.

But MacDonald does not soften the reality of the fire for those who resist it. He is brutally honest about what happens to the person who refuses to be purified. If a man resists the burning of God, the consuming fire of Love, a terrible doom awaits him. He shall be cast into the outer darkness who hates the fire of God. And what is the outer darkness? MacDonald answers: it is but the most dreadful form of the consuming fire—the fire without light, the darkness visible, the black flame.²⁹

The outer darkness is not the absence of fire. It is fire experienced as pure darkness because the person has no capacity to receive its light. God has not withdrawn His love. But the person has so thoroughly shut themselves against it that they cannot feel anything but the burning. They have, as it were, turned the light of God into darkness by the sheer force of their refusal.

Baker’s Otto: The Fire in Action

Sharon Baker, in her book Razing Hell, brings all of this down to earth with a vivid thought experiment. She asks us to imagine a man she calls Otto—an international leader who has launched wars, terrorized nations, and caused the death of thousands of innocent people. Otto is the worst of the worst. And now it is judgment day.³⁰

Otto comes into the throne room of God. He expects wrath. He expects vengeance. He expects to be punished. Instead, he encounters glaring flames of fire so bright and hot that he cannot see. And as he moves closer to the flames, he realizes something that undoes him completely: the blazing fire is God. And the closer he gets, the more deeply he feels not God’s hatred, not God’s judgment in the punitive sense, but God’s love. A love of such magnitude that, in its abundance, it acts as wrath, judging him for his deficiency. In its purity, it serves as a hell, punishing him for his depravity.³¹

Baker’s portrait is haunting in its details. Otto does not hear God say, “You vile murderer! I am going to punish you forever!” Instead, he hears God say with sorrow forged from love: “I have loved you with an everlasting love. But look at your life; what have you done?” Otto is made to face his victims, to lay his hand on each of their hearts and feel every ounce of pain he has caused. With gnashing teeth and uncontrollable weeping, his heart breaks. The fire of God burns, devouring his wickedness and evil deeds. This is hell for him—not because God is torturing him, but because love is doing what love always does: exposing the truth, burning away the lie, refusing to let evil stand.³²

And here is where Baker’s account opens up into the question that runs through the rest of this book. What happens to Otto after the fire has done its work? Baker presents two possibilities. It is possible that Otto, broken by the fire of love, finally accepts God’s offer of reconciliation. The fire has purified him. The dross has been burned away. What remains is a man who can finally receive the love he spent his whole life running from. He enters the kingdom of God, tested by fire, forgiven by grace.³³

But Baker is honest enough to present the other possibility too. Otto may not accept. After the fire has done its work, nothing may remain. If Otto is all dross and no gold—if there is nothing in him that can survive the encounter with perfect Love—then the fire consumes him entirely. This is the second death. This is conditional immortality within the divine presence model. Not punishment. Not torture. Just the devastating reality that some beings may be so thoroughly defined by their rejection of love that when love finally reaches them, there is nothing left to save.³⁴

We will wrestle much more with these two possibilities in later chapters (especially Chapters 12, 13, 30, and 31). But for now, what matters is the fire itself. In Baker’s portrait, the fire is love. The judgment is love. The pain is love. The only question is whether the heart that encounters the fire has anything in it that love can save.

C. Objections and Responses

Objection 1: “Fire in Scripture Is Obviously Punishment, Not Purification”

Someone might object that I am reading the fire imagery of Scripture too selectively. After all, there are plenty of passages where fire is clearly used as a symbol of God’s judgment and punishment. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed by fire and brimstone from heaven (Genesis 19:24). God’s fire consumed Nadab and Abihu when they offered unauthorized fire before the Lord (Leviticus 10:1–2). Elijah called down fire from heaven on the soldiers sent to arrest him (2 Kings 1:10–12). These passages seem to present fire as a weapon of divine wrath, not as an instrument of purification.

But this objection actually proves my point rather than refuting it. In every one of these examples, the fire of God destroys what is evil, corrupt, or rebellious. The fire that fell on Sodom destroyed a city so wicked that not even ten righteous people could be found in it (Genesis 18:32). The fire that consumed Nadab and Abihu was the response of God’s holiness to a flagrant violation of His sacred presence. The fire that fell on the soldiers was a response to the king’s attempt to arrest God’s prophet. In every case, fire does what fire always does: it consumes what cannot survive its touch.³⁵

The question is why these things are consumed. Is it because God is expressing personal rage? Or is it because the holy, burning reality of God’s presence is simply incompatible with what it encounters? The divine presence model argues for the latter. God’s fire does not change. God does not become more or less fiery depending on His mood. His fire is what it is—the radiance of His being. What changes is whether what the fire touches can survive the encounter.

Moreover, even in these “punishment” passages, the purpose of the fire is not torture. In no case does the fire prolong suffering indefinitely. In Sodom, the destruction is swift and total. With Nadab and Abihu, the death is instant. The fire destroys. It does not torture. This is far more consistent with the purifying-and-consuming model than with the traditional view of eternal conscious torment, where fire is imagined as a tool for inflicting endless pain without ever actually destroying anything.³⁶

Objection 2: “You’re Reading Eastern Orthodox Theology Into the Bible”

Someone might object that the whole argument depends on importing Eastern Orthodox theology into Scripture. Kalomiros is an Orthodox writer. The Church Fathers I have quoted are mostly from the Eastern tradition. Isn’t this just an Orthodox reading being forced onto a text that Western Christians have always read differently?

There are two things to say in response. First, the argument of this chapter is built primarily on Scripture, not on Orthodox theology. I began with Hebrews 12:29, 1 Corinthians 3:12–15, Malachi 3:2–3, and Luke 12:49—all texts that are in everyone’s Bible, not just the Orthodox one. The pattern of fire as both purifying and consuming is woven throughout the entire canon. I then drew on the Church Fathers to show that the earliest Christian readers of these texts understood them in exactly the way I am arguing. The Fathers are not imposing a foreign reading on the text. They are reading the text in its own language, in its own context, without the juridical overlay that later Western theology would impose.³⁷

Second, it is worth pointing out that the “Western” reading is itself a theological tradition, not a straightforward reading of the text. The idea that fire in Scripture always and only means punitive torment is not self-evident from the text. It is a conclusion shaped by centuries of theological development—by Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, Anselm’s satisfaction theory, and the Reformers’ emphasis on divine wrath. These are all important theologians, and I do not disrespect them. But the fact that a reading is traditional does not make it correct. And the fact that an older, more ancient reading exists should at least give us pause before we assume the Western reading is the only legitimate one.³⁸

I am not asking anyone to become Eastern Orthodox. I am an evangelical, and I am writing as an evangelical. But I believe that the Eastern tradition has preserved something that the Western church has lost—a vision of God’s fire as the fire of love, not the fire of revenge. And I believe recovering that vision is not a departure from Scripture but a return to it.

Objection 3: “This Makes God Passive—Doesn’t God Actively Judge?”

A more sophisticated objection might run like this: the divine presence model seems to make God entirely passive in judgment. God just is, and the wicked happen to experience His being as painful. But doesn’t Scripture present God as actively judging, actively condemning, actively sentencing? Doesn’t the judge imagery imply that God is doing something, not just being something?

This is a fair question, and the answer is nuanced. The divine presence model does not deny that God judges. It redefines what “judgment” means. On this model, God’s judgment is not the pronouncement of an arbitrary sentence. It is the revelation of truth. When the “books are opened” (Revelation 20:12), what is being revealed is not God’s verdict but the true condition of the human heart. God does not need to impose a verdict from outside. He simply reveals what is already there. The light of His presence exposes everything that has been hidden.³⁹

Kalomiros puts it this way: God’s judgment is nothing other than our coming into contact with truth and light. On the Day of Judgment, all people will appear naked before the penetrating light of truth. The “books” that are opened are our hearts. Our hearts will be opened by the penetrating light of God, and what is in those hearts will be revealed. If there is love for God in those hearts, they will rejoice in seeing God’s light. If there is hatred for God, they will suffer by receiving that same penetrating light.⁴⁰

So God is not passive. He actively reveals Himself. He actively shines His light. He actively loves. But the consequences of that revelation are determined by what the light encounters, not by an act of divine punishment imposed from the outside. Think of it this way: the sun is not passive when it melts ice and hardens clay. The sun is doing the same thing to both—radiating heat. But the ice and the clay respond differently because of their different natures. God’s judgment works the same way. He radiates love. And love melts some hearts and hardens others.⁴¹

Objection 4: “What About ‘Eternal Fire’ and ‘Unquenchable Fire’?”

Someone might point to passages like Matthew 25:41 (“eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”) and Mark 9:43 (“unquenchable fire”) and argue that these clearly describe a fire of punishment that lasts forever. How can the purifying model account for fire that is “eternal” and “unquenchable”?

We will deal with these passages in much greater detail in later chapters when we examine the key “hell passages” one by one (especially Chapters 19–22). But even at this stage, a preliminary answer is available. If God is the consuming fire, and if God is eternal, then the fire is eternal—because God is eternal. The fire does not stop burning because God does not stop being who He is. The fire is “unquenchable” not because God refuses to stop punishing but because God cannot stop being God. His love burns forever because His love is forever.⁴²

The question is not whether the fire is eternal. Of course it is. The question is what the fire does to those who encounter it. Does it torment them forever without end (the traditional view)? Does it purify them and eventually bring them to repentance (the universalist hope)? Or does it consume and destroy those who have nothing in them that can survive the encounter with perfect love (the conditional immortality view)? The divine presence model is compatible with each of these outcomes, and we will explore each one in detail as the book unfolds. But the fire itself is not the issue. The fire is simply God being God. The fire is love.

D. Conclusion and Connection

We have covered a great deal of ground in this chapter. We have traced the image of fire through Scripture—from the burning bush to the pillar of fire, from the refiner’s furnace to the throne of God, from the words of Malachi to the words of Jesus, from Sinai to the Transfiguration to Pentecost. And we have found, again and again, the same pattern. Fire in the Bible is not primarily an instrument of torture. It is the way Scripture describes what it is like to encounter the living God.

God’s fire purifies what is good. It refines gold, removes dross, and makes precious things shine. God’s fire consumes what is evil. It devours stubble, burns away corruption, and leaves nothing impure standing. And the same fire does both. Not two fires. One fire. One God. One love.

The Orthodox Fathers saw this clearly. Basil the Great spoke of the two properties of fire—burning and illuminating. Isaac the Syrian spoke of love as the scourge that torments the wicked while blessing the righteous. Kalomiros spoke of the river of fire that flows from God’s throne and is nothing other than the river of God’s love for His creation. MacDonald spoke of the consuming fire that burns worst at a distance and becomes comfort as one draws near. Baker brought the image to life in the story of Otto, standing before God and experiencing love itself as the most devastating judgment imaginable.⁴³

And at the center of it all stands one enormous, world-shaking claim: paradise and hell are not two different places. They are two different experiences of the same reality—the inescapable, all-consuming, utterly relentless love of God.

I want to be honest with you about what this chapter has meant to me personally. When I first encountered this reading of fire in Scripture, it changed everything. I had always been taught that the fire of hell was a weapon—God’s tool for tormenting those who rejected Him. And that picture terrified me, not because it made me fear God in a healthy way, but because it made me fear that the God I worshipped might be a monster. If God would burn people alive forever, what kind of God was He really? And could I trust a God like that?

The divine presence model gave me my God back. It showed me that the fire is not a weapon. The fire is who God is. The fire is His love. And His love is not something to run from. It is everything we have ever wanted—if only our hearts are open enough to receive it. The fire does not change. God does not change. The only thing that changes is us. And the entire project of the Christian life is learning to love the fire rather than fear it—learning to run toward God rather than away from Him, knowing that the closer we get, the more the burning becomes warmth, and the warmth becomes joy, and the joy becomes home.

This is the claim on which the rest of the book will stand or fall. In the chapters that follow, we will test it against every objection, every competing view, every difficult passage of Scripture. We will evaluate eternal conscious torment and show how the divine presence model handles its strongest arguments better than it handles them itself. We will evaluate the choice model and show where it falls short. We will present the full divine presence model in detail. We will trace the image of fire through every major “hell passage” in the Bible. And we will wrestle honestly with the hardest question of all: does the fire eventually win every heart, or does the fire sometimes find nothing left to save?

But before we can do any of that, we need to carry this image with us. The fire of God is love. It has always been love. It will always be love. And that love is the most beautiful, most terrifying, most hopeful reality in the universe.

Our God is a consuming fire. And His fire is love.⁴⁴