The church began like this: “On the day of Pentecost all the believers were meeting together in one place. Suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm, and it filled the house where they were sitting. Then, what looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them.” (Acts 2:1-3 NLT) A W Tozer explains what it meant for the people: “That visible fire on the day of Pentecost had for the Church a deep and tender significance, for it told to all ages that they upon whose heads it sat were men and women apart. The mark of the fire was the sign of divinity; they who received it were forever a peculiar people, sons and daughters of the Flame.”[1]
Tozer borrows the word peculiar from Peter’s
first epistle. I cringe a little at being called peculiar, but it is
properly descriptive even if it has a pejorative connotation today. An
increasing number of Americans do think of Christians as peculiar meaning,
“strange, odd; unusual” as the Google
Dictionary defines it. I prefer the second entry though: “particular;
special.” We are particular in that we must be discerning and demanding; we are
special in that we are chosen by God to do His will on earth.
I have to ask myself if American Christians today are in any
way peculiar as Tozer suggests the first century believers were. I wonder what
it should look like to be “sons and daughters of the Flame.” I suppose we
should first consider what flame represents. Fire has three different but
related properties: heat, light, and transformation. Each of these lends
meaning to the idea of being people of the Flame.
Heat is representative of life. We speak of warm bodies to indicate
living beings. In the absence of heat, there is no life. If absolute zero
temperature could be achieved (a
physical impossibility), matter as we know it, let alone life, would cease
to exist because kinetic energy, a feature of molecular “life” and a
characteristic of heat, would cease to exist. No heat – no life. The biblical
understanding that God created our universe ex nihilo (out of nothing)
forces us to conclude that He created heat – molecular motion – as a foundation
for the rest of creation. That’s the physics of flame as heat.
The metaphor drawn from heat-as-life is equally important.
When the Flame (Tozer’s upper case) hovered above the disciples on the Day of
Pentecost, they came alive in an entirely new sense. At the moment the Holy
Spirit descended on them, He filled them, and I suspect though cannot prove
Scripturally, He also regenerated them in that moment. I believe it was at that
point that they were placed “in Christ” in the way that all subsequent believers
are in Christ. It is the Apostle
Paul who makes this crystal clear when he tells the Romans that they cannot
be in Christ unless the Spirit is in them. It is the Flame who accomplishes
this miracle of rebirth and sustains the life He grants.
The second characteristic of flame to be considered is
light. When God spoke our world into existence, His
first words were, “Let there be light.” I wrote in “E=MC2
in Genesis” that a modern physicist might see a great deal more than
visible light in that statement. I have already mentioned that kinetic energy
(heat) is elemental to creation. No less so is light. Notice that plants
require light to exist; without light for photosynthesis, they die. Although
there are some creatures that exist without the benefit of sight (light
reception), most would not survive very long without it. The advance of human
civilization depends largely on our ability to see and manipulate our environment.
Galileo saw in planetary movements the truth that the sun does not revolve
around Earth. Columbus saw that incoming ships appeared to rise from the sea,
indicating that the earth was not flat. The Wright brothers saw in the flight
of birds the possibility that men could take to the skies. We see what is and
dream what could be.
There is a metaphorical meaning here too. Throughout the
Bible, light is used as an analogy for knowledge. To know God is to see that He
is light. Darkness represents everything that is evil; the Light that is God is
the opposite of the darkness of evil. Just as the absence of heat precludes the
presence of life, the absence of light signifies the loss of holiness,
righteousness, and goodness. This is why the Apostle John could write that the
coming of Jesus to earth amounted to the coming of light into the world – the
Light who gives life to all people.
Lastly, the understanding of flame as an agent of
transformation is essential to what it means to be people of the Flame. A
scientist will explain that fire accomplishes not annihilation but oxidation
that creates a change in the item that is burned. We watch a log turn to ash in
a fireplace, and we enjoy the heat it radiates, and we know at some point we
will shovel the remains into the trash. But we may not think about the gasses
that go up the flue or the soot they deposit as they cool. In other words, the
fireplace log is changed into dissimilar physical elements and into heat
energy. Science tells us that the matter involved in a fire is not destroyed;
it is transformed.
Look at what the Flame did to the disciples on the Day of
Pentecost. They went from hiding in the upper room, afraid of what the Jews
would do to them to preaching boldly in the temple courts. They went from a
handful of insignificant people in a forgotten corner of the Roman Empire to “these
that have turned the world upside down.” They accomplished that feat in a
couple of decades. Transformation indeed! If you have been touched by the
Flame, you carry the life that is the Light of men within you, and you are
commanded to be transformed and to take the message of transformation into your
world. If you are hiding your light under a basket, you shame the Flame.
Related Posts: What Do
You Know; E=MC2
in Genesis; Why Witness?
[1]
A. W. Tozer and Gerald B. Smith, Evenings with
Tozer: Daily Devotional Readings (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers,
2015), 391.
No comments:
Post a Comment