The Theology of Fire

FIRE!! FIRE!! FIRE!!

My brother Peter asked a question:

Bible readers, help me with Leviticus 21:9. God permits burning a priest’s daughter who has become a prostitute?!

And here is my response:

In today’s Pentecostal churches people are heard shouting this word fire in what they call deliverances services. They believe that God is a consuming fire to the demons and the dark world (Deuteronomy 4:24, Hebrews 12:29).

Fire, to them, is a solution to demons that cause havoc to their lives in all versions. Fire, then is a conclusive solution to the demons which are the cause of all the problems. This fire solution is an Old Testament invention and fire always solved sin and its container once and for all. What we see in Leviticus 21:9:

And the daughter of the Priest if she profanes herself by playing the harlot, profanes her father; she shall be burned with fire is not an ordinary punishment but dealing with a fundamental problem fundamentally.

The first thing to establish about this whole thing is that the text is not about Sacrifice, but rather, Problem Solving. It was not some kind sacrifice. In fact, Human/child sacrifice was and is banned throughout the word of God: Leviticus 18:21; Leviticus 20:1-5; Deuteronomy 12:30-31; Deuteronomy 18:9-12; 2 Kings 21:1-6; Psalm 106:37-40.

God, in the Bible, has always endeavoured to demonstrate to all of us human beings how our problem (sin) cannot be solved by all measures that we can think about. God applied water (Floods) and sin remained, then he applied wars and the sword (Biblical Genocides) but sin remained, then God tried dealing with sin by burning all the matter that contained it (Fires).

In Leviticus 21:9,  God is using fire to deal with sin. The lesson here is not multiple failures of divine’s measures of solving the problem of Sin, but rather, a demonstration of how the problem of sin is complicated and cannot just be dealt with the earthly ultimate solutions we know.

Incriminating the guilty was one of the Old Testament practices to ensure that the Holiness of both the land and people is maintained. The Bible says in Joshua 7: 24-25 that:

And Joshua and all Israel with him took Achan the son of Zerah, and the silver and the mantle and the bar of gold, and his sons and daughters, and his oxen and asses and sheep, and his tent, and all that he had; and they brought them up to the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said, “Why did you bring trouble on us? The LORD brings trouble on you today.” And all Israel stoned him with stones; they burned them with fire and stoned them with stones.

In Leviticus 20:14 there was another punishment by fire:

If a man takes a wife and her mother also, it is wickedness; they shall be burned with fire, both he and they, that there may be no wickedness among you.

And there are many more incidences where God burns people due to their mistakes (Isaiah 47:13-14; Psalms 21:9; Numbers 11:1; Genesis 38:24; Numbers 16:35; Deuteronomy 32:21-24 etc.).

We have definite knowledge of only two forms of execution: stoning (after which the corpse was suspended in public view) and burning. Fire is believed to be the final punishment that Go will employ to sin and to this sinful world. (John 15:6, Revelation 21:8; 1Thessalonians 1:7-9; Revelation 14:10-11).

Burning was not only a punishment imposed by a court of law. When people took the law into their own hands, they used the threat of burning. In one case such, a threat was even carried out.

In Samson’s stories, we read that the Philistines who pressured Samson’s wife to discover the answer to his riddle threatened to burn her and her father’s house (Judges 14:15). Later on, we read that they indeed carried out the threat and they burned her and her father (Judges 15:6).

The question here should be focused on the issue of FIRE as a punishment and why fire? According to some Biblical Scholars: _The fire motif appears many times in the prophetic literature in war oracles where fire is to destroy the enemy.

The divine fire in battle often appears in the mythology of the ancient Near East. As it is alluded in these verses: Isaiah 29:6; 30:27, 30; 66:15-16; Ps 18:9, 13; 50:2-3; 104:4. The punishment of burning in the Hebrew Bible meant an end to continuity and the final extinction of the deceased, who had not been “gathered to his ancestors.” His spirit wandered aimlessly never to be resurrected. In the Hebrew Bible execution by burning appears in cases of illicit sex, sacrilege and as a threat.

Execution by burning aims at the total obliteration of the evil. The usage of the fire motif comes to stress that nothing is left of the sinner, a method of utter extinction. Burning was done in order to not allow the deceased to find rest. The execution by burning was an atrocious deed meant to profane the dead person’s memory.

The act of burning came to prevent the deceased from being gathered to his kin in the underworld the issue with fire in the Old Testament thinking was about dealing with sin once and for all, it was about making sure that a sinner and their sin are no more forever.

They believed, for instance, that if someone was stoned and buried, they were gathered to their ancestors and their souls still existed but if the culprit was burnt then he/she was no more.

However, their solution had one problem, the spirit of the culprit lived on only that it wandered all-over and this meant the problem was not dealt with completely and yet it was the goal.

Burning left ashes, and if ashes vanished they at least vanished from human sight but not from the sight of the all-knowing and all-seeing being we know as God. Fire, therefore, is not the ultimate solution to sin for God, God has the ultimate solution to sin and fire might not necessarily be the final solution to the existence of sin and its residues. Fire does not entirely extinct sin in the eyes and knowledge of God as it may in our sight. The God who created us and everything from nowhere (nothing/Ex-nihilo), will eventually consume (not necessarily with fire) all that which is foreign (sin, its geography, and its container) to real nothingness, divine oblivion and original nihility.

I hope this will help the brother and others who would love to understand what the fire solution is about in the Biblical Theology to open new fields of research and revelation.

God bless you, I invoke TRUTH, REASON and FAITH
Pr. ITM White
The Gospel Hawker