Intro Scriptures
“Be on guard
so that you do not forget the covenant of the Lord your God that He has made
with you, and that you do not make an image of any kind, just as He has
forbidden you. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire; He is a jealous God”
(Deut 4:23).
“As I
watched, I noticed a windstorm coming from the north – an enormous cloud, with
lightning flashing, such that bright light rimmed it and came from it like
glowing amber from the middle of a fire… In the middle of the living beings was
something like burning coals of fire or like torches. It moved back and forth
among the living beings. It was bright, and lightning was flashing out of the
fire. The living beings moved backward and forward as quickly as flashes of
lightning… I saw an amber glow like a fire enclosed all around from His waist
up. From his waist down I saw something that looked like fire. There was a
brilliant light around it, like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds after
the rain. This was the appearance of the surrounding brilliant light; it looked
like the glory of the Lord. When I saw it, I threw myself face down, and I
heard a voice speaking” (Ezek 1:4, 12-14, 27).
Re-Contextualizing Scripture for Today
What we need
today is to be caught on fire by One who is
a Consuming Fire. Our inner person needs to be ablaze with the fiery heart
of the Living God, whose name is Jealous, Jealous.
We have had
the fires of illicit passion burn within us for the spoiled fruit of
lawlessness. We burned for satisfying sexual cravings. We burned for satisfying
carnal lusts for immediate self-medicated pleasure of the senses. Our heart
burned for Hollywood that the lusts of our eyes may partake in sensuality and
violence, that our ears may partake of profanity and sexual innuendoes, that
our mind’s eye may partake of self-escaping fantasies.
Our heart
desires to be the character on the screen. Our heart desires to possess the
romance depicted on the screen. Our heart burns for the heights of romantic
highs of hormone driven ecstasy. We seek to satiate the fires kindled in our
heart by the stories in romance novels, in romantic cinema presentations, by
the sizzling articles in magazines.
We search
craving for satiation of these desires that burn seek a way of escape into our
entire livelihood that we can become caught up in the realm where our fictional
fantasies become concrete reality. The fire within us cries out to be released.
We search to find release. We seek the reality of our fiction. We move from
person to person, occasion to occasion, seeking our true first love. Our heart
craves to have its yearning kindled by fiction to become fully and never-endingly
satiated with the self that freely partake in the height of romantic
enrapturement, where loneliness ceases, where emptiness ceases, where striving
for acceptance ceases, where the thirsts for more ceases.
The script
has been written, yet we seek the actor (actress) who can join us in our masquerade
of romantic fiction. Our heart yearns for the story that kindled this fire to
become ours, that our candle can be lit. Reality sucks and our heart becomes
kindled for escape. To pass into another world through a screen, a mouse, and a
keyboard. To play a role on social networking to numb the isolationism that has
become one lonely candle burning.
Our heart burns for pleasure. We eat. We
drink. We overload the senses. Then comes the pain. Then comes the regret. The
fire has turned into a self-consuming fire of insatiable lusts. We eat and eat.
We drink and drink. We watch and watch. Yet the more we do the more the
emptiness of our existence turns into an abyss with a floating candle gradually
fading in the whirlwind of unbridled desire. In moments the candle bursts and
unleashes forth pain in the lives of those around us, who no longer play the
role we had set for them. They no longer serve our dreams. They remind us of
how lost we are to our dreams. We hate these reminders.
We escape
into fires of career, the fires of video games, the fires of social networking,
the fires of hobbies, the fires of partying, fires of friendship, the fires of identity
crises. We burn to find our self elsewhere.
