Kindle Notes & Highlights
The symbol of the consuming fire would seem to have been suggested to the writer by the fire that burned on the mountain of the old law.
Or could it have been gramma burning the violin because music leads to pride, according to Calvin.
No revelation can be other than partial . .
Relatively to a lower condition of the receiver, a more partial revelation might be truer than that would be which constituted a fuller revelation to one in a higher condition; for the former might reveal much to him, the latter might reveal nothing.
The true revelation rouses the desire to know more by the truth of its incompleteness . .
Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress.
Can it be any comfort to them to be told that God loves them so that he will burn them clean. Can the cleansing of the fire appear to them anything beyond what it must always, more or less, be—a process of torture?
He is against sin: in so far as, and while, they and sin are one, he is against them—against their desires, their aims, their fears, and their hopes; and thus he is altogether and always for them.
That thunder and lightning and tempest, that blackness torn with the sound of a trumpet, that visible horror billowed with the voice of words, was all but a faint image to the senses of the slaves of what God thinks and feels against vileness and selfishness . . . that so the stupid people, fearing somewhat to do as they would, might leave a little room for that grace to grow in them, which would at length make them see that evil, and not fire, is the fearful thing; yea, so transform them that they would gladly rush up into the trumpet-blast of Sinai to escape the flutes around the golden
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For when we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more. But there is something beyond their fear—a divine fate which they cannot withstand . . . The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear, coming out with tenfold consciousness of being . . . .
That which is immortal in God shall remain in man. The death that is in them shall be consumed.
all that is destructible shall be destroyed .
Away in smoke go the lordships, the Rabbihoods of the world, and the man who acquiesces in the burning is saved by the fire; for it has destroyed the destructible, which is the vantage point of the deathly, which would destroy both body and soul in hell.
He shall be cast into the outer darkness who hates the fire of God. What sick dismay shall then seize upon him! For let a man think and care ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God . . . . God gives him himself, though he knows it not. But when God withdraws from a man . . . then will he listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door; then . . . he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life . . .
The outer darkness is but the most dreadful form of the consuming fire—the fire without light
the darkness visible, the black flame. God hath withdrawn himself, but not lost his hold.
Our every relation, both to God and our fellow, must be acknowledged heartily, met as a reality .
I think I have seen from afar something of the final prison of all, the innermost cell of the debtor of the universe; I will endeavor to convey what I think it may be. It is the vast outside; the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light—where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs is over. Every sense has its signs, and they were all misused: there is no sense, no sign more—nothing now by means of which to believe.
Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his consciousness reaches him
a whole world of miserable contradictions and cold-fever dreams.
no liveliest human imagination could supply adequate representation of what it would be to be left without a shadow of the presence of God
The man who minds only himself must at last go mad if God did not interfere.
Only, then, if a being be capable of self-disgust, is there not some room for hope—as much as a pinch of earth in the cleft of a rock might yield for the growth of a pine? Nay, there must be hope while there is existence; for where there is existence there must be God; and God is for ever good, nor can be other than good.
all I have been saying is imaginary; but our imagination is made to mirror truth; all the things that appear in it are more or less after the model of things that are; I suspect it is the region whence issues prophecy; and when we are true it will mirror nothing but truth . . .
God once get a willing hold, if with but one finger he touch the man’s self, swift as possibility will he draw him from the darkness into the light. For that for which the forlorn, self-ruined wretch was made, was to be a child of God, a partaker of the divine nature, the heir of God and joint heir with Christ.
Then indeed wilt thou be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one—O God, we trust in thee, the Consuming Fire—shall have been burnt clean and brought home.
As for us, now we will come to thee, our Consuming Fire. And thou wilt not burn us more than we can bear. But thou wilt burn us. And although thou seem to slay us, yet will we trust in thee. 37
“A Sunday With Falconer”
David Elginbrod
F.D. Ma...
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outspoken social reformers of the mid 19th century. This made of him a figure
preaching always focused on the fatherhood of God, a fact which obviously drew MacDonald to him.
“On Eternal Life And Eternal Death,”
accused of heresy
forced to resign his professorship of theology at King’s College, London.
the root of our sectarianism,
Men are not regarded as rejecting the counsel of God against themselves. God is represented as the destroyer.
can only kill the body, but of that greater enemy who can destroy their very selves, and that this enemy is—not the devil, not the spirit who is going about seeking whom he may devour, not him who was a murderer from the beginning—but that God who cares for the sparrows!
“Your Father has created multitudes whom He means to perish for ever and ever. By my agony and bloody sweat, by my cross and passion, I have induced Him in the case of an inconceivably small minority to forego that design.”
REMOVE LOVE FROM THE GOSPEL . . . AND WE LOSE EVERYTHING
Every man who knows what it is to have been in a state of sin, knows what it is to have been in a state of death.
I ask no one to pronounce, for I dare not pronounce myself what are the possibilities of resistance in a human will to the loving will of God.
I am obliged to believe in an abyss of love which is deeper than the abyss of death: I dare not lose faith in that love. I sink into death, eternal death if I do. I must feel that this love is compassing the universe. More about it I cannot know. But God knows. I leave myself and all to Him.
it pleases God not to discover all his truth at once, but to cause it to be revealed in portions.
Beginning with Genesis, we trace gradually increasing light till we come to the New Testament
To possess a completed revelation is one thing, to know all that can be known from that revelation is quite another.
so I venture to believe that not many years hence will the doctrine of the restitution of all things find general acceptance, and that good men will look back and sadly wonder how they could ever have held the theory which consigns the larger portion of the souls that God made and Christ died for to immutable, irremediable, never-ending torment and perdition . .
What do we oftenest mean by justice? Is it not the carrying out of the law, the infliction of penalty assigned to offence?
punishes as much as, and no more than, the law has in the case laid down.
repentance removes the offence which no suffering could. I at least should feel that I had no more quarrel with the man.
giving into my heart a repentant brother,
