Purification

​Midweek 5 – 2025                                                                            LSB #’s 420:1-4; 420:5-7; 421
Text – Daniel 3:25
 
“…I see four men unbound, walking in the midst of the fire, & they are not hurt; & the appearance of the fourth is like a son of the gods.”   
 
PURIFICATION
 
 
The faith of Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego led them into the fire.  When they refused to bow down & worship the image of King Nebuchadnezzar,  he commanded the furnace to be heated seven times as hot as usual & had them thrown in,  thinking  it would incinerate them.  
But  it did not harm them.  It did not burn their clothing.  It did not even leave the smell of smoke on them,  though it did kill the unfortunate servants  who threw them in. 
FIRE IN GOD’S WORD
All of us know  that is not how fire normally works.  “Our God is a consuming fire” (12:29), says the author of Hebrews,  & throughout the Bible, fire is the instrument of God’s wrath to completely consume the wicked.  When Nadab & Abihu offered incense to the Lord which he did not command,  fire came out from the Lord & consumed them.  (Leviticus 10:1-2)  
When Korah assembled 250 chiefs of the congregation to rebel against Moses, fire came out from the Lord & consumed them all.  (Numbers 16:35)   When the outcry against Sodom & Gomorrah became great, the Lord rained down fire & brimstone to consume both cities.  
When God gave His Law on Mt. Sinai,  there was fire on the mountain (Deuteronomy 5:22) that struck fear into the hearts of the Israelites.  They said, “This great fire will consume us.  If we hear the voice of the Lord our God anymore,  we  shall die.”  (Deuteronomy 5:25) 
It’s not very often in the Bible that something is on fire & not consumed.  One example occurs in Exodus 3.  Moses looked, & “behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.”  (3:2)   The Lord was in the fire.    The three men in the fiery furnace of Daniel 3, is another example: “The hair of their heads was not singed, their cloaks were not harmed, & no smell of fire had come upon them.”  (3:27)   The only thing the fire consumed was the ropes that bound them.  Perhaps this miracle had something to do with the presence of the Lord in the fire.  
Nebuchadnezzar looked into the furnace & saw a fourth man there with Shadrach, Meshach & Abednego,  & this 4th man looked like “a son of the gods.”   That phrase can also be translated, “the Son of God.”  (Daniel 3:25)   This fits the larger biblical story since Christ, the Son of God,  is the one who keeps us safe from God’s wrath. 
Faith leads us into the fire of repentance during Lent,  & every day.  This fire purifies us & helps us to amend our sinful ways.  Tonight, I’ll use these two different descriptions of fire in the Bible as a way of discussing two different ways to think about repentance.  
First, repentance means that we are totally consumed by God’s wrath & have to be resurrected every day.   Second, repentance means that we are not hurt at all by God’s wrath, but only the ropes that bind us  are burned away. 
REPENTANCE AS BEING CONSUMED
Ordinarily, when we talk about repentance as death & resurrection, we use the image of water, not fire.  The Small Catechism tells us that such baptizing with water indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition & repentance be drowned & die with all sins & evil lusts  & a new man daily come forth & arise.  But we can make the same point with fire.  
By daily contrition & repentance, God’s law reduces us to ashes, & the gospel raises us from those ashes.  In this respect, we are like the Phoenix, the bird from Greek mythology which periodically burns to ashes & then rises again from those ashes.  That’s an image the early church sometimes picked up to describe the resurrection. 
To say that we are completely consumed is to say that there is no part of us that is
untainted by sin.  When Nineveh repented,  the whole city repented from the king  down to the animals.  When we repent, we confess not only that our animal instincts have gone astray, such as our lust or anger or envy,   but we confess that even the best parts of ourselves, the parts we are most proud of,  have likewise gone astray. 
C. S. Lewis points out that our highest desires are at the same time our most dangerous precisely because they are high  & are more easily confused with goodness.  What could be higher than a mother’s love for her child?  And yet  what could more easily eclipse  love for God?  Few people think that their lust makes them good.  
It’s much easier to imagine that love for a child can make someone good,  yet  even that can be selfish.  Lewis imagines a woman who loved her child so much that when he died, she kept the furniture in his room in place  for ten years.  She could not let go of him no matter what, even though it was destroying the husband & daughter  still with her.  
Lewis imagines another woman who loved her child so much that she couldn’t part with him, so she made sure he would always be with her… even in hell.[1]  Perhaps this is a kind of love,  but it is a twisted, selfish kind.   All of our best impulses are susceptible to this sort of distortion by our sinful nature. 
That is why daily contrition & repentance means that every part of us goes into the fire every day & is burned away.   Then, God raises us, every day,  from the ashes.  
REPENTANCE AS ONLY THE ROPES BEING CONSUMED
Another way to think about daily contrition & repentance is that we are not hurt by the fire of God’s wrath at all, but only the ropes that bind us  are burned away.  Here the point is that God created us good & implanted in us the natural desires that we have.  Sin is not a different set of desires that invades us,  but it is a corruption of those desires that God gave us.[2]   It’s as if sin has wound ropes around our healthy desires & dragged them off in a direction God did not mean for them to go.  Even our most sordid desires have a basis in something good.  
C. S. Lewis illustrates this with a story of a man who appears in heaven with a red lizard on his shoulder.  The lizard is a demon of lust.  An angel kills the lizard & throws it on the ground, freeing the man from its grasp.  Yet there is no void left where the lizard was  because the lizard transformed into a great white horse.  The man got on the horse & rode away.[3]  
The point of the story is that God has implanted desires in us which are far nobler & more powerful than lust,  as a horse is nobler & more powerful than a lizard.  But sin has constrained & diminished them  from a horse  down to a lizard.  The fire of repentance, then, burns away the constraints  & lets us begin to function closer to our God given capacity.
Taken together, these two ways of thinking of repentance  help us understand that it does not make us less human; it makes us more.   We are tempted to imagine that being purified means  God expects us to slice off pieces of ourselves  until we become well curated, gentle, harmless creatures who have no struggles  because we have only the mildest of feelings. 
That assumes there are pure parts of us that would remain after the “surgery.”   If we understand that the fire consumes us completely, then  there’s no process whereby we determine which parts of us need to go  & which parts we should keep.  
On the other hand, if we understand that the fire only burns the ropes, then we realize that our desires are not the problem,  but sin’s constraint of them is.   The underlying desires want & need to function within the boundaries that God has created so they can truly flourish.  The fire of repentance is a blessing because it helps us become who we truly are.  Still, it is a terrifying blessing because of its power.   This is why we remember the 4th man in the fiery furnace – the Son of God.  Whether the fire consumes us  or only burns away the ropes,  it cannot ultimately harm us  because Jesus has already been consumed by it,  & He rose  from the ashes.  
As Jesus rose from the ashes,  in Christ,  so shall we.  Repentance purifies us  so that we become what God intended us to be.   Because it kills our sinful nature, honest repentance is a painful process, but as we trust in God’s promises, the Holy Spirit enables us to turn back to Christ.  There, in Jesus, we find rest from all the struggles & sorrows of life.  Amen. 
 
 
 
Thou hast suffered great affliction  & hast borne it patiently,  even death by crucifixion,  fully to atone for me;  Thou didst choose to be tormented  that my doom should be prevented.   Thousand, thousand thanks shall be,  dearest Jesus,  unto Thee.      Then, for all that wrought my pardon,  for Thy sorrows deep & sore,  for Thine anguish in the Garden,  I will thank Thee evermore,  thank Thee for Thy groaning, sighing,  for Thy bleeding & Thy dying,  for that last triumphant cry,  & shall praise Thee, Lord on high.  Amen.  LSB 420:6-7. 


[1] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), 90–96.

[2] For a technical doctrinal discussion of this matter, see FC SD1, which uses Aristotelian terminology to classify original sin as an accident, not a substance.

[3] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, 98–105.