Devouring Fire
And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.
….
And the Lord came down upon mount Sinai, on the top of the mount: and the Lord called Moses up to the top of the mount; and Moses went up.
And the Lord said unto Moses, Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the Lord to gaze, and many of them perish.
-thus Exodus 19:18-21
And the sight of the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel.
-thus Exodus 24:17
I don’t think we’ve quite incorporated this into our picture of deity. I know I haven’t.
His love and glory are hungry, to the point of eating you up. Love and righteousness is not just a concept or an emotion, and too concentrated a form of them is dangerous, like concentrated uranium, to the point that it will kill you. Not just kill you, but burn you up.
C. Rossetti
April 27, 2022
Our God, heaven cannot hold Him
Nor earth sustain,
Heaven and earth shall flee away
When He comes to reign:
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty —
Jesus Christ.
E.C.
April 27, 2022
This reminds me of the hymn ‘Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise’, which has a whole 4 more verses that aren’t currently in the hymnbook, dealing with the events leading up to the Millennium, of which this is the last:
Then when the thousand years are past,
And Satan is unbound,
O Lord preserve us from his grasp,
By fire from heav’n sent down,
Until our great last change shall come,
T’imortalize this clay,
Then we in the celestial world,
Will spend eternal day.
The D&C reiterates the idea of ‘everlasting burnings’ and a God whose brightness and glory might actually devour the unprepared.