I was reading the Letter of Jude the other night as a Compline meditation, and I came across the phrase, "eternal fire" used in a threatening way. It wasn't the first time I encountered this phrase, as it appears in similar forms in other epistles, but it was the first time I stopped to think a little more about it, and tried to discern why every time I read it I felt that there was something wrong with the way I was seeing it.
The image that comes to mind with this phrase is a fire that burns us forever - adding to that ever-present threat of eternal punishment against misbehavior (non-conforming?) in this life. This interpretation is not consistent with the loving, compassionate, merciful God that I've come to know through experience.
So, either God is not the loving, compassionate, merciful God that I think He is, or we are looking at the phrase "eternal fire" incorrectly.
Let's consider the sentence, "The king wears a royal crown."
The king, and the crown, are two separate things. The crown itself is mostly metal, cloth and jewels. By itself, there is nothing really royal about it.
What makes the crown royal? Certainly not the crown itself, but rather the status of the king. Since it's the king's crown, the crown gets its royalty from the king, not from itself. So the word royal in this case better describes the source of the royalty, rather than something that comes from the crown itself like, "shiny" or "beautiful." The adjective royal describes a transient property rather than one that emerges from the thing described.
This same treatment of the adjective royal can be applied to the adjective eternal in the phrase "eternal fire." The word eternal is not so much a characteristic of the fire as it is the source of the fire. Since God is the only true eternal being, eternal fire in this sense means "God's fire" just like royal crown really means king's crown."
Now, if God is indeed loving, merciful, and compassionate, then somehow this fire must also have these same characteristics. The fire is not a fire that punishes throughout all eternity, but one that cleanses. It will remove (burn off) all the pieces of the false self that surrounds our soul, our true selves; things like false pride, prejudice, illusions, hatreds, fears, anxieties, guilt and shame - any spiritual ill that prevents us from being who we truly were made to be.
God wants to reclaim us for Himself - not destroy or torture us. "Fire" is a metaphor used to describe whatever actions He may take to prepare us for this homecoming, done in a spirit of love, compassion and mercy.
"I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!" (Luke 12:49)
