Unquenchable Fire

The sight was surreal as smoke shrouded and flames seized the charming old farm house nestled next door.  Lights whirled and sirens wailed while gutsy firemen, hoses in hand, darted about the yard determined to conquer the fierce inferno.

I watched in horror from an upstairs window of our house up the hill.  Joel and Travis, five year old twins who rode with me to school each day, lived there.  In all the haze and glare of the surreal frenzy I couldn’t spot them or their Mom or Dad.  I desperately prayed for their safety and waited for word.

Word finally came.  The boys and their parents were ok.  The house was not.  No one needed to tell me that.  In spite of the best efforts of the brave firefighters, the blaze could not be quenched.  I watched it all from the window.  The frail dwelling was a tinder box of dry kindling.  A charred skeleton of ancient stud walls collapsed as torrents of water collided with towers of smoke. 

The fire could not be put out.  The house burned up.

When John the Baptist warned Pharisees and Sadducees of the wrath to come, he spoke in a rural vocabulary familiar to farmers.  The camel hair garbed wilderness wildman called the pious pretenders “snakes.”  Farmers know all about snakes.  The leather girdled baptizer with a wild honey and locust diet spoke of clearing paths, lifting stones, gathering fruit, felling trees, and burning brush.  Farmers know these tasks like the back of their calloused hands.  In the spirit of Elijah, the plain speaking prophet laid his proverbial axe to the root of the trees, and no one had to explain his earthy exhortations- they were colorful illustrations drawn with simple black and white words.

So when the rustic revivalist painted his apocalyptic masterpiece, his style was realism, his brush the sword of the word of the Lord, and his landscape a farm with a barn.   “Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire,” John plastered the canvas.  “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance. but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:10-12). 

Every farmer, which was quite nearly everyone, understood every word.  The “fan in his hand” would be a winnowing fan or fork, such as a pitchfork, used to toss the wheat in the air to allow even a slight breeze to separate the light chaff from the heavier grain- “the ungodly… are like the chaff which the wind driveth away” (Psalm 1:4).  This process of thorough purging would take place on a threshing floor with the valuable grain “garnered” (it’s how we got the word) in the garner (granary), and the worthless outer husk discarded and burned.            

Like the fire that destroyed my neighbors’ house, the fire that burns up the chaff cannot be put out; it is unquenchable.  Now any Galilean grain grower would understand that if the fire couldn’t be put out, the highly flammable wheat waste would certainly burn up.  Yet John doesn’t depend on his audience to easily translate the simple picture (though I’m sure they did); he explicitly states “he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”  It pictures complete consumption, not ceaseless trauma.  How is it then that such lucid language has been enlisted to defend endless torment?       

As news of the farmhouse fire spread in the community, it was sadly reported that ‘they weren’t able to put the fire out.”  No one deduced from that detail that the house was still burning.  Rather, it was immediately understood that since the fire couldn’t be put out, the house by then had surely burned up, or “burned to the ground” as it is commonly expressed in these parts.  That’s common sense.  But this common sense is uncommon when it comes to how “unquenchable fire” is parlayed by proponents of perpetual pain.  “Unquenchable fire” is deemed indisputable affirmation of ongoing agony of the damned.  Traditionalists cite fire that can’t be put out as evidence of people who won’t burn up.  And that… is non-sense.  

But it shouldn’t be surprising that tanned tillers of the soil comprehend what ivory tower highbrows convolute.  As Jesus celebrated the incomparable John (“among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist”) and expounded on the coming retribution (“it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom in the day of judgment, than for thee”), “at that time Jesus said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.  Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight” (Matthew 11:11, 24-26).  God bless the farmers!   

In the preceding chapter we thoroughly dissected the undying worms coupled with unquenchable fire (Mark 9:44, 46, 48).  In the context of its source (Isaiah 66:24) we learned that these irrepressible agents of destruction completely consumed carcases (that's the antecedent of "their").  They didn’t terrorize undying souls; they devoured dead bodies.  The point of this chapter is to amply prove that “unquenchable fire” expressly expresses destruction, not torment.  

As we see from the pictures in the scriptures, the fire of judgment is unquenchable, eternal, and everlasting.  The objects in the fire are chaff, tares, stubble, dry branches, etc.  What is being clearly communicated is that just like a ramshackle old house, such flimsy flammable items will certainly burn up in a powerful unquenchable fire.  

There are two similar examples in the Old Testament. God says “I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched” (Jeremiah 17:27).  Unquenched fire devours palaces.  “The land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall not be quenched night nor day; the smoke thereof shall go up for ever: from generation to generation it shall lie waste; none shall pass through it for ever and ever” (Isaiah 34:9, 10).  Obliteration is the result of unquenched fire.  Things burn up in fire that doesn’t burn out.

But my traditionalist friends seem blinded by the smoke, and one in particular was sure he had me in a tight corner.  With a smug grin framed in confidently curled lips, he quizzically queried, "If endless torment isn't true, then why is the fire unquenchable?"  I could hear deputy Warren (Barney's replacement in Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show) goading me further: "Ya know what I mean, huh? huh? huh?"  

"It's irrelevant," was my terse reply.  "I believe I know why it is unquenchable, and I will be glad to discuss it," I offered, "but it doesn't matter why as it relates to what happens to the chaff.  The wording is clear: 'he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.'" 

Such conversations have made me realize that defenders of unending torture have not only presumed that unquenchable fire presumes unquenchable chaff, they have also grotesquely visualized the tormented as the eternal fuel for the fire- in other words, the fire burns on because the immortal damned cannot and will not burn up. Ick!  So in spite of John's plain words and clear picture, creed overwhelms read, and an unquenchable consuming fire becomes an afflicting flame that consumes nothing.

Such a concept is both unscriptural and unscientific.  Fire, as we know it, consumes its fuel.  There is no substance that is fuel for fire that is not consumed by the fire it fuels.  I believe the judgment fire in the Bible is unquenchable because it is the eternal fire of God.  As we have discussed, our God is a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:24; 9:3; Hebrews 12:29), and the fire of God consumes.  This eternal, everlasting, unquenchable fire does not need earthly kindling to start; it is already burning when it falls.  Maybe that’s why it’s unquenchable.  Maybe not.  Either way, it is a fire that consumes.  

Scripture is teeming with references to fire as an agent of punishment.  Fire is the inspired word used to communicate, not to confuse.  As we learned in the chapter on the pictures in the scripture, the pictures are not of fire alone, but of incendiary items in an invincible fire.  Fire is not a foggy concept, nor a mysterious word.  Fire is something we understand.  We know what it is, and we know what it does.  Fire consumes!  I witnessed it from the window.  But fire as an instrument of torture that never consumes anything is contrary to our understanding of fire, and to the Bible’s use of “unquenchable fire.”  

It certainly burns up chaff.  Just ask any farmer.  Or fireman.