Fire! Glory! And God killing His anointed ones
In my years in the charismatic church, two words I heard ubiquitously were “Fire!” and “Glory!”
They were always in a positive context, usually associated with ecstatic, sensual experiences fueled by emotional manipulation.
I was never taught that in the Bible, fire was mostly an instrument of God’s judgment. In my reading recently, I came across an example of that.
In Leviticus 9:23-24, the glory of the Lord appeared to the people. His fire came down from heaven!
FIRE! GLORY!
And then ...
God killed the sons of Aaron. The priests whose job it was to lead worship of Him.
The Lord consumed them in the fire of His wrath, just like He consumed the sacrifices. Because they worshiped Him in a way He had not instructed them.
Makes us think twice about singing “consume me with Your fire,” eh?
And this was shortly after they had been anointed (there’s another word heard a lot in charismatic circles).
Unrestrained worship
Perhaps they got caught up in the excitement and ecstasy and spectacle of the supernatural manifestation of God’s glory, and thought that gave them license to do what they wanted to do. They got caught up in their passion. They were unrestrained.
They may have learned that from their father Aaron, who presided over another time the Israelites worshiped God in a way that brought His wrath upon them.
When Aaron fashioned the golden calf in Exodus 32, the people feasted, danced, and “rose up to play” (verse 6). When Moses descended from Mount Sinai, he said he heard “the sound of singing” (verse 18). It was a time of revelry, reminding me of the romper-room atmosphere I saw many times in charismatic churches.
Verse 25 says, “Moses saw that the people were unrestrained (for Aaron had not restrained them, to their shame among their enemies).” As the worship leader, it was Aaron’s job to restrain the people’s worship, to keep it from going beyond what God has instructed. He sinfully did just the opposite.
Related video: What Christians can learn about worship from the golden calf
To obey is better than sacrifice
Many Christians want the rush, the passion, of experiencing the manifest presence of God. When we get carried away in that, we take it upon ourselves to worship God our way. We think we can do whatever we want, and when that happens, we do all sorts of things we don’t see in Scripture. We become unrestrained.
We think God’s OK with it because it’s coming from our hearts, from our zeal for Him, and that’s what matters.
But when the Israelites partied before the golden calf, and when Aaron’s sons offered “strange fire” before the Lord, He wasn’t like, “They mean well. They’re trying to worship Me. I delight in that, whatever form it takes. I don’t want to put them in a religious box or invalidate their feelings. They’re My people, and they should have the freedom to express themselves from their heart.”
No, what God wants is reverence and order and sobriety and, most of all, obedience to His word. That's the only proper response to His presence (which we are in all the time, everywhere).
The golden calf came shortly after God revealed the Ten Commandments to Israel. The second of those commandments is not to make a graven image. That’s not just about worshiping statues of other gods; that’s about reducing the one true God to an image that we can control (which is what the Israelites did when they made the calf). It’s about worshiping God our way.
We don't get to do that.
Jesus said in John 4:24 that “those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” I’m afraid that in many churches, we zoom in on the spirit and forget the truth.
