Fasten me upon your heart as a seal of fire forevermore. This living, consuming flame will seal you as my prisoner of love. My passion is stronger than the chains of death and the grave, all consuming as the very flashes of fire from the burning heart of God. Place this fierce, unrelenting fire over your entire being. Rivers of pain and persecution will never extinguish this flame. Endless floods will be unable to quench this raging fire that burns within you. Everything will be consumed. It will stop at nothing as you yield everything to this furious fire until it won’t even seem to you like a sacrifice anymore. Song of Songs 8:6-7
We had barely started talking when I blurted the words.
“I don’t take saying ‘I love you’ lightly. I must know that I mean it before I say it.”
I expected a response but when none came, I added, “I feel like it kills me every time I say it”
His lips curved into a smile and it seemed those beautiful eyes had fire in them boring a hole straight through me.
“That’s the whole point”, He said.
My eyes grew wide and I laughed out loud. Love is supposed to put you to death and then resurrect you as a new being, with a new source of life from the focus of your love. It is Love only when a part of you loses its source of existence from you and gains it from another. This is one of the reasons we subconsciously hold back. What if the focus of your love doesn’t plug your life support into its own source or breathes something other than pure love into you? We are afraid of dying and forget that resurrection is only available to the dead.
A defence mechanism many of us have built is to claim to love without expecting love back in return. We don’t want to owe anyone and least of all, God. How can you even begin to repay? But how can you keep giving, if you don’t keep receiving? Love’s cycle is incomplete unless it receives and gives. You are not a self-producer of love, God is.
Another scenario is that your pipe could be clogged with your own mess and the air from your new source can only now enter in small measures. This is where the love of God deals us the best card with His powerful cleansing nature.
This is what the poet in Song of Songs describes in the fiery verses above.
Growing up, when we called God a consuming fire, it was with a feeling of dread. We’d hear and say that even though God is a loving Father, He is also a consuming fire, so it was important to please Him and avoid that fire.
Now, I see the foolery of that. Avoiding that fire has been our error. We are to embrace everything that is God, knowing that He is all good and loving. We are to understand that whatever His fire strips away from us was never ours, to begin with. Only the pure will see God and this is God’s desire for us; and He fulfils this by purifying us with His audacious, carefree, relentlessly burning love.
This isn’t always enjoyable but it is necessary for the removal of all fear, perverted understanding of what love is, doubts, and anything else that cannot be found in God. As these get removed, we are able to receive from Him, pure, sweet, and unfeigned love. We are able to enjoy the overwhelming heat of His love.
One quality about His love is that you do not have to look for it. He is always with you as you try to do life on your own, taking a hold of you just at the right time.
The Passion Translation captions it well in that rendition of the poetic verses in the Song of Songs. It’s also in Psalm 40. God seals us as a prisoner of His love. His love ties us to the altar as a love offering. It has been written before time was created.
Prisoners and sacrifices are not exactly the most willing of beings. After getting caught or reared to be God’s offering, will you give in to being sealed, offered up and burned until all that’s left of you is God?
