Some Like it Hot

There’s a little one staying with us now who describes everything unpleasant as “hot!”

Prickly pine needles, cold ice cubes, cat scratches, and the oven are all “hot.” 

At least when I say, “Hot!” about the electric fence, she gets the picture and stays away. 

I was thinking of her description of danger this weekend as I taught the book of Jonah at our children’s worship time. There’s a lot of danger in the book of Jonah: tempests at sea, looming shipwrecks, drowning, being swallowed by a fish, preaching repentance to sinners in Nineveh, and even scorching heat. It’s all hot.

Even though the sailors on the ship and the pagans in Nineveh did not know who God was, they did know their eternal danger. At sea, the sailors said twice that they did not want to “perish.” In the wicked city of Nineveh, even the King pagan encouraged his people to repent so that “we may not perish.”

They knew that the danger of any sort of death was perishing eternally. 

In our modern culture, you rarely meet anyone- pagan or otherwise- who is afraid of perishing. No one says, “Hot!” at the threat of death. Instead, we placate ourselves with useless platitudes about “the man upstairs” who loves us too much to send anyone to a nasty place called hell. You’ve probably heard it as much as I have: “There’s no such place as hell, unless you count where we are now.”

I wish we were as honest as the sailors or the Ninevites in Jonah’s day. They knew when danger was hot.

The trials and persecution of the early church led the Apostle Peter to write a letter encouraging them to persevere. He didn’t deny that the trials were hot. He wrote, “…You have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith- more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire- may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

Peter didn’t deny that the fiery trials were hot, but he encouraged the suffering Christians that the worth of their faith was what would prevent them from perishing. Even gold, refined many times by fire, will perish in a fire that is hot enough. However, faith will not. It is refined by fiery trials only to be more solid as it passes through death to life. 

If you don’t acknowledge the danger of perishing, though, how will you ever see your need to be saved from it? If you are never saved from perishing by placing your faith in Jesus, how will you ever have the strength to pass through the trials of earth? 

Genuine believers have both, knowing both the danger of getting burned but also the soothing aloe of Christ’s touch.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”