The mountains melt like wax at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth. Psalm 97:5
Fire is frequently used in the Bible to describe God’s appearances, attributes, blessings, and judgments. He appeared to Moses “in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush” (Exodus 3:2); He went before the Israelites “by day in a pillar of cloud to lead the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light” (Exodus 13:21); and He appeared as a “consuming fire on the top of the mountain” when He gave them His law at Mount Sinai (Exodus 24:17).
Malachi describes the coming Christ as “a refiner’s fire” (Malachi 3:2); John the Baptist says, “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16); and when the Holy Spirit was given to the apostles at Pentecost, He came in the form of “tongues, as of fire” (Acts 2:3).
Hebrews 12:29 tells us that “our God is a consuming fire,” whose final judgment of those not in His Book of Life is the lake of fire (Revelation 20:15).
O Lord my God, You are very great: You are clothed with honor and majesty, Who cover Yourself with light as with a garment, Who stretch out the heavens like a curtain. He lays the beams of His upper chambers in the waters, Who makes the clouds His chariot, Who walks on the wings of the wind, Who makes His angels spirits, His ministers a flame of fire. Psalm 104:1-4
The vast majority of our heat is produced by the sun, a fiery furnace with an estimated core temperature of 27 million degrees. Yet only about one two-billionth of its energy reaches the earth. The rest is lost in the 93 million miles of space that separate the sun from the earth.
Only a medium-sized star in the Milky Way galaxy, the sun is still more than a hundred times larger than the earth. The largest stars, however, are a thousand times bigger than the sun, or big enough to fill the space between the sun and the earth. The closest star beyond the sun is over 25 trillion miles away—so far that it would take the fastest jet over a million years to get there. The most distant stars are more than a billion times farther than that.
The Milky Way is one of approximately 100 billion galaxies. The next closest galaxy is 160 thousand light-years away, and the farthest galaxies are billions of light-years from it. And beyond those galaxies, outside of the realms of space and time and yet throughout it all, is the Spirit of the living God. (Deuteronomy 10:14; 1Kings 8:27; Nehemiah 9:6; Psalms 113:4-6; 139:7; Isaiah 40:22, 26; 57:15; 66:1-2; Jeremiah 23:23-24; Acts 7:49-50; 17:24-28).
The mountains will melt under Him, and the valleys will split like wax before the fire, like waters poured down a steep place. Micah 1:4
Occasionally I’ve been privileged to have a close-up view of God’s mighty power in nature. The 1971 eruption of Sicily’s Mount Etna provided one of those moments, when a truck-sized boulder was swept into the river of lava only fifty feet in front of me. Skidding over the fiery current like a small cork bobbing in a stream, it suddenly burst into a brilliant flame, then melted like wax into the flow. Such visions are a humbling reminder of David’s question in Psalm 8:4: “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?”