Strange Fire

The debate continues on TM. The thread has been moved around a bit...to another section of the forum. I also think some of the posts were lost during the transfer process to another server. I haven't posted much of late. There is a lot going on in several areas of my life that have taken up my time and attention, but I do check in daily to see what has been written.

In one of the posts, someone brought up the subject of the "strange fire" mentioned in Leviticus (and again, briefly, in Numbers) that killed Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, when they offered "strange fire" to God. Her point was that since God struck these guys dead, and if we could not come up with a satisfactory rebuttal to the issue, then how could we say that God did not order the atrocities in the OT? I didn't reply, but it did get my thinker going. And I have continued to think about it....

When I typed it into google to get some perspective for this post, it is not surprising that many doomsayer have used it to warn against "strange doctrine".....which pretty much amounts to doctrine which does not agree with THEIR doctrine. No big surprise there.

So what have I been musing about? Well, there are several possibilities that I see. One is, of course, that God really did get pissed at Nadab and Abihu for offering unauthorized fire and struck them dead with some kind of fire that "came out for the Lord" to teach them all a good lesson. This, however, does not seem at all consistent with the God we see portrayed in Jesus.

Web sites like God's Last Call Ministries and God Quest might blame satan, since they seem to lean toward the thought that satan was the instigator of the elaborate rules and regulations of the sacrificial system and other Old Testament oddities and laws. I think there is a lot of merit to their writings and if you have not visited their sites, you should.

Another idea is that, perhaps, these guys took in some kind of strange fire that backfired. Perhaps it was some kind of chemical process or fluke that killed them. Everyone is familiar with the dangers of mixing Clorox with ammonia...and that a toxic gas forms. Who knows what they put in their fire pans? There are other natural type gasses that are poisonous...sewer gas for one. It can be lethal. People have died from sewer gas. (I realize this is a bit farfetched here with the sewer gas...so I remind you all that I am just musing about it) How about natural gas? Fire in the fire pan and natural gas escaping somehow from the earth could do some damage. How about carbon monoxide? How is it formed? (MUSING here...remember that!!) However from later passages dealing with this story, it seems that their clothes were, for the most part, in tact. So then what about lightning?

When my mom was a kid, at a Bible study a bolt of lightning somehow came in the house (through an open door or window, I think) and "rolled across the floor". She said it was like a big ball of electricity...so it happens. "Ah-ha!" those who hold to a literal interpretation of the acts and commands of God in the OT might exclaim at this point. If it was lightening then surely that was from God....and the "fire that came out from the Lord" was what he used to strike them dead. But not so fast there. Does that mean a golfer, out on a Sunday morning, opting out of church for the lure of 18 holes, who is struck by lightning was struck down by God? How about the little girl skipping across the open field when a thunderstorm hits? Or the hundreds of other people who are struck by lightning every year. We might have to stop then and attribute every lightning strike to the Lord's displeasure.

More musings...and perhaps more farfetched and perhaps not, were sparked by the writings I came across via google by a man named Alfred de Grazia. He is quite the prolific writer. There are dozens of writings on his websites among which are writings on quantavolution described briefly as follows....

an abrupt, large-scale change caused by, and affecting one or more spheres such as the astrophere, biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and anthrosphere.

To make a long story shorter, he thinks that many of the things that happened in the OT (in particular some of the things associated with the Exodus, the tabernacle in the wilderness and the arc, and some of the times many of the children of Israel were wiped out. (Golden Calf incident etc) were from changes in the above listed "spheres"...and in electron/electric related things. He goes into great detail which I did not have the time to read...but it sure piqued my curiosity. He also thinks this has something to do with the Egyptian plagues. As a possible cause, he mentions a slow moving comet hovering near the earth for a long period of time. And any of these miraculous/terrifying things the Israelites witnessed that could not be easily explained with their limited reasonings, they attributed to their God (who in their eyes was a tribal type war god to begin with) There are several writings on Alfred de Grazia's web site related to this.

Also in this Q-series were The Lately Tortured Earth, which is a proposed revision of the conventional earth sciences; God's Fire: Moses and the Management of Exodus, which interprets the Exodus in the light of modern science and psychiatry, which offers a new theology and new considerations on the existence of gods; The Burning of Troy, a collection of special studies and memoranda and Chaos and Creation, which presents the general theory of quantavolution.

Just some things to think about when we ponder the fire that "came out from the Lord" Strange, indeed!

I want to write more about the OT. I've come across a few other articles and have some heretical thoughts of my own. But for right now, nap time beckons. Have a great Sunday!!!!!