Consuming Passion

His disciples remembered that it was written, "ZEAL FOR YOUR HOUSE WILL CONSUME ME." (John 2:17)

This is the verse that presents itself for my attention this morning. What comes up in my mind are questions about this zeal, this passion and how I should understand it correctly. I like another rendition of this verse that I found which seems to put it more succinctly.

And it came to the minds of the disciples that the Writings say, I am on fire with passion for your house. (John 2:17 BBE)

This event and the similar one like it near the end of Jesus' ministry has been used as justification for all sorts of attitudes and actions throughout history that have almost nothing to do with the kind of passion that was really in the heart of Jesus. People tend to only look at these stories on the surface and immediately jump to conclusions and make assumptions about what they may be justify or encourage by Jesus' example. Many times a person's anger and even violence is excused by pointing to these actions of Jesus when in fact these displays of selfishness have nothing to do with the kind of jealousy for His Father's reputation that motivated the heart of Jesus.

But what also came to my attention this morning was the fact that this intensity, this zeal, this passion seemed to become most obvious in the life of Jesus under certain circumstances. And in this case it was when He was in the temple which was supposed to be the house on earth belonging to God, the Father of Jesus and to Jesus Himself since He too was God. So in effect, it might be seen that when Jesus came to His own family's house on earth as a representative of humanity He could rightfully be expecting to find God's presence there in that house.

With this expectation in mind, when Jesus found instead a counterfeit system of religion firmly entrenched in the very house where He should have been able to find God's sweet presence and love, He became very jealous and passionate about this terrible slander against His family reputation and was moved to try to restore a better picture of God in the house of His Father. What He wanted to do was to reunite God's house with God's presence. And God's presence itself is the nuclear core, the very center of passionate love, the great source from which all other passions find their origin.

This concept of God as the originator and center of all passion has been something relatively new in my awareness. But the more I study about this the clearer this truth becomes. As I have unmasked the many false assumptions about passion and the misinterpretations of what is called God's “wrath”, it has become much more clear to me that humans have distorted the messages God wanted to pass down to us in the Scriptures about God's passion.

A principle that I have come to observe in the Bible is that the closer we get to God's presence the more intense will be our emotions. Passion itself seems to me to simply be an intensification of emotions, something like an accelerator, a booster, an amplifier. It is not necessarily an identifier of the nature of the root emotion or attitude which it amplifies, it simply intensifies whatever is already there.

It is like greatly increasing the light on an object making it much more clearly seen for what it really is.

It is like turning up the volume on a quiet sound so that everyone can clearly hear what it really sounds like.

It is like adding a power booster to a moving object to accelerate its movement in a certain direction. It does not change the direction of the object but only increases its speed in whatever direction it is already traveling.

Our confusion about passion often comes from observing its effects when it has been applied to human motives, human cravings of the flesh that are amplified and intensified by passion.

When sexual desires are suddenly intensified by great passion a person often feels driven to acts of violence against others. But this only reflects the basic selfishness that already controls the life.

When anger and desires for revenge are amplified by passion, violence is usually the result and wars break out in attempts to control or destroy all who are in opposition.

When greed is amplified by passion, honesty, integrity and compassion for others can quickly evaporate in the rush to enrich one's self at the expense of others.

Because most of the examples of passion are in the realm of intensifying human, sinful desires, some have come to view passion itself with suspicion, believing that it is itself sinful. But this is a mistake and sets us up to misunderstand the passion of God. It also prevents us from being able to properly appreciate many of the actions of Jesus when fueled by the passion of heaven.

There are two other places in the Bible that come to mind as I think about this principle of passion. There are many more I know, but two stand out right now. One is found in Revelation 14 where it points out that those who reject the truth about God will suffer fiery torment in the presence of the angels and the Lamb. This is one of the most misunderstood verses in the Bible because of the false assumptions about God that people bring to this text.

If one starts with the false assumption that God gets mad, runs out of patience and is ready to punish and reek revenge against those who spurn His advances of love, then this text will be assumed to mean that God is intentionally hurting everyone who will not agree with Him. This is the view of nearly the whole world today and reinforces a picture of God worse than the devil himself.

But when this verse is carefully viewed through the lens of a better understanding of God's character and attitudes towards sinners which is based only on real love, it can be seen that it is talking about the danger of being exposed to pure love when it is mingled with intense passion. For it is not God who is torturing these people in His presence but it is their own conscience that torments them when faced with the irreconcilable conflict between pure love and entrenched resistance to love that has been stored in their own hearts. When enough power and resistance meet there is always heat and fire produced as a result.

On the other hand, God's passion which amplifies our awareness of His unbelievable love for us can have the opposite effect if we have previously let go of the lies about Him in our hearts put there by the distortions of His enemy. When we allow God to bring us into full harmony with His love and let go of all resistance to His grace, that same passion that induces unimaginable pain and torment for the rejectors of mercy becomes the greatest motivation for joy, pleasure and excitement for the saved. The Bible says that they will shine as the stars of the sky. This is a result of the passion of God flowing through a life and heart that has been brought back into full synchronization with the passionate heart of God who is love.

The other incident that I see in the life of Jesus where I sense this same passion flashing out of His heart was when He was anointed with perfume at Simon's feast. In John 12:7 Jesus' response to selfish criticism by some of the disciples was to instantly exclaim, “Leave her alone!!!” I see in this story the same kind of passion that came to the defense and protection of an extremely sensitive heart that had come to know God's heart in ways that none of the others in the room had yet experienced.

Passion is consuming, no doubt as this text states. But the fuel that passion ignites when it comes will determine the outcome and nature of what happens next.

When sinful desires are mingled with passion, then what will ensue will be the amplification of sin and its results.

When pure love is ignited by the intensifier of passion, what will be demonstrated is a revelation about the heart of God that may often be unfamiliar to most of us.

We confuse God's passion with the more familiar human examples of sinful passion because we almost never see the pure and holy passion of God in our experience. But this is, in fact, the very thing that we need the most and at a deep level really crave to experience. This is what we were originally designed for and what will cause us to thrive and come to be fully alive.