consuming fire
Deuteronomy 4:24
4:24 consuming fire. This verse is quoted and applied relative to professing Christian believers in Hebrews 12:29.
4:28 ye shall serve gods. This is a prophecy remarkably fulfilled in later ages. Not only were the Israelites scattered among the nations of the world, but great multitudes of these apostates abandoned the faith of their fathers in favor of many forms–ancient and modern–of evolutionary pantheism. Modern “Reform Judaism,” for example, is little more than evolutionary humanism.
4:30 tribulation. This prophecy, given by Moses as Israel prepared to enter the promised land, apparently looks into the distant future, 3500 years or more, to “the latter days” when Israel will be in the “great tribulation” (Revelation 7:14). At that “time of trouble...thy people shall be delivered,” (Daniel 12:1), and “immediately after the tribulation of those days...He shall send His angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other” (Matthew 24:29,31).
4:32 God created man. “The days that are past,” to which Moses referred, “since the day that God created man upon the earth,” had been some 2500 years (assuming no “gaps” in the received chronological genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11). That was a long time, of course, but was at least a reasonable point of reference to which the people could relate–nothing like the eternal evolutionary ages postulated by the Egyptians, Canaanites and other ancient pagan nations.
4:37 he loved thy fathers. Israel was not God’s chosen people because they deserved to be, but “because He loved thy fathers.” He had made an unconditional promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob because of their faithfulness, not that of their “seed after them.”
