V. 29.— For our God is a consuming fire. The Apostle refers to Deuteronomy 4:24, —“ For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God;” and while the Gospel exhibits the boundless riches of the love of God, it gives a more awful display of His justice, and abhorrence of sin, than if all mankind had been destroyed. He pardons sins of the deepest dye, but it is only through the death of His only begotten Son. Here we see that He is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and that He cannot look upon sin. When Jesus stood in the place of sinners, the sword was called to awake against the man who was the fellow of the Almighty, and He drank to the very dregs the cup of wrath; so that while the believer joys in God through Jesus Christ, whose mercy endureth for ever, the more clear his apprehension of the way in which this mercy flows to him, the more is he impressed with the evil of sin, which is that bitter thing which God cannot look upon.