Isaiah 30:27
Behold, the name of the LORD cometh from far, burning with his anger, and the burden thereof is heavy: his lips are full of indignation, and his tongue as a devouring fire: Behold, the name of the LORD cometh from far, burning with his anger, and the burden thereof is heavy: his lips are full of indignation, and his tongue as a devouring fire:
Isaiah 30 belongs to a portrayal of Israel's rebellion in forsaking God and seeking help from Egypt, teaching against trusting in people and exposing human weakness. That prophecy concerning Israel is typical of conditions in the Christian age. The same failure is repeated when churches seek union with civil power instead of relying on God alone.
The verse describes the name of the Lord coming from far, burning with anger and bearing a heavy burden of punishment, with lips full of indignation and tongue as devouring fire for the judgment of the wicked. That coming is shown as the second coming of the Lord with terrible consequences immediately following. It is also God rising in judgment to vindicate His existence and character after men have rejected Him. Yet the surrounding prophecy connects this coming with the defense and deliverance of Jerusalem, so the devouring-fire imagery is not to be taken as a description of the final advent alone.
His glorious personal presence comes in unveiled glory as a consuming fire that first devours sin and then destroys those who have identified themselves with sin and rejected God and His righteousness, because the wicked are as inflammable in that glory as the sin they embraced. Those who admit His presence through His Spirit have sin consumed within them and are left free and holy, while those who refuse perish with their sin, since the fire consumes sin and all that is bound up with sin. This fiery judgment falls on the wicked and on all earthly things identified with sin, turning the earth into a lake of fire that forever purges it of sin. As the Old Testament counterpart to Gehenna, the fire of Hinnom, it proves complete destruction of what the fire consumes rather than everlasting conscious torment.
The judgment includes punishment for Satan as leader of the wicked, for the fire prepared for him burns up the wicked completely and purifies the earth from sin before it is restored as a new earth for God's people. The context also exposes the terrible wickedness of the people's leaders, whose cruel deceptive power is as a bridle in the jaws of the people causing them to err and saddling and riding blind humanity into ruin, now at work in teaching that the first day of the week is the Sabbath and that Moses and not God wrote the Ten Commandments.