A few years ago, when I was preparing a sermon on refining, I was rather distracted from thinking about what I was going to say by Youtube videos. In my defence, it all began in a good place – I was doing some research into what the process of refining silver would have looked like in the time of the prophet Malachi. The trouble is, what I found were videos of people nowadays refining silver and gold at home. There was one chap who had worked out how to extract the gold from old computer circuit boards and sim cards using various chemicals and processes. I’m a sucker for this kind of thing, I love watching things being made. Anyway, he started off with half a kilo of sim cards and the little electrical connectors that had been trimmed off computer circuit boards and two days later had a whole 1g of pure gold. Not very cost effective, but quite cool.
In a quite different image of refining, I once heard a speaker tell the story of a lady who went to see a silver smith to find out how silver is refined, and discovered that the silver worker has to stay and watch the silver as it is refined, and that the refiner knows when the silver is ready because she can see her reflection in the silver.
We’ve been exploring the various aspects of God’s fire for a month or so now. A couple of weeks ago we thought about the experiences of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, and how God was with them, protecting them, in that fire. If you missed it, then you can always go back and look on our video streams or listen on the podcast.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego had been exiled from the promised land, and carried off to Babylon. They were far away from their homes, the temple, where they wanted to be, and yet they were still faithful to God.
In our first reading this morning, from the book of the prophet Isaiah, we heard God’s message to the people of God in exile. It’s to people like Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego that God is speaking. God says,
“I have refined you – tested you in the furnace of affliction.”
This, however, is not the first time that the metaphor of refining has appeared in Isaiah’s writings. It first appears right back in the first chapter of the book, in verse 25 where we read,
“I will thoroughly purge away your dross and remove all your impurities.”
This verse comes in the middle of that early chapter, which kind of lays out the pattern or programme for Isaiah’s ministry.
It starts with challenges, calling out the unfaithfulness of the people of God, moves on to warnings of the consequences of that unfaithfulness, talks about refining, before moving onto the promises of the restoration of the people of God, once they have been refined.
We see this pattern in chapter 48. We read of their stubborn hearts and rebellion. Then we read that God delayed his wrath, held back the fire of judgement, but refined the people in adversity. If we’d gone on, we would have read about the promise of freedom that God is going to lead the exiles back into.
At the beginning of this series I spoke about the fire of God’s judgement, and the reality of the consequences of choosing to live apart from God. Today we read that sometimes God holds back the fire of judgement, allowing the fire of refining to do its work.
As we think about the that refining work, I wonder if it would be helpful to think of the process from start to finish.
At the beginning of the process there is a mess of stuff, all mixed up. There’s the material you want – the silver or gold or whatever, but it’s all bound up with the stuff you don’t want, the dross. So what is the dross?
In Isaiah we read about the things that were causing chaos in the lives of the people of God, their stubbornness against God, the way in which they repeatedly turned to idol worship – valuing things that they had created above worshipping the one who had created them. They had rebelled against God, refused to follow God’s ways, to love God. These things were dross in their lives and heart.
In a passage about refining in Malachi 3v5, we read, in summary that the dross is “Sorcery, adultery, lying, not paying a fair wage, oppressing the widow or the orphan, not depriving foreigners among you justice.”
These are very practical, every day things (well maybe not sorcery), that foul up our lives and the lives of our communities. They need to be done away with, and the process for doing that is refining.
Let’s think about that refining. I knew those Youtube videos would come in useful really. A couple of things struck me about them. Firstly, what a complex and careful process it is to refine gold and silver. It really does take a lot of time, energy, and effort to get the precious metal out of whatever alloy or ore it’s in. The other thing that struck me was how destructive many of the processes involved are – whether it’s extreme heat or corrosive chemicals – refining is a destructive process. It ends up with something beautiful and precious, but it involves stripping away, separating, burning off.
But that’s not all that we can say about refining. We can also draw on the image of the silver refiner always present, always watching, managing the temperature, waiting for her reflection to appear in the surface of the liquid silver.
And so, we know when it feels like we are going through a refining fire that God is not absent, but is there, with us, closely attentive, and we know that we are being made more able to bear God’s image.
Once that process is complete, what is it that we end up with? What’s the end result, what is the gold and silver?
As we read on in Isaiah 48 we discover that God promises to lead the people into truth, and that as they follow God’s lead and teaching so they will leave Babylon, and return to Jerusalem in peace. This is full restoration.
Although James doesn’t refer explicitly to refining in his letter, it seems that this is the kind of process he is describing. And what are the outputs of this process? They are perseverance, the crown of life, wisdom.
Later in on James 1, in verse 27 we get something that looks like the positive side of some of what Malachi describes as the dross:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
These are the silver and gold, the finished products of the refining process.
So, what are the practical implications of this awareness of God’s refining fire?
Firstly, for us each as individuals. This is time to look at our lives and ask ourselves, is their dross that needs to be refined away? Does what we say we believe make a difference to how we treat those on the edges of society – the widow, the orphan, the foreigner? Does it inform the way we treat and pay our employees and people who work for us? Are we faithful in our marriages? If we are Christians, then our baptism is the sign of our cleansing. We still sin, and get things wrong, and need to repent and be cleansed again and again. Being refined is a long and complex process, and it can feel painful and destructive, but in the end the output is so beautiful because it is the beauty of holiness expressed in wholehearted worship and faithful obedience.
Secondly this is a message that needs taking to our society, to the culture that we live in. It seems to me that we live in society that increasingly demonises the foreigner, neglects the elderly, and marginalises the powerless. So let’s ask God for opportunities to be living examples of a different way of being, let’s speak up for those on the edge, let’s choose to spend our money and our time in ways which support families in their lives. Refining a community is a long and complex process, and it can feel painful and destructive, but in the end the output is so beautiful because it is the beauty of holiness expressed in wholehearted worship and faithful obedience.
As we do these things, so we will be able to say, with the Psalmist:
“8 Praise our God, all peoples,
let the sound of his praise be heard;
9 he has preserved our lives
and kept our feet from slipping.
10 For you, God, tested us;
you refined us like silver.
11 You brought us into prison
and laid burdens on our backs.
12 You let people ride over our heads;
we went through fire and water,
but you brought us to a place of abundance.