Refiner’s fire and us

Watch this video to the 2:40 (two minutes forty seconds) mark. You need not watch the rest of it, but you may if you wish.

Have you ever received the e-mail below?

Malachi 3:3 says: ‘He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.’

This verse puzzled some women in a Bible study and they wondered what this statement meant about the character and nature of God …

One of the women offered to find out the process of refining silver and get back to the group at their next Bible Study.

That week, the woman called a silversmith and made an appointment to watch him at work. She didn’t mention anything about the reason for her interest beyond her curiosity about the process of refining Silver.

As she watched the silversmith, he held a piece of silver over the fire and let it heat up. He explained that in refining silver, one needed to hold the silver in the middle of the fire where the flames were hottest as to burn away all the impurities.

The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot spot; then she thought again about the verse that says: ‘ He sits as a refiner and purifier of silver.’

She asked the silversmith if it was true that he had to sit there in front of the fire the whole time.

The man answered that yes, he not only had to sit there holding the silver, but he had to keep his eyes on the silver the entire time it was in the fire. If the silver was left a moment too long in the flames, it would be destroyed.

The woman was silent for a moment. Then she asked the silversmith, ‘How do you know when the silver is fully refined?’

He smiled at her and answered, ‘ Oh, that’s easy — when I see my image in it.’

If today you are feeling the heat of the fire, remember that God has his eye on you and will keep watching you until He sees His image in you.

Pass this on right now. This very moment, someone needs to know that God is watching over them.

And, whatever they’re going through, they’ll be a better person in the end.

It is typical of the type of pious e-mails that are constantly being forwarded to you. Generally, I tend to delete them without reading them because they are made up tales that are often little morality plays. Worse, quite often they present a picture of God that is inaccurate, and a view of how he works that makes him little more than a wish-fulfillment device. Inevitably they have a line at the bottom about passing the e-mail on, and that line is often a completely heretical and/or superstitious statement that almost begs someone to “cleanse” or “exorcise” 👿  the e-mail, because that final line often clearly presents a view of God that is not in any way Scriptural.

Nevertheless, this particular e-mail caught my eye, not because of the completely fictional pious story that reads like a morality play. No, it was the comment on refining silver and the process that it takes to refine it. So, I thought you would find it interesting to see how silver is refined today. In passing, the silver is NOT being heated in the processes above to refine it. It is being heated to melt the already-refined silver into nuggets. Below is a fuller quote from Malachi.

“I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the LORD Almighty.

But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the LORD will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the LORD, as in days gone by, as in former years.

Lately, I have had some “end-times” postings, not about the end-times, but about the attitudes that we used to have about the end-times back in the early 1970’s. Back then, we would have split this verse into two parts, as some dispensationalists still do. We would have said that this verse concerns both the First Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Second Coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and that Malachi did not see the period between the two comings, which was the Age of the Church. So, only the first part applied to us. The “messenger of the covenant, whom you desire” has truly come and given us salvation. But, the next part of the verse would only apply to the post-rapture Jews, for whom the plagues, etc., would call them to finally accept the Messiah, and prepare them to be his end-time messengers.

Unfortunately, that is not what the verse is talking about. Like the story above, it is talking about our sanctification, about how he will “refine” us more and more into his likeness. It is no wonder that Saint Paul says:

. . . we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

As I commented a couple of posts earlier, the Holy Spirit is in our hearts working powerfully to transform us. But, often, the catalyst of our transformation is suffering, a lesson that should not be lost. When we ask how this or that Christian was able to go through an incredible experience of suffering and come out like they have, it is often because they were previously prepared by the Holy Spirit, and in the midst of their great suffering, they were powerfully transformed by that same Holy Spirit to become the saint that we see afterward. It is because of that process that Saint Paul can say to the Philippians:

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

One final note. Sadly, the e-mail quoted at the beginning is just as false as all the others. The method used in ancient times for refining silver is the cupellation process. The reason why the refiner closely watched the fire was not because he was waiting to see his reflection in the silver. As you know, we were missionaries in Bolivia (and Perú). In Bolivia, in the Potosí area, the cupellation method is still used in a very limited way. Should you actually wish to see a clay cupellation furnace of the type of which Malachi speaks, go to http://lamar.colostate.edu/~mvanbure/smelting.html and read through the various descriptions. What the e-mail is describing is what you see in the video, the modern melting of already-refined silver so that it is ready to pour into a mold.

But, it gets even worse. The e-mail has a line about silver being destroyed if it is left in the flames too long. This is not true. The boiling point of silver is at 3,924 F°. That temperature is way above what would be used by your common hobby silversmith making jewelry in the way in which the e-mail describes. The reason the silversmith watches the silver heat to the mirror-like state you see in the video is because he then knows that it is fully melted and ready to pour. It has nothing to do with purity. It could sit there at that temperature for a long time. So, sadly, while this e-mail let me reflect some on God, it is still just as false as the rest and did not change my opinion about those type of e-mails. I recommend you do not read them either, lest you get some bad theology, and really wrong ideas about various verses of Scripture. Not only that, but you will learn some junk science. In other words, you will learn stuff about the natural world that is false.