22 Thus says the Lord,
“Behold, a people is coming from the north land,
And a great nation will be aroused from the remote parts of the earth.
23 “They seize bow and spear;
They are cruel and have no mercy;
Their voice roars like the sea,
And they ride on horses,
Arrayed as a man for the battle
Against you, O daughter of Zion!”
24 We have heard the report of it;
Our hands are limp.
Anguish has seized us,
Pain as of a woman in childbirth.
25 Do not go out into the field
And do not walk on the road,
For the enemy has a sword,
Terror is on every side.
26 O daughter of my people, put on sackcloth
And roll in ashes;
[s]Mourn as for an only son,
A lamentation most bitter.
For suddenly the destroyer
Will come upon us.27 “I have made you an assayer and a tester among My people,
That you may know and assay their way.”
28 All of them are stubbornly rebellious,
Going about as a talebearer.
They are bronze and iron;
They, all of them, are corrupt.
29 The bellows blow fiercely,
The lead is consumed by the fire;
In vain the refining goes on,
But the wicked are not [t]separated.
30 They call them rejected silver,
Because the Lord has rejected them.
At first glance, these two sections don’t seem quite connected. Yet both of them have to do with God disciplining His people. In the first, we see that it has come to an extreme time, where God must use extreme measures to get their attention. Why? Well, we see the answer in the second section. They were stubbornly rebellious, all of them corrupt.
The worst of it all was to be seen in v. 29, “In vain the refining goes on, but the wicked are not separated.” Why not? Because there was nothing to separate them from. It might have looked like silver, but it wasn’t even salvageable. Ouch! Fortunately for them, God had promised never to flood the earth again. Unfortunately, that meant the only way to “press reset” was by doing something drastic.
God is performing this same refining in our day and in our lives, though perhaps not quite to the extreme of Israel’s day. That is, God is refining our hearts, blowing the bellows, raising the heat, working to craft something precious. But what will He find when the job is done? Will God find a heart that is turned toward Him, or something that looks like silver, but isn’t really?
Sometimes God has to raise the heat quite a bit to get our attention, and sometimes even that isn’t enough. Would that our hearts weren’t so stubborn, and we would listen more readily. God doesn’t discipline out of fury or spite, but out of love. We need to look for His hand at work, pumping the bellows, and thank Him that He hasn’t given up on us yet.
We need to (I know I sure do) yield our hearts to His process, let Him burn away the dross, the impurities, and shine all the brighter when we come out the other side. Fire isn’t easy to endure, sometimes it is downright painful, but God wants to make something beautiful in our lives. He wants to make us more like Him, loving people as He does, and showing His glory to the world.