Proverbs 17:3, “The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, and YHWH tests hearts.”
The crucible and the furnace melt the metals down to liquid so that the dross and slag that were inseparably fused within and throughout the pure metal rise to the surface and can be skimmed off. It is a traumatic process. Extreme heat that transforms the solid metal into a liquid, that breaks down whatever form or function it previously had and leaves it—for a time—a useless puddle. That is what the Holy Spirit tells us YHWH is to the heart.
The Lord is like this fire. He melts us down, He exposes the dross and the slag, He divides the impure from the pure, and He does it through the fire of His sovereign purposes for each one of us. And for the one in Christ, this is good news. Good news not because it means the melting won’t be painful; rather, good news because it means that the fires—like the Furnace Himself—are for us. In Christ, YHWH Himself has extinguished the “fire that is not quenched,” He has borne the fullness of wrath in Himself. This means that every fire He may bring into our lives is a fire of cleansing, of testing, of further fitting us for more of Himself. If God is for us in Christ, what good news it is that He who tests us has committed Himself to bringing us through the test and present us before His own glory with great joy (Jude 24-25).
And notice that, for the hearts of His people, YHWH does not use a crucible or a furnace, it is He Himself who tests them. What does this mean? At the very least it means that the various and grieving trials by which the Lord tests us (1 Peter 1:6-8) are not impersonal processes….it is not as though God puts us in the crucible of cancer or family tension or hunger or loss and sends us into the fires to suffer for a while and then draws us back out to see the results…..No, for the Christian, the Lord Himself is our crucible. He surrounds us and upholds us in the flames. And, because He bore our sufferings on the cross, it is truly as if He—just as a crucible—is heated to white-hot intensity by the same fires that melt us down. And just as the proud silver goblet becomes a molten pool cradled in the heart of the crucible, so too when we melt, we melt into His hands….the very hands that bore our wrath and that will now, in love, mold us anew into a vessel fit to bear the eternal flood of life that is God poured out in Christ through the Spirit.
