Refiner's Fire


On The West Wing, newly elected President Josiah Bartlett faces the use of force as an abstract concept. He knows America has enemies but doesn't feel any personal animosity toward them. When an aid plane filled with actual Americans including a doctor he has met is shot down, the president wants to meet those enemies with the fury of God's own thunder.

Isaiah 1 has been building to this. If there were music, it would be increasing in tempo and depth. Your sacrifices are offered halfheartedly, God charges. You show no reverence for Me, the confrontation continues, in the way you handle the human needs in front of you. You use and murder one another made in MY image. Even the highest levels of your society are rotten. Verse 24 thunders, "Therefore the Lord says, the Lord of hosts, the Mighty One of Israel, "Ah, I will rid Myself of My adversaries and take vengeance on My enemies." The point of human-like release of wrath has been reached.

Or has it?  When venting for personal vindication is justified, we take note of the proportional response. When Chief of Staff and best friend Leo McGarity calls for that proportional response, that longer-term perspective from the President, the result is captivating. Leo summons his patient, incremental action because it's what there is. It's what our fathers did. It's also what our Heavenly Father does in the amazing restraint encompassed by Isaiah 1:25.

"I will turn My hand against you, and thoroughly purge away your dross, and take away your alloy."  With all the fire that is deserved to raze the entire infected culture, that which God could surely and literally command, what fire is promised? The fire He will use instead is the metallurgist's fire: careful, restrained, planned, exact. This fire, notably, is pledged to purify the heart of the individual. With all that is wrong with the community as a whole, God is patient enough in his perspective, and confident enough in His work eternal in scope to start with one heart, one person. He will manage circumstances to heat and stir one heart, bring to the surface impurities, and patiently remove them.


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