Refiner's Fire
On the television show The West Wing, newly elected President Josiah Bartlett faces the use of force as an abstract concept. He says he knows America has enemies but doesn't feel any personal animosity toward any of them. When an aid plane filled with actual Americans including a doctor he has met is shot down, the president is transformed. He wants to meet those enemies, he declares, with the fury of God's own thunder.
Isaiah 1 has been building to that fury of God's own thunder. 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 anthropomorphic release of wrath has been reached.
Or has it? Familiar with the potentate who reacts primarily to restore his own equilibrium, we take note of the proportionate response. When Chief of Staff and best friend Leo McGarity calls for that proportionate response, that longer-term perspective from his best friend, the President, the result is captivating. Leo summons the president's 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.
He knows, after all, what Alexander Solzhenitsyn will discover and confess in The Gulag Archipelago. "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts." Solzhenitsyn further discerns, "This line shifts. Inside us it oscillates with the years. And even within the hearts overwhelmed with evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an un-uprooted small corner of evil. " Isaiah's God Who purifies, Solzhenitsyn's God Who uproots, is still at work.
Isaiah 1 has been building to that fury of God's own thunder. 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 anthropomorphic release of wrath has been reached.
Or has it? Familiar with the potentate who reacts primarily to restore his own equilibrium, we take note of the proportionate response. When Chief of Staff and best friend Leo McGarity calls for that proportionate response, that longer-term perspective from his best friend, the President, the result is captivating. Leo summons the president's 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.
He knows, after all, what Alexander Solzhenitsyn will discover and confess in The Gulag Archipelago. "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either - but right through every human heart - and through all human hearts." Solzhenitsyn further discerns, "This line shifts. Inside us it oscillates with the years. And even within the hearts overwhelmed with evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an un-uprooted small corner of evil. " Isaiah's God Who purifies, Solzhenitsyn's God Who uproots, is still at work.
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