Opus 2026-040: Producing the Gold

We have a process which we go through as God develops His people.  We get occasional glimpses of the process.

(Pro 25:4 KJV)  Take away the dross from the silver, and there shall come forth a vessel for the finer.

We often refer to this as related to tribulation, hard times, persecution.  We look at it as the way in which God builds godly character.  But that is more the end process.  It totally ignores the earlier steps to getting pure gold or silver.

The days of picking up gold nuggets in the stream bed are gone.  People still pan for gold and I understand can possibly make a daily wage at that, but it is not something that’s just sitting there waiting to be gathered in.  Modern gold, along with silver and anything else that’s a precious metal, has to be dug out of the Earth and go through a long process.

Of course, the first step is mining the rock that contains the oar.  This is a long, difficult and dangerous process.  It requires tunneling in the right place and dragging large amounts of rock out of the ground.

I believe the next step is to crush the ore.  This is something which was very difficult before we had the industrial revolution.  It involves massive weights and big machines smashing down on the rocks and breaking them up into smaller, manageable pieces.

Then you have to heat the rock to the point where the metal liquefies and runs out to be gathered together.  In that condition it might have some uses, but it is still a long way away from being a pure product.

Then you get to the process described above.

After you have the pure product it still might have limited usage.  Pure gold is a wonderful thing.  It does not corrode.  It is malleable.  It is also too soft to be of use in much besides jewelry.  Gold coins say on the front, I believe, that they are something like 99% pure gold.  It is that one percent that is added that makes them useful in anything except decoration.

Iron is a wonderful product.  It has many uses . But it does not become steel until you add a bit of carbon and possibly other elements.  It is those added elements which can give it whatever qualities you’re looking for.

If you look back through the history of the Bible, you see God preparing people through the same process.  Out of the entire population of the Earth only Noah and his family survived the flood.  Consider that the mining process and flood as the crushing of the rock.  From that rock comes an impure element.  It had to be separated and the impurities removed.  You might consider Israel going to the promised land and being told to cleanse it a similar process.  Then you get to the real refining.

I am not an expert on this obviously, but my picture is that you have to continually heat the gold and skim the dross off the top.  It is a long process.  I think of the times of the prophets as they kept calling Israel to repent, and Israel pretty much laughed in God‘s face.  Yet we always see reference to the remnant.  There is always a remnant.  When God sends in the Philistines or the Chaldean’s or the Babylonians to decimate the population, the remnant survives.  The remnant multiplies.  The remnant is once again heated up and dross is removed.

Eventually, the children of God get to the point where they’re ready for the Messiah.  Again, it is only a small remnant that respond.  Paul used to get upset because there were so few Jews that responded to the gospel.  Of course, if you look at the number of Gentiles that responded out of the total population it was always a small group also.  Somewhere in here you add in the alloys. Those are the materials which add the needed quality to the pure metal.

Enter the Holy Spirit.  It can be a long process.  For most of us it is still going on at an individual level.  I cannot speak for God, but I believe there is a sense in which He is preparing people for eternity.  At one point they were called the children of Israel.  Now they are called body of Christ.  I don’t know what we will be called in the language of Angels, but I hope to find out.

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