“Therefore, the Lord, the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the Mighty One of Israel, says, “I will take revenge on my enemies and pay back my foes! I will raise my fist against you. I will melt you down and skim off your slag. I will remove all your impurities. Then I will give you good judges again and wise counsellors like you used to have. Then Jerusalem will again be called the Home of Justice and the Faithful City.”“
Isaiah 1:24-26 NLT
The previous verses in Isaiah 1 paint a picture of a corrupt Jerusalem. In the prophecy, Isaiah wrote of a series of comparisons between the Jerusalem of old, “Once the home of righteousness and justice” and now instead being “filled with murderers”. The Lord said that Jerusalem was “Once like pure silver, [but had now] become like worthless slag”. It wasn’t, of course, the bricks and mortar of Jerusalem that had become corrupt, but it was the people who lived within its walls. They “loved bribes and demanded payoffs” and refused “to defend the cause of orphans or fight for the rights of widows”. The leaders were a morally flawed people who selfishly lined their own pockets and neglected the social needs of the people. But that didn’t let the ordinary inhabitants of Jerusalem off the hook because they were all pursuing an agenda that was in conflict with God’s and found themselves vulnerable to judgement and punishment.
So with that background, the “Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the Mighty One of Israel” was warning then that a time was coming when He would take revenge on these corrupt and Godless people so that Jerusalem could be restored to what it should have been, “the Home of Justice and the Faithful City”. The process would involve much pain, the Lord said, with the inhabitants going through a refining process and all the dross, the useless rubbish, being removed. And the corrupt leaders would be replaced by honest judges and wise and capable leaders, all of them God-fearing and tasked with restoring Jerusalem’s reputation.
When was this going to happen? That was up to the people. If they repented of their sin and returned to the Lord, then God would not have needed to take any action at all. That was why He chose Isaiah to be His messenger to the people. It was always better for people to change themselves rather than force God’s hand.
A prophet called Zechariah emerged in Jerusalem about 200 years after Isaiah, and he spoke the Lord’s message to the people in Jerusalem, which had been rebuilt after the exile. He had a similar warning to the people as Isaiah’s, and in Zechariah 13, he warned the people that a time was coming when two-thirds of the people would perish. Of the remaining third, the Lord said, “I will bring that group through the fire and make them pure. I will refine them like silver and purify them like gold. They will call on my name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘These are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The Lord is our God’” (Zechariah 13:9). The refining process was something that was going to happen under God’s control. A skilled silversmith will carefully refine the silver, watching what is happening closely. The purpose of the process is to remove all the impurities so that the silver becomes pure, and when the silver has been fully refined, the silversmith can see his reflection in the surface of the silver. If we spiritualise that we can see that “silver” is the people, and the impurities are the sins and evil they committed. Once refined, God can see His reflection in the people, meaning that all their sins have been dealt with, and they reflect God to the people around them.
So for us pilgrims today, God’s refining process continues. Through life’s journeys, God carefully and gently deals with our sin. The Holy Spirit within us brings to the surface situations and behaviours that need to be dealt with and cleansed. Sins are skimmed off one by one as we clean up our lives under God’s gaze, until our lives truly reflect the One we love and worship. It can be a painful process, particularly for those stubbornly entrenched in a life of sin and who are reluctant to let go. But God loves us too much to allow us to continue in a life of sin.
When we find ourselves going through the “crucible of silver”, we need to allow the Master Silversmith His way, no matter how painful that might be, so that one day we will be in His presence, pure and holy, the people that He created us to be.
Dear Heavenly Silversmith. Thank You that You care for us so much that You don’t want us to languish in our sins. Through Jesus, You supplied a remedy for our iniquities, and we come before Him today with deeply grateful hearts, responding to Him in worship. Amen.
Being a Pilgrim 