A furnace can heat our homes, keeping us warm in the depths of winter. We adjust the thermostat, and it operates in the background, keeping us seamlessly comfortable without a moment’s thought.
A furnace that works well is never noticed. It just does its job without a care on our part.
That’s not the furnace of the Lord. His furnace is a burning fire that changes everything it touches. Things dipped into the furnace of the Lord come out renewed and purified. Impurities are burned away, and only the things that are good and righteous are left behind. The Lord’s furnace is holy and pure, and there is no bad thing that can escape it.
Exodus paints a picture we can envision in Exodus 19:18:
“And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.”
There are two ways to view this verse. Either, 1. God physically descended upon Sinai, the smoke was his awesome presence, and the ground shook because of his unlimited power, or, 2. Mount Sinai, in its explosive, volcanic state, was the closest thing to God’s unlimited power that the Lord could use to portray his awesome presence before his children.
Either way, this example paints an awesome picture for us to contemplate. God has at his command the very forces inside the earth. They exist at his pleasure, and they have overwhelming power over us. All we can do when the earth vomits out its internal reservoirs of molten matter is to shake in our boots and run if we can.
The same is true with God. When his furnace of righteousness and truth erupts over the world, we can only quake where we stand, or run into his arms. When we get close enough to him, we’ll find he’s no longer fearful and deadly. He’s become the warmth we treasure and our trusted source of security in the night.
The closer we get to God, the safer we are from the spiritual battles that will try to bring us down.
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Code: FGO.E.16.17b.vp.kjv