Austin's Blog

The Lord says to the people of Israel in Isaiah 48:10-11, “Behold, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tried you in the furnace of affliction. For my own sake, for my own sake, I do it, for how should my name be profaned? My glory I will not give to another.” The Lord is committed to the process of refining, reshaping, and remolding His people until they fully and finally showcase His glory. We have felt like we have been in the furnace now for these last nine months. It has been the hardest season of life up until this point, a season begun by something I would not wish upon my worst enemy. It is a season forced upon us through the mistakes and mishandling of others. Yet, we know the Lord is doing something. He is up to something glorious, radiant, and stupefying.

If we are in the furnace, it is not for no reason. It is doing something. Tim Keller writes, “Things put into the furnace properly can be shaped, refined, purified, and even beautified. This is a remarkable view of suffering, that if faced and endured with faith, it can in the end only make us better, stronger, and more filled with greatness and joy. Suffering, then, actually can use evil against itself. It can thwart the destructive purposes of evil and bring light and life out of darkness and death.” The Enemy perhaps meant this for evil but God meant it for good (Gen. 50:20; Rom. 8:28-30) and what will be has not yet been made known. The flames feel intensely hot and scarring yet the dross of sin, triviality, and worldliness is being burned away.

How is the furnace of affliction bearable? Because we are not in these flames alone. Charles Spurgeon wrote, “As sure as God puts His children in the furnace of affliction, He will be with them in it.” Just as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were thrown in the flame and a fourth man “like a son of the gods” was with them in it (Dan. 3), we have not been abandoned. We feel the heat but, ultimately in the end, the flames will not hurt us. Tim Keller again notes, “Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire.” We couldn’t do it if He wasn’t with us. We couldn’t survive if the Lord Jesus was not in this furnace with us. It isn’t about our strength (we have little left) but His preserving and sustaining hand in the fire.

He isn’t just with us in the flames, we feel and believe He knows intimately the pain we feel. Only the Christian God has scars. Hebrews 4:15 makes it plain that “…we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” God sympathizes with us. Because of the incarnation, God in Christ knows what it is like to feel the weight of the world with all its pain and grief. “When believers in Jesus suffer, he is quite literally with us in our furnace of trouble, in some way actually feeling the flames too.” The believer and the believed upon are in the furnace of affliction together and that makes all the world of difference right now.