Daily Manna · Day 267 · September 24
Coming Forth as Gold
“But he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”
A goldsmith lays a broken gold ring on a charcoal block and brings a flame down onto it. The metal goes dull, then bright, then liquid, and a grey scum slides out to the edge of the little pool.
Gold does not rust or wear away, and that is a fact about the metal, more than a figure of speech. Gold has been brought up from shipwrecks after two thousand years, still shining yellow. Fire takes nothing away from pure gold, because there is nothing in it for the fire to take. Everything that leaves in the smoke was never gold in the first place.
Job was not describing something he could see happening. Read the two verses before this one. He says, "Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him," and he cannot find God on the left hand or the right. He has no proof, and he says so. What he has is one sentence he will not let go of: "he knoweth the way that I take." The road is dark to Job and clear to God, and that is all Job has to stand on. Notice what the promise about gold leaves out. There is no timetable, no account of what the fire will cost, and no explanation. It is simply Job's refusal to believe the fire is pointless, spoken by a man with as much reason as anyone to think it was.
So may the thing you cannot see through be a thing God sees through clearly. May whatever leaves you in the fire turn out to be what was never truly you. And when He has tried you, may you "come forth as gold."
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 267 is The Singular Fruit (Galatians 5:22-23).