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 jeweller lays a broken ring on a charcoal block and brings the flame down onto it. The metal goes dull, then bright, then liquid, and a grey scum walks itself out to the edge of the little pool.
Gold does not corrode. That is not a figure of speech, it is a property of the metal; you can pull it out of a wreck two thousand years down and it comes up yellow. Fire takes nothing from gold because there is nothing in gold for fire to take. Everything that left in the smoke was never gold in the first place.
Job is not describing something he can see happening. Read the two verses in front of this one. He says he has gone forward and backward, and to the left hand and the right, and cannot perceive him anywhere. He has no evidence and he says so. What he has is one sentence he will not put down: he knoweth the way that I take. The road is dark to Job and lit to God, and that asymmetry is the whole of his footing. Notice too what the gold line does not promise. No timetable, no account of what the fire will cost, no explanation. It is a refusal to believe the fire is pointless, made by the one man in Scripture with the best case that it was.
May the thing you cannot see through be a thing he can see through. May whatever leaves you in the smoke turn out to have been the part that was never you. And may you come up yellow.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 267 is The Singular Fruit (Galatians 5:22-23).