An ancient proverb:

The crucible is for silver, and the furnace is for gold, but the LORD tests the heart. (Proverbs 17:3)

To refine silver means to extract it from the other worthless elements in which it is embedded. This was done by means of extreme heat, and then subjecting the surrounding material to a sudden change of temperature that would reduce it to ash. To refine silver meant to free it from its rocky prison.

To purify gold also required superheating the precious metal to draw out the impurities from the gold itself.

These are intense and involved processes even today, so one can imagine how much more dangerous and challenging they were in an ancient near eastern context when this proverb was written down.

In the proverb we can see a kind of escalation of intensity and value:

Crucible for Silver.

Furnace for Gold.

The Lord for The Heart.

Don’t miss that the treasure is the human heart.

More valuable than silver and gold.

In the ancient imagination, “The Heart” is the whole human place of desiring, willing, thinking, acting. The Heart is the essential you.

The clear implication is that the recovery, refinement, purification, liberation (all these words mean the same thing!) of the human heart is of eternal value. It’s God’s own work.

The movement of the Great Heart at the center of the universe is to free your heart, your essential self, from immaturity and ego.

We turn in on ourselves, but God draws us out into compassion for others. And there, in the pain of risk and vulnerability, we find the true freedom of love–a love that flows to us and from us.

In this test we discover who are ones in our lives who are willing to walk with us in our pain. We learn who is faithful, we find “the holy ones”, and we separate the wheat from the chaff in our own spirits and in our social connections.

This is the crucible and furnace of God’s unquenchable love.

And it clarifies and confirms our faith and who is worthy of it.

Speaking of that faith, Karl Barth writes:

“And where that faith is, in the midst of the old world of war and money and death, there is born a new spirit out of which grows a new world, the world of the righteousness of God. The need and anxiety in which we live are done away when this new beginning comes. The old fetters are broken, the false idols begin to totter, for now something real has happened—the only real thing that can happen: God has now taken his own work in hand. Life receives its meaning again—your own life and life as a whole. Lights of God rise in the darkness, and powers of God become real in weakness. Real love, real sincerity, real progress becomes possible; morality and culture, state and nation, even religion and the Church now become possible…We are taken with the vision of…a future life here on earth in which the righteous will of God breaks forth, prevails and is done as it is done in heaven. In such wise the righteousness of God, far, strange, high, becomes our own possession and our great hope.”

God has taken God’s own work in hand.

Freedom and reality, our true selves known, will always be its end.