My mother grew up in the shadow of what was at one time the largest copper mine in the world. That mine was in Jerome, Arizona and Mom spent her youth in Cottonwood, a town that supported the mining community with agriculture, shops, etc. In between was Clarkdale, the town that, as I understand it, grew up around the smelting operation.
It required a great deal of turquoise green copper ore in order to extract any significant amount of pure copper. The ore was crushed, treated with chemical and at some point “smelted,” heated and melted down at temperatures high enough to separate a much more concentrated copper “matte” from the “slag,” which was drawn off and discarded. You can still see huge slag heaps near Clarkdale. A tourist train ride now takes visitors pasts those heaps as part of a tour of historical sites of interest in the area.
As I read our text for this week, Malachi 3:1-4 speaking of the coming Messiah as a “refiner’s fire,” I picture those heaps of waste mineral from the smelter operation near my mother’s childhood home. It makes me wonder if our Lord has to melt off a similarly large proportion of “slag” from our lives in order to produce anything really good or useful.
Yet I’m also reassured that the Lord sees us as valuable enough to refine, that even the most corrupt of us, like the Levites of Malachi’s time, are worth the time and effort to redeem and purify what is good in us.
And even if we feel like slag heaps sometimes, like God has cast us off in His refining of better, more productive servants, the grace of Christ still keeps working to refine us. There is a present day operation, Searchlight Minerals, working at methods to recycle that heap of slag by Clarkdale to extract gold and other precious minerals. That’s what our Lord would like to do with us.
Yet as the recitative from Handel’s “Messiah” based on this text emphasizes, in the heat of God’s refining fire, “Who can stand when he appeareth?” That’s the question isn’t it? Will we allow ourselves to face the heat and be refined into something better than we are now? Or will we melt away under that divine gaze which will lay bare all our innermost thoughts and failings? Our hope lies only in the fact that Jesus our Lord freely offers us the purity and holiness which can stand when He appears. But we must accept it, let the dross be burned away, and become new people. It’s a continual process which is not always easy nor comfortable.