Treasure The Process

“The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the LORD trieth the hearts.” (Pr 17:3 AV)

The word ‘but’ threw me.  There is a relationship between the purifying of precious metals and the trying of the heart.  Fire or heat purifies a lot of things.  It purifies water.  Heat can purify oil.  Heat purifies food.  Heat separates.  Heat kills that which is harmful while keeping that which is good.  In other words, Solomon deliberately chose precious metals to compare against a pure heart.  Why?  The little three-letter word above gives us a clue.

I have seen enough depictions of prospecting to understand what the prospector experiences when he discovers gold.  There is a process to make the gold market worthy.  He or she must first remove it from the ground or water.  It then goes through a separation process called sleuthing.  The gold goes through a sleuth box where finer gold dust is separated from lighter material.  The nuggets to the dust are then dried.  The next step is what I think Solomon is referring to.  The prospector would then take his gold to the refiner.  Usually, these are very small businesses that do their refining on a very small scale.  The furnace is heated to an enormous temperature.  The gold is poured into a stone vat that is then inserted into the furnace.  After a few minutes, the gold is poured into a cooling vat and rapidly cooled with water.  The sludge rises to the top.  What the prospector is left with is solid and pure gold.  What stands out is the look in the eyes of the prosecutor as his gold is purified.  He knows he has a treasure.  He just doesn’t know how much or the quality of it.  His eyes get really big as the refiner removes the metal and taps away the sludge.  A broad smile spans his face as he realized how blessed he is.

I think our wise king is sharing that the purification of the heart is only by the LORD and it is more precious than any purification process seen in the natural world.  Therefore, there is a great application here.  The process by which the heart is purified is not easy.  Just as heat is required to separate sludge from gold, the heat of correction or trials is needed to purify the heart.  The logistics here are not as important as how we should view the value of the process and product.  This is the comparison Solomon is making.  As a king, he would appreciate this.  His life was surrounded by gold and silver.  The beauty of these metals would be a daily part of his life.  The purification process would have been something with which he was very familiar.  But to him, as much as wealth was a part of him, he valued God’s purification process of the heart and the end result as far more precious than anything the world could offer.  The real treasure was a cleansed heart; not a full treasure chest.