Out Of The Furnace

by GRIERSON, G. | Category: N/a | Aug 2003

In parts of Nigeria they still build a traditional bottle-shaped furnace, or kiln, fuelled by wood to fire and finish large earthenware pots to be used for cooking and other essential activities of daily life.

I remember many years ago heading into Stoke-on-Trent, centre of the 'Potteries' industrial area in the English midlands. The road wound down through a suburb and all around were the bottle kilns in use at that time, belching out flames and smoke. It was dusk and it seemed like a setting for Dante's Inferno!

There was a furnace built long ago in what is now Iraq. King Nebuchadnezzar hadn't ordered it to be fuelled for pots or bricks, but for three men: Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego (Dan.3). They had disobeyed the king's decree to bow down to a false god and in his anger he ordered them to be thrown into a blazing superheated fiery furnace.

The men who threw them in themselves perished with the heat, but the three obedient servants of God came out unscathed, with not a hair on their bodies singed! Their God was indeed the great Deliverer, to whom one day every knee must bow, even the knee of the king of Babylon. The furnace only served to glorify God.

As disciples of the Lord Jesus, sometimes there can be a fiery furnace in our experience too. Peter, writing to believers in a largely hostile world, could say, 'Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you' (1 Pet.4:12).

If you are going through a 'fiery trial', a furnace experience, don't be afraid. Paul wrote, 'Your life is hidden with Christ in God' (Col.3:3) and nothing can touch it. The fiery trial is testing 'the genuineness of your faith' (1 Pet.1:7). It is making you into a vessel fit for the Master's use (2 Tim.2:21).

GRIERSON, G. | Aug 2003
N/a