Gold in the fire

There is a small phrase in 1 Peter 1:6 that is easy to pass over. Peter says his readers rejoice in their salvation, though now for a little while they may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. May have had to. The suffering is not treated as a mistake or a failure of faith. It is treated as something that sometimes has to happen.

Then he gives a picture. Gold is refined by fire. The ore goes into the heat, the impurities rise, the metal that comes out is purer than what went in. Peter says faith is more valuable than gold, and that trials do for faith what fire does for metal. They prove it. They show what is real and burn off what is not.

This is not a cheerful thought, and Peter does not dress it up as one. He says grief. He knows the word. He wept bitterly once, outside a courtyard, after a rooster crowed. What he offers is not a reason to enjoy suffering but a reason to trust that it is not wasted. Faith that has been through the fire is faith that will result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus is revealed.

Verse 8 is one of the tenderest lines in the New Testament. Though you have not seen him, you love him. Peter had seen him. His readers had not. And yet he says their love and their joy are the real thing, inexpressible and glorious. Faith that has never seen and still loves is exactly the faith the fire is refining.

If you are in a season of heat, the turn Peter asks for is small. Not to pretend it does not hurt. Not to explain it away. Simply to hold on to the thought that what is being tested is genuine, and that the one testing it knows the exact temperature and the exact time. Gold does not stay in the fire forever. Neither do you.

Today, name the trial honestly to God, and then name the hope. Both are true at once. Peter held them together, and so can you.