Jeremiah 6

The ending of this chapter was a white-hot indictment: “They’re a thickheaded, hard-nosed bunch, rotten to the core, the lot of them. Refining fires are cranked up to white heat, but the ore stays a lump, unchanged. It’s useless to keep trying any longer. Nothing can refine evil out of them. Men will give up and call them ’slag,’ thrown on the slag heap by me, their God.” (vs 28-30)

Maybe it was because I did a lot of cooking yesterday, but when I read about the refining fires being cranked up to white heat, the first image that popped into my mind was a pot of boiling water sitting on a stove. Now, imagine that you had a fresh egg and a fresh potato, and you put them both into the boiling water.

You don’t need advanced cooking skills to know that, in the water, the egg will become hard and the potato will become soft. In fact, the longer the potato—which started out hard!—remains in the water, the softer it will get.

It seems that, when it came to the nation of Israel, God was dealing with a bunch of eggs. No matter how hot He cranked up the refining fires, the people became harder and harder and harder. Instead of allowing God’s discipline to soften their hearts, they used His corrective measures as opportunities to run further away from Him: “This is what the Lord says: ‘Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, “We will not walk in it.” I appointed watchmen over you and said, “Listen to the sound of the trumpet!” But you said, “We will not listen.”‘” (vs 16-17)

At some point, all of us pass through the refining fire. All of us will have encounters with the Holy Spirit—who will plunge our hearts into a spiritual pot of boiling water. It’s up to us how we will respond. Will we choose to be an egg—steeling ourselves against God and becoming harder and harder in the process? Or will we choose to be a potato—yielding ourselves to God and becoming softer and softer in the process?

Some days we may choose to be a potato. Some days we may choose to be an egg. I think this process, for most people, is much more of a back-and-forth dance on a continuum than it is a straight shot up or down. But if we persist in the hardening, eventually we will get to the place where there is no going back. We will get to the place where our hearts can no longer hear or discern the Spirit.

Potato or egg? It’s up to us.

God lets us decide what we will be.