You Discard Like Dross

In our pursuit of mercy and love in the church it seems we have lost sight of part of who God is—that He is a God who discards what is worthless, evil, and vile. How quickly we accuse God in our hearts, as if He were wrong to do this.

We fail to realize that all people who “go astray from [His] statutes”, are vain, empty, and worthless—and that God sees them as such. That God saves us from absolute insanity, emptiness, worthlessness; a life entirely mean and vain. That without being truly connected to the God of the universe, we truly live whole lives that are completely vain. “Vanity” in our culture today means “excess”, but the biblical meaning of vanity is “producing no results; useless”. 

“For their cunning is in vain”—every single way people imagine to turn away from God is of total ruin, not partial. If we cannot perceive this it is due to our own blindness, yet it is still true. Our lives without God are a horror, madness, empty of meaning—regardless of how much we imagine them to be full of meaning, truth, or goodness. Our imagining does not mean we truly possess these things. 

God does not simply “punish” people for not doing things His way, He throws out the dross—that which is truly worthless and vile. And while this might offend us, we would do much better to be wise and face the truth of God’s Word; face how truly worthless our lives actually are without Him or lived in any disobedience to Him. Though we cannot perceive it, we would do well to allow Christ to lead us to the true healing of our sight in Him—to allow Him to lead the blind. He who is truly merciful, a wise physician, who leads us in a way not to cause us to trip or stumble, but ever towards the Truth. Trust Him, the One who can see! And the One who has mercy, rather than these blind, worthless, fools who are the blind leading the blind into a pit (Matt 15:14).

For the Christian, we should love a God who is just, “love a law which condemns sin… government which ferrets out and punishes the guilty.” (Barnes’ Notes, Psalm 119:119) This seems to us so contradictory of mercy, but it is not. Where we do not see, we must trust in our God who says they both belong and stop taking other Christian values too far—to the extent of trying to abolish other values by them. This is wrong and taking good and godly things beyond their bounds, for evil uses. By these actions we seek to condemn what God is after. We seek to put God under us rather than ourselves under God. It doesn’t matter how “kindly” you try to do this, it is great sin. 

So many in the church today, in the name of “mercy”, work against justice and judgement. What a truly evil and vile thing. It is a case of too much honey making the church sick (Prov 25:16). We take things to such an excess that they become sickening and do harm rather than good. They must be in right proportion! We must remember that God rules and dictates all things, not us. We must learn to trust God in His full word and wrestle before Him in what we don’t understand—but never back down from the truth He has revealed, never seek to remove any of His Scriptures. We must fight to conform ourselves to the Word of God, and not fight to try and conform the Word of God to ourselves.