Do We Want to Endure?

Malachi 2:17-3:5

'You have wearied the Lord with your words. "How have we wearied him?" you ask. By saying "All who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord, and he is pleased with them" Or "Where is the God of Justice?" 
"See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come," Says the Lord Almighty.  
But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a Launderer's soup. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years. 
"So I will come near to you for judgement, I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive aliens of justice, but do not fear me," says the Lord Almighty.'

'But who can endure the day of his coming?' It's not surprising to me that the Jews of Jesus day didn't recognize him. He didn't come in guns blazing calling fire down from the sky. He didn't clean house. He didn't get rid of the pesky Romans. Instead he called fisher men and a tax collector to be his disciples. He called for a radical way to love. In fact the only time he really gets violently angry is when he over throws the tables of the money changers in the temple. The refining that Jesus brings is so different from what was expected.

The Lord promises that he is going to come and judge the people of the earth. That the wrong that has infiltrated the very essences of every filament in our being will not be left. When silver and gold are refined, all the lesser metals and junk are burned away. God makes a promise that he will bring judgement. But more then that, he will give us a way to bring offerings that are expectable to him.

No longer will our rightness with God be determined by our own ability to carry out his commandments and laws. Because there never really was a chance of us being about to do that in the first place. We have, down to our filament, our very molecules, been separated from God by our perfect ability to imperfectly worship him. Who can endure his coming? He promises to break us down, to in a way, completely remake us. We can not endure, at least not how we are now.

But do we want to endure? Of course we do. That's the major problem. God promises to unravel us to pull out our very selves. The monumental heap of dung that is our lives, is more important to us then the utter wonderment of God's love. Against God we are worthless, sin infested, specks of nothing. But we don't like that comparison, so we compare ourselves against those like us. After-all, I'm better then that guy who drinks every night and doesn't work. Sure I'm not perfect, but no one is.

The Lord isn't forcing his refining on us. He is offering it to us, because he wants to call us Children. He wants to be our father. He is promising to make us as we should be, as he intended us to be. No longer are we a bit of shiny dirt, we will be pure gold. No longer a monumental heap of dung, but a pure reflection of the one who made us. No longer will we be imperfect, we will be perfect in him. It might not be fun in the fire, but it could be worth it.