God’s Word for You
Psalm 119:119-120 Sig, slag and the smith
by Pastor Timothy Smith on Saturday, November 9, 2024
119 They are slag! You throw away all the wicked of the earth,
therefore I love your testimonies.
120 My flesh trembles because I fear you;
I stand in awe of your judgments.
The boys knew the way to the village smith from a lifetime of experience, but a stranger could have found his hut easily enough. It was one of the only dwellings that had a wooden roof and two walls open to the air, and of course there was also the constant, rhythmic ringing of his hammer on the forge. The boys came straight from Hebrew school, dismissed by the old Rabbi in time for his afternoon nap, and before going home the boys went to watch the smith and munch on the apples he let them have out of his barrel.
“Good day, Soref,” they said. “God bless you, boys,” he answered without looking away from his hammering. “Aaron,” he added, “I have your mother’s pot ready. And little Joseph, can you take your father’s belt to him? I mended the buckle.” There were a few other comments like this as the boys justified their trip with useful errands. Then they stopped as the smith started to pick out certain chunks of wood and charcoal. He was stoking the fire as the wind picked up, coming off the hills to the south. He didn’t seem to mind the dust in the wind, but he liked the breeze that helped the fire to rage. Sometimes he paid the boys to fan the flames when he needed them to, but today they could just watch. He was setting a lump of silver into a small crucible. Two of the boys, his own nephews, came closer. After a few windy, turbulent minutes, the metal began to dissolve into a sun-bright glow. The rest of the world seemed to get dark all around the crucible.
“What is the dark stuff, uncle?” asked one of the boys. “That’s the sig, that the Gentiles down the hill call dross or slag.” He skimmed the dark stuff away with a kind of long spoon that smoked, and tapped the smoldering thing into a pile of jagged metal next to one of the stumps he kept in the hut. Another boy wondered, “Is it good for anything—the sig?” “No,” said the smith as he poured the purified silver into a little mold that they hadn’t even noticed, sitting on another wide, blackened stump. “It’s just junk now. I’ll take it away and bury it where it won’t do any harm.”
“Why not throw it in the river?” asked another boy. “Can’t do that,” the smith said with the patience of answering the same question a hundred times. A couple of older boys had said the words with him, which made the group laugh. “Look how jagged it is. One of you lads might cut your foot when you go scooping for guppies if I put it there. The sig, the slag, is like the wicked people God punishes in hell for their sins. They go through the fire, they go through cold and loneliness, but they get no water. They get no relief. But this slag only goes through the fire a couple of times at most. The wicked in hell get the fire every day. The prophets say that the fire never ends, and they are tortured by worms inside, too.”
“They don’t really say that, do they?” asked a boy. “Yes, they do,” said the smith. He wiped the sweat from his face and let the breeze do some of its cooling work on his hot skin. His eyes were fixed on the hills in the distance as he recalled the words from his memory. “The last sentence in Isaiah the prophet: ‘They will go out, and they will see the corpses of the ones who were rebelling against me, for their worm will not die, and their fire will not be quenched, and all flesh will be horrified by them.’”
“Well done, rev Soref, said a familiar voice behind the boys. “Welcome, Rabbi,” said the smith, offering his old teacher an apple. The village Rabbi took it and smiled. “What does God say about our escape from the fire, gentlemen?” he asked the group.
“The judgment of God is that we deserve to be punished for our sins,” said one younger boy, the strange one with yellow hair. “But the grace of God is that we have a Savior from our sins, the child promised to Eve, and to Abraham…” he began, and the Rabbi finished as the boy’s reply slowed down a little: “And to us all. ‘The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.’ Home now, boys, all of you.”
The boys picked up items, mended pots and kettles for their parents as they left for home. And one belt. The smith pretended not to notice a few little hands sneaking a second or third apple from his stout little barrel. “Good day, master Soref!” came their voices back to him as they walked away with the easy carelessness of the end of the school day.
The Rabbi took the ladle from the rain barrel and passed it to his grandson the smith. “I could warm my hands on a cold day just by standing near you, boy. The forge heats the smith as well as the iron and the bronze.” “And the silver.” At this they both chuckled. Silver work was the only way the smith really made any profit.
The smith looked into his grandfather’s eyes, which he didn’t often let himself do with the boys (a spark had damaged one eye, and although he was a quiet and gentle man, he had the look of a pirate—or so his mother said). “‘My flesh trembles because I fear him,’” he said, quoting the Great Psalm. “That we are not slag to the Holy One of Israel, but are silver, and dearer than refined silver! ‘I stand in awe of his judgments.’” And he drank down the ladle of water with more than one kind of thirsty gratefulness.
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in New Ulm, Minnesota. To receive God’s Word for You via e-mail, please visit the St. Paul’s Lutheran Church website.