Deuteronomy 4:20 But as for you, the Lord took you and brought you out of the iron-smelting furnace, out of Egypt, to be the people of His inheritance, as you now are.
(Unlike the other peoples surrounding them, the Lord had separated this people for His Own special purposes.
Like the smelting process that refines metals and rids them of their impurities through intense heat, the people's bondage and oppression in Egypt was an experience that tried them by the fire of affliction
to bring them to the place where they cried out to the Lord
and where they submitted to His plans for them.
The difficult and challenging situations before us today, the times in which we may find ourselves in the iron-smelting furnace, are not the end of the story. The furnace heat is the place of refinement, of purifying, where the dross of our failures, our inattention to the Lord, our disregard for the Lord, our rebellion against the Lord, our disobedience to the Lord, all bubble up to the surface where we can recognize them for what they are and where the Lord can skim them off our nature to make us look more like Him.
Not only does He deliver and heal us,
but the Lord also chooses us as His heritage, as His possession,
as His chosen people, as heirlooms of His estate.
We are His peculiar people, our peculiarity lying in God's having singled us out and chosen us to be His Own inheritance, the inheritance of One Who needs none, Who lacks nothing, but Who has chosen us to be related to Him in a special, unique relationship
through our relationship in Christ Jesus, His Son.)
