In verse 4 of the King James Version (KJV) we find that the language used isn’t common for most of us today. The word dross is used:
Take away the dross from the silver, and there shall come forth a vessel for the finer.
What is dross? Well we can guess or look it up, but I’m sure you know what we typically do. We’ll just skip over that and go onto to the next passage. When we do this, we lose a lot as the passage we skip must be relevant and intended to be known by us or it would not have been included in the scriptures.
One of the things I like to do is go to other translations and see how verses are interpreted or sometimes even spend longer periods of time just in one different translation to get a different perspective. For study this isn’t good as some translations are paraphrases and not completely accurate to the original language (Greek, Hebrew or Aramaic), but for meditation it is great in my opinion!
Let’s take a look at verse 4 in other translations and see if it helps:
NIV: Remove the dross from the silver,
and out comes material for the silversmith;
This is exactly the same translation used in the KJV so most-likely we’d just skim past it too.
NLT: Remove the impurities from silver,
and the sterling will be ready for the silversmith.
Ah, this is beginning to make sense now to those of us that don’t know the meaning of the word dross. It’s like impurities. We could have probably guessed that, but should we approach the Bible guessing about what it means?
Let’s look at one more translation and see if it offers any more help:
CEV: Silver must be purified
before it can be used
to make something of value.
Can you see how this elaborates even further than the NLT version? It’s not just that the impurities must be removed from the silver before the silversmith can use it; instead, we must have the impurities removed from the silver so that the silversmith can make something valuable. Now that is something that most people can read and come to understand clearly without a dictionary or without having to guess.
I’d encourage you to refer to translations like the NLT (New Living Translation) or the CEV (Contemporary English Version) to help in your devotion and meditation time. It will allow you to know and understand some of those things that God wants you to give up (impurities) so that he (silversmith) can present you as something valuable to others. We must keep in mind too that we are of tremendous value in God’s eyes just as we are! We should remember that he would leave the 99 to go after the 1 that went astray (Matthew 18:12-14). So, we don’t remove impurities to be more valuable to God, instead we become more valuable for God to use us so that someone else can be found.
May God be perfecting you as precious silver so that others can look at you and see the beauty in God and all that he creates.
