Today's Scripture Reading (August 15, 2026): Ezekiel 22
In 2014, NASCAR's Brad Keselowski spun out on lap 137, trying to make up
a lap. Earlier in the race, Keselowski was involved in an incident with Danica
Patrick, and he had been chasing the race ever since. But on lap 137,
Keselowski, essentially out of the race by that time, aggressively tried to
make up a lap. The spinout resulted in a crash involving 14 cars and shut down
the track for over 10 minutes. What caused a backlash at the time was that
Keselowski had criticized Matt Kenseth the week before for essentially doing
the same thing. The issue did not seem to be that Keselowski's aggressive
driving caused the pile-up, although drivers would like him to ease up a little.
The real issue seems to be that Keselowski was still driving aggressively even
though he was essentially out of the race. Some of the big names in the sport
would have liked Keselowski to learn the difference between driving
aggressively when the race was still in doubt and driving aggressively when
there is no possibility of winning, or even of placing in the important top ten.
As far as Keselowski was concerned, if he was on the track and had a
steering wheel in his hands, he wanted to compete to the best of his abilities.
To be honest, this is the attitude of a winner. In any other sport, we want to
see our teams compete until the final whistle, no matter how lopsided the score
might be.
What we sometimes miss is that heat (and fire), whether we are talking
about a competitive fire in sports or a physical fire, often come with two very
different outcomes. One is to destroy. Fire burns and destroys what it touches.
We witness the destructive power of fire whenever it breaks out in places where
we don't want it, and we put in significant effort to fight it. But the second
purpose of fire is to cleanse. Here, destruction is not the purpose; fire removes
the impurities within something. For Keselowski in 2014, maybe that was the
hope. No one wanted the figurative fire of criticism to destroy the drivers;
rather, they hoped Keselowski, Kenseth, and others would emerge as better, more
competitive NASCAR drivers as a direct result of the heat and scrutiny focused
on their aggressive driving techniques at various stages of a race. The purpose
of the fire of criticism was to purify and make the drivers better, and maybe a
little safer on the track.
Biblically, it is often hard to tell the difference between these two
fires. But it seems that the biblical use of fire is often for the second
purpose, not the first. Some have even argued that the fires of Revelation,
which we often take as purely destructive, are really intended to have a
purification aspect.
But in Ezekiel, the author really leaves us no doubt. Even though we are
told that it is God's wrath that has burned toward Israel, this is not about
the destruction of the nation; it is about purification and making something
better out of what has come before. And the clue is that Ezekiel speaks about
the melting of silver, a melting which is done very purposefully for
purification reasons. While God's wrath may have been part of the reason for
the exile, the overwhelming message is that God is not done with Israel yet. He
still has more in store for his people. God's intention was and still is to
burn away everything that does not belong so that it is only the pure us, which
is actually the real us, that is left.
Tomorrow's
Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 23
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