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Bible Dictionaries
Sifting
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or SIFTING.—The vb. ‘sift’ (Gr. σινιάζω, fr. σινίον, a late word for a sieve) occurs only in Luke 22:31. Two varieties of sieve were used for separating the finer particles of substances from the grosser (see art. Agriculture). Scripture refers to the sieve and the process of sifting only rarely (Isaiah 30:28, Amos 9:9, Luke 22:31), but is full of the idea of sifting. In this process the methods of different industries join to give force to the metaphor which they supply. Of these farming is the chief, with its floors, fans, etc. (Matthew 3:12, Luke 3:17). The preparation of wine also enters in with its emptying from vessel to vessel (Jeremiah 48:11). The refining of metals (Isaiah 1:25, Malachi 3:2 f.), too, contributes to the contents of the idea of sifting. All these moralize it. It concentrates on character. St. Peter and his fellow-disciples [plur. ὑμᾶς] are sifted; Pharisees strain out gnats (Matthew 23:24); evil work avoids the sifting of the light (John 3:20). The ministries of John, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit (John 16:8), all have this trait—they sift men. Yet Jesus is Himself sifted by Satan, whose ‘findings’ are nil (John 14:30), while, also, the disciples are not above the Master. ‘As the wheat in the sieve is shaken backwards and forwards, and thus the refuse separates itself from the grain, and falls out; so Satan wishes to trouble you and toss you about (by vexations, terrors, dangers, afflictions) in order to bring your faithfulness to me to decay’ (Meyer’s Luke 22:31).* [Note: Note that the point of the comparison lies in the shaking. Satan aims at destruction; Jesus is thinking of purification as the real result. Christ comes with His fan to get rid of chaff (Matthew 3:12); Satan sifts in order to get rid of wheat. For, as Thomas Fuller says somewhere, when Satan comes with his sieve, he desires to find the chaff and not the wheat.] The case of St. Peter is not singular. St. Paul underwent the process (Philippians 3:7, 2 Corinthians 6:4 ff.). The sifting is a law of life. All the Father’s chastenings are with a view to sift His children as wheat. It is of the essence of the ways of God with men alike in providence and grace. Its place in that economy is among the final, not initial, processes. Readier and rougher means of grace have their earlier day; this is a delicate, even final, means of dealing with the finest of the wheat.
Literature.—Ecce Homo, ch. vi.; Bushnell’s New Life, sermon on ‘Spiritual Dislodgements’; Longfellow’s The Sifting of Peter.
J. R. Legge.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Sifting'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/s/sifting.html. 1906-1918.
