The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying: “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause you to hear My words.” Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something at the wheel. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter; so he made it again into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make.
Then the word of the LORD came to me, saying: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter?” says the LORD. “Look, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in My hand, O house of Israel! The instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, to pull down, and to destroy it, if that nation against whom I have spoken turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I thought to bring upon it. And the instant I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it, if it does evil in My sight so that it does not obey My voice, then I will relent concerning the good with which I said I would benefit it.
“Now therefore, speak to the men of Judah and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says the LORD: “Behold, I am fashioning a disaster and devising a plan against you. Return now every one from his evil way, and make your ways and your doings good.”’”
Dear Suzanne, Rebecca, Anna and Mikayla,
In the beginning of Chapter 18 we find Jeremiah heading toward the potter's house to hear from God. Jeremiah found the potter at the wheel making something. I am pretty sure we all get the symbolism, but let's review it anyway. The potter here is God and the thing He is forming is one of us. Now the potter, girls, lest we forget, is a skilled artist, and artists make beautiful things. Sometimes you can't tell what he is making just from looking but the artist/potter always has a plan and a picture in his mind of the end result. He can see the end when all that there is is a lump of clay...and we know who that lump of clay is. Yes, that clay is us. We are the dirt. The wheel represents the circumstances of life.
Let's go back to the clay for a minute...For me there is nothing that says God is sovereign more than remembering that I am a lump of clay. How much can a lump of clay do? It has to be placed on the wheel. If it falls off the wheel, it has to be picked up. If it gets out of shape, it has to be pressed back into shape. It has no say. It is totally at the mercy of the potter who can make it into whatever he wants to make it into. God is the One doing the work, girls...He is the One who is creating a work of art...we are His masterpieces. I know if I get involved I will only cause Him more work and perhaps mar the end result...but I sometimes do it anyway...
Eph 2:8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
Okay...so as Jeremiah watched, the clay resisted the potter and the work was marred in the potter's hand. The potter starts over and makes it into another vessel of His choosing. Now of course this was meant to tell Judah that it is God who controls the nations. (vs 5-10) Really...God can do what He wants. He doesn't need our advice Romans 11:34 says “ For who has known the mind of the LORD? Or who has become His counselor?” We can be very happy that what He does He does perfectly and in accordance with who He is. The Lord presents two scenarios in these verses. The first one...if a nation is doing evil and then turns and repents...He would relent and not send judgment. I am thinking of Jonah and Nineveh here. The next is if He promised to bless a nation and they go and do evil...He will send judgment instead and hold back blessing. Israel now comes to mind. I got a little bogged down thinking about how much of this was God's sovereignty and how much was our choice. I mean as a believer or an unbeliever we are formed by God and used for His purpose. Our ends, depending on our choice; however, are very different. I went to Romans 9 and read the following:
What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? Certainly not! For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whomever I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whomever I will have compassion.”So then it is not of him who wills, nor of him who runs, but of God who shows mercy. For the Scripture says to the Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I may show My power in you, and that My name may be declared in all the earth.” Therefore He has mercy on whom He wills, and whom He wills He hardens. You will say to me then, “Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?” But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed say to him who formed it, “Why have you made me like this?” Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel for honor and another for dishonor? What if God, wanting to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He had prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom He called, not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles?
God's purposes for us is mercy. He is sovereign. He works all things together for our good for those who believe. We can trust Him. When we understand these qualities of God, we know that his choices are good even if we don't understand all his reasons. Our job is just to be obedient...the results are up to Him. The beautiful thing about the Lord is that when we are saved, He allows us, by His grace, to cooperate with Him in His work. So as we surrender our hearts to Him, He makes us into beautiful vessels of mercy. AND... WAIT FOR IT...2 Cor 4: 7 says: "But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us." We bring Him our tired, weary, flawed and cracked pots and He does all the work and makes them into things of beauty. Pretty good deal from where I sit.
Isaiah 64:8 says But now, O LORD, You are our Father; We are the clay, and You our potter; And all we are the work of Your hand. There is rest in that verse. If we truly believe that we are the clay and He is the potter and that we are the work of His hand than we should be able to relax...right? It is not up to us. Intellectually, we know that the Creator has control over what He creates. As the created thing we can't demand anything of our creator...we exist at and for his pleasure. Can the thing that is formed boast or take credit for anything He accomplishes...no...because he was MADE..the glory always goes to the creator not the thing created. For it is God who works in us both to do and to will for His good pleasure. How very, very silly it is for us to boast and yet we do. We willfully forget who He is and who we are...we think we are something in ourselves. More on this below...
How does all this work practically into shaping us into a useful vessel of mercy? I mentioned earlier that the wheel represents the circumstances of life...it is controlled by the potter's foot and the clay is shaped and formed by the potter's hands. The wheel spins representing the circumstances and trials of life. The Potter's hand is on us at all times..sometimes the pressure is hard, sometimes it is softer, but always it is there. Now, unlike the clay, we do have the ability to resist God's will. Again, think of how silly this is. We are resisting God!! Who do you think is going to win...and if you win you are really losing. This is what God's people chose. Look at what the very next verse says right after He asked them to repent and return in verse 11.
Jeremiah 18:12 And they said, “That is hopeless! So we will walk according to our own plans, and we will every one obey the dictates of his evil heart.”
Do you see how deceitful the heart is...they are fighting against God because they are so enslaved and blinded by their sin that they have become irrational. God is laying out for them the way of obedience which would bring blessing and the way of disobedience which would bring judgment...and they choose...drum roll...judgment!
In the next several verses God tells them just how irrational they are being:
Therefore thus says the LORD:“ Ask now among the Gentiles, Who has heard such things? The virgin of Israel has done a very horrible thing. Will a man leave the snow water of Lebanon, Which comes from the rock of the field? Will the cold flowing waters be forsaken for strange waters? “ Because My people have forgotten Me, They have burned incense to worthless idols. And they have caused themselves to stumble in their ways, From the ancient paths, To walk in pathways and not on a highway, To make their land desolate and a perpetual hissing; Everyone who passes by it will be astonished And shake his head. I will scatter them as with an east wind before the enemy; I will show them the back and not the face In the day of their calamity.”--Jeremiah 18:13-17
THE PEOPLE ACTED CONTRARY TO EVERYTHING THAT WAS REASONABLE. Really how smart is it for dirt to resist an intelligent designer...a master craftsman? It is not rational. Don't laugh...you and I do this all the time. We cannot succeed without Him, yet we act as if we can. We are filled with our own ways. We jump off the wheel and abandon those ancient paths for ones of our own making and God rightly leaves us to our own devices. I think here of what Dr. Phil says..."How's that working for you?" It isn't working and it never will. So eventually we get tired of trying to do it ourselves and we get back on the potter's wheel. God graciously and willingly molds us again...even though we have caused damage by our own pride and resistance. His mercies are new every morning and in Him there is no condemnation. God is so patient with us.
Warren Wiersbe quotes from Alexander Whyte in regard to these verses in Scripture. Here is what Mr. Whyte has to say, who saw the "victorious" Christian life as a "series of new beginnings": "No failure in our lives need be fatal or final, although we certainly suffer for our sins. God gave new beginnings to Abraham, Moses, David, Jonah, and Peter when they failed, and He can do the same for us today."
The next verse remind us that sinners often do not want to hear from God's messenger. They run from the Light not only because their deeds are evil but because they do not want to come to the Light...they want to continue in their sin. Then they said, “Come and let us devise plans against Jeremiah; for the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet. Come and let us attack him with the tongue, and let us not give heed to any of his words.” Let's discredit or kill the messenger because we do not like his message. God told Jeremiah that he would be persecuted as His prophet. The Bible tells us that all who live godly in Christ Jesus will face persecution and be reproached for the name of Christ. It says in John that in this world you will have tribulation, but to be of good cheer, He has overcome the world.
Jeremiah ends Chapter 18 with a prayer to His God. I was a little taken aback with its harshness and thought that God was going to ask him to repent again as in Chapter 15, but that was not the case. Jeremiah was God's prophet. As God's prophet when they rejected him, they were rejecting the Lord and His word. His anger was righteous. He felt anguish in his heart for their utter rejection of God against everything that was reasonable and rational. He knew what was to come. He foresaw the destruction of the people and the city. He saw the innocence of the children that would not be spared because of the sins of the leaders and the people of God that followed those leaders. He expressed His heart to God and left the matter in God's hands.
Girls, trust the Master Potter with your lives. He loves us and died for us when we were still sinners. Read what Romans 5:6-10 says:
For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. For if when we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
I love it when it says how much more we shall be saved by His life. If He cared about us that much that He died for us when we were His enemy...how much more will He care for us and shape us for our good when we are reconciled to Him.
And there is more...read the verses from Matthew 27:3-9. Jesus' blood bought the potter's field...where the potter throws all his pieces of useless, broken and cracked pottery. Jesus purchased our redemption with His blood so that He could remake us into His image...so that we could be made into useful, beautiful vessels of mercy.
Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”
And they said, “What is that to us? You see to it!”
Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself.
But the chief priests took the silver pieces and said, “It is not lawful to put them into the treasury, because they are the price of blood.” 7 And they consulted together and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Therefore that field has been called the Field of Blood to this day.
Then was fulfilled what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, “And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the value of Him who was priced, whom they of the children of Israel priced, 10 and gave them for the potter’s field, as the LORD directed me.”
Love
Mom
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