Daily Archive

Jeremiah 18:¹ The word which came to Jeremiah from Yahweh saying, ² “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will make you hear My words.”³ Then I went down to the potter’s house, and behold, he was making something on the wheel. ⁴ But the vessel that he was making of clay was ruined in the hand of the potter, so he turned around and made it into another vessel, according to what was right in the eyes of the potter to make.

Jeremiah gets up and goes down to where God has told him to go – to the Potter’s house. There, God says, “I will make you hear My words.” Sometimes isn’t that what we need to pray? “God, make us hear Your word.” A pastor friend of mine, Lance Johnson, says that too often in our prayers we come to God and ask God to help us do what we know we’re supposed to do. If you know what you’re supposed to do don’t ask Him for help. Ask him to do it through you. He by his Spirit is living in you. Ask him to accomplish His work through you. Ask God to do it and then yield yourself to Him.

As he goes down to the potter’s house, the potter is making something on the wheel and the picture here is actually of a stone wheel that the clay would be placed upon and it would be sitting on another stone and you could spin it by either a mechanism or just with your hands. As the potter is working the clay, something goes wrong. Now, we’ve got to be careful about this because as we look at this, it sounds like, the way we read it in English, that the potter messed up, that the potter was making something and it was ruined and it didn’t come out right, so he just started over. Just crushed it all and started over.

Now, this was my experience, and if you are my age, or a little older, you remember art class in school?And do you remember pottery day? I remember pottery day several years in a row and the first year I wanted to make a coffee mug, and so I gave my dad an ashtray. And the next year I wanted to make a cup and a saucer, so I gave my grandmother an ashtray. That was just, that was the way it worked. That’s what we made and I promise you if we could go back through my grandmother’s house, it’s probably still there up on the shelf somewhere. See, that was a problem with the potter, not with the clay.

But the words that are used here tell us that the vessel that he was making of clay was ruined in the hand of the potter. It wasn’t the hand of the potter that caused the problem. It was something wrong with the clay. The clay would not cooperate. And so, the potter started over to make something that the clay would be suited to form so that it would be right when it was finished.

Now when we look at the potter at work and we see the potter’s wheel, of course the potter’s wheel is a parable for us of God’s providence. This is our sovereign God making and forming us, conforming us into the image of Christ. Of course, He formed us in our mother’s wombs. We see throughout the scripture this parable that’s used of the potter and the clay. We see that God himself is the fashioner all through Jeremiah. “For the Maker of all is He.” When we look at the potter and we look at the clay, we are not the potter, we are the clay. And God is making of us what He wants.

Now the problem with the clay being ruined here, you would think that God would have some perfect clay. Well, He started with some perfect dirt, didn’t He? And created Adam out of the dirt of the ground, created Eve from the rib of Adam, and then said as he brought Eve to Adam, not just that it was good, but that it was very good. But then we have the fall. We have there the ruin of our nature. We have depravity. We have hearts that are turned to stone that we looked at in chapter 17. We are deceitful and self -serving, idolatrous and unfaithful, self -seeking and selfish.

There is a problem with the clay. Now this of course reminds me, back when we were working through Isaiah, in chapter 5. “Let me sing now for my well-beloved a song of my beloved concerning His vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill. He dug it all around, removed its stones, and planted it with the choicest vine. And He built a tower in the middle of it and also hewed out a wine vat in it; then He hoped for it to produce good grapes, but it produced only worthless ones. “So now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, please judge between Me and My vineyard. What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I hoped for it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones?”

Isaiah goes on to describe the rebellious hearts of the people.

But here what we have is a potter working with clay. There’s something wrong with the clay, so the potter instinctively now works to build something with that clay that that clay is suited for. As we read in the text, it says the vessel that he was making of clay was ruined in the hand of the potter, so he turned around and made it into another vessel. That phrase translated turned around, that signifies repentance. What made the change so that the clay could be rightly used in the hands of the potter? Repentance, a turning around, and even that is providence because it’s the potter that does the turning around. We know this throughout the New Testament because we’re told that repentance, just like faith, is a gift from God. God gives the gift of repentance (Acts 5:31; 11:18).

That vessel that was being made from this faulty clay was not going to hold up for the reason it was being made so it had to be changed. This is what we read about when we talk about regeneration and having the heart of stone removed and a heart of flesh put in. This is God working His will to turn us around and then with us to make what is right of us in His eyes, the eyes of the Potter. And so by His providence, He turns us around and makes something that is pleasing in His own eyes that’s right for us. We’re dependent upon Him for everything, for our creation, for our re -creation.