Jeremiah 18:1

Jer 18:1 The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD, saying,

Ver. 1. The word which came to Jeremiah.] To show the just punishment of the people for disobeying the precept concerning the Sabbath, {Jer 17:27} and other of God’s commandments. See Jer 7:1.

John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Jer_18:1-10

Go down to the potters house.

The potter and the clay

(with Rom_9:19-24):--The potter and the clay! Is not that parable the germ of all that is most oppressive in the terrible decree of Calvinism? Does it not justify the Moslems acceptance of the will of Allah as a destiny which he cannot understand, but to which he must perforce submit? Is not this the last word of the apostle, even when he is most bent on vindicating the ways of God to men, in answer to the question which asks now, as Abraham asked of old, Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? Why doth He yet find fault, for who hath resisted His will? I do not purpose entering into the thorny labyrinth into which these questions lead us. We shall do well to trace the history and to note the bearings of this parable. Does it really teach what men have imagined that it taught--the powerlessness of man and the arbitrary sovereignty of God? or does it lead us to acknowledge a wisdom and righteousness and mercy in the history of men and nations? Does it simply crush us to the ground with the sense of our own impotence? or does it rightly take its place in that noble argument which makes the Epistle to the Romans, more than any other art of Scripture, a true Theodicaea, a vindication of the ways of God to man?

I. It was in a dark and troublous time that Jeremiah was called to do his work. The purpose and promises of Jehovah to His people Israel seemed to fail utterly. It was in this mood that there came to him an inner prompting in which, then or afterwards, he recognised the Word of the Lord. Acting on that impulse he left the temple and the city, and went out alone into the valley of Hinnom, where he saw the potter at work moulding the clay of the valley into form and fashioning it according to his purpose. The prophet looked and saw that here too there was apparent failure. The vessel that he wrought was marred in the hands of the potter. The clay did not take the shape; there was some hidden defect that seemed to resist the plastic guidance of wheel and hand. The prophet stood and gazed--was beginning, it may be, to blame the potter as wanting in his art, when he looked again and saw what followed. So he returned, and made it another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Skill was seen there in its highest form--not baffled by seeming or even real failure--triumphing over difficulties. And then by one of those flashes of insight which the world calls genius, but which we recognise as inspiration, he was taught to read the meaning of the parable. Then the Word of the Lord came to me, saying, O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potters hand, so are ye in Mine, O house of Israel. Did the thought which thus rushed in on his soul crush it as with the sense of a destiny arbitrary, supreme, not necessarily righteous, against which men struggled in vain, and in whose hands they had no freedom and therefore no responsibility? Far otherwise than that. To him that which he saw was a parable of wisdom and of love, working patiently and slowly; the groundwork of a call to repentance and conversion. When he passed from the potter and his wheel to the operations of the great Work-Master, as seen in the history of nations, he saw in the vessels that were being moulded, as on the wheel of providence, no masses of dead inert matter. Each was, as it were, instinct with a self-determining power, which either yielded to or resisted the plastic workings of the potters hand. The urn or vase designed for kingly uses refused its high calling, and chose another and less seemly shape. The Supreme Artificer, who had determined in the history of mankind the times before appointed and the bounds of mens habitations, had, for example, called Israel to be the pattern of a righteous people, the witness of truth to the nations, a kingdom of priests, the first-fruits of humanity. That purpose had been frustrated. Israel had refused that calling. It had, therefore, to be brought under another discipline, fitted for another work: He returned, and made it another vessel. The pressure of the potters hand was to be harder, and the vessel was to be fashioned for less noble uses. Shame and suffering and exile--their land left desolate, and they themselves weeping by the waters of Babylon--this was the process to which they were now called on to submit. But at any moment in the process, repentance, acceptance, submission might modify its character and its issues. The fixed unity of the purpose of the skilled worker would show itself in what would seem at first the ever-varying changes of a shifting will. True it was that a little later on in the prophets work he carried the teaching of the parable one step further, to a more terrible conclusion. The Word of the Lord came to him again, Go and get a potters earthen bottle, and take of the ancients of the people, and of the ancients of the priests; and go forth unto the valley of the son of Hinnom (Jer_19:1), and there in their sight he was to break the bottle as a witness that, in one sense, the day of grace was over, that something had been forfeited which now could never be regained. But not for that was the purpose of God frustrated. The people still had a calling and election. They were still to be witnesses to the nations, stewards of the treasure of an eternal truth. In that thought the prophets heart found hope and comfort. He could accept the doom of exile and shame for himself and for his people, because he looked beyond it to that remoulded life.

II. The age in which St. Paul lived was like that of Jeremiah, a dark and troublous time for one whose heart was with his brethren, the children of Abraham according to the flesh. Once again the potter was fashioning the clay to high and noble uses. To the Jew first, and also to the Gentile, was the law of all his work. But here also there was apparent failure. Blindness, hardness, unbelief, these marred the shape of the vessels made to honour. Did he for that cease to believe in the righteousness and faithfulness of God? Did he see no loving purpose behind the seeming severity? No, the vessel would be made for what men held dishonour--exile lasting through centuries, dispersion over all the world, lives that were worn down with bondage--but all this was in his eyes but the preparation and discipline for the far-off future, fitting them in the end for nobler uses.

III. The history of nations and Churches has through all the ages borne witness of the same truth. Each has had its calling and election. Dimly as it has been given to us to trace the education of mankind, imperfect as is any attempt at the philosophy of history, we can yet see in that history that the maze is not without, a plan. Greece and Rome, Eastern or Latin or Teutonic Christendom--each nation or Church, as it becomes a power in the history of mankind, has been partly taking the shape and doing the work which answered to the design and purpose of God, partly thwarting and resisting that purpose. So far as it has been faithful to its calling, so far as the collective unity of its life has been true to the eternal law of righteousness, it has been a vessel made to honour. Those who see in history, not the chaos in which brute forces are blindly working from confusion to confusion, but the unfolding of a righteous order, can see in part how resistance, unfaithfulness, sensuality, have marred the work,--how Powers that were as the first of nations have had written on them, as it seemed, the sentence passed of old on Amalek, that their latter end should be that they should perish forever. Spain, in her decrepitude and decay; France, in her alternations of despotism and anarchy; Rome, in the insanity of her claims to dominate over the reason and conscience of mankind--these are instances, to which we cannot close our eyes, of vessels marred in the potters hands. Each such example of the judgment of the heavens bids us not to be high-minded, but to fear. We need to remember, as of old, that the doom which seems so far from us may be close at hand, even at our doors, that that which seems ready to fall on this nation or on that, Turk or Christian, Asiatic or European, is not irreversible. At what time soever, now as in the prophets days, a nation shall turn and repent, and struggle over the stepping stones of its dead self to higher things, there is the beginning of hope. The Potter may return and mould and fashion it, it may be to lowlier service, perhaps even to outward dishonour, but yet, if cleansed from its iniquity, it shall be meet for the Masters use.

IV. The parable bears upon the individual life of every child of man, and it is obviously that aspect of its teaching which has weighed most heavily upon the minds of men, and often, it would seem, made sad the hearts of the righteous whom God has not made sad. Does it leave room there also for individual freedom and responsibility? Did the inspired teachers think of it as leading men to repentance and faith and hope, or as stifling every energy under the burden of an inevitable doom? The words in which St. Paul speaks of it might be enough to suggest the true answer to that question. To him even that phase of the parable which seems the darkest and most terrible does but present to mans reverential wonder an instance of the forbearance of God enduring with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted for destruction. The Potter would fain return and mould and remould till the vessel is fit for some use, high or humble, in the great house of which He is the Supreme Head. By the discipline of life, by warnings and reproofs, by failures and disappointments, by prosperity and success, by sickness and by health, by varying work and ever-fresh opportunities, He is educating men and leading them to know and to do His will. Who does not feel in his calmer and clearer moments that this is the true account of the past chances and changes of his life? True, there is a point at which all such questionings reach their limit. In the language of another parable, to one is given five pounds, to another two, and to another one--to each according to his several ability. But the thought that sustains us beneath the burden of these weary questions is that the Judge of all the earth shall assuredly do right. Mens opportunities are the measure of their responsibilities. To whom men have committed much, of him will they ask the more. The bitter murmur and passionate complaint are checked by the old words, Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus? The poorest and the humblest may find comfort in the thought that if his work be done faithfully and truly, if he sees in the gifts which he has received, and the outward circumstances of his life, and the work to which they lead him, but the tokens of the purpose of the great Designer, he, too, yielding himself as clay to the hands of the potter, may become in the least honoured work, a vessel of election. What is required in such a vessel when formed or fashioned is, above all, that it should be clean and whole, free from the taint that defiles, from the flaws that mar the completeness of form or the efficiency of use. The work of each soul of man is to seek this consecration, to flee the youthful lusts, the low ambitions, the inner baseness, which desecrate and debase. Our comfort is, that in so striving, we are fellow workers with the great Work-Master. Our prayer to Him may well be that He will not despise what His own hands have made. (Dean Plumptre.)

Man in the hands of God

I. Man in the hand of God as morally defective.

1. Humanity throughout all ages and climes has been defective--

(1) In moral judgment;

(2) In moral affections, and

(3) In moral conduct.

2. How this defection occurred is a question that lands us into the mysterious region whence evil sprang.

II. Man in the hands of God as morally improvable.

1. God can improve the marred vessel of humanity.

(1) He can emotionally. He has the heart for it. He is great enough in love to forgive the past, and bless the future.

(2) He can magisterially. The mediation of Christ enables Him to do so in a way consistent with the justice of His character, the honour of His government, and the stability of His throne.

(3) He can reformatively. He has all the moral instrumentality necessary to reform the soul.

2. The Gospel is the power of God.

III. Man in the hands of God as morally free.

1. Man is responsible for his conduct. The social history of the world, the universal consciousness of man, and the concurrent teachings of the Bible all show this.

2. Man is responsible for his destiny. Humanity will be plucked up, and pulled down by God, or built up and planted according to its conduct. (Homilist.)

The potter and the day

I. Every man naturally engendered of the offspring of Adam, is, in the sight of an all-seeing, heart-searching God, only as a piece of marred clay.

1. As man was created originally after God in knowledge, as well as righteousness and true holiness, we may rationally infer that his understanding, in respect to things natural as well as Divine, was of a prodigious extent: for he was made but a little lower than the angels, and consequently, being like them, excellent in his understanding, he knew much of God, of himself, and all about him; and in this, as well as every other respect, was, as Mr. Collier expresses it in one of his essays, a perfect major: but this is far from being our case now. Men of low and narrow minds soon commence wise in their own conceits; and having acquired a little smattering of the learned languages, and made some small proficiency in the dry sciences, are easily tempted to look upon themselves as a head taller than their fellow mortals, and accordingly, too, too often put forth great swelling words of vanity. But persons of a more exalted and extensive reach of thought dare not boast. No: they know that the greatest scholars are in the dark in respect to many even of the minutest things in life.

2. This will appear yet more evident, if we consider the perverse bent of his will. Being made in the very image of God; undoubtedly before the fall, man had no other will but his Makers. Gods will, and Adams, were then like unisons in music. There was not the least disunion or discord between them. But now he hath a will as directly contrary to the will of God, as light is contrary to darkness, or heaven to hell.

3. A transient view of fallen mans affections will yet more firmly corroborate this melancholy truth. These, at his being first placed in the paradise of God, were always kept within proper bounds, fixed upon their proper objects, and, like so many gentle rivers, sweetly, spontaneously, and habitually glided into their ocean, God: but now the scene is changed; for we are now naturally full of vile affections, which, like a mighty and impetuous torrent, carry all before them.

4. The present blindness of natural conscience makes this appear in a yet more glaring light. In the soul of the first man Adam, conscience was, no doubt, the candle of the Lord, and enabled him rightly and instantaneously to discern between good and evil, right and wrong. And, blessed be God! some remains of this are yet left; but, alas! how dimly does it burn, and how easily and quickly is it covered, or put out and extinguished.

5. Nor does that great and boasted Diana, I mean unassisted, unenlightened Reason, less demonstrate the justness of such an assertion. The horrid and dreadful mistakes which the most refined reasoners in the heathen world ran into, both as to the object as well as manner of Divine worship, have sufficiently demonstrated the weakness and depravity of human reason: nor do our modem boasters afford us any better proofs of the greatness of its strength, since the best improvement they generally make of it is only to reason themselves into downright wilful infidelity, and thereby reason themselves out of eternal salvation. Need we now any further witness that man, fallen man, is altogether a piece of marred clay?

6. But this is not all, we have yet more evidence to call; for do the blindness of our understandings, the perverseness of our will, the rebellion of our affections, the corruption of our consciences, the depravity of our reason, prove this charge; and does not the present disordered frame and constitution of our bodies confirm the same also? Doubtless in this respect, man, in the most literal sense of the word, is a piece of marred clay: for God originally made him of the dust of the earth.

II. The absolute necessity there is of this fallen natures being renewed. Archimedes once said, Give me a place where I may fix my foot, and I will move the world; so, without the least imputation of arrogance, with which perhaps he was justly chargeable, we may venture to say, Grant the foregoing doctrine to be true, and then deny the necessity of mans being renewed, who can. I suppose I may take it for granted that all hope after death to go to a place which we call heaven. But permit me to tell you, heaven is rather a state than a place; and consequently, unless you are previously disposed by a suitable state of mind, you could not be happy even in heaven itself. For what is grace, but glory militant? what is glory, but grace triumphant? This consideration made a pious author say, that holiness, happiness, and heaven, were only three different words for one and the self-same thing. And this made the great Preston, when he was about to die, turn to his friends, saying, I am changing my place, but not my company. To make us meet to be blissful partakers of such heavenly company, this marred clay, I mean these depraved natures of ours, must necessarily undergo a universal moral change our understandings must be enlightened; our wills, reason, and consciences, must be renewed; our affections must be drawn toward, and fixed upon things above; and because flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven, this corruptible must put on incorruption, this mortal must put on immortality. Christ hath said it, and Christ will stand. Unless a man, learned or unlearned, high or low, though he be a master of Israel as Nicodemus was, unless he be born again, he cannot see, he cannot enter into, the kingdom of God. If it be required, Who is to be the potter? and by whose agency this marred day is to be formed into another vessel? Or in other words, if it be asked, how this great and mighty change is to be effected? I answer, not by the mere dint and force of moral suasion. Neither is this change to be wrought by the power of our own free-will. We might as soon attempt to stop the ebbing and flowing of the tide, and calm the most tempestuous sea, as to imagine that we can subdue, or bring under proper regulations, our own unruly wills and affections by any strength inherent in ourselves. And therefore I inform you, that this heavenly Potter, this blessed Agent, is the Almighty Spirit of God the Holy Ghost, the Third Person in the most adorable Trinity, co-essential with the Father and the Son. This is that fire which our Lord came to send into our earthly hearts, and which I pray the Lord of all lords to kindle in every unrenewed one this day. (G. Whitefield, M. A.)

A visit to the potters house

I. Mind originates power. The work is a work on the wheels; but the power begins with the workman; it is spirit that presides, it is will that controls; an intelligent being makes use of the power he has set in motion to fashion his design. The perfect type is in the mind of the workman, and he must give it form and shape, and impress it on matter. All power originates with God, and is under His control.

II. Divine patience is associated with Divine power. You do not see in the potter at work what God can do if it pleases Him, but what it pleases Him to do; not what He may do with the clay, but what His purpose is. We are taught the intention of the Divine worker to mould men and nations according to a Divine pattern, that there is nothing arbitrary in His procedure; that every act is regulated by a reference to His plan, and that Divine patience is constantly and perseveringly at work.

III. Divine patience perseveres in the accomplishment of its design. How often have you been marred through want of submission to a perfect and loving will, manifested in Gods providential dealings with you or in His Gospel? The clay may be broken so often that it loses all its adhesive properties, and when placed on the wheels may splinter into fragments and become utterly worthless.

Conclusion--

1. There is a fixed and settled plan, an original idea in the Divine mind, according to which His work is to be conformed. Known unto God are all His works from the beginning. Man is Gods work. God found in Himself the pattern of this wondrous creation. He made man in His own image, in His own likeness. Man was a failure; the world therefore was a failure, and the flood was brought in, and the work destroyed. There was to be a new manifestation of humanity. Men were to be distributed into families and tribes, into nations and kingdoms. We are predestinated to be conformed to the image of His Son. We are to be like Him: our bodies are to be fashioned like unto His glorious body. There is a perfect type of society. There is to be the universal diffusion of truth and righteousness. There is a perfect type of a Church.

2. God does not make anything for the sole purpose of destroying it. See the interest God takes in what is going on in the world, and the effect it has on Him.

3. That there is no waste in life. There is no waste in nature. There was in Christs miracles no waste of power. There is no waste in human life. That part of it which is introductory to the rest, which we call childhood, is not waste; it has its relations to the rest of life. That portion which is tried and tested, which is subjected to many experiments, is not waste. The sorrows and tears of life are not the waste of life--toil, strife, agony, are not lost. All these things that seem to fall from life, are worked up again into new forms. Life may be a marred and broken thing, but God can work it up into a form of Divine beauty.

4. Life is a work on the wheels. Character is in the course of formation: it will come out either marred or perfected, just as you submit to the Divine will, or resist the influences brought to bear upon you. (H. J. Boris.)

Pottery

Such was the invitation which came to me as I spent a holiday among the potteries of North Staffordshire.

1. The preparation of the clay. In my ignorance I had thought very lightly of that. I supposed that the clay was brought from some place or other, and, after being kneaded, would be used for the purpose of the potter. But as we looked over the various processes, several things astonished us very much in this preparation of the clay. In the first place, we were astonished at the materials used. There was, of course, the clay as we understand it, but in addition we found stones of the very hardest description and flints also used. In one factory some eight or ten mills did nothing else but grind to the very smallest powder these hard flint stones mixed with the clay. And then these ground flint stones were further churned with water until it became a fluid mass. Another interesting feature was the straining, and the use of magnets to extract any iron that might be there. At last it was run into bags placed under a press and the water squeezed out, and the clay left behind. It was then turned out as plastic clay for the potters use. We often speak of the potter and the clay, and we are warranted by the Scriptures to use this simile for the sovereignty of God. And, no doubt, we must hold fast the eternal sovereignty of God. But I am not quite sure that we do not see here the process anterior to what we speak of as the sovereignty of God. The sovereignty of God is shown in the form of the vessel made from the clay, but here we have something anterior to the making of the vessel--the preparation of the clay. And while we believe in the sovereignty of God, we also believe that salvation is perfectly free. Your heart may be as hard as a flint, or without any stamina as that liquid mass, and yet it is quite possible from that hard flinty rock, or from that fluid liquid mass, to make the clay which shall be plastic for the Potters use. Are you willing to be made clay?--willing to be just put into His hands?

2. The making of the vessels. Nothing could be more beautiful than to watch the skilful potter mould the clay upon his wheel until it became a beautiful vessel under his touch. Here I learnt what a great variety of vessels the potter made. Here were vessels which would adorn the tables of the rich, and also vessels necessary for the poor; here were vessels which might only be for ornaments, and others of the greatest practical use. Oh, if you are only willing to be as clay in the Great Potters hands, He is able to make you vessels meet for the Masters use. The use may be very varied, and the vessels may differ in form and beauty, but if you are willing to be as clay in His hands, He will fashion you so that you may be a vessel for His glory, and for the benefit of those around you.

3. The varied processes to fix the shape of the vessels. Until the vessel was fired, the potter could break it up, as he did, and throw it back into the mass, but when once the vessel was fired, its shape and form were fixed. Two things about the firing interested me. The one was the gradual preparation that the vessel had to go through. I asked why it was necessary to dry it so slowly by steam first, before it was put into the great oven. I received the reply that if it was put into the oven at once, it would break. There must be the slow process of drying by steam. Ah! and is it not so with our Great Potter? Does He not gently train us? He does not put us into the fiery oven all at once. He prepares us by less difficult temptations for the fiery heat which we must all go through. Every man must pass through the fire in order that the stability of his own character may be brought out. God knows the amount of heat which is necessary, and He will not send one temptation more than we are able to bear. Another interesting thing in the firing was, that every vessel had to be separate from the others. They were packed up in the saggers so that not one single clay vessel should touch another. And the reason, they told us, was that the two vessels would be so fused in the fire that both would be spoilt. Is it not true with the great fiery oven through which the Great Potter passes us? We must pass through the fire alone.

4. Then we came to the decorative process. First, there was the making of the pattern. The pattern was made upon a copper plate, and then taken off upon the tracing paper and placed upon the plate. The pattern in many cases was very similar. One machine rolled off some millions of patterns. The Christian has only one pattern--the Lord Jesus Christ. It is His purpose that we should be conformed to His image. The next thing that struck us was the number of hands through which the pattern had to pass. An ordinary dinner plate had to pass through some ten or twelve different hands--one filling in one colour, and another another colour, until it passed down the whole line; one fining in a little stroke of blue, another red, another colouring a leaf, until at last the whole pattern was brought out upon the one plate. Is it not so with the Christian? The pattern must be the same, but the pattern is variously brought out. It may be a very different colour. We take our pattern from those we mix with day by day, and if we are only upon the lookout we may find many things to colour the pattern of Jesus Christ in our lives. Here we may colour with a little bit of unselfishness, here a little bit of charity, here a little bit of self-sacrifice. You may take from one and another impressions which will bring out the grand pattern. Another interesting thing was the firing in order to fix these colours. The vessel must be put into the kiln to fix the colours. There is intense scorching heat in there. And is it not so with the Great Potter? Does He not often put us Christians into the kiln in order to fix the colour? How many Christians you see who have had their colours fixed by adversity! This ones love is brought out by trial; this ones charity by temptation. Then came the last process. Once more the vessel is put into the kiln, and the fire brought to bear upon it, and then the colour and pattern come out still more glorious than before. The glaze is now dry, and the work of the potter now finished. And so ofttimes the Christian is plunged into despondency, losing all the evidences of his faith; is plunged once more into the fire; and in the fire he sees that there is One walking with Him, and His form is as the Son of God, and he sees the pattern is being brought out by the great Potter.

5. At last we were taken up to the showroom, and here were displayed all the triumphs of the potters art, and we could have spent hours in admiring the work of the potter. So we look forward to the show room when we leave all the dross of the workshop and the whirl of the factory; and when we ascend up to the showroom where we shall see the triumphs of the Great Potters art, we shall simply wonder that out of these stones and liquid clay it is possible to make such vessels as He has prepared for His glory. (E. A. Stuart, M. A.)

The teaching of the potter

Divine revelation is a possible thing only because of that great and earliest fact in the record of human history, And God made man in His image, a fact which nothing, not even sin, can destroy. Gods words to men are made possible and meaningful because of the fact that, in spite of rebellion and fall, there is enough deep, true kinship left to afford resting place for His appeal and interpretation of His speech. As long as spiritual being lasts, this must be true. Now proceed a further step. The method of communication is not a matter of essential importance. So long as I make you understand what I mean, the way in which I do this does not matter much. We meet with those who do not speak our language, or perhaps any tongue that we can speak and understand; but we find that some sufficient things can be said by signs. We can buy this or that by pointing to it, and showing the value in coin. There is one further step to take, and then we shall arrive at the position from which I want to look at the words of this text. The activities and occupations of men are full of resemblances to the activities of God. What we have to do, and are doing every day, illustrates much more fully than, perhaps, we have ever thought, what God is doing around us and within us; so that we may rise somewhat to comprehend His work in its grand patience and victory over hindrance and pauseless triumph, by means of a fuller understanding of our own. And, significantly enough, this is the more completely true of those occupations which are simple and manual, most necessary and least artificial, compelled by the wants which are common to us all, rather than of those which are the creation of empty social custom and artificial routine. The Divine word to Jeremiah, both in itself and in the manner of its communication to him, is strikingly suggestive. What was the word? Jeremiah had been a very faithful minister and messenger, and yet his endeavours had been unavailing to stay the torrent of national disaster. As a rock, staunch in midstream, only adds to the tumult of the waters that dash, and break, and hurry on their way, this mans obedient and firm obstruction only made him to suffer the fretful wrath of the people, whose downward rush would not be stayed. It seemed as though he were a protest and nothing more. For the people there was nothing but hopeless ruin. God wants to show His servant that such despair is not true. What the people might have been they refused to be, but they might yet be something. What the potter does with the clay with which he works, the Lord can do with the men with whom He deals. What is that? Well, go down to the workmans house and watch him. See the frame, and the wheels, and the mass of ready clay. See the mans tutored hands and nimble fingers. He has purpose, ability, design. His power is complete. He can do what he likes. He can take the lump of clay in his hands and say, This shall be a fair and stately vase fit to stand on the table of a king; or, This shall be a thing for common use, one among a thousand like itself, winning no regard or admiration, to be appraised at no appreciable value. He can bid the clay be what he chooses. Can he? Let us see. Now the workman has put clay upon the wheel, and it begins to whirl; the beginning of the design is manifest, some outline of a shape appears under the touch of his plastic hand. But then comes a pause: something has gone wrong. Where is the fault? Not in the care and genius of the workman? Surely not in the clay? Yes, there is a flaw, a rebellious and intractable mingling of impurities, and the workman cannot do as he had purposed. What will the potter do? Toss the clay away? Clay is plentiful and cheap. No, not if the workmans heart is right and his enthusiasm true. A fellow workman may say, I would not trouble with it. No one can make anything of that piece; it is utterly useless. But the right-souled man says, I waste nothing, and despise nothing. I can make something of this clay if you cannot; and I shall make what can be made, if not what I hoped, at least the very best that is according to its nature possible. So he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it (Jer_18:4). And so can I do, says the cheery word to the prophet, so can I the Lord do with this apparently hopeless and intractable nation. With them, as with the piece of clay, there is a resolute, rebellious intermingling. They show themselves unworthy. They make themselves incapable of the high destiny among the nations to which My call would lead them. They must lose their crown. My purpose must be fulfilled in other ways, and by other instruments and ministries. But--and here speaks the heart of generous, patient love--I have not done with them. I shall do the very best that can be done with them, and put them in a place which they can fill. This is My pleasure anything short of it would be anguish. But, to do the possible best, even with the most unpromising material, is the object and aim of My redeeming hand. The right-hearted workman is like-minded of God, and, in his sphere, does an identical work. The man who makes two ears of corn grow where only one would grow before; the man who shapes wood, or beats and moulds metal into fashions of use, beneficence, and comeliness, is, besides all the wage-profit that his industry brings, doing a redemptive work that is akin to Divine. Industry, cleanliness, usefulness, beautifying labour--these are far more than means of livelihood, they are means of might and spiritual life. (D. J. Hamer.)

The relation of the will to character and destiny

The figure of the potter is of frequent occurrence in Scripture; and its meaning is the more easily understood, because there is scarcely any craft of which the principal tools have been less altered in the lapse of the centuries. The purposes for which the figure is used in the Bible may be arranged under two chief heads. In every case the power of the potter over the clay is emphasised. But while some passages stop with that fact,--that the potters power is absolute, without measure or limit, that he can do what he likes with the clay,--others teach distinctly that the potter is not ruled by his fancy or caprice, or by any momentary or arbitrary impulse, but the exercise of his power is itself determined by something, some quality or fitness, within the clay. Of these two lessons, the former is most frequent in Isaiah and in Paul, although other writers adopt or enforce it. That is the most obvious meaning of the figure, to be found in almost every literature, never to be forgotten by the reverent--the potter has complete command over the clay. He, at his wheel, is the symbol of power: the clay, of helplessness and necessary submission. There has probably never been a man who believed that more thoroughly than did Jeremiah. In this very chapter he represents God as saying to the house of Israel, Behold, as the clay is in the potters hand, so are ye in Mine hand. In his account of his own call, the prophet describes a Divine voice as speaking to him: Before thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. He never hesitates in his ascription to God of the right and power of complete control over man, or to man of the necessity of submission and the obligation of obedience. But according to Jeremiah that is not a complete account of the relation, either of God to man, or of man to God. And in this chapter he uses the figure of the potter to show, on the one hand, that the potters power is not exercised arbitrarily, and on the other, that its exercise is determined, and even in some sense conditioned, by the clay itself.

1. With regard to the figure, it is in the particulars of the fourth verse that Jeremiahs use of it differs from that of most other scriptural writers. As soon as the potter saw that the clay he was dealing with would not answer the purpose he had in view, with a slight touch of his hand he crushed it down into a shapeless heap of mud, began anew, and made it into another vessel. In other words, the potters treatment of the clay depends upon his knowledge or discovery of its qualities, its capability, or its faultiness. Or, dropping the figure, God does not always act upon and complete His first apparent design with a man; and any change of design on His part is determined by some adequate cause, which is always to be found in the man himself--in the way in which he exercises his freedom of will, or in the attitude in which he puts himself towards conscience, and duty, and truth. There has sometimes been a disposition, amongst nations and amongst individuals, to imagine that some moral character had been stamped indelibly upon them by God, and was permanent and unalterable, whatever they did. So far was Jeremiah from believing that, and so far is the Bible from teaching it, that it represents mans will as in a sense entrusted with the supreme control over his spirit and over his destiny. The plastic skill and power of the Great Potter, in themselves immeasurable and without limit, are yet not applied arbitrarily, under the impulse of fancy or caprice, but depend at least for their direction upon the clay itself.

2. That truth is sometimes overlooked, or qualified, or even rejected. Some of the current philosophies deny it in theory, but, when pressed, will reluctantly acknowledge that consciousness can be quoted in its favour, or, as the greatest English psychologist of the day puts it, The assumption of the freedom of the will is in a certain sense inevitable to anyone exercising rational choice. In the Old Testament it is an especial favourite of Jeremiahs, though not confined to him; and in this single paragraph he is not contented with the dubious form it assumes in the figure, but recurs to it once and again afterwards. When verse 14 is compared with the preceding verse, it becomes evident that the prophet wanted to point a contrast between the steadfastness of the phenomena and laws of nature, and the apparent fickleness of those of morals. To the one the eternal will of God which knows no change is central; to the other, the uncertain will of man. The forces that seem to play in the cloud forms and the winds, to move with slow rhythm in the solid structures of the ages, or with quick inapparent catastrophe and explosion, the life that modifies the cell and pulsates in a myriad forms through the universe--all simply fulfil their Sovereigns will; and the only power, not in the same way subject to His rule, but permitted to rebel against Him, and to check and alter His purposes, is that of the personality or will of man. To that extent the Potter renounces His power over the clay, and the clay is allowed to determine the design of the Potter.

3. The same truth is put in a third way in verses 7-10. The inference evidently is, that neither Gods threats nor His promises are absolute, in the sense that they are incapable of diversion or of change. Every word that goes forth from His lips is of necessity law; but the nations, the individuals, are left at liberty to choose which of the words shall govern them, and the occasions of choice are more than one. It appears accordingly that men can actually, by their choice of evil or carelessness concerning right, frustrate Gods purposes or grace, just as by penitence and self-reform they can avert a doom that is impending. That is the word of the Lord by others than Jeremiah (Eze_18:20-24). Nor does the New Testament reject such a lesson, which is in accordance further with the teaching of reason and with the fundamental conception of justice. There is no finality in Gods design for a man, until the mans will has either frittered itself away, or hardened itself into invincibility. But by the attitude towards God into which men put themselves, they determine the pattern according to which His methods mould them, and every change of attitude on their part is quickly followed by its appropriate and necessary change of design. Nor is this modification of Gods design represented as confined to nations or communities. Jonah himself was called of God to be a prophet, but the action of his own will made him a sacrifice to appease the sea, until, when he willed better things, Gods plan for him changed back again. There is thus cumulative evidence, in Scripture, in history, in human experience, that God does not always act to the end upon His original design for a man, but that His designs are sometimes changed on account of something in the men themselves. What is that something? This chapter alone, to say nothing of teaching that abounds elsewhere, leaves no room for doubt. If that nation turn from their evil, is laid down with all emphasis in the eighth verse as the one condition upon which the modification of Gods purpose depends; and the most powerful and essential human factor in every act of moral turning is of necessity the will. The responsibility for a mans character rests substantially, it would be hardly too much to say entirely, upon himself. It is a terrible responsibility, of which men have tried to rid themselves in many ways; but so long as human nature remains what it is, free to choose the right or the wrong, it is a responsibility which every man must face and every man must bear. God gives, in the conscience and by His Spirit, a clear revelation of what is right, and in His Son a source of strength that is sufficient for every duty. He gives opportunities, allurements, warnings without number; and having given those, ceaselessly present with us, His part in the formation of character may be said to be done. The man has then to determine, by the action of his own will, whether the law of perfecting or the law of perdition shall work in him. (R. W. Moss.)

The potter and the day

The whole revealed Word of God takes for granted, appeals to, and proceeds upon two facts: first, that nothing can proceed from God which is not like God; next, that man is a co-worker with God in the shaping out of his own destiny. The Bible is all quick with the great truth that man can escape from evil, and that the work to which the good God has, more than anything else, set Himself is to help him to escape. Even the heritage of misery and disease which a bad parent leaves to his child is--in Gods world--not so potent but that the child may rise above it.

I. Every human life is, first of all, an idea in the mind of God. The potter is an artist, and it is the thoughts of his head he embodies in the vessels he makes. He is thus a likeness to us of God. Such men as Bernard Palissy and Josiah Wedgwood did not spend their instructive lives only to make clayware for human use, but also to reveal to us, and enable us to understand, the working of the Divine Artist in the formation of human lives. Can you recall, you who have read Palissys life, the passionate eagerness with which he sought out beautiful forms in nature? Do you remember how his unresting brain toiled to make new combinations of colour and form? And with what unwearying zeal he sought to bring beauty and strength and polish into the vessels he made? It is all a far-off portrait of God. The human artist who never saw a wonderful conjunction of natural objects, of form and colour, in field or wood, without bringing it in straightway to his workshop in the brain, is but an outshadowing to us of the Divine Artist, and of the thought, the care, the skill, the beauty, which God expends on every life He makes. It is true that the Divine Artist has to work with inferior clay. He has to embody the thoughts of His creative mind in material that has been soiled by sin--flesh that has corrupted its way, and transmitted its taints and diseases and weaknesses to the children. But, all the same, the life and the outshaping of the life are the work of God. The gladsome fact, therefore, in the teaching of the potter and the clay, is that our lives are not shaped by accident; nor are the materials of our life combined by blind chance. My personality, as truly as my body, is the work of His hands. But here is my joy. In this very fact I have a ground of appeal to God. When my spirit is overwhelmed by the mysteries of existence, or my way hedged up by moral difficulties, which I have in myself no strength to overcome, I can go to Him and say: O Maker of my being, O Planner out of my lot, Thou faithful Creator, I am poor and needy: wilt not Thou have respect to the work of Thy hands, and make haste to help me?

II. Every human life is shaped for a Divine use. When the potter turns a vessel on his wheel, the first pulse of thought concerning it touches its use. It is the use which determines the shape. And this holds good in the shaping of human life by God. Anterior to the infinite variety of shape in our lives is this grand common fact for all life, We are not driftwood on a tumbling sea. We are created to be vessels for God and of God, vessels of His sanctuary, set apart to His service, and filled with all sweet and wholesome things. This great primal purpose of the Creator seeks to fulfil itself many ways in our lives. But in all ways the Divine intention is that we shall contain and give forth some fair measure of his own life. One is set to fulfil this purpose on one level, another on a level higher or lower. One must do it by work, another by suffering. But for one and all this is the Divine purpose and requirement, that we be vessels of truth and righteousness, embodiments and manifestations--up to the measure of our natural capacities and shapes--of the Divine character and life. It is the sad fact, as we all know, that this primal use intended by our Creator is not fulfilled in all. But our shortcomings do not alter the fact that we were made for this purpose. In the fulfilment of this end our happiness consists. He who made us has linked the right use of life and our personal well-being together.

III. Lives tried in one shape are sometimes broken up and reshaped to fulfil themselves in new spheres or different capacities. And He breaks up Joseph the dreamer and the slave, and forms Joseph the wise statesman, administrator, and prince of Egypt. That was a strong well formed vessel who went forth from Jerusalem to Damascus, carrying fiery zeal for God, cruel death for Gods people. The Divine Artist takes this vessel--formed of good clay, impact of such energies, such zeal--and breaks it up and puts it on the wheel, and reshapes it for higher levels and wider ends. Christian biography is full of such instances. Here is one who was only a timid lad at the outset, shrinking from boisterous companions, retiring to woods for meditation on Gods Word. The timid lad becomes a fearless preacher, and the founder of the Society of Friends. Here is another, a poor cobbler, piecing together little scraps of different coloured leathers to make a map of the world, and by the black pieces to point out to his friends the extent, of heathenism. The poor mapmaker becomes William Carey, the founder of Missions to India and the translator of the Bible into Indian languages. A third is at first a poor piecer in a spinning factory on the banks of the Clyde. But at last he is the voice of one crying in a wilderness: Prepare ye the way of the Lord: make a highway in the desert for God. And so great in this ministry that black men carry his bones, when he dies, a years journey from the depths of Africa to England; and white men there reverently bury them in the sepulchres of their kings, because he had done good to God and to man. God breaks up the first-shaped clay which has promise in it to make better vessels for His use. Shall we turn aside and look at the Divine Artist at this work of reshaping? Those awful times in the experience of His people when He comes with a succession of trials, when He sends whole tides of sorrow into the soul, are the times when we shall best see God at His work, when He reshapes for higher ends the clay that was shaped for lower ends before.

IV. God has left it to man himself to decide whether he will be a vessel of honour or of dishonour. Hath not the potter power over the same lump to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour?--that is one side of this mystery. If a man purge himself--from being a vessel unto dishonour--he shall be a vessel unto honour, sanctified and meet for the Masters use--this is the other. But the one side does not contradict the other. The Creator has power over the lives He moulds; but it is never so wielded as to quench the power of choice He has given to us. In respect of natural capacity, position in society, function, time and place of birth, joy and sorrow, health and sickness, this power of God is absolute. He appoints the bounds of our habitation. He alone designs the fashion of our personality. He alone fixes the doom on sin. But at those points in the development of life, where the real battle of the soul is waged, where the decisive shocks of the conflict between righteousness and unrighteousness have to be sustained, and the burden of responsibility taken up, we are in a region where God leaves man as absolutely free as He is Himself. The Creator has power over the life; but, as put forth by God, it is a power tempered with justice and mercy, and quick with all the goodness of the Divine character.

V. Be true to the Divine intention and shaping of your lives. Do not lower yourselves to evil shapes. Do not suffer yourselves to degenerate into vessels set to vile uses and filled with base, unwholesome things. What the great King desires is that we should all be vessels for Him, vessels to carry and pour forth His love, His life, His purity, in all we do and wherever we go. And what He seeks to fill our souls with is His own life as God, that eternal life which He has poured out for us all in Christ. And this is eternal wisdom to receive that life of God into the heart. This is the one grand, informing, outshaping, abiding power for human life. This will reshape the most unshapely into the very image of God. (A. Macleod, D. D.)

The Divine Potter

Am I clay in the hands of the Divine Potter? The Bible does not say so: yet apparently this is the very thing that it does say. The context does not teach us that God is speaking about the individual man, or about personal salvation, or about the eternal destiny of the individual soul: the Lord is speaking about nations, empires, kingdoms, vessels which He only can handle. Moreover, He Himself descends into reasoning, and therefore He gives up the arbitrary power or right, if He ever claimed it. He bases His action upon the conduct of the nation spoken about. So His administration is not arbitrary, despotic, independent, in any sense that denies the right of man to be consulted, or that undervalues the action of man as a moral agent. The potter did not reason with the clay: God did reason with Israel. The analogy therefore can only be useful up to a given point; never overdrive any metaphor; always distinguish between the purpose of the parable, its real substance and its accessories, its incidental draperies and attachments. Let us take the inquiry in its crudest and most ruthless form. Can He not do with a man as this man does with the clay? The answer is in a sense Yes, in a larger sense No. As a matter of power, crudely defined, God can do with us as the potter does with the clay: but God Himself has introduced a new element into power; He is no longer in relation to the soul simply and merely omnipotent, He has made Himself a party. In so treating Himself He exercised all His attributes. He need not have done so, but having done so He never shrinks from the conditions which He has created and which He has imposed. Observe, He does not give up any part of His sovereignty. In the first instance He created man, devised a great scheme and ministry of things: all this was done sovereignly; it was not man that was consulted as to his own creation, it was the Triune God that said, Let us make man. The Lord, then, having thus acted from the point of His sovereignty, has Himself created a scheme of things within which He has been pleased to work as if He were a consenting and cooperating party. When did God say, By the exercise of a potters right I will break you, the soul, in pieces, although you want to be preserved and saved? When did Jesus Christ ever say to any man, You want to be saved, but I do not want to save you; I doom you to everlasting alienation from the throne of light and the sceptre of mercy? Never. May not a man, changing the level of inquiry, do what he likes with his own? No. Society says No; law says No; the needful security without which progress is impossible says No. Yet we must define what is meant by can and may and cannot. Then in the use of the word can we always come upon the further word cannot at the same time. You can and you cannot, in one act. Why, how is that? Is not that a simple contradiction of terms? No, that statement, though apparently paradoxical, is one, and admits of easy reconciliation in both its members. If it were a question of mere power or physical ability, as we have often seen in our study of this Bible, we can do many things: but where are we at liberty simply to use ability or power in its most simple definition? Power is a servant; power is not an independent attribute that can do just what it likes: power says, What shall I do? I am an instrument, I am a faculty, but I am intended by the Sovereign of the universe to be a servant--the servant of judgment and conscience and duty and social responsibility. Power stands in an attitude of attention, awaiting the orders of conscience. Mere power therefore is one thing, mere ability, and it is a faculty that never ought to be exercised in itself, by itself, for itself. It must be always worked in consent, in union, in cooperation. I repeat, power--great, self-boasting power--must obey orders. Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God. May not a man do what he likes with his own? What is his own? Not his child. He says, This child is my own; we say, Yes and No. Once more we come upon the double reply. Every child has two fathers. There is a little, measurable, individual father, and there is the greater father called Society: may we not recognise a third, and say, there is the Father in heaven? Your child cannot speak, and yet you cannot do with it what you like; your child has no will, no opened judgment, and yet you cannot do with the child as you please. Society has taken its name, and its age, and the eyes of Society are upon that child night and day, and if you slew it at midnight you would have to answer for its blood at midday. Here, then, we rest, in presence of this great doctrine of Divine sovereignty in relation to man. We may search the Bible from beginning to end to find that the sovereignty of God ever said to a man, I will not save you when you want to be saved, and we shall find no such instance in the record. With regard to nations, it is perfectly evident from the face of things that there is a Power that is placing nations where they are, and working up the great national unit to great national ends. God has always had, as it were, a double policy, and it is because we have confounded the one policy with the other that we have been all our lifetime subject to bondage through fear lest God may have predestinated us to hell. He never predestined any man to such a place. He predestined unrighteousness to hell and nothing can ever get it into heaven; into that city nothing shall enter that is unholy, impure, defiled, or that maketh a lie. Eternity has never been at peace with wickedness. The infinite tranquillity of immeasurable and inexpressible duration has never been reconciled to one act of trespass, one deed of violence, one thought of wrong. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The potters wheel

Does God rule the nations of the earth? When men set themselves in opposition to what are believed to be the laws of righteousness, will the nation prosper as it would have done if righteousness had been its aim? That was the question which perplexed the prophet. Gods work, he believed, was not frustrated by mans sin, only the nation which set itself against God was broken. Somehow the human mind came to suspect that each man was in direct and intimate relationship with God, that He was dealing with him as truly as if there were no other being in the universe. Every word of Jesus tended to deepen that impression. The very hairs of your head are all numbered . . . Not one sparrow falleth to the ground without your Heavenly Father. Are ye not of more value than they?

I. The first thing which attracts our notice is the clay. It is of different qualities. Some of it is very pure and pliable, other is too soft--fat the potter calls it--to be used in its present state; some is almost white, and will make the finest porcelain, other has such an excess of iron that it will make only coloured ware; some is doubtful,--it will form, but it will twist or crack in the firing. The clay of the potter is human nature, good, bad, and indifferent. Is there any of it so bad that it cannot be used? Not if it be clay. There is no clay that the potter cannot employ. He cannot use stone, and he cannot make a vase of water. There are men so hard that they seem to be stone; there are others so flabby that it seems as if they never could hold together on the revolving wheel; still, if they be men, something can be done. It may not be possible to make poets and statesmen of them, any more than it is possible to make Sevres china of Jersey clay; but they can be moulded and fixed into some form of usefulness as long as they are men. The difficulty, however, which arises in some mens minds, even when that is settled, is this: Is not the best what we want? Can we rest satisfied with any dealing with human nature which leaves the large majority of the race on a low plane, and exalts only a chosen few? Now, if we cannot, how can the Creator? Must we not suppose that He too is disappointed in His work, and that He is limited in His operations? How, then, can we believe in One who is omnipotent? Is not He too limited by necessity, and are we not right in saying that that which determines character is the previous condition of the material with which God works? And does not this lead finally to disbelief, in God? It certainly does lead to a disbelief in such a God as we have fancied. But it may lead to a belief in a nobler God than that. The potter puts his hand on a lump of clay. He can never make pure porcelain out of it. Well, who said that he intended to? Who told us that he tried to and failed? Did not the potter bring the clay into the house? Did he not know what he would find there? Not so. The fineness of the pottery is determined by the quality of the clay, and so is its colour, but not its form. That is the work of the potter alone. It is in that that we see the power of his genius. And the coarser the material and the cruder its colour, the more are we led to marvel at the genius and the goodness which was content to embody itself in such material. The more we study human nature, the more we become convinced that God never intended all men to be alike. The more we study sociology, the more we feel convinced that it would be a fatal thing to have a town with but a single industry, a nation with no variety of employments, a world perfectly homogeneous. We all admit that it is not possible for every man to have all the moral qualities in an equal degree. The important thing in life is that each man should be faithful in the employment of those which he has. It is with individuals as with nations. We say that we cannot, and God ought not to be content with anything less than the best. But what is best? Is it best that all the clay in the world should be turned into Dresden china? By no means. What is best is that there should be a great variety fitted for different purposes. There are certain virtues which would be out of place in certain conditions of civilisation--that is, in certain individuals. Refined sensibility would be as embarrassing to a frontiersman as a carriage hung on delicate springs. What is needed is that he should be brave and just. We say that it is not as high a type as the courteous gentleman who would shrink from profanity as from physical pollution. But the test is to be found not in the quality of the virtue, but in the faithfulness with which it is used. Two things, then, ought to be learned from a consideration of the clay in the potters house. The first is, that God is dealing with men as individuals indeed, yet not as isolated beings, but as members of a great family. It is to the advantage of the family that they should differ, and it is to their own advantage too. This difference in the clay, of which we have many theories, such as the law of heredity, or the influence of environment, are the conditions which God Himself has ordained. All creation is self-limitation. God is working in clay. He must make what the clay is capable of expressing; only, there is no clay which is not capable, on a higher or lower plane, of being conformed to the image of Jesus Christ.

2. The second thing which we see in the potters house is the wheel. On it the lump is placed, and the unseen foot presses the treadle, and the wheel revolves. About the wheel, too, men have formed a theory. First they began with the clay--the substance of human nature. And there was evolved many a philosophy. It has produced the spirit of agnosticism. Men, weary with speculations which lead to nothing, have said there is nothing to be known of the constitution of the clay nor the mind of the worker. And they are right: there is nothing to be known by the exclusive study of the human mind. And so they have turned to the study of the revolutions of the wheel. The clay is on the wheel, and it turns and turns, and slackens not its speed, still less stops in answer to curses or groans. If you ask whence came the clay, the answer is, the wheel made it. If men asked how it took forms of beauty, the answer was given by pointing out that, if the wheel went slower by one revolution in a thousand years, the thing of beauty would be marred; that if it increased its speed but the fraction of a second, the clay would be destroyed. The wheel never changes. Well, how does the ease stand today? Men have roused themselves, and asked at length, What moves the wheel? Such a simple, natural question! But no one can answer it. We do not know, say the wisest students of nature. Every increase of knowledge only serves to widen the surrounding abyss of nescience. And what is more, nothing can ever be known of that secret, for we have learned enough of nature to know that no study of it will tell us any of those things which we would like to know. The study of the clay was formulated in metaphysics, and led to agnosticism. The study of the wheel has done the same. There are, however, certain impressions which the mind has received from the study of nature which nothing will ever shake. The first is the universality of law--that nothing happens anywhere except in accordance with invariable rules, which are never changed. That is the one thing we have learned from the study of nature, and almost the only thing we have learned which throws any light on the great problem which perplexes us. Is this all that can be learned from the potters house? So many tell us, but as we turn away there comes, we cannot tell how, & feeling that we have not seen all. And to me that is, after all, the greatest mystery of life. How did it ever come to pass that man should dream that there is more to be known than can be seen? That is the mystery. From what does it arise? How is it that I, a creature of a moment, without power, an infinitesimal particle in the universe, should come to believe that this is not the whole story of my life, but that there is a hand upon me fashioning me and moulding me, making me walk in the paths which I would not, and comforting me, and filling me with hope? It is because of something else which is in the potters house. That which the prophet saw first of all: I saw the potter work a work on the wheels. It is on that that our eyes must be fixed if we would gain comfort and hope. It is on that that the eyes of thoughtful men must be fixed before we can have a philosophy of life. The study of the clay will show us only the limitations of the clay. The study of the wheel will teach us nothing but the conditions under which the clay is moulded. The contemplation of the hand alone will yield nothing but unsubstantial dreams. The result of the first has been formulated in philosophy; of the second in science; of the third in theology. Should there ever be a complete philosophy of life, it must be from the combination of what each thing in the potters house has to teach us. The clay we can analyse. The wheel we can watch. How can we learn from the hand? Only by taking the testimony which the clay itself bears to its own experience, only by noting the effects produced on the human soul by the awful, mysterious experiences of life. The limitations of your life and mine were fixed long before we saw the light. We have learned that to begin with. The experiences which come to you and me are not made to break in upon the course of this world, violating the law which governs life. They come by rule. There is an undeviating law which governs life. That, too, we have learned. Where, then, is Providence? That is to be seen in the moulding of our life. Gods hand is on us, and in the turn of the wheel which brings joy He lifts us up, and in the turn which brings calamity He moulds us for some use. That is what men forget. The race has always believed, that there was overruling, but supposed that the proof of it was to be found in the events of life, and then was dumfounded when these events proved different from what had been expected. It is not in the events, but in the result of them, that we shall find the proof of the hand of God. That thought frees us at once from the deadness of spirit which comes with the knowledge of inexorable law. If there be a hand fashioning, we may be sure that it chose the clay to make that which it knew the clay could become. If there is a hand moulding our souls, it must be that these laws were prepared by it because He knew that no condition which those laws produce is unfavourable to the development of the life which He loves. And more than that, if there be laws for the clay and laws for the wheel, there are likewise, we may be sure, laws for the moulding hand as well. What are these laws? That we do not know, and that is why there is so much confusion and fear. There is one thing more to be said, and that is, that the parable is incomplete in one respect. There are times when we can speak of humanity as clay in the hands of the potter, but we all know that this human clay has the power of resistance. It can tear itself from the moulding hand; it can fatten itself in sin, so as to frustrate the work on the wheels. So the house of the potter has an exhortation for us, as well as an object lesson. What it is saying to every man is, Do not resist, but cooperate. Look at the clay--it is yourself, it has its limitations. Two things are before you when that truth has entered into your soul. You may despair; you may throw away your life because it is physically, mentally, or morally incomplete or marred. Or you may submit. You may learn to be content; you may rise to thank God that you are what you are. You may be made useful, and in the eyes of the Master beautiful, because expressing the love of God. Look on the wheel. It is the revolving life, with all its manifold experiences. They may be so joyous that we forget that we are here for a purpose, and pass the time in the enjoyment of things which unfit us for beauty or power. They may be hard and bitter, and you may upbraid God. You may say, I have been a religious man, and look at me, old and poor and sad! Are not these laws, which He established, and which now bear heavy on me, for a purpose? We may go further, and say, The consolations of God are not small with us. We may hear the voice of the apostle saying, My brethren, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial as if some strange thing happened to you; there hath no trial taken you but such as is common to man. He wrought a work on the wheels. Let nothing shake that faith. Submit your souls to God. Do not ask Him to make you great, only to make you useful. The hand of the Potter is on your life, moulding it in the midst of manifold experiences. It is the hand of your Father--the same hand which was on Jesus, and moulded that sweet Jewish boy into the perfect manifestation of His own glory. Remember that, and He will make you a thing of beauty, fit for the Masters use. (Leighton Parks.)

The Potter and His clay

You can really see the prophet in his loose flowing robes, walking slowly and softly out of the temple, and away through the narrow streets of Jerusalem towards the Eastern Gate. Then selecting his road, he wanders down the slopes into the Valley of Hinnom. The voice of God is in his ear. The Spirit is directing his steps. Listen! He is reciting over the pathetic words of his great predecessor, with almost as much pathos as Isaiah himself. O that thou hadst hearkened to My commandments! then had thy peace been as a river, and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea. The prophet has come forth from a night of sore travail of spirit. The deep thought of his soul was ever this, How different may have been the course of Israel, and the flow of their national life, if only Gods rule had been supreme. He had chosen them to be a light to the Gentiles, but, alas! they were darkness. In their evil choice and deeds they had foiled the Divine plan, and frustrated the Divine purpose. A father loves his boy dearly. He conceives a plan unto which to shape his life. The boy is the one object for which he lives; to carry out his ideal he saves his hard earnings and seeks to inspire the lad to its lofty attainment. But there is resistance, and the plan is abortive. Again the father tries to shape the lads life according to another plan, only to result in another failure. Still the father never despairs, he will try again and again, until upon some noble model he has shaped the career of his lad. Now, while Jeremiah was wandering on, he was thinking something like that about Israel. Presently the prophet reaches the base of the Valley of Hinnom, and pauses in front of a potters bench. Here he stands and observes. He sees the potter take the clay that is on his bench, knead it until it is soft and pliable to the touch. What was the great truth that God forced home upon the prophets heart? Some have thought it was that men are irresistibly in Gods hand, that He is the absolute Sovereign, working all things after the counsel of His own will. We do not deny this truth, but we do not believe that was the lesson God taught Jeremiah by the side of the potters bench.

I. It is not a discussion of fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute. Gods will had not been absolute in Israel, or there would have been no Divine pleadings, Turn ye, turn ye, for, why will ye die. But another and more hopeful lesson came into the prophets heart. When the vessel was marred, the potter did not throw away the clay, but changed the pattern, and remoulded it. When God first called Abraham the type was patriarchal, afterwards it was theocratic, when God governed them by the dispensation of angels, prophets, and judges. After this there was set up a kingdom, wherein David was Gods viceroy, but now, as the 11th verse of the 19th chapter makes clear, God was about to change the pattern again, and ever will, until Shiloh shall come. Israel shall yet be perfected.

II. The symbols employed. The clay, the worker, the wheels, and the production. The people are the clay. God made man of the dust of the earth, and breathed into him the breath of life. Though made in the image of God, man fell; but God lifts man out of the pit of destruction and from the miry clay, that He may by regeneration conform him into the image of His Son. That clay is resistant or pliable. It was not for want of skill on the part of the potter that the vessel was marred, but there was some hidden defect in the clay itself, that would not yield to the plastic guidance of wheel and hand. But where the clay is pliable the potter perfects the vessel. The Worker is plainly God Himself. He is represented as possessing will, intelligence, and ability to execute. There are two wheels, an upper and a lower, a heavenly influence and an earthly circumstance. His hand is on the upper, His foot upon the lower. While the Divine Potter by His Spirit moulds us, He keeps His foot upon the lower wheel. Providence is under His control as well as grace. The productions are various. He may mould of the clay a common vessel or a beautiful vase. But we are all to be vessels for the Kings use, we are all to bear a likeness to His dear Son.

III. God has design in the life of every believer. What is the difference between the work of an unskilled workman and an artisan? We may define it thus. The unskilled man creates his design as he proceeds, according as necessity determines, or his ideal grows. A skilled man designs first, and then constructs according to plan. The Divine Potter is not shaping our lives indefinitely, but is moulding our character according to His will and purpose. You cannot understand the drift of your life, there is so much mystery in it; it often seems chaotic, a mere tangled skein. But patience! Hope thou in God. Be of good courage. We are not the creatures of chance, the subjects of a blind force that is whirling us round and round without purpose or aim. God employs all things to accomplish His will. Gods unique power is to use all things in our life to His glory, and our highest good. There may be a full flowing river, with a desert land on either side, but its larger usefulness is lost until it is skilfully employed to irrigate the land through which it flows. In the economy of Gods providence, nothing runs to waste. All things are turned to good account. All defeats, as well as victories, all the blightings of our hopes, as all fulfillments, are made to work together for good to them that love God. Herein is the power and the wisdom of the Master Potter. God works wonders out of the most disappointing lives. O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!

IV. Much depends also upon the material. With one piece of wood you may be able to do much, but with another nothing--it flies off ink chips, and breaks into fragments at the touch of the chisel. There are some souls that never yield to Gods moulding; others only when they are melted in the fires of affliction. There our wills bend. Now see this vessel that is marred in the hands of the potter. But why is it marred? There is no lack of skill. No, but there is some gritty substance there, some stubborn resisting quality that will not yield to the deftness of the potters hand. Human nature is often resistant, rather than pliable, to Gods touch. An evil disposition in our nature mars the vessel in the hands of the Potter.

V. The patience of the potter. Jeremiah was not particularly impressed with the fact that the clay was marred in the hand of the potter, but what made the deepest impression was, that when the clay was spoilt there was no sign of anger upon the face of the potter. That was the great lesson for Jeremiah, and for us. He had laboured for Israel, and failed; but had he been as patient as this? Had he not despaired when he should have commenced afresh? And have not we been Jeremiahs, and do we feel this rebuke? I have seen a mechanic spoil a piece of handicraft, and because he spoilt it, in a passion of wrath, dash it to the ground. That is never Gods way. If Israel has failed to answer to the one mould, He will try another. There are broken ideals, over which we all mourn. But God is patient, and if He cannot make us of such a glorious pattern as He first designed, He will go on shaping our life according to another pattern, and finally perfect us for the palace of the King.

VI. The process to which the clay was subjected. Had the clay possessed mental, sensitive being, it might have complained of the method, the pressure of the kneading hand, the spinning of the wheel. But objection is unwisdom. We are sometimes whirled round and round upon the wheel of life, until the head is giddy and the heart sick. But there is not one unnecessary pang. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. Courage! Trust in God. Gods will is of the highest purpose. Character can only come by discipline, and through suffering we pass into the perfect beauty of holiness. (F. James.)

On the potters wheel

Perhaps this second vessel was not quite so fair as the first might have been, still it was beautiful and useful. It was a memorial of the potters patience and long-suffering, of his careful use of material, and of his power of repairing loss and making something out of failure and disappointment. O vision of the long-suffering patience of God! O bright anticipation of Gods redemptive work! O parable of remade characters, and lives, and hopes! Who is there that is not conscious of having marred and resisted the touch of Gods moulding hands? Who is there that does not lament opportunities of saintliness which were lost through the obdurateness of the will and the hardness of the heart?

I. The Divine making of men.

1. The potter has an ideal. Floating through his fancy there is the vessel that is to be. He already sees it hidden in the shapeless clay, waiting for his call to evoke. Before the woman applies scissors to the silk, she has conceived the pattern of her dress; before the spade cleaves the sod, the architect has conceived the plan of the building to be erected there. So of God in nature. The pattern of this round world and of her sister spheres lay in His creative thought before the first beam of light streamed across the abyss. So of the mystical body of Christ, the Church, His Bride. So also of the possibilities of each human life. See that mother bending over the cradle where her firstborn baby son lies sleeping! Mark that smile which goes and comes over her face, like a breath of wind on a calm summers day! Why does she smile Ah! she is dreaming; and in her dreams is building castles of the future eminence of this child--in the pulpit or the senate; in war, or art. If only she might have her way, he should be foremost in happiness, renowned in the service of men. But no mother ever wished so much for her child as God for us, when first cradled at the foot of the Cross.

2. The potter achieves his purpose by means of the wheel. In the discipline of human life this surely represents the revolution of daily circumstance; often monotonous, common place, trivial enough, and yet intending to effect, if it may, ends on which God has set His heart. Many, on entering the life of full consecration and devotion, are eager to change the circumstances of their lives for those in which they suppose that they will more readily attain a fully developed character. Hence, much of the restlessness and fever, the disappointment and wilfulness of the early days of Christian experience. Do not, therefore, seek to change, by some rash and wilful act, the setting and environment of your life. Stay where you are till God as evidently calls you elsewhere as He has put you where you are. In the meanwhile, look deep into the heart of every circumstance for its special message, lesson, or discipline. Upon the way in which you accept or reject these will depend the achievement or marring of the Divine purpose.

3. The bulk of the work is done by the potters fingers. How delicate their touch! How fine their sensibility! It would almost seem as though they were endued with intellect, instead of being the instruments by which the brain is executing its purpose. And in the nurture of the soul these represent the touch of the Spirit of God working in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. But we are too busy, too absorbed in many things, to heed the gentle touch. Sometimes, when we are aware of it we resent it, or stubbornly refuse to yield to it. The wheel and the hand worked together; often their motion was in opposite directions, but their object was one. So all things work together for good to them that love God. Gods touch and voice give the meaning of His providences; and His providences enforce the lesson that His tender monitions might not be strong enough to teach.

II. Gods remaking of men. He made it again. The potter could not make what he might have wished; but he did his best with his materials. So God is ever trying to do His best for us. How often He has to make us again! He made Jacob again, when He met him at the Jabbok ford; finding him a supplanter and a cheat, but, after a long wrestle, leaving him a prince with God. He made Simon again, on the resurrection morning, when He found him somewhere near the open grave, the son of a dove--for so his old name Bar-jonas signifies--and left him Peter, the man of the rock, the apostle of Pentecost. Are you conscious of having marred Gods early plan for yourself? Whilst into the soul the conviction is burnt: I had my chance, and missed it; it will never come to me again. The survival of the fittest leaves no place for the unfit. They must be flung amid the waste which is ever accumulating around the furnaces of human life. It is here that the Gospel comes in with its gentle words for the outcast and lost. The bruised reed is made again into a pillar for the temple of God. The feebly smoking flax is kindled to a flame.

III. Our attitude towards the Great Potter. Yield to Him! Each particle in the clay seems to say Yes to wheel and hand. And in proportion as this is the case, the work goes merrily on. If there be rebellion and resistance, the work of the potter is marred. Let God have His way with you. We cannot always understand His dealings, because we do not know what His purpose is. (F. B. Meyer, B. A.)

A shattered life restored

Dr. Pope says, When I was in Florence I saw a triumph of restorative patience and skill. There is a statue there which had been found broken into a thousand fragments, and a patient man, with fine tact, replaced the shattered particles, and eventually the broken image was restored; and there it stands in its elastic beauty, as wonderful and as perfect as in the ancient years. And I say that in Christianity we have a supreme Artist who can pick up the most shattered life that the philosopher would cast to the void with the rubbish, and He can hold that life up in moral beauty and perfectness, and He does do it every day.

Restored manhood

Restored! Men can restore many things. I have read of them restoring pictures, cleansing them from the dust and filth that have gathered in the course of years, and restoring them to something like the brilliance and beauty they had when they left the painters easel. I have read of them restoring old buildings--grand old cathedrals, monuments of the genius and devotion of past generations--which have begun to show signs of decay. But there is a restoration work greater far than the restoration of one of the old masters or the restoration of a cathedral, and that is the restoration of man himself. For man is a wreck, a ruin; a wreck so complete, a ruin so utter, that his restoration has seemed hopeless and desperate. The best of men gave up the task, shook their heads over publicans and sinners, and said, The ruin is beyond restoration. But Jesus came and looked upon these wrecks of humanity, and said, These, too, can be restored, and He has justified His word. He found Zacchaeus a wreck, and restored him; He found Onesimus a wreck, and restored him; He found Augustine a wreck, and restored him; He found Henry Barrowe a wreck, and restored him; He found J.B. Gough a wreck, and restored him. Out of these battered ruins and shattered wrecks of humanity He has made temples of the living God. (J. D. Jones, M. A.)

O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord.

The answer is Yes-and No

. So far as all physical energy is concerned, the Lord can do with us as the potter does with the clay; but the Lord Himself cannot make a little child love Him: there is a point at which the clay lives, thinks, reasons, defies. The potter can only work upon the clay up to a given point; so long as it is soft he can make it a vessel of honour or a vessel of dishonour, he can make it this shape or that; but once let him burn it, and it is clay no longer in the sense in which he can fashion it according to model or design. A marvellous thing is this, that the Lord has made any creature that can defy Him; and that we can all defy Him is the testimony of every days experience. Let the Lord say, Can I not crush the universe? and the answer must be, Yes, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye; Thou hast but to close Thy fingers upon it, and it is dead, and Thou canst throw the ashes away. But almightiness has its limits. There is no almightiness in the moral region. The Lord cannot conquer the human will by any exercise of mere omnipotence: the will is to be conquered by instruction, persuasion, grace, moral inducement, spiritual ministry, exhibition of love upon love, till the exhibition rises into sacrifice and indicates itself in the Cross of Christ. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. Why does He not go in? Because He has no key of that door that can open it by force. Why does He not break it with one tremendous blow? Because then the heart would be crushed and killed, and would not be persuaded into becoming a guest chamber for the King. We have it in our power to say No to God, to defy the Lord, to withdraw ourselves from the counsel and guidance of heaven. (J. Parker, D. D.)

The Biblical Illustrator, edited by Joseph S. Exell (c. 1880s–1900s) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Jer 18:1-4. The word which came to Jeremiah, &c. — We have here the beginning of a new discourse of Jeremiah, which, if introduced in its proper place, as we have reason to think it is, was probably also, as well as the foregoing, delivered in some part of the first three years of Jehoiakim’s reign. Arise, and go down to the potter’s house — Some well-known place where pots were made; and there I will cause thee to hear my words — I will further reveal my mind to thee, that thou mayest make it known to this people. God has frequently condescended to teach us his will by very familiar and striking images. Then I went, &c. — Not being disobedient to the heavenly vision. And behold he wrought a work on the wheels — Hebrew, על האבנים, literally, upon the stones. Thus also the LXX., επι των λιθων. “There can be no doubt,” says Blaney, “that the machine is intended on which the potters formed their earthen vessels; and the appellation, οι λιθοι, the stones, will appear very proper, if we consider this machine as consisting of a pair of circular stones placed one upon another like millstones; of which the lower was immoveable, but the upper one turned upon the foot of a spindle or axis, and had motion communicated to it by the feet of the potter sitting at his work; as may be learned from Sir 38:29. Upon the top of this upper stone, which was flat, the clay was placed, which the potter, having given the stone the due velocity, formed into shape with his hand.” And the vessel that he made of clay — Hebrew, כחמר, as clay, that is, while it was yet clay, was marred, was spoiled in the potter’s hand, so that he did not think fit to go on with his design, as to the form of the vessel, but turned the same clay into a vessel of another form: as he judged best. Nothing can more strongly represent the absolute dominion God has over us than this image of the potter fashioning his clay into what form or vessel he pleased.

Joseph Benson's Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1811–1818) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

THE FIGURE OF THE POTTER, Jer_18:1-4.

1. The word which came, etc. — A general title of the ensuing three chapters, which should be taken together as constituting a single section. This section consists of two parts; distinct, but mutually complementary. The first (chap. 18) contains the parable of the potter and the misshapen vessel; the second (chapters 19, 20) gives an account of the breaking of the pitcher, and of the warnings and persecutions which followed.

Daniel D. Whedon (gen. ed.), Commentary on the Old and New Testaments (1874–1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL NOTES.—1. Chronology of the Chapter. Early in Jehoiakim’s reign (See Chronological Note on Section 19–27 of previous chapter). Probably about two years later than that message respecting the Sabbath in Jer_17:19-27. Naegelsbach suggests, before the fourth year of Jehoiakim. For 2, 3, and 4, see Notes at the head of previous chapter.

5. Geographical References.—Jer_18:14. “The snow of Lebanon which cometh from the rock of the field.” Lebanon was called the white mountain, because of its perpetually snow-clad heights—especially Hermon’s. The words should read: “Will the snow of Lebanon cease from the rock of the field? Hitzig suggests that the waters of Gihon in Jerusalem (the rock of the field, cf. Jer_17:3, Jer_19:13), which never were known to fail, were probably fed by the melting snows of Lebanon. Henderson is, however, nearer the interpretation: he says, The rock of the field is only a poetical expression for Lebanon itself; the melting snows from which supplied numerous perennial rivers. “Shall the cold flowing waters that come from another place be forsaken!” Read the words thus: “Shall the cool flowing rivers that come from afar be dried up?” which is, doubtless, another form of the foregoing idea—the streams flowing from Lebanon could not fail.

6. Personal Allusions.—(None); 7. Natural History.—(See Geographical References, supra.)

8. Natural Customs.—Jer_18:3. “The potter’s house, he wrought a work upon the wheels:” “The potter’s field” (Zec_11:13, Mat_27:10) lay just beyond the valley of Hinnom, south of Jerusalem. Two wheels: the lower one he worked with his feet; this set the upper wheel in motion. The lower wheel was probably stone, the upper was a flat disc of wood: on this the potter placed the clay, and, as it revolved, the potter shaped his work.

9. Literary Criticisms.—Jer_18:3. A work on the wheels: dual: the two wheels. Jer_18:7. At what instant: “at what” in italics. Lit. once. רֶגַע, adv. in the moment, forthwith: and when repeated, as Jer_18:7; Jer_18:9. Now … again. Jer_18:8. “I will repent.” I repent, so also in Jer_18:10. Jer_18:12. “And they said, There is no hope:” Yet they are saying: the consecutive perfect form of a Heb. verb implies the continuance of the action. “Do the imagination:” practise the stubbornness. Jer_18:14. “Will a man leave the snow of Lebanon?” (see Geographical Reference, supra): lit., “Doth the snow of Lebanon fail from—cease to flow from—the rock of the field?” “Or shall the cool flowing streams that come from another place,” זָרִים, strange, foreign, i.e., whose sources are foreign (as 2Ki_19:24, so Hitzig, Keil, and Payne Smith): but Ewald, Graf, and Bunsen suggest, that hurry along, from זָרַר, to press, urge, i.e., flowing through narrow gorges. But there is no sufficient proof that the word can have this latter meaning: the former is, therefore, better. Jer_18:15. “Because My people:” Yet My people. “Vanity and they,” &c. (see Note in chap. Jer_2:30). “Vain gods, and these have caused them to stumble.” “In their ways from the ancient paths,” &c. Or, “In their ways, the everlasting paths; to walk in byeways, in a road not cast up.” Jer_18:21. “Pour out their blood by the force of the sword:” lit., “Spill them into the hands of the sword” (cf. Psa_63:10), i.e., cast them out to slaughter. “Put to death:” rather, “slain of death.”

HOMILETIC OUTLINES ON SECTIONS OF CHAPTER 18

Sections

Jer_18:1-10.

The Potter’s work: symbolic of God’s Sovereign Power.

Sections

Jer_18:11-18.

The justice of threatened ruin vindicated.

Sections

Jer_18:19-23.

Imprecatory prayer provoked by hostility to God’s messages.

Section 1–10. THE POTTER’S WORK: SYMBOL OF GOD’S SOVEREIGNTY

“I have used similitudes.” The end is a merciful one—to impress. Particularly calculated to impress. Consider—

I. The right of the Divine sovereignty which is here claimed by Jehovah.

One of the claims most frequently urged in the Word of God—He claims from mankind an acknowledgment of His power and right to do as He pleases in the affairs of men and angels. Certainly He that formed the heavens and the earth, the sea and the dry land, who made all the creatures with which they are peopled, who by His power and His might sustains them, must possess both the power and the right to regulate all their affairs and all their movements. None so fit as He to govern—to choose our lot and to regulate our ways. His understanding is infinite, His power is unlimited and wonderful, and His goodness equals them both. The angels in heaven fully admit His sovereignty, and His right to exercise it. But with men it is far otherwise. Observe—

1. This is an attribute which every man naturally denies. Sin has thrown the foundations of the earth out of course, and hence man refuses one of the most reasonable of all claims, and one of the most important and necessary of the Divine prerogatives. This attribute is denied—

(a.) In so many words. There are the infidel deniers of Providence,—and there are the Pharisees who deny it in their creed.

(b.) There are still more who deny it in practice. What does that man do who neither courts His favour, nor fears His anger? What are you doing who at this moment refuse to obey His voice in the great matter of salvation? Think of the fallen angels—they denied it—they would not have the Lord to reign over them—they would not bend to His authority and mild dominion—and they are crushed by His vengeance. How will they face the Judge, when they wake up in the eternal world, whose authority and whose sovereignty they have denied?

2. This is the last attribute of God received even by Christians in their real creed. There are but few Christians who deny the doctrine in so many words; but it is one thing to profess belief on any point, and another one to believe it practically.

Hence the Armenian scheme.

Hence the Antinomian—preaching to none but saints.

Hence our gloomy discontent in affliction.

Hence our frequent departures from the directions of the Word of God.

But notwithstanding all, no attribute is more evident in its exercise than this. All creation proves it. All nature in her movements. All providence. Especially, hence we proceed to consider—

II. The manner in which God is pleased to exercise His sovereignty towards the children of men. The prophet, by Divine command, went down to the potter’s house, where he received instructions, &c.

This is applicable to the grand and important things of eternity, and shows that man in God’s hand is as clay in the hand of the potter, and that He has power over them to mould them as He pleases, and that he actually exerts that power. Observe—

1. He does what He pleases with the penitent. And this in every way according to mercy; yet does He act as a sovereign:

(a.) In the gift of repentance:

1. In giving it to whom He pleases.

2. In the means employed to bring them to repentance.

3. In rendering it effectual.

(b.) In pardoning their sins. “At what instant,” &c. In that He pardons through His Son—freely. All sins—past, present, and to come; and is pleased to make the pardon known. In heaven to his angels—they rejoice. To the believer on earth, and to all the universe in the world to come. Are you penitents? Do you desire to be such? “Ask, and you shall receive.”

2. As to the impenitent. The purposes of heaven must stand. Barren and contradictory are the opinions of mankind concerning the measures of God towards this guilty world, but He pursues His own unceasing plan. Many deny that these judgments will ever take place,—that denial will not alter the fact. It will render them the more dreadful to the hardened infidel, because the denial increases his guilt.

Though these words mention kingdoms, they are equally applicable to individuals. And God has spoken good concerning you. Often have you heard the Gospel. But if you are impenitent—these words point to you. He will do as He pleases. You are at His mercy. What have you to expect reasonably? He threatens to punish. You are not certain of His mercy. You must repent or perish. But you are in the world of hope. Oh! then seek it. With such a prospect before me, my soul shudders for you, “knowing the terrors of the Lord,” &c.—Nameless MS. dated A. D. 1824.

See further: Noticeable Topics at end of chapter; also Addenda: “GOD’S SOVEREIGN POWER.”

Section 11–18. THE JUSTICE OF THREATENED RUIN VINDICATED

I. God’s purpose of evil avowed (Jer_18:11). “I am framing evil against you.” Evil was in God’s purposes.

II. An interval for reformation offered. “Return ye now, every one from his evil.” Evil was in God’s purposes, because “evil” was every one’s way.

III. Wilful iniquity repudiates the opportunities of grace (Jer_18:12). There was “no hope,” but only because there was no compunction for sin, and a resolve not to reform.

IV. Man’s reckless guilt justifies God’s anger. (Jer_18:13-17).

1. Sins against grace render our guilt more heinous than any which heathenism can furnish (Jer_18:13).

2. Desertion of God estranges refreshing comforts from the sinner (Jer_18:14).

3. Substitutes chosen instead of God mislead their dupes into desolation (Jer_18:15).

4. Misery entailed by irreligion justly awakens amazement (Jer_18:16).

5. God deserts apostates in the day of their calamity (Jer_18:17).

Or thus:

I. God’s operations plainly tend towards the ruin of sinners. “Behold I frame evil,” &c. (Jer_18:11). Your conduct towards God shows you deserve it; His dealings with you show that He designs it.

II. God’s warnings and threatenings are invitations to timely repentance. “Return ye now,” &c. God may turn from the evil He purposes to do, if you turn from the evil you persistently do.

III. Man’s obstinacy towards God closes the door of hope (Jer_18:12). Mercy is conditional upon reformation; sinners resolve not to reform, and so court despair and ruin. See Addenda, DESPAIR.

IV. Immovable defiance of God is a fact of awful amazement. Defiant impenitence is a startling anomaly (Jer_18:13), a “very horrible thing” in itself, being self-murder; entails the loss of all refreshing comforts (Jer_18:14); shows amazing folly, ancient ways being deserted for byeways (Jer_18:15); awakens derision (Jer_18:16); and brings disconsolate ruin (Jer_18:17).

Section 19–23. IMPRECATORY PRAYER PROVOKED BY HOSTILITY TO GOD’S MESSAGES

All their virulence turned itself upon God’s prophet, whose righteous soul was stirred to well-nigh ungovernable wrath against his persecutors who were flagrant enemies of God and scoffers of His claims. Matthew Henry suggests the following homiletic divisions:—

I. See here what are the common methods of the persecutors. We may see this in Jeremiah’s enemies (Jer_18:18).

1. They consulted together to be revenged upon him for what he had said, and to silence him for the future.

2. They pretended a mighty zeal for the Church, which was endangered by his preaching. They insinuated—

(a.) That Jeremiah could not be a true prophet, because neither commissioned by the priests, nor did his predictions concur with other prophets.

(b.) That the matter of his prophecies could not be from God, because it reflected upon the priests and prophets.

3. They agreed to do all they could to blast his reputation, “Smite him with the tongue.”

4. To set others an example, they resolved not to heed anything he said; this will show ethers to regard his utterance merely as “his words,” not God’s.

5. That they may effectually silence him they determine upon his death (Jer_18:23).

II. See here what is the common relief of the persecuted. We may see this in the course which Jeremiah took.

1. He referred himself and his cause to God’s cognisance (Jer_18:19). It is a matter of comfort to faithful ministers that if men will not give “heed” to their preaching, God will give heed to their praying.

2. He complains of their base ingratitude to him (Jer_18:20). To render good for good is human; evil for evil is brutish: good for evil is Christian; but evil for good is devilish.

(a.) See how great the evil was that they did against him: “digged a pit for his soul.”

(b.) See how great the good was that he had done them: “I stood before Thee to speak for them.”

3. He imprecates the judgments of God upon them; not from revengeful disposition, but from prophetical indignation against their horrid wickedness (Jer_18:21-23).

(a.) That their families might suffer famine.

(b.) That they might be cut off by the sword.

(c.) That the terrors and desolations of war might seize them suddenly (Jer_18:22).

(d.) That they might be dealt with according to the desert of this inexcusable sin: “forgive not their iniquity,” &c.

(e.) That God’s wrath against them might be their ruin: “Let them be overthrown before Thee.”

Note:—This was not written for our imitation. Jeremiah, by the impulse of the spirit of prophecy, in the foresight of the ruin certain to come upon them, might pray such prayers as we may not. If by this example we think to justify ourselves in imprecations, we “know not what manner of spirit we are of.” Christ has taught us by His example to bless them that curse us, and pray for them that despitefully use us. Yet this may teach us—

i. That those who have forfeited the benefit of the prayers of God’s prophets for them, may expect to have their prayers against them.

ii. That persecution is a sin that fills the measure of a people’s iniquity very fast, and will bring sure destruction upon them.

iii. Those who will not be won by the kindness of God and His prophets, will certainly at length feel the resentments of both.

HOMILIES AND COMMENTS ON VERSES OF CHAPTER 18

Jer_18:1-4. Theme: CLAY IN THE POTTER’S HANDS.

Suggestions: A parabolic representation impresses the mind more powerfully than simple statement or teaching. God has greater power over men than a potter over clay, for the potter is not the creator of clay, as God is of us.

I. The Almighty yet patient worker.

1. God works. He does not arbitrarily will and imperiously effect His purposes; but carefully works to realise them. God is not imperious, not arbitrary; not a mere dominating Will, but a patient Artificer, taking pains in His work.

2. God works for definite ends. He has a design—to form a graceful vessel. He does not make marred things by design; He purposes to make only what is beautiful—“would have all men to be saved.”

II. The pliable yet perverse material. It must not escape notice that—

1. The material is base, unclean, unsightly. And such is the vile material from which God would make us into vessels of honour unto sanctification.

2. The material swiftly changes form. Easily takes new shape, for better or worse.

3. The material works into wrong shapes most perversely. Though the Artificer works deftly and with good instruments (“wheels”), yet man is slow to assume the “form and comeliness” God desires.

III. The various products of God’s handiwork.

1. The marred vessel. This was not through imperfect skill in the Potter, but through resistance or non-consistency in the clay. In either case it would not take or retain the shape the Worker designed. “Ye have received the grace of God in vain.”

2. The renewed endeavour. “He made it again.” Often, after renewed operations of God’s grace, the once resistant soul yields itself unto God, and becomes “created in Christ Jesus.” Then the man is “renewed in the spirit of his mind.”

3. The perfected vessel. This perfection is the result which “seemed good” to the Potter, and for which He patiently worked. It is not that God forms marred things or perfect things just as it takes His caprice; no. Nothing “seems good” to Him but the perfect work.

And the perfected result “seemed good” to Him. He was thereby pleased and satisfied. Nothing less satisfies God: “For this is the will of God, even your sanctification.” “He saw that all was very good” in creation. And in redemption, “Ye are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God before ordained that ye shall walk in them.” And the soul which fully realises His aim is “perfect before Him in love.”

(a.) Consider the long patience and careful efforts God extends towards us in His gracious operations to form us according to His will.

(b.) Consider the grace and comeliness in us which alone satisfies Him.

Jer_18:6. Theme: MAN’S CHANGEABLE CONDITION.

A practical homily: Nothing is fixed or certain in this world. As the clay assumes variable shapes, and passes through manifold vicissitudes, we recognise—

I. The multiform possibilities of man. He may become a “marred” or perfected thing; a Judas or a Stephen; a Diotrephes or a John of Patmos!

1. This in the region of social life.

2. Equally so in the realm of morality and intelligence.

3. Manifestly so in the kingdom of grace.

II. The incertitude of worldly position. As the wheel moves round, the whole shape and fortune of the vessel varies:

1. God can change our condition as with a touch: can cast the eminent from their elevation, can mould the imperfect into graceful forms (Psa_113:7).

2. No life is beyond God’s formative touch. Judah thought herself safe against catastrophe, but God cast her down. We depend wholly on God’s good-will for what we are and have.

III. The consolation of being in God’s hands.

1. The tranquillity of faith is well founded. “He doeth according to His will among the inhabitants of the earth”—but “He doeth all things well”—and “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.”

2. Our condition is secure through the gratuitous goodness of God. And being all of grace, it depends on His grace that we remain in His love and care. And none that trust in Him shall be desolate.

See further: Noticeable Topics. THE POTTER’S WORK.

See Addenda: “GOD’S SOVEREIGN POWER.”

Jer_18:7-10. Theme: CONDITIONAL COVENANTS.

I. God’s providential dealings with men are conditioned upon conduct.

1. There are penal laws which only act as they are violated.

2. There are beneficent comforts, for enjoying which harmonious conduct is imperative.

II. The Scriptural covenants are based upon human behaviour. Both the Old and New Testaments are called covenants: were created and given to the world on specific terms.

1. Spiritually, our case is not fixed and absolute. We may depart from our fidelity, may refuse to comply with the revealed terms on which God’s love and salvation are made to depend.

2. The relationship the Scriptures set forth is dependent upon our fidelity—our compliance with Divine requirements.

III. Individual experience is according to this conditional rule.

1. Specific promises may be forfeited, and specific penalties incurred either in this life, accordingly as we are obedient or disobedient.

2. Our spiritual salvation is dependent upon definite conditions, “Repent and believe the gospel.” “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

3. All Christian gladness, progress, and triumph rest upon similar terms. We have “exceeding great and precious promises,” all “yea and amen in Christ Jesus,” yet only ours as we “hold fast the beginning of our confidence steadfast unto the end.”

Theme: COMFORT AND WARNING. The threatenings and promises of God are given only conditionally.

i. The comfort consists in this, that the threatened calamities may be averted by timely repentance.

ii. The warning in this, that the promises may be annulled by apostasy.—Naeg.

Theme: HOW WE SHOULD BE MOVED BY GOD’S JUDGMENTS AND GOODNESS. That each should

i. Turn from his wickedness.

ii. Should reform his heart and life.—Kapff, in Lange.

Jer_18:11. Theme: GOD DEVISING YET DEPLORING EVIL.

It was not moral evil, but physical, national. Special to Judah and Jerusalem. Yet there is a truth for all: “Is there evil in the city, and the Lord hath not done it?”

The word “frame” is the same which, as a noun, means “potter”.

I. An ominous interval—ruin is preparing.

(a.) The evil is not yet shaped nor ready to devastate.

(b.) Yet God is busily employed in devising the destruction.

(c.) And certainly God will not work without effect.

1. The opportunity of turning aside the evil is with us.

2. That opportunity is of uncertain duration.

3. Salvation may be found during this interval.

II. A gracious interval—God is appealing.

1. While He works out His devices of evil, He yet desires our good.

2. The devices of evil are inevitable only in consequence of man’s impenitence.

3. Prompt reformation would arrest the impending doom.

4. God urges upon man the diligent use of the auspicious hour—“Return ye now.”

Comp. Homiletic hints on Jer_7:3.

Jer_18:12. Theme: THE UNREASONABLENESS OF DESPAIR. “And they said, There is no hope: but we will walk after our own devices,” &c.

The devil’s chief artifices are to produce either—

(a.) False security and presumption; or (b.) despair.

I. Despair is sinful.

(a.) In itself.

(b.) Because it is the parent of other sins, as is seen in the cases of Cain, Saul, and Judas.

II. Despair is dangerous.

(a.) It paralyses effort after escape or reformation.

(b.) Allures to besotted unconcern.

(c.) Drives to recklessness in further wrong-doing. Thus “heaping up wrath.”

III. Despair is groundless.

(a.) Because we still enjoy life and the means of grace.

(b.) Because of the longsuffering character of God.

(c.) Because of the universality of the scheme of redemption.

(d.) Because of the Person, character, and invitations of Christ.

(e.) Because of the many instances of final salvation.—Payson.

See Addenda: DESPAIR.

See further: Noticeable Topics: DESPERATION DANGEROUS.

Jer_18:13. Theme: “A VERY HORRIBLE THING.” See Sectional Homily, chap. Jer_2:9-13. “Facts for Amazement—Reckless desertion of the Fount of Life.”

I. It was the violation of all the lessons of experience. After having known so much of God and His grace, and tasted so much of His goodness. For in these experiences they transcended every nation.

II. It was criminality surpassing all heathen vices. “Knew the Lord’s will, yet did it not.”

1. Such ingratitude to God.

2. Such depreciation of precious benefactions.

3. Such insolent disregard of the Holy One of Israel (Jer_18:15).

III. It was folly of the most appalling magnitude.

1. Deserting the cool and perennial streams, which the pure and perpetual snows of Lebanon fed.

2. Coquetting with delusive trifles: “burned incense to vanity” (Jer_18:15).

All this is wicked, “very horrible” an outrage on human nature itself; a violation of every law of righteousness; a course so iniquitous as to ensure the most “horrible” malediction and doom!

Jer_18:15. Theme: DESERTING ANCIENT PATHS.

i. THESE ANCIENT PATHS—

1. Were appointed by the Divine law.

2. Had been walked in by all the saints.

3. Were therefore the right way to their journey’s end.

4. A safe way, being well tracked; and both easy to hit and easy to walk in.

ii. THE BY-PATHS: “a way not cast up.”

1. Not the highway, the king’s highway.

2. A dirty and rough way; in which they could but “stumble.”

3. An iniquitous way; as is the way of idolatry and all transgression.

4. A false way; full of falls and ending fatally.—(Comp. Henry.)

See numerous Homilies on chap. Jer_6:16. Especially on “The old paths,” by H. W. Beecher, whose sermon is on the two texts, Jer_6:16, Jer_28:15.

Jer_18:17. Theme: THE SINNER’S DOOM. “I will show them the back and not the face, in the day of their calamity.”

I. The cause of the evil threatened. The punishment of sinners is not caused by the Divine purpose alone, but in conjunction with the commission of sin. A sinner is the author of his own miseries (Jer_2:17; Jer_4:18). The children of Judah were guilty of

1. Rejecting the Divine government. “We will walk after our own devices,” &c. (Jer_18:12). Multitudes regard their own will as the rule of action, and live without God in the world (Zec_7:5-6; Zec_7:11-12).

2. Guilty of idolatry (Jer_18:15, comp. Rom_1:22-23). Idolatry is the great sin of the human heart. Man worships his own person, his natural and acquired talents, his wealth, his honours, the creature, this evil world.

3. Rejecting the mercy of God. Previous to inflicting His wrath He offered them mercy (see Jer_18:11). But they repudiated it (Jer_18:12). So, “we preach Christ crucified,” beseech men, &c., but “who hath believed our report?”

4. Their conduct was characterised by the greatest folly (Jer_18:13-15). Commonsense taught men to value clear waters, which, from the melted snows of Lebanon, were purified by running through the cavities of rocks, &c.; but Israel had forsaken the infinitely glorious Jehovah for worthless idols. And for what do sinners now part with God and holiness? Not for an equivalent, but for what dazzles and vanishes.

5. Their conduct was a manifestation of basest ingratitude. And so is the conduct of every sinner.

II. The nature of the evil threatened. God would abandon them. The “light of His countenance” is the joy of every soul, and of heaven; for Him to show His back is woful.

1. God sometimes shows His back in a way of mercy (Exo_33:23). In compassion to our weakness “He holdeth back,” &c. (Job_25:6).

2. But this threat is expressive of Divine wrath. (See Lev_17:10; Lev_20:3; 1Pe_3:12. Comp. Job_23:8; Psa_84:1-4; Psa_22:1) For a moment only God hides Himself from His people; but it here means the angry abandonment of the wicked.

3. The wrath of God is retributive. Sinners turn their back upon God. He will “show them the back in the day of their calamity” (comp. Psa_18:26-27; Jer_2:27-28; Jer_32:33-35; Deu_31:17-18).

4. The language of the text implies a final departure. “Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone” (Hos_9:12).

III. The time when the evil shall be inflicted. “In the day of their calamity.”

Sometimes it may be seen in the present life (1Sa_28:15; Mat_23:27).

1. In the time of adversity. When cold poverty is on them, where is God?

2. In sickness. The wicked have no refuge in distress.

3. When deserted by their friends. Cast off by friends, yet no God!

4. The time of old age. Grave opens, yet without God near thee!

5. A dying hour. “The wicked is driven away in his wickedness.”

6. At the last day (Rev_6:16-17).

Application:

(a.) The awful state of the unconverted; enemies to God, and doomed to everlasting destruction.

(b.) If we desire to be at peace with God, the way is prepared. Reconciled through His Son.

(c.) Blessed is the prospect of all true Christians. In the day of calamity He will show them His face. “I will never leave thee.”—Helps for the Pulpit.

Jer_18:17. Theme: THE SINNER’S DOOM.

So inveterate was the attachment of the people of Israel to their idols, and so incorrigible amidst national calamities, that God at length determined, not only to bring upon them the threatened captivity in Babylon, but to leave them in the hands of their enemies without pity or compassion, and, like a friend aggrieved, would utterly forsake them in the day of trouble. Consider—

I. The evil threatened: “I will show them the back and not the face.”

Here we may observe,

1. God sometimes shows His back in a way of mercy, as in the case of Moses, when He caused His goodness to pass before him because he could not see His face and live (Exo_33:23).

2. The Lord here threatens to hide His face. Note—His face is either the most delightful or the most dreadful of all objects. He has an angry and a frowning face when sin is to be punished (Lev_17:10; Lev_20:3; 1Pe_3:12); and an approving smile and regard for His people (Isa_66:2). To turn His back upon His people—the Jews—in indignation and wrath. The Lord may hide Himself from His people, and be wroth; but towards the wicked it denotes His total abandonment of them to deserved wrath and punishment—particularly when the Lord says “He will show them the back and not the face.” It includes—

(a.) The withdrawment of that providential care and protection which was to be the peculiar privilege of the people of Israel (2Ch_16:9), and leaving them exposed to every evil and danger. Thus He dealt with the apostate Jewish church: He broke down its wall that it might be trodden under foot (Isa_5:5).

(b.) A direct expression of His displeasure; as when we turn our back upon those who have offended us. So Christ once turned His back upon Peter, because he was an offence to Him (Mat_16:23).

(c.) It intimates a final departure; giving them up to walk in their own way, and to follow their own counsel. To be abandoned as incorrigible is the sorest of all judgments: and “woe unto them when I depart from them, saith the Lord” (Hos_9:12).

II. The time when the threatened evil shall be inflicted: “In the day of their calamity.”

There is a day of trouble coming upon the wicked, an appointed day, a dark and gloomy day. Alas, if God has to turn His back, and leave the sinner to his fate! Yet such will be the doom of the finally impenitent.

1. A little of this may be seen amidst the calamities of the present life. What was the condition of Saul, when God had departed from him (1 Samuel 28.) Of Jerusalem, when He would return to His temple no more (Mat_23:37-38).

2. What then will be the state of the wicked in the last day, when God shall forever disown and forever forsake them! That will indeed be the day of their calamity: there is none like it, and all entreaties will be in vain (Rev_6:16-17).

Lessons—

1. Let the unbeliever beware, and let him well consider what he shall answer, when the Lord cometh forth to punish him (Jer_13:21).

2. If a Christian finds himself forsaken in the day of trouble, let it cause great searchings of heart; and like Israel, let him lament after the Lord. (1Sa_7:2).

3. Let all remember there is still a refuge from the storms of life, and from the wrath to come (Pro_18:10).—The Preacher.

Comments:

Jer_18:18. “DEVICES AGAINST JEREMIAH.” The effect of the foregoing prophecy upon the Jews was—

i. A more hardened and desperate antagonism to the prophet. “Smite him with the tongue.” Carry malicious reports of what he says to Jehoiakim, and so stir his anger.

ii. A flattering self-satisfied repudiation of his messages, “For the law shall not perish,” &c.; i.e., we do not need this prophet, we have the authorised “priest,” the “law” of Moses, “wise” men to give us “counsel,” and “prophets” to declare “the word”—not indeed the Jehovah Word, but “smooth things” (Isa_30:10).

Jer_18:20. “EVIL RECOMPENSED FOR GOOD.”

i. Faithful warnings and rebukes proved the prophet’s patriotism. He refused to flatter and delude. “Faithful the wounds of a friend.”

ii. Wilful love of wrong-doing rendered them hostile to truth. “The wicked hate the righteous, and gnash upon him with their teeth.”

Jer_18:18-20. Theme: AUTHORITY ARRAYED AGAINST AUTHORITY. This appeal to the “law and priest” as against Jeremiah and his words, is used by Naegelsbach (in Lange) as the basis of a homily on the anniversary of the Reformation. Thus:—

“Opposition of the office which has apparent authority to that which has true authority.”

i. The basis of the opposition. The assertion of the infallibility of the former office.

ii. The mode of the opposition.

(a.) In not being willing to hear.

(b.) In the attempt to destroy the latter by violence.

iii. The result of the opposition is nugatory. For:—

(a.) The Lord hears the voice of the oppressors, to judge them.

(b.) He gives heed to His servants to protect them.

[This treatment of the text makes it appropriate to all occasions when secular or ecclesiastical power is invoked to suppress the voluntary movements of Christendom; or when the authority of antiquity is urged against any new development of the Christian life, whether in individuals or churches.]

NOTICEABLE TOPICS IN CHAPTER 18

Topic:—THE POTTER’S WORK (Jer_18:1-6).

The prophet sees a man engaged in a task to which he is devoting all his thoughts. The potter designs to make some clay into a vessel of a certain shape; the form or pattern is present to his mind, he is fully resolved that the material with which he is working shall come forth in that form and no other.

But apparently it disappoints him. One piece of clay after another is “marred in his hands:” it takes a shape different from that which he would give it; but he goes on perseveringly till he has done the thing which he intended to do.

“O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hands, so are ye in mine, O house of Israel.”

Commentators have no doubt what this means! God could do as He liked with the clay; He could destroy it if He pleased! But Jeremiah was sent to see what the potter liked. And he saw he desired to make a vessel of a certain form, and for that end he laboured. The analogy, if of any force or worth at all, must mean that—

I. There is a form according to which God is seeking to mould men and nations. He is not doing any single act arbitrarily, or without reference to a purpose; He is patiently and continually working for the accomplishment of this purpose.

1. Men are throughout Scripture assumed to have wills, upon which no mere blind mechanical power can operate, but upon which God, a living Person, is operating by gracious, mysterious, orderly processes, that He may make men in His own likeness.

2. Here was the mystery of a people’s repentance. If they acknowledged this Will which was working upon them, yielded to it, and desired to be formed by it, this was the conversion and inward change He was seeking to produce. Marvellous that persons should see in this symbol nothing but an assertion of the sovereignty of God, when the whole thought is the order of God’s proceedings with men to produce this voluntary obedience!

II. The purpose which the potter cherished was at the last fully realised. As the prophet gazed on the potter, he saw how one piece of clay after another was marred, and yet how the thing he designed was at last done, the whole truth of the symbol came upon him with an awful vision of what was preparing for his land; yet also, with a bright vision of what must ultimately follow the judgment.

1. The vessel must be made, not after some different type, but after the original and perfect life which dwelt not in the dead matter, but in the living mind of Him who was shaping it.

2. If any particular race must be cast aside, it would not be wilfully, not in rage, but after a series of gracious merciful experiments had been made upon it, but because of a moral incapacity for understanding the grace of its Ruler, and for exhibiting any qualities but those most opposed to His grace, most hateful and destructive.

3. Thus the destruction which Jeremiah had foreseen to be approaching his land justified itself to his conscience and heart. He shrank from it through tenderness of nature, through patriotism; but he saw that one generation or another might have to be broken that the end might be accomplished.

III. Here was the power which could reform individuals and society.

1. The strife of the clay with the Potter, the struggles of men against a Divine Artificer not to be brought into their true, reasonable, healthy condition; not to be at peace with each other by being at peace with Him who had made them to bear a common image, were working national and individual desolation. Hence, therefore—

2. The threatened captivity and destruction would form a method of reformation; God would bring life out of death. This marring of the clay was a fearful sight; but the patience, longsuffering, and final victory of the Potter was a glorious one.

Take then this simple image of a living and righteous Being, working amidst the changes of times, working upon human wills for a loving and gracious purpose, for a purpose which has been realised, does it not give—

IV. An elucidation of facts which were left unexplained, and felt to be inexplicable?

1. The fall of great nations; 2. The subjection of such portions of the kingdom of Christ as Jerusalem, Constantinople, Alexandria, to the power of the Crescent.

(a.) Are not these cities proofs that the clay is marred in the new, as it was in the old time, when it resists the will of the Artificer? And what is there in the clay of Italy, Germany, France, England, to give it special exemption from the sentence upon that which is unprofitable? It is written, “If He spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He spare not thee.”

(b.) But we know that whatever happens to one generation or another, He will claim human clay and all natural things for Himself. God has said He will write upon human hearts His own name and the name of the new Jerusalem, His holy city.

(c.) And for each individual, in whom dwells the Spirit of Christ, it will be realised that the body of humiliation will be made like to Christ’s glorious body by that power whereby He is able to subdue all things unto Himself.—Contracted from Maurice’s Prophets and Kings.

Note: “When through the clay not being of a proper consistency, or otherwise not answering to the potter’s will, the vessel is spoilt, he does not throw it away, but crushes it together, dashes it back upon the wheel, and begins his work afresh, till the clay has taken the predetermined shape. So then, it was God’s purpose that Judea should become the proper scene for the manifestation of the Messiah, and its sons be fit to receive the Saviour’s teaching and carry the good tidings to all lands. If, therefore, at any stage of the preparation, the Jewish nation took, in its free will, such a course as would frustrate this purpose of Providence, it was crushed by affliction into an unresisting mass, in which the formative process forthwith began again.”—Dr. Payne Smith.

Topic: DESPERATION DANGEROUS (Jer_18:12).

Nothing more proves the perverseness of the human heart than its unsuitable entertainment of the dealings of God with it; especially in His gracious excitements and invitations to repentance, conversion, and turning to Himself; in that these have oftentimes very little impression upon or prevalency with it. Nor only so, but now and then it proves to be from henceforth the more confirmed and settled in evil. This is the case here.

I. A desperate conclusion. “There is no hope.”

No hope of us; our lusts charm and master us. No hope in regard of thee and thy ministry; thou art not likely to do any good amongst us. No hope of favour from Him; there is no probability of any mercy

i. In reference to themselves: despair as to their own amendment or reformation. There are people desperate in this regard, because of—

1. An absolute indisposition and averseness to all kind of good (Job_21:11). This distemper hath sundry grounds and causes from which it proceeds:—

(a.) A neglect of religious duties and exercises. (b.) A persisting in some loose course of life. (c.) A walking contrary to light. (d.) Worldliness and too deep an implunging into secular affairs.

2. An absolute thraldom and subjection to all kind of evil. And there are divers grounds for this also. There are people who despair of ever conquering their lusts because of—(a.) Spiritual laziness. (b.) Unbelief of God’s promises. (c.) Carnal confidence. (d.) Indifference to the thing itself.

ii. In reference to Jeremiah and his ministry: despair as to the value of preaching God’s messages amongst them. There are fortifications to this purpose, which men raise to themselves, to hold out against the workings of the ministry. 1. Pride and self-conceitedness. 2. Cavillings and wranglings against the word of the ministry (Act_13:45). 3. Prosperity and outward welfare. It is because people are so much hardened against the ministry, that, let the prophets say what they may, they are resolved to do what they list, that there is no hope.

iii. In reference to God Himself. They despair of the grace of God, and call it in question:—1. From the suggestions of Satan. 2. From the infidelity which is in their hearts. 3. From a measuring of God by themselves.

Such a frame of spirit as this is most dangerous and pernicious.

(A.) It is against ourselves. (a.) Our grace—obstructing it and uniting evil thoughts and habits; and (b.) our Comfort—opening the soul to horror and grief.

(B.) It is against God. Despair is the sin which opposes Him in His main design in promulgating the Gospel, and denies “the exceeding riches of His grace” in Jesus Christ.

II. A peremptory resolution. “But we will walk after our own devices,” &c. Consider this determination—

i. Simply and absolutely in itself, they declare that they will walk after their own devices.

1. There is implied here: That the nature of man is very prone and subject to “devices”—evil devices.

2. There is here expressed: That there is in men an affection towards these devices. Three things are here to be noticed—

(a.) Their obstinacy and perverseness: “We will walk” (comp. chap. Jer_2:25, and Jer_8:6). (1.) This obstinacy and perverseness is grounded upon security and presumption (Ecc_8:11). (2.) It proceeds from the power which Satan has over them (Eph_2:2). (3.) They are not persuaded of the truth of God’s Word.

(b.) Their conspiracy and combination: “We will, every one,” &c. It was a set plot and design amongst them against the Lord and His prophet. All were agreed: and this makes the sin an aggravation, as being the more malignant.

(c.) Their wilful transgression and sin against knowledge: “We will every one do the imagination of his evil heart.” Not we will do what in our judgment we think best; but knowing their ways were evil, they determined on “evil” still.

ii. Reflexively and derivatively. They said this—

1. Said it expressly in so many words: were not ashamed to say this. So much impudence is there upon men’s spirits as that they blush not to proclaim their wickedness with open mouths.

2. They said it practically, in that which they did: persisting in their evil ways, without amendment and reformation.

Those sins which were single before admonition come to be double afterwards, and the judgment is so much the greater which waits upon them (Joh_15:22).—Rev. Thomas Horton, D.D., A.D. 1678.

See Addenda: DESPAIR.

ADDENDA TO CHAPTER 18: ILLUSTRATIONS AND SUGGESTIVE EXTRACTS

Jer_18:4. GOD’S SOVEREIGN POWER.

“Repine not, nor reply;

View not what Heaven ordains with reason’s eye;

Too bright the object is, the distance is too high.

The man who would resolve the work of fate,

May limit number and make crooked straight;

Stop thy enquiry, then, and curb thy sense,

Nor let dust argue with Omnipotence.”

—Prior.

“God’s patience is lasting, but it is not everlasting.”—Anon.

See Dr. Thomson’s “The Land and the Book” on this passage.

Scripture reference to “the Potter:” 1Ch_4:23; Isa_41:25; Isa_64:8; Jer_18:3-4; Dan_2:41; Zec_9:13; Mat_27:7-10; Rom_9:21.

Man compared to “clay” in Scripture: Isa_64:8; Jer_18:6.

Simeon says, in his Sermons on Romans 8, that there were three reasons why he preached the doctrine of Election; not only because he found it in the Scriptures, but because it laid the axe at the root of (1) pride, (2) presumption, and (3) despair.

Jer_18:12. DESPAIR.

Francis Spira, an Italian apostate, died in the most awful despair. On his deathbed he exclaimed, “My sin is greater than the mercy of God. I have denied Christ voluntarily; I feel that He hardens me, and allows me no hope.”

“All hope is lost

Of my reception into grace; what worse!

For where no hope is left, is left no fear.

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear.

Farewell remorse, all good to me is lost:

Evil, be thou my good.”—Satan’s Address:

Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

“Dreadful is their doom, whom doubt has driven

To censure fate and pious hope forego;

Like yonder blasted boughs by lightning riven,

Perfection, beauty, life, they never know,

But frown on all that pass, a monument of woe.”—Beattie.

“Despair is the offspring of laziness, fear, and impatience; it argues a defect of spirit and resolution, and oftentimes of honesty too. I would not despair unless I saw my misfortune recorded in the Book of Fate, and signed and sealed by necessity.”—Collier.

The Preacher's Complete Homiletical Commentary (gen. ed. Joseph S. Exell; Funk & Wagnalls, c. 1892) — public domain (pre-1929). A full-Bible homiletical/sermon-outline anthology covering 65 of 66 books (2 John is absent from the source module). Text from a community e-Sword module.

THE SEVEN DISCOURSE

(Jeremiah 18-20)

As these three chapters appear under a common superscription of the longer form, which does not recur till chap. 21, they are evidently to be regarded as a connected whole. They have in fact an internal connection, although they cannot by any means be considered as a rhetorical whole, or as a connected discourse. Two historical facts are here set before us, which are internally related, but are different as to time, and probably also as to their original record, to which are also attached both prophetic indications and subjective effusions. The first historical fact is the incident with the potter, related in Jeremiah 18. As in this chapter the impending judgment is still announced in the same general manner as before, the Chaldeans not yet being mentioned as the instrument, it is manifest that it must have been written before the decisive turning-point reported in Jeremiah 15, viz., before the battle of Carchemish in the 4th year of Jehoiakim. On the other hand chh. 19. and 20. were written after this crisis. For in Jer_20:4 we read “I will give all Judah into the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall carry them captive into Babylon.” Jeremiah does not speak thus till after that decisive battle. It is also noteworthy, that the prophet in Jer_20:2 is called יִרְמְיָהוּ הַנָּבִיא, not simply ירְמְיָהוּ, which mode of expression likewise prevails only after the great crisis. (Comp. Jer_25:2; Jer_28:5; Jer_28:10-12; Jer_28:15, etc.) It follows definitively that chh. 19 and 20 belong to the time of Jehoiakim from the circumstance that in the reign of Zedekiah, not Pashur, but Zephaniah, the son of Maaseiah, appears to be invested with the dignity of temple-officer (comp. Jer_29:26 coll. Jer_21:7; Jer_37:3; Jer_52:24), and moreover as the successor of Jehoiada, which renders the probability that Pashur no longer held this office under Zedekiah so much the greater, especially if we consider that Jeremiah 29 belongs to one of the first years of Zedekiah (see the Introd. to Jeremiah 29) Pashur, who in Jer_20:4 sqq. is threatened with being carried away captive to Babylon, had most probably met this fate with king Jehoiakim and that numerous company which is spoken of in Jer_29:1 and 2Ki_24:12-14.—Notwithstanding therefore that Jeremiah 18 belongs to an earlier period than chh. 19 and 20 they are placed together because both are based on symbolic actions, of which the productions of pottery form the substratum. In Jeremiah 18 the clay on the potter’s wheel first fails, but is then immediately formed anew; in Jeremiah 19 the vessel is ready-made, which being poured out is then (irreparably Jer_19:11) broken by the prophet. Both actions are of such a character as to set before the people that the Lord has not only the power but the will to destroy them. Nevertheless there is a great difference between the two actions, the first having a parænetic, the second more of a declarative character, as will be shown in the exposition. Graf is of opinion that Jer_19:1-13 was written down at the same time with Jeremiah 18, because the event narrated in Jer_20:1 sqq., is related to the prophecy in Jer_7:30 sqq. as Jer_26:1 to her Jer_7:12, and since the discourse in Jeremiah 7 sqq. belongs to the fourth year of the reign of Jehoiakim, so also the prophecy in Jer_19:1-13, and the event recorded in Jer_20:1-6 must belong to this time. But the latter was not recorded till afterwards, like all the narratives from the life of Jeremiah. The lyrical passage Jer_20:7-13 has no connection with the preceding context. But it may have been composed under the impression of the shameful treatment which Jeremiah had received in the temple, or subsequently in remembrance of this and other persecutions. The five verses, Jer_20:14-18, are said to be an independent fragment, an amplification of Jer_15:10, which was perhaps composed in consequence of the same occurrences, and were put here on this account, or only on account of its agreement with Jer_18:7-8. To this I have to object; 1. It is an unnatural supposition that Jer_19:1-13 was written before Jer_19:14 to Jer_20:6. For both passages are so closely connected that we cannot conceive what could have occasioned the prophet to defer the relation in Jer_19:14, etc., after having recorded the previous facts, together with the prophecy connected with them. The narrative Jer_19:14, etc., was certainly recorded after the prophet had already begun to call himself הַנָביאי׳, but only because the prophecy itself belongs to this later period. This is not identical with Jer_7:30-34 and does not therefore belong to the first years of Jehoiakim. The agreement in particular words and phrases corresponds only to the general usage of Jeremiah, to repeat himself frequently and extensively, and in different connections by no means justifies the assumption of identity. 2. The passage Jer_20:7-13 is closely connected with the previous context, as is especially seen in the words מָגוֹר מִסָּביב (comp. the Comm. on Jer_20:10); it is not however an objective and official word of God, but a memorial of subjective thoughts and feelings, which then moved the prophet, and thus bears to some extent the character of a private record. 3. The case is the same with Jer_20:14-18. This passage also is of an entirely subjective and private nature. To strike it out or explain it as only patched on accidentally is to deny the dualism which must undoubtedly have prevailed in the mind of the prophet. To transpose it from this place and set it before Jer_20:7 (as Ewald does, in this however opposed by Graf) would be to disturb the natural course and the clear picture of the inner feelings of the prophet. For it is only too probable that in those troubled times a troubled frame of mind finally became predominant.

I am therefore of opinion that Jeremiah 18. belongs to the period before, chh. 19. and 20 to the period after, the fourth year of Jehoiakim, that the passages however being of related contents were placed in juxtaposition in the collection of prophecies; further, that Jer_19:1 to Jer_20:6 is to be regarded as a closely connected whole, on which follows as an appendix a subjective effusion of double and contradictory purport, by which however we obtain a true picture of the prophet’s then prevailing state of mind.

The discourse may be divided as follows:—

THE SYSMBOLS OF POTTERY

First Symbol: the clay and potter, Jeremiah 18

1. The parable of the potter and its interpretation in a negative sense, Jer_18:1-10.

2. The interpretation of the parable in a positive sense, Jer_18:11-17.

3. The manner in which the people receive the word of the prophet, and his petition to the Lord for protection from their hostility, Jer_18:18-23.

Second Symbol:—the broken vessel, chaps. 19 and 20

1. The symbolic action and its interpretation, Jer_19:1-13.

2. Opposition and punishment of Pashur, Jer_19:14 to Jer_20:6.

3. Appendix. The prophet’s joy and sorrow, Jer_20:7-18.

a. Through sorrow to joy, Jer_20:7-13.

b. For the present sorrow only. The prophet curses the day of his birth, Jer_20:14-18.

___________

Jeremiah 18-20

THE SYMBOLS OF POTTERY

First Symbol:—the clay and potter

Chap. 18

1. The parable of the potter and its interpretation in the negative sense

Jer_18:1-10

1, 2     The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord [Jehovah], saying, Arise and go down to the potter’s house and there I will cause thee to hear my words. 3Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the 4wheels. And the vessel which he was making1 of [as] clay2 was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to5make it. then the word of the Lord [Jehovah] came to me, saying,

6     Cannot I do to you as this potter does,

O house of Israel? saith Jehovah.

Behold as the clay in the hand of the potter,

So are ye in my hand, O house of Israel!

7     Suddenly I speak against a nation and against a kingdom,

To extirpate and exterminate and to destroy:

8     If now this nation, against which I have spoken, turn from its wickedness,

I repent of the evil which I thought to do unto it.

9     And suddenly I speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom,

To build and to plant:

10     If now it does that which is evil3 in my eyes,

So that it hears not my voice,

I repent of the good wherewith I promised to benefit it.

EXEGETICAL AND CRITICAL

The prophet receives the command to go into the potter’s house, to receive there a revelation from the Lord. He obeys and is a witness how the clay is spoiled in the hands of the potter, as he works on the wheel, and how he immediately forms a new vessel out of the clay (Jer_18:1-4). Hereupon the prophet receives the word of the Lord: As the clay is in the hand of the potter, so is Israel in the hand of the Lord (Jer_18:5-6). As the Lord by penitence and conversion is dissuaded from the accomplishment of His threatenings, so by evil-doing He may be prevented from performing His gracious promises (Jer_18:7-10).

Jer_18:1-4. The word … to the potter to make it. The superscription is like that in Jer_7:1; Jer_11:1.—האנים, wheels. The meaning of the word, which occurs besides only in Exo_1:16 cannot be doubtful in this passage. With respect however to Exo_1:16, it was the object of a literary controversy. Comp. Böttcher in Winer’sZeitsch. f. wiss. Theol., Bd. II., H. 1, S. 49 ff.; Rettig, Böttcheru.Redslob, Stud. u. Krit., 1834; Benary, Berlin, Jahrbb., 1841; Ernst Meier, Stud. u. Krit, 1842. [For a description and diagram of the wheel, see Gesen. Lex., s. v.]—As seemed good. Comp. Jer_27:5.

Jer_18:5-10. Then the word … to benefit it.—On as the clay in the hand of the potter comp. Isa_29:16; Isa_45:9; Isa_64:7; Wis_15:7; Sir_36:13; Rom_9:21.—Suddenly, Jer_18:7; Jer_18:9, is evidently not to be referred to the proximate verb, but to the main thought, i.e., to the apodosis. The mode of expression is paratactic. In our syntactic mode it would be: Suddenly, if I have spoken against a nation … and this nation turn, I will repent, etc. Comp. Naegelsb.Gr., § 111, 1, Anm. Moreover, the word refers evidently to the rapidity with which the potter changes the form of the clay. Observation may be recommended as the best commentator on this passage.—To extirpate. Comp. Jer_1:10.—Against which I spoke is not to be referred to wickedness, but to nation.

Footnotes:

[1]Jer_18:4.—ונשׁחת. The perfects נִשְׁחַת and שָׁב signify that these facts are not to be regarded as co-ordinate points in the course of the narrative, but as further developments of the עֹשֵׂה מְלָאכָה, from which it is not necessary to assume that the word designates more than a single act (Hitzig, Graf). The form וַיָּשָׁב is used (as ex. gr., Gen_26:17) for the reason that the word does not contain the main idea, but a subordinate one attached as it were by the preceding perfect. Comp. Gen_29:2 sqq.; Isa_6:3; Dan_8:4; Ewald, § 342 b; Naegelsb. Gr., § 84, b; § 95 g, Anm.

[2]Jer_18:4.—כחמר ו׳. These words have been unjustly suspected by different translators, transcribers, and commentators. They are not a gloss from Jer_18:6, but doubtless chosen with reference to this verse. The intention is to set forth prominently the puactum saliens by similarity of expression in the historical narrative and the application. The כְּ is to be regarded as Kaph veritatis = as clay, i.e., as he is accustomed to do to the clay. Comp. Jer_15:19; Naegelsb. Gr., § 112, 5, c. [Wordsworth: As clay sometimes fails in the hand of the potter.—Henderson. “בַּחֹמֵר with ב instead of כ, is found in the text of fifty-eight MSS., has originally been in several more, and is now in five more by correction. It is likewise exhibited in seventeen printed editions, and alone makes sense.”—S. R. A.].

[3]Jer_18:10.—הרעה. The Masoretes would read חָרַע, according to the usage which prevails elsewhere without an exception (comp. Num_32:13; Jdg_2:11; Jdg_3:7; Jdg_3:12, etc.; 1Ki_11:6; 1Ki_14:22; Jer_7:30; Jer_32:30, etc.). The reading of the Chethibh is, however, evidently occasioned by הטובה after, and רעתו before it.

Lange's Commentary on the Holy Scriptures (Critical, Doctrinal, and Homiletical), ed. John Peter Lange, English translation edited by Philip Schaff (1864–1880) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

CHAPTER 18

The Potter and the Clay

1. In the potter’s house and the message (Jer 18:1-17)

2. The plot against the prophet and his prayer (Jer 18:18-23)

Jer 18:1-17. He was commanded to go to the house of a potter and watch his work. The vessel Jeremiah sees fashioned out of clay is marred; it did not turn out well. Then the clay was taken up again and made in another vessel as it seemed good to the potter to make it. Then came the message: “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in my hand, O house of Israel.” If the creature of the dust can do as he pleases with the clay, how much more the Sovereign God. The Holy Spirit evidently uses this in Rom 9:20-32.

If a nation is threatened with destruction and that nation turns to the Lord, He will repent of the evil pronounced upon them. This is fully illustrated in the case of Jonah’s prediction, God-given as it was, of Nineveh’s overthrow. Nineveh repented and the judgment was not executed upon that generation. But if the Lord has promised a nation good and that nation does evil in His sight, He will repent of the good He had promised unto them. Thus the potter’s action is used to convey a great lesson, the lesson of God’s sovereignty, to do as He pleaseth, yet always in perfect righteousness. If Israel had owned then the sin and guilt and turned to the Lord, He would have acted in sovereign grace towards them. Their answer was: “There is no hope; but we will walk after our own devices, and we will every one do the imaginations of his evil heart.” What depravity and wicked boldness these words reveal! They refused to believe the message of the Lord. They pushed aside the hand which would snatch them out of the fire. They acknowledged the evil heart and deliberately declared to continue in wicked defiance of Jehovah. And is it any better in professing Christendom today? The answer of the Lord, an answer of kindness and long-suffering follows.

Jer 18:18-23. They arose in rebellion against the messenger of Jehovah. They hated him. They would smite him with the tongue, malign him, bring false accusations against him. But the man of God does not take up their contentions. Like Hezekiah when the enemy reviled him, Jeremiah turned to the Lord. He tells the Lord all about it. Then he prays for judgment to fall upon them. Here once more we must look upon these words prophetically. Such expressions as used by the prophet here will, during the great tribulation, come from the lips of the remnant of Israel, who suffer from their enemies and who righteously call for heaven’s vengeance, which will fall upon these enemies when Jehovah, our Lord, is manifested in glory.

Arno C. Gaebelein, The Annotated Bible (1913–1922) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

18:1-11 The Lord had Jeremiah take part in an object lesson. What Jeremiah observed at the potter’s shop became a picture of what the Lord was about to do with Judah.

18:1-4 Jeremiah watched as the potter formed an earthen jar, then crushed it and started over.

Tyndale Open Study Notes — © Tyndale Open Resources, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

The prophet is here sent to the potter's house (he knew where to find it), not to preach a sermon as before to the gates of Jerusalem, but to prepare a sermon, or rather to receive it ready prepared. Those needed not to study their sermons that had them, as he had this, by immediate inspiration. "Go to the potter's house, and observe how he manages his work, and there I will cause thee, by silent whispers, to hear my words. There thou shalt receive a message, to be delivered to the people." Note, Those that would know God's mind must observe his appointments, and attend where they may hear his words. The prophet was never disobedient to the heavenly vision, and therefore went to the potter's house (Jer 18:3) and took notice how he wrought his work upon the wheels, just as he pleased, with a great deal of ease, and in a little time. And (Jer 18:4) when a lump of clay that he designed to form into one shape either proved too stiff, or had a stone in it, or some way or other came to be marred in his hand, he presently turned it into another shape; if it will not serve for a vessel of honour, it will serve for a vessel of dishonour, just as seems good to the potter. It is probable that Jeremiah knew well enough how the potter wrought his work, and how easily he threw it into what form he pleased; but he must go and observe it now, that, having the idea of it fresh in his mind, he might the more readily and distinctly apprehend that truth which God designed thereby to represent to him, and might the more intelligently explain it to the people. God used similitudes by his servants the prophets (Hos 12:10), and it was requisite that they should themselves understand the similitudes they used. Ministers will make a good use of their converse with the business and affairs of this life if they learn thereby to speak more plainly and familiarly to people about the things of God, and to expound scripture comparisons. For they ought to make all their knowledge some way or other serviceable to their profession.

Now let us see what the message is which Jeremiah receives, and is entrusted with the delivery of, at the potter's house. While he looks carefully upon the potter's work, God darts into his mind these two great truths, which he must preach to the house of Israel: -

I. That God has both an incontestable authority and an irresistible ability to form and fashion kingdoms and nations as he pleases, so as to serve his own purposes: "Cannot I do with you as this potter, saith the Lord? Jer 18:6. Have not I as absolute a power over you in respect both of might and of right?" Nay, God has a clearer title to a dominion over us than the potter has over the clay; for the potter only gives it its form, whereas we have both matter and form from God. As the clay is in the potter's hand to be moulded and shaped as he pleases, so are you in my hand. This intimates, 1. That God has an incontestable sovereignty over us, is not debtor to us, may dispose of us as he thinks fit, and is not accountable to us, and that it would be as absurd for us to dispute this as for the clay to quarrel with the potter. 2. That it is a very easy thing with God to make what use he pleases of us and what changes he pleases with us, and that we cannot resist him. One turn of the hand, one turn of the wheel, quite alters the shape of the clay, makes it a vessel, unmakes it, new-makes it. Thus are our times in God's hand, and not in our own, and it is in vain for us to strive with him. It is spoken here of nations; the most politic, the most potent, are what God is pleased to make them, and no other. See this explained by Job (Job 12:23), He increaseth the nations and destroyeth them; he enlargeth the nations and straiteneth them again. See Psa 107:33 etc., and compare Job 34:29. All nations before God are as the drop of the bucket, soon wiped away, or the small dust of the balance, soon blown away (Isa 40:15), and therefore, no doubt, as easily managed as the clay by the potter. 3. That God will not be a loser by any in his glory, at long run, but, if he be not glorified by them, he will be glorified upon them. If the potter's vessel be marred for one use, it shall serve for another; those that will not be monuments of mercy shall be monuments of justice. The Lord has made all things for himself, yea, even the wicked for the day of evil, Pro 16:4. God formed us out of the clay (Job 33:6), nay, and we are still as clay in his hands (Isa 64:8); and has not he the same power over us that the potter has over the clay? (Rom 9:21), and are not we bound to submit, as the clay to the potter's wisdom and will? Isa 29:15, Isa 29:16; Isa 45:9.

II. That, in the exercise of this authority and ability, he always goes by fixed rules of equity and goodness. He dispenses favours indeed in a way of sovereignty, but never punishes by arbitrary power. High is his right hand, yet he rules not with a high hand, but, as it follows there, Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne, Psa 89:13, Psa 89:14. God asserts his despotic power, and tells us what he might do, but at the same time assures us that he will act as a righteous and merciful Judge. 1. When God is coming against us in ways of judgment we may be sure that it is for our sins, which shall appear by this, that national repentance will stop the progress of the judgments (Jer 18:7, Jer 18:8): If God speak concerning a nation to pluck up its fences that secure it, and so lay it open, its fruit-trees that adorn and enrich it, and so leave it desolate - to pull down its fortifications, that the enemy may have liberty to enter in, its habitations, that the inhabitants may be under a necessity of going out, and so destroy it as either a vineyard or a city is destroyed - in this case, if that nation take the alarm, repent of their sins and reform their lives, turn every one from his evil way and return to God, God will graciously accept them, will not proceed in his controversy, will return in mercy to them, and, though he cannot change his mind, he will change his way, so that it may be said, He repents him of the evil he said he would do to them. Thus often in the time of the Judges, when the oppressed people were penitent people, still God raised them up saviours; and, when they turned to God, their affairs immediately took a new turn. It was Nineveh's case, and we wish it had oftener been Jerusalem's; see Ch2 7:14. It is an undoubted truth that a sincere conversion from the evil of sin will be an effectual prevention of the evil of punishment; and God can as easily raise up a penitent people from their ruins as the potter can make anew the vessel of clay when it was marred in his hand. 2. When God is coming towards us in ways of mercy, if any stop be given to the progress of that mercy, it is nothing but sin that gives it (Jer 18:9, Jer 18:10): If God speak concerning a nation to build and to plant it, to advance and establish all the true interests of it, it is his husbandly and his building (Co1 3:9), and, if he speak in favour of it, it is done, it is increased, it is enriched, it is enlarged, its trade flourishes, its government is settled in good hands, and all its affairs prosper and its enterprises succeed. but if this nation, which God is thus loading with benefits, do evil in his sight and obey not his voice, - if it lose its virtue, and become debauched and profane, - if religion grow into contempt, and vice to get to be fashionable, and so be kept in countenance and reputation, and there be a general decay of serious godliness among them, - then God will turn his hand against them, will pluck up what he was planting, and pull down what he was building (Jer 45:4); the good work that was in the doing shall stand still and be let fall, and what favours were further designed shall be withheld; and this is called his repenting of the good wherewith he said he would benefit them, as he changed his purpose concerning Eli's house (Sa1 2:30) and hurried Israel back into the wilderness when he had brought them within sight of Canaan. Note, Sin is the great mischief-maker between God and a people; it forfeits the benefit of his promises and spoils the success of their prayers. It defeats his kind intentions concerning them (Hos 7:1) and baffles their pleasing expectations from him. It ruins their comforts, prolongs their grievances, brings them into straits, and retards their deliverances, Isa 59:1, Isa 59:2.

Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible (1708–1710) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

CHAPTER XVIII

The type of the potter's vessel, and its signification, 1-10.

The inhabitants of Judah and Jerusalem exhorted to repentance,

11;

but on their refusal, (which is represented to be as unnatural

as if a man should prefer the snowy Lebanon or barren rock to a

fruitful plain, or other waters to the cool stream of the

fountain,) their destruction is predicted, 12-17.

In consequence of these plain reproofs and warnings of

Jeremiah, a conspiracy is formed against him, 18.

This leads him to appeal to God for his integrity, 19, 20;

who puts a most dreadful curse in the mouth of his prophet,

strongly indicative of the terrible fate of his enemies, 21-23.

NOTES ON CHAP. XVIII

Verse 1. The word which came to Jeremiah] This discourse is supposed to have been delivered some time in the reign of Jehoiakim, probably within the first three years.

Adam Clarke's Commentary on the Bible (1810–1826) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

The sum of what is here taught is, that as the Jews gloried in God’s singular favor, which yet had been conferred on them for a different purpose, even that they might be his sacred heritage, it was necessary to take from them a confidence of this kind; for they at the same time heedlessly despised God and the whole of his law. We indeed know that in God’s covenant there was a mutual stipulation — that the race of Abraham were faithfully to serve God, as God was prepared to perform whatever he had promised; for it was the perpetual law of the covenant,

“Walk before me and be perfect,”

which was once for all imposed on Abraham, and extended to all his posterity. (Genesis 17:1.) As then the Jews thought that God was by an inviolable compact bound to them, while they yet proudly rejected all his prophets, and polluted, and even as far as they could, abolished, his true favorship, it was necessary to deprive them of that foolish boasting by which they deluded themselves. Hence the Prophet was commanded to go down to the potter’s house, that he might relate to the people what he saw there, even that the potter, according to his own will and pleasure, made and re-made vessels.

It seems indeed at the first view a homely mode of speaking; but if we examine ourselves we shall all find, that pride, which is innate in us, cannot be corrected except the Lord draws us as it were by force to see clearly what it is, and except he shews us plainly what we are. The Prophet might have attended to God speaking to him at his own house, but he was commanded to go down to the house of the potter — not indeed for his own sake, for he was willing to be taught — but that he might teach the people, by adding this sign as a confirmation to his doctrine.

John Calvin's Commentaries (1540-1563) — public domain. Text from the Calvin Translation Society English edition (1840s-50s) via the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org). Calvin's coverage is partial (roughly two-thirds of the Bible); uncommented books and verses are honest gaps, never fabricated. The 19th-century editor's footnotes and remarks are omitted so the notes are faithfully Calvin's own voice.

XVIII.

(1) The word which came to Jeremiah.—The message that follows comes in close sequence upon that of the preceding chapter, i.e., probably before the fourth year of the reign of Jehoiakim. It has the character of a last warning to king and people, and its rejection is followed in its turn by the more decisive use of the same symbol in Jeremiah 19

A Bible Commentary for English Readers, edited by Charles John Ellicott (1878–1897) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying. The word of prophecy, as the Targum: this is a distinct prophecy from the former, though it may be connected with it; it referring to the destruction threatened in the latter part of the preceding chapter.

The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying. The word of prophecy, as the Targum: this is a distinct prophecy from the former, though it may be connected with it; it referring to the destruction threatened in the latter part of the preceding chapter.

Jeremiah 18:2

jer 18:2

jer 18:2

jer 18:2Arise, and go down to the potter's house,.... Which, no doubt, was well known to the prophet; but where it was is not certain. Some think Jeremiah was in the temple, and this house was beneath it, and therefore he is bid to go down to it; but of this there is no certainty, nor even probability: it is most likely that this house was without the city, perhaps near the potter's field, Mat 27:10; and which lying low, he is ordered to go down to it:

and there I will cause thee to hear my words; there the Lord would tell him what he had further to say to him, and what he should say to the people; and where by lively representations, by sensible objects before him, he would cause him to understand more clearly what he said and designed to do: as God sometimes represented things to the minds of the prophets in dreams and visions, setting before them mental objects, and raising in their minds ideas of things; so sometimes he represented things to them by real visible objects, and, by similes taken from thence, conveyed unto them a clear and distinct knowledge of his mind and will, and they to the people; which was the case here.

John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.

In the first prophecy of the series Jer. 18, the fate of Jerusalem was still undetermined; a long line of kings might yet reign there in splendor, and the city be inhabited forever. This was possible only so long as it was still undecided whether Josiah’s efforts would end in a national reformation or not, and before Jehoiakim threw the weight of the kingly office into the opposite balance. In the present prophecy mercy is still offered to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but they reject it Jer 18:11-12. They have made their final choice: and thereupon follows the third prophecy of “the broken vessel” Jer 19:1-15 in which the utter overthrow of city and kingdom is foretold. We should thus place this prophecy of the potter very early in the reign of Jehoiakim; and that of the broken vessel at the commencement of his fourth year. This internal evidence is confirmed by external proof.

Albert Barnes' Notes on the Bible (1834–1885) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.

Jeremiah's Eleventh Prophecy (Reign of Jehoiakim). Prophecies Illustrated from the Work of the Potter

Jeremiah 18 gives and explains the figure of the potter's clay, and tells of the effect upon the people. Jeremiah 19 gives and applies the figure of the potter's broken vessel, while Jeremiah 20 describes the consequent sufferings of Jeremiah and his complaints.

The outrage on the prophet committed by Pashur (Jer_20:2) would certainly not have been permitted in Josiah's time. On the other hand, there seems from the language used to be still a chance for the people, and the calamity threatened had not yet arrived. Therefore we may date the symbolical actions early in Jehoiam's reign.

1-17. Figure of the potter's clay.

3. The potter's house] Clay from which pottery was made was found S. of Jerusalem: cp. Zec_11:13; Mat_27:10. The potter teaches Jeremiah important lessons concerning the providential rule of the world. 'As I watched him shaping the pliant clay, remodelling the imperfect vessels until they conformed to his ideal, God revealed to me the manner in which He is able to mould at His will the nations. At the same time I realised that man may render God's work imperfect' (Sanders and Kent, 'Messages of the Earlier Prophets').

7-10. Predictions of good or evil were conditional on the moral state of those addressed.

11. Frame] the Hebrew word is the same as that for 'potter.'

14. Will a man leave, etc.] RV 'Shall the snow of Lebanon fail from,' etc. Understand the answer, 'No, it is perpetual.' Shall the cold, etc.] RV 'Shall the cold waters that flow down from afar' (mg. 'of strange land that flow down') 'be dried up?' Nature is constant in her operations, hat God, the Rock of Israel, is forsaken by those who used to trust in Him.

15. Vanity] i.e. idols.

16. Hissing] not in contempt, but amazement.

17. I will shew them the back] God's countenance will be turned away.

18-23. Invocation of evil on the prophet's enemies.

18. The people's appeal against Jeremiah's words to the three classes of persons whom they thought to be in undoubted possession of the truth.

21-23. The stern spirit of the OT. dispensation, as shown in these imprecations, was connected with the comparative darkness in which a future existence was then shrouded. This would make righteous men more eager that God's glory should be vindicated and His people avenged in this life.

J. R. Dummelow, A Commentary on the Holy Bible (Macmillan, 1909) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

This chapter is the introduction of a group of prophecies (extending to Jer 25) of various dates; their sequence has evidently not been determined by chronological considerations. The prophet"s first object is, perhaps, to refute the scoffing inquiry, (Jer_17:15) "What has become of the threatening word of Jehovah?" and to justify the glorious premise given at the conclusion of the last chapter. The fulfill-merit of threatenings and promises alike is conditioned by the moral attitude of the people. (comp. Eze_33:11) God, as it were, holds them in either hand, and there is still time (contrast Jer_16:21) to choose the sweet and reject the bitter by sincerely turning to their true Friend. Unhappily the people misuses its day of grace, and, instead of listening to God"s messenger, seeks to rid itself of him by persecution. Upon this, Jeremiah falls again into the tone of bitter complaint, and, so far from interceding for his people, does the very opposite; on which painful and mysterious phenomenon, see remarks in general Introduction.

Vers. 1-6. The simple and familiar craft of the potter becomes a parable of religious truth. (comp. Isa_29:16 Isa_45:9 Isa_64:8; Ecc 33:13; Rom_9:20; and the account of man"s creation in Gen_2:7, which has doubtless given rise to the figure) God has the sovereign right to do as he wills with his own handiwork; thus much can be expressed by the figure. But the moral element in Jeremiah"s teaching stands outside this, viz. that the Divine action is governed, not by mere caprice, but a regard for character. "The thought is not so much the arbitrariness as the patience of God, who will bring men to be what he would have them be in the end, as the potter eventually twists the clay to the shape he originally intended, stubborn as the clay may be." But whether Jeremiah meant the lesson which Mr. Maurice deduces from his words may be gravely doubted. It is not of individuals that the prophet is thinking, but of the nation , and not of the nation as destined to be all but certainly saved, but as placed before a serious and awful decision. (For different lessons derived from the same figure, see the " Rabbi Ben Ezra" of Browning.) Egypt and Palestine were, as it seems, at one in the extreme simplicity of the potter"s art. Dr. Birch has given us an account of the Egyptian potter at his work, as he appears in the pictorial representations at Beni Hassan ("Ancient Pottery," pp. 33-35), and Dr. Thomson has described the procedure of a potter in modern Palestine ("The Land and the Book," p. 520). The chief difference between them seems to be that in Egypt the wheel was turned with the left hand, and the vase shaped with the right, while in modern Palestine the wheel is turned with the fool "Taking a lump in his hand," says Dr. Thomson, "he placed it on the top of the wheel (which revolves horizontally), and smoothed it into a low cone, like the upper end of a sugar-loaf; then thrusting his thumb into the top of it, he opened a hole down through the center, and this he constantly widened by pressing the edges of the revolving cone between his hands. As it enlarged and became thinner, he gave it whatever shape he pleased with the utmost ease and expedition." It should be observed that in ver. 3 the "wheels," or rather "two wheels," spoken of are simply the two round plates which formed the horizontal lathe of the potter.

HOMILETICS, Vers. 1-6. The potter and the clay.

The relations of the potter to his clay afford a familiar and apt illustration of the relations between God and his human family. At first sight this illustration suggests a harsh view of providence and a hopeless prospect for human endeavor. But on closer consideration, while it teaches lessons of humility and reverent submission on our part, it also throws light on the merciful goodness of God, and encourages us both to hope and to act for that which will lead to our highest blessedness.

I MEN ARE UNDER THE ABSOLUTE POWER OF GOD, LIKE CLAY IN THE HANDS OF THE POTTER. The potter has power to leave the clay untouched or to make out of it either a vessel of honor or a vessel of dishonor, a beautiful vase or an ugly piece of crockery, a dainty cup for a prince"s banquet or a coarse culinary utensil. God has absolute power over us. He is the Almighty. No man can eventually succeed in resisting the will of God. No Divine purpose can be eternally frustrated. God has also absolute authority over us. He has the ultimate right of supreme sovereignty to do as he will with his subjects. Yet there is nothing alarming in this fact, but rather an infinite consolation. For God is not a heartless, conscienceless despot, displaying arbitrary power by mere caprice; he is holy, and exercises his sovereignty according to principles of strict justice, truth, and right. He is gracious, and rules with purposes of love for the good of his creatures. Our dependence on God is, like that of the infant on its mother, the security of our own welfare. Those horrible applications of the doctrine of Divine sovereignty which attribute to it designs that would be accounted cruel in any responsible being are blasphemous insults to the impartial justice and love of God"s character. If God"s actions are not limited by any physical compulsion or constitutional law, they are governed by his regard to eternal righteousness and by the beneficence of his nature.

II MEN CAN NO MORE ATTAIN A WORTHY END IN LIFE WITHOUT GOD THAN THE CLAY CAN BECOME A SHAPELY VESSEL WITHOUT THE POTTER. There lies the clay a dead, heavy, amorphous mass, with no possibility of spontaneously generating forms of beauty, with no secret principle of evolution to work it into something orderly. We are as clay. Except God wrought in us and upon us, we could simply lie helpless, only to waste away with the flux of circumstances. If we are more than clay, it is because God breathes his life into us and sustains us every moment by his indwelling Spirit. If we seem to effect anything actively, it is because he first works in us both to will and to do.

III GOD HAS A PURPOSE IN EVERY LIFE AS THE POTTER HAS WITH THE CLAY. There is a meaning for the strange discipline of providence. God is shaping us into that form which he deems most fitting. Every life has not the same purpose. The potter makes vessels of innumerable shapes. Yet each life is successful as its own particular purpose is fulfilled. The homely jug may be perfect, though it is very different from the graceful vase. A life is no failure because it is lowly and put only to lowly uses so long as it attains the end for which God designed it. It is important to note that God"s first work with us is in forming our own souls aright. The first question is not as to what we do, but as to what we are. The potter is making vessels: God is making characters, souls, lives. After this we may be put to some further end used for good after we have been made right, as the vessel is of service after the potter has done his work with it.

IV GOD SHAPES OUR LIVES BY THE DISCIPLINE OF PROVIDENCE AS THE POTTER THE CLAY UPON HIS WHEELS.

The wheel of time spins fast, but not carrying us away, changing but not destroying each separate individuality. In providence there are wheels within wheels. We do not understand their meaning. The clay is pressed now below into a solid base, now above into a dainty rim, but it is difficult to see what the final outcome will be till all is finished. So our lives are pressed on one side and on another something which in our eyes is indispensable is taken away, something which to us seems needless is added. But out of the dizzy whirl, the rush and confusion of life, God is steadily working out his purpose.

V GOD WILL ULTIMATELY ACCOMPLISH HIS PURPOSE IN US, THOUGH AT FIRST IT SEEMS TO FAIL. (Ver. 4.) The clay is refractory. It must be broken up and remodeled. Man is more than clay. He has free will, mysterious as may be the connection of this with the almighty sovereignty of God. In a much more terrible way he too is refractory, willfully and stubbornly. For this he must be broken. His life must be disturbed and shaken up, but only that God may begin again to fashion him for his destined end. Great disappointments, destructive events, the failure of a man"s work, the disruption of a Church, the revolution of a nation, may seem simply disastrous. But we see how that by means of these things God, in his infinite patience and gracious perseverance, will finally effect his own great purposes, and so secure the true blessedness of his creatures.

HOMILIES BY A.F. MUIR Vers. 1-10. The potter and the clay.

The revelations of God are often given in unlikely places, and common circumstances and scenes may symbolize the divinest mysteries. The profoundest things in God"s universe are side by side with the simplest. If the mind be open and the spirit susceptible we shall see God in everything. Is there not a fitness in this ancient handicraft of the potter becoming the symbol of the eternal action of God? The potter"s clay suggests

I THE INFLUENCE OF GOD UPON HUMAN DESTINY. Some of the forms into which human life builds itself impress the imagination with the presence of a power greater than human, which conditions and determines them. The race, the nation, the Church, represent relations and affinities which are not of merely human origin. But even the individual life, if properly studied, will be found to be associated with the same mystery and full of the same suggestion of a Divine influence. In the case before us it is the Jewish nation which is suggested to the mind of the prophet. The hand of God is apparent in its formation and history. God"s influence upon these is felt to be

(1) omnipotent,

(2) sudden,

(3) irresponsible,

(4) to create or to destroy.

II CIRCUMSTANCES IN HUMAN NATURE THAT AFFECT DESTINY. The clay in the hand of the potter was marred and had to he remolded. The allusion here was to the idolatrous practices of the Jews in Jeremiah"s own time. The causes at work, therefore, in the marring of the vessel are not mechanical or constitutional in their nature, but moral. The history of the same people has shown that external circumstances are of little account in this question. The chief hindrances to God s purposes with man in nations, institutions, and individuals arise from

(1) original depravity and

(2) willful disobedience. The free-will of man may thwart even the grace of God.

III THE PURPOSE OF GOD WITH REGARD TO MAN. This is essentially and persistently a creative one. The first effort of the petter is formative; and when, through the marring of the vessel, he has to reduce the clay into the lump again, there still remains an intention to form anew. The effects of sin are shown to be profound from the fact that the potter is obliged to remake what has been marred. The effort of restoring love succeeds upon another, and "where sin abounded grace did much more abound". (Rom_5:20) There is no nation which has not had many opportunities of recovering its position and influence forfeited by unfaithfulness and unbelief, and there is no sinner hardened in his sins who has not repeatedly rejected a heavenly voice. Each proclamation of God"s Word is a fresh opportunity which may avail for salvation to every one who will embrace it. M.

HOMILIES BY S. CONWAY Vers. 1-10. The blessed parable of the potter and the clay.

Few passages of Scripture have been more misread or with sadder results than this one. From St. Paul s reference to it in Romans 9. it has been thought that it taught the absolute sovereignty of God, his right to dispose of men as he pleases; that, in the exercise of that sovereignty, he makes some vessels unto destruction, and that the vessels so made have no ground of complaint whatsoever. Now, we affirm that, whilst there is much truth in these representations, they are not "the whole truth," still less are they" nothing but the truth." God is Sovereign, we cheerfully confess, and has right to dispose of us as he will. But that he exercises these rights in any arbitrary, or capricious, or cruel way, as is taught by this misreading, or that if he did the vessels made for destruction would have no ground of complaint, we altogether deny. Such teaching has clouded the face of God to many souls and made God our Father "a terror" to them. But blessed be his Name, this misreading is not the truth. Let us try to see what that truth is. In passing, we may note how the command to the prophet to go down to the potter"s workshop teaches us how workshops and our common work may have precious lessons about God to teach us if we be like as was the prophet, willing to learn them. The star-studying Magi were led by a star to Jesus. The centurion by his soldier-life gained true comprehension of Christ. The fishermen-apostles of how they were to be "fishers of men." Manifold are the ministers and ministries of God to attentive souls. "There is a book, who runs may read, Which heavenly truth imparts; And all the lore its scholars need, Pure eyes and Christian hearts.

That is said of the book of nature, so it may be of the book of our lawful work. Now let us go down to the workshop told of here and learn what we may. And we are taught

I THAT IT DOTH NOT YET APPEAR WHAT WE SHALL BE." We are the clay. But who can tell what is to be fashioned out of that mere mass of material? Every human soul is but as clay in process of formation into some designed result.

II GOD HAS WISE AND GRACIOUS INTENT IN REGARD TO ALL. The meanest vessel that the potter makes is an advance in worth and excellence on the clay ere it was fashioned by him. How much more, then, in the case of the "vessels of honor!

III BUT THE CLAY CAN FOR A WHILE MAR AND FRUSTRATE THE POTTER"S PURPOSE. The vessel the prophet saw was marred in the making. What innumerable instances there have been and are of this! Not Israel and Judah alone, but other nations, other churches, innumerable separate souls. And they have had to be broken up and set down from the place of honor for which they were at first intended. They have with shame to take a lower place. But

IV EVENTUALLY THE MAKER"S WILL BE DONE IN REGARD TO THEM. "So he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it." It is never "all the same" to a man if he sins against God. He may not be destroyed, but his will be "another" position and a worse one.

V AND ALL THIS IN HARMONY WITH THE NATURE OF THE MATERIAL WROUGHT UPON. As the potter"s work was in harmony with the clay out of which he fashioned his varied vessels, so God"s work will be in harmony with the mental and moral nature which he has given to us. It is to us an inexplicable problem the harmony of the Divine sovereignty and human freedom. We cannot tell how it will be done, only that it will be done.

VI THE LESSONS OF THE WHOLE ARE.

1. Of inquiry. Are we, by obedience to the Divine will, furthering the work designed in us or by disobedience hindering? Ver. 9 teaches that, however good and gracious a purpose God may cherish concerning us, if we "do evil" then God"s work will be marred.

2. Of admonitions. Seeing how terrible a process is the "making again" of the marred vessel what was it not to Judah and Israel? and the process is not finished yet let us repent of sin and turn to God now, and so be delivered from so great a woe. It has been said that the most terrible part of the road to heaven is that which the sinner goes over three times once in his first following of Christ next when he by sin goes back that way, and the third time when in bitter repentance he travels over it again.

3. Of praise to God, that he has revealed so gracious a purpose concerning man, and that his will shall be done.

4. Of prayer, that we may be found not resisting but ever obedient to that will. C.

HOMILIES BY D. YOUNG Vers. 1-10. The clay in the potter"s hand.

I THE PURPOSE OF THIS PRACTICAL ILLUSTRATION. It is a practical illustration in the most suggestive sense of the word "practical." Jeremiah had not to go out of his way to produce a sufficiently impressive figure of what God was about to do. He had to go through a very peculiar and protracted experience to bring out the lesson of the marred girdle. But here he has only to go down to the potter at his wheel, a thing he could do at any time; and there is a lesson particularly plain and forcible, as coming out of the daily life, the simple and common life, of the people. Notice, then, that Jeremiah was not sent down to learn just what his own unaided observation might tell him concerning the potter and the clay. He might, indeed, have drawn out many important lessons, yet overlooked the one that was most important of all. God wished the prophet clearly to understand and then distinctly to impress upon the people this truth, that as the potter is to the clay, in respect of the control which he has over it as clay and in its plastic condition, so Jehovah is to Israel in respect of his control over its temporal destiny as a nation. Hence we have to look at the potter"s action upon the clay, positively and negatively. We have to recollect both what he can do and what be cannot do. Within certain limits his power is resistless; outside those limits he has no power at all. Give the potter a piece of moist plastic clay; he takes it up, designing to make from a vessel of a certain shape and for a certain use. Suddenly he finds it desirable to change the shape, and because the clay is still moist and plastic he can do this with the rapidity, expertness, and success which come from long practice It is this particular power of the potter which God would have us to understand is his power over us. What the potter does is limited by the nature of that with which he works. He cannot turn clay into something else than clay. Clay it is when he first touches it: clay it remains when its shape is finally decided. Let the vessel be baked in the furnace and come out hard, its shape cannot then be altered. If it is thrown to the ground it will be broken, it may even be shivered "so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it a shard to take fire from the hearth, or to take water withal out of the pit". (Jer_30:14) No volition or power of the potter will give to the clay vessel the qualities of a wooden vessel or one of metal. He may fashion it for a vessel of honor or dishonor, just as he pleases; but whatever its use its material is still of clay. And similarly we must recollect that, whatever God does with us, he does in harmony with our nature. He finds us, as to the affections and purposes of our hearts, free agents, and, however great the changes he may affect in our circumstances and our future, all must be done without touching this freedom. The Divine potter hero was changing the circumstances of the human clay, just because that clay was so stubborn in submitting to his will so clearly, so lovingly, so often expressed. If we refuse to be molded into the shape that means for us true peace, glory, and blessedness, then we must be molded into the shape which will secure at the least peace and blessedness in God"s kingdom, and manifest glory to his great Name.

II THE GREAT RESULT WHICH SHOULD BE PRODUCED BY OUR CONSIDERATION OF THIS ILLUSTRATION. Too readily is it said by many, "If we are as clay in the hands of the potter, then we need not trouble ourselves. God will shape our destiny, whatever we do." But if we look honestly and humbly at this illustration, we shall see that what God would have us above all things to learn from it is that the shaping of our destiny lies practically with ourselves. In selfish and ignorant obstinacy we wish our life to take a certain mold. Strenuously, and heedless of all Divine counsel and warning, we try what self can do toward the shaping. Then at last our purpose comes to be broken off. All that we have been and all that we have done prove useless so far as our aims are concerned. But for all that we cannot be useless to God. God wishes to work in us a change which would make all our circumstances those of liberty. He wishes to renew our hearts and establish in them a holy love as the central principle. If we refuse this Divine appeal, then we must come under ever-narrowing constraints. We are asked to walk in the liberty of God"s children; if we refuse and confess ourselves the enemies of God, then we must be loaded with chains and put in the innermost dungeon. Our wisdom is to turn from our hardness and impenitent hearts, and allow God to lead us into the full metanoia . (Rom_2:4) Then with understanding shall we address God, "We are the clay, and thou our potter". (Isa_64:8) If we by repentance come beck to God and make ourselves clay, such as will have in it a peculiar responsiveness to the touch of God, then we may leave ourselves to his loving-kindness. He will fashion us into just that shape whereby we shall be meet for the Master"s service. And if men say in their ignorance that we are turning out but vessels of dishonor, let us recollect that of honor and dishonor God alone is judge. If we only stoop from our pride to do the will of God, God will take care of our position. For is not God he who exalts the humble and abases the proud? Y.

The Pulpit Commentary (1880–1919), ed. H.D.M. Spence-Jones & Joseph S. Exell — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

By the parable of a potter, God's absolute power and disposal of nations is set forth, ver. 1-10. Judah's unparalleled revolt: and her judgments, ver. 11-17. The prophet prays against his conspirators, ver. 18-23.

John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Whole Bible (1754–1765) — public domain. Text via the GEBible commentary corpus.

The Emblem of the Clay and the Potter and the Complaint of the Prophet against his Adversaries. - The figure of the potter who remodels a misshapen vessel (Jer 18:2-4). The interpretation of this (Jer 18:5-10), and its application to degenerate Israel (Jer 18:11-17). The reception of the discourse by the people, and Jeremiah's cry to the Lord (Jer 18:18-23).

Keil & Delitzsch — Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament (1861–1891) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API. (Old Testament only.)

The word

Israel (the whole nation) a vessel marred in the Potter’s hand, is the key to this prophetic strain. But Jehovah will make "it again another vessel" Jer 18:4.

The Scofield Reference Bible (1917 edition), notes by C. I. Scofield — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

The Parable of the Potter

v. 1. The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying,

v. 2. Arise and go down to the potter’s house, his workshop being located in the lower part of the city, near the clay-pits, and there I will cause thee to hear My words, in a special message intended for the people of Judah.

v. 3. Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels, literally, "on the disks," for the potter’s lathe consisted of two horizontal wooden plates, the lower one larger than the upper, the clay being molded into shape on the upper disk.

v. 4. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter, it was spoiled in the making, due to some mischance; so he made it again another vessel, using the same lump of clay over again, as seemed good to the potter to make it. This was the incident which the Lord used as the basis of His parable.

v. 5. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying,

v. 6. O house of Israel, the entire nation being addressed, as including the true Church of God, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the Lord, namely, in discarding a people that had proved unfaithful to His call and choosing others in its stead. Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in Mine hand, O house of Israel, still in a position to be molded if they but heeded His call.

v. 7. At what instant, namely, in a moment of time, when the nation least expects it, I shall speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it, threatening extermination:

v. 8. if that nation against whom I have pronounced turn from their evil, giving heed to His warnings, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them, in accordance with His long-suffering and mercy, according to which He does not desire the death of the sinner.

v. 9. And at what instant, with the same suddenness, I shall speak concerning a nation and concerning a kingdom to build and to plant it, having arranged to carry out a plan of blessing upon it, to give it a position of power and authority above others:

v. 10. if it do evil in My sight, that It obey not My voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said I would benefit them, the obstinacy and wickedness of such a people depriving it of the blessings which the Lord would freely have vouchsafed all its members. It is man’s own fault if he does not become a partaker of the benefits which God’s kindness and mercy would like to bestow upon all men.

Paul E. Kretzmann, Popular Commentary of the Bible (1921–1924) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

Jer 18:3-4

(with Jer 19:1-2, Jer 19:10-11)

I. There is a Divine ideal possible for every man. God has not made any man simply for destruction. He has an archetype or pattern before Him, which it is possible for each man to reach. That ideal is not the same for all, but it is in each appropriate to and in correspondence with the environment in which he is placed.

II. This ideal is to be attained by a man only through implicit faith in God, and willing obedience to His commands.

It was a profound saying of a great philosopher that "we command nature by obeying her." And similarly we may affirm that we command God by obeying Him.

III. If such faith and obedience are refused by a man, that man’s history is marred, and it is no longer possible for him to become what otherwise he might have been. Sin mars the Divine ideal for a man. It deprives him of the full advantage of the skill and help of God in the development of His character. It is no longer possible even for God, in consistency with the moral nature of His government, to make of him all that was originally attainable by him.

IV. If the man should repent and turn to the Lord, he may yet, through the rich forbearance of God, rise to a measure of excellence and usefulness, which, though short of that which was originally possible to him and intended for him, will secure the approval of the Most High.

V. If the man harden himself into persistent rejection of God, show stubborn impenitence, there comes a time when improvement is no longer possible, and there is nothing for him but everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His power. The clay that was plastic was made into another vessel; but the bottle that was burned into hardness, and was found to be worthless, was broken into pieces and cast out. So when impenitence is perversely persisted in there conies a point at which the heart is so hardened that impenitence is neither thought of nor desired, and the man is abandoned to perdition.

W. M. Taylor, Contrary Winds, p. 150.

Jer 18:6

I. Every human life is, first of all, an idea in the mind of God. The potter is an artist, and it is the thoughts of his head he embodies in the vessels he makes. Our beings are Divine productions, embodied thoughts of the Divine heart, the very work of the Divine hands.

II. Every human life is shaped for a Divine use. When the potter turns a vessel on his wheel, the first pulse of thought concerning it touches its use. It is the use which determines the shape. And this holds good in the shaping of human life by God. We are created to be vessels for God, and of God; vessels of His sanctuary, set apart for His service, and filled with all sweet and wholesome things.

III. The third truth in this parable is that lives tried in one shape are sometimes broken up and re-shaped to fulfil themselves in new spheres of different capacities and shapes of the Divine character and life.

IV. God has left it to man himself to decide whether he will be a vessel of honour or dishonour. If we were mere clay, God being Lord and Maker of us, each would pass to the fulfilment of the Divine purpose as stars and trees do, and there would be no after-story of sorrow—no divergence from the Divine intention. But we are human beings, not mere clay. The Creator has power over the lives He moulds, but it is never so wielded as to quench the power of choice He has given to us.

V. Be true to the Divine intention and shaping of your lives. The Great Householder reserves for the highest honour the cup which carries the wine to His own lips or to the lips of His guests. Be, each of you, that cup for God. So shall God be well-pleased with the work of His hands.

A. MACLEOD, Days of Heaven upon Earth, p. 23.

References: Jer 18:11.—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi, p. 279. Jer 18:12.—Ibid., Sermons, vol. xii., No. 684. Jer 18:18-19.—J. S. Howson, Good Words, 1868, p. 617. Jer 19:13.—S. Greg, A Layman’s Legacy, p. 223.

The Sermon Bible, ed. William Robertson Nicoll (1888–1900) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.

CHAPTER XI

THE DIVINE POTTER

Jeremiah 18

JEREMIAH goes down into the Lower Town, or the valley between the upper and lower city; and there his attention is arrested by a potter sitting at work before his wheel. As the prophet watches, a vessel is spoiled in the making under the craftsmans hand; so the process begins afresh, and out of the same lump of clay another vessel is moulded, according to the potters fancy.

Reflecting upon what he had seen, Jeremiah recognised a Divine Word alike in the impulse which led him thither, and in the familiar actions of the potter. Perhaps as he sat meditating at home, or praying in the court of the temple, the thought had crossed his mind that Iahvah was the Potter, and mankind the clay in His hands; a thought which recurs so often in the eloquent pages of the second Isaiah, who was doubtless indebted to the present oracle for the suggestion of it. Musing upon this thought, Jeremiah wandered half-unconsciously down to the workshop of the potter; and there, under the influence of the Divine Spirit, his thought developed itself into a lesson for his people and for us.

"Cannot I do unto you like this potter, O house of Israel? saith Iahvah; Behold, as the clay in the potters hand, so are ye in My hand, O house of Israel." Iahvah has an absolute control over His people and over all peoples, to shape their condition and to alter their destiny; a control as absolute as that of the potter over the clay between his hands, which he moulds and remoulds at will. Men are wholly malleable in the hands of their Maker; incapable, by the nature of things, of any real resistance to His purpose. If the first intention of the potter fail in the execution, he does not fail to realise his plan on a second trial. And if mans nature and circumstances appear for a time to thwart the Makers design; if the unyielding pride and intractable temper of a nation mar its beauty and worth in the eyes of its Creator, and render it unfit for its destined uses and functions; He can take away the form He has given, and reduce His work to shapelessness, and remodel the ruined mass into accordance with His sovereign design. Iahvah, the supreme Author of all existence, can do this. It is evident that the Creator can do as He will with His creature. But all His dealings with man are conditioned by moral considerations. He meddles with no nation capriciously, and irrespective of its attitude towards His laws. "At one moment I threaten a nation and a kingdom that I will uproot and pull down and destroy. And that nation which I threatened returneth from its evil, and I repent of the evil that I purposed to do it. And at another moment, I promise a nation and a kingdom that I will build and plant. And it doeth the evil in Mine eyes, in not hearkening unto My voice; and I repent of the good that I said I would do it" (Jer_18:7-10).

This is a bold affirmation, impressive in its naked simplicity and directness of statement, of a truth which in all ages has taken possession of minds at all capable of a comprehensive survey of national experience; the truth that there is a power revealing itself in the changes and chances of human history, shaping its course, and giving it a certain definite direction, not without regard to the eternal principles of morality. When in some unexpected calamity which strikes down an individual sinner, men recognise a "judgment" or an instance of "the visitation of God," they infringe the rule of Christian charity, which forbids us to judge our brethren. Yet such judgment, liable as it is to be too readily suggested by private ill will, envy, and other evil passions, which warp the even justice that should guide our decisions, and blind the mind to its own lack of impartiality, is in general the perversion of a true instinct which persists in spite of all scientific sophistries and philosophic fallacies. For it is an irrepressible instinct rather than a reasoned opinion which makes us all believe, however inconsistently and vaguely, that God rules; that Providence asserts itself in the stream of circumstance, in the current of human affairs. The native strength of this instinctive belief is shown by its survival in minds that have long since cast off allegiance to religious creeds. It only needs a sudden sense of personal danger, the sharp shock of a serious accident, the foreboding of bitter loss, the unexpected but utter overthrow of some well-laid scheme that seemed assured of success, to stir the faith that is latent in the depths of the most callous and worldly heart, and to force the acknowledgment of a righteous Judge enthroned above.

Compared with the mysterious Power which evinces itself continuously in the apparent chaos of conflicting events, mans free will is like the eddy whirling round upon the bosom of a majestic river as it floats irresistibly onward to its goal, bearing the tiny vortex along with it. Mans power of self-determination no more interferes with the counsels of Providence than the diurnal revolution of the earth on its axis interferes with its annual revolution round the sun. The greater comprises the less; and God includes the world.

The Creator has implanted in the creature a power of choice between good and evil, which is a pale reflection of His own tremendous Being. But how can we even imagine the dependent, the limited, the finite, acting independently of the will of the Absolute and Infinite? The fish may swim against the ocean current; but can it swim at all out of the ocean? Its entire activity depends upon the medium in which it lives and moves and has its being.

But Jeremiah exposes the secret of Providence to the eyes of his fellow countrymen for a particular purpose. His aim is to eradicate certain prevalent misconceptions, so as to enable them to rightly apprehend the meaning of Gods present dealings with themselves. The popular belief was that Zion was an inviolable sanctuary; that whatever disasters might have befallen the nation in the past, or might be imminent in the future, Iahvah could not. for His own sake, permit the extinction of Judah as a nation. For then His worship, the worship of the temple, the sacrifices of the one altar, would be abolished; and His honour and His Name would be forgotten among men. These were the thoughts which comforted them in the trying time when a thousand rumours of the coming of the Chaldeans to punish their revolt were flying about the land; and from day to day men lived in trembling expectation of impending siege and slaughter.

These were the beliefs which the popular prophets, themselves probably in most cases fanatical believers in their own doctrine, vehemently maintained in opposition to Jeremiah. Above all, there was the covenant between Iahvah and His people, admitted as a fact both by Jeremiah and his opponents. Was it conceivable that the God of the Fathers, who had chosen them and their posterity to be His people forever, would turn from His purpose, and reject His chosen utterly?

Jeremiah meets these popular illusions by applying his analogy of the potter. The potter fashions a mass of clay into a vessel; and Iahvah had fashioned Israel into a nation. But as though the mass of inert matter had proven unwieldy or stubborn to the touches of his plastic hands; as the wheel revolved, a misshapen product resulted, which the artist broke up again, and moulded afresh on his wheel, till it emerged a fair copy of his ideal. And so, in the revolutions of time, Israel had failed of realising the design of his Maker, and had become a vessel of wrath, fitted to destruction. But as the rebellious lump was fashioned again by the deft hand of the master, so might this refractory people be broken and built up anew by the Divine master hand.

In the light of this analogy, the prophet interprets the existing complications of the political world. The serious dangers impending over the nation are a sure symptom that the Divine Potter is at work, "moulding an evil fate for Judah and Jerusalem." And now prithee say unto the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem:

"Thus hath Iahvah said,

Behold I am moulding evil against you,

And devising a device against you!"

But Iahvahs menaces are not the mere vent of a tyrants caprice or causeless anger: they are a deliberate effort to break the hard heart, to reduce it to contrition, to prepare it for a new creation in a more glorious likeness. Therefore the threat closes with an entreaty:

"Return ye, I pray you, each from his evil way,

And make good your ways and your doings!"

If the prophetic warning fulfil its purpose, and the nation repent, then as in the case of Nineveh, which repented at the preaching of Jonah, the sentence of destruction is revoked, and the doomed nation is granted a new lease of life. The same truth holds good reversely. Gods promises are as conditional as His threats. If a nation lapse from original righteousness, the sure consequence is the withdrawal of Divine favour, and all of blessing and permanence that it confers. It is evident that the prophet directly contradicts the popular persuasion, which was also the current teaching of his professional opponents, that Iahvahs promises to Israel are absolute, that is, irrespective of moral considerations. Jeremiah is revealing, in terms suited to the intelligence of his time, the true law of the Divine dealings with Israel and with man. And what he has here written, it is important to bear in mind, when we are studying other passages of his writings and those of his predecessors, which foreshow judgments and mercies to individual peoples. However absolute the language of prediction, the qualification here supplied must usually be understood; so that it is not too much to say that this remarkable utterance is one of the keys to the comprehension of Hebrew prophecy.

But now, allowing for antique phraseology, and for the immense difference between ancient and modern modes of thought and expression; allowing also for the new light shed upon the problems of life and history by the teaching of Him who has supplemented all that was incomplete in the doctrine of the prophets and the revelation granted to the men of the elder dispensation; must we pronounce this oracle of Jeremiahs substantially true or the contrary? Is the view thus formulated an obsolete opinion, excusable in days when scientific thinking was unknown; useful indeed for the furtherance of the immediate aims of its authors, but now to be rejected wholly as a profound mistake, which modern enlightenment has at once exposed and rendered superfluous to an intelligent faith in the God of the prophets?

Here and everywhere else, Jeremiahs language is in form highly anthropomorphic. If it was to arrest the attention of the multitude, it could not well have been otherwise. He seems to say that God changes His intentions, according as a nation changes its behaviour. Something must be allowed for style, in a writer whose very prose is more than half poetry, and whose utterances are so often lyrical in form as well as matter. The Israelite thinkers, however, were also well aware that the Eternal is superior to change; as is clear from that striking word of Samuel: "The Glory of Israel lieth not nor repenteth; for He is not man, that He should repent". {1Sa_15:29} And prophetic passages like that in Kings, which so nobly declares that the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain God, {cf. Jer_23:24} or that of the second Isaiah which affirms that the Divine ways and purposes are as much higher than those of His people, as the heavens are higher than the earth, {Isa_55:9} prove that the vivid anthropomorphic expressions of the popular teaching of the prophets ought in mere justice to be limited by these wider conceptions of the Divine Nature and attributes. These passages are quite enough to clear the prophets of the accusation of entertaining such gross and crude ideas of Deity as those which Xenophanes ridiculed, and which find their embodiment in most mythologies.

There is indeed a sense in which all thinking, not only thought about God, but about the natural world, must be anthropomorphic. Man is unquestionably "the measure of all things," and he measures by a human standard. He interprets the world without in terms of his own consciousness; he imposes the forms and moulds of his own mind upon the universal mass of things. Time, space, matter, motion, number, weight, organ, function, -what are all these but inward conceptions by which the mind reduces a chaos of conflicting impressions to order and harmony? What the external world may be, apart from our ideas of it, no philosopher pretends to be able to say; and an equal difficulty embarrasses those who would define what the Deity is, apart from His relations to man. But then it is only those relations that really concern us; everything else is idle speculation, little becoming to creatures so frail and ephemeral as we.

From this point of view, we may fairly ask, what difference it makes whether the prophet affirm that Iahvah repents of retributive designs, when a nation repents of its sins, or that a nations repentance will be followed by the restoration of temporal prosperity. It is a mere matter of statement; and the former way of putting the truth was the more intelligible way to his contemporaries, and has, besides, the advantage of implying the further truth that the fortunes of nations do not depend upon a blind and inexorable fate, but upon the Will and Law of a holy God. It affirms a Lawmaker as well as a Law, a Providence as well as a uniform sequence of events.

The prophet asserts, then, that nations reap what they have sown; that their history is, in general, a record of Gods judgments upon their ways and doings. This is, of course, a matter of faith, as are all beliefs about the Unseen; but it is a faith which has its root in an apparently ineradicable instinct of humanity. "The doer must suffer," is not a conviction of Hebrew religion only; it belongs to the universal religious consciousness. Some critics are fond of pronouncing the "policy" of the prophets a mistaken one. They commend the high tone of their moral teachings, but consider their forecasts of the future and interpretations of passing events, as erroneous deductions from their general views of the Divine nature. We are not well acquainted with the times and circumstances under which the prophets wrote and spoke. This is true even in the case of Jeremiah; the history of the time exists only in the barest outline. But the writings of an Isaiah or an Amos make it difficult to suppose that their authors would not have occupied a leading position in any age and nation; their thought is the highest product of the Hebrew mind; and the policy of Isaiah at least, during the Assyrian crisis, was gloriously justified by the event.

We need not, however, stop here in attempting to vindicate the attitude and aims of the prophets. Without claiming infallibility for every individual utterance of theirs-without displaying the bad taste and entire lack of literary tact which would be implied by insisting upon the minute accuracy and close correspondence to fact, of all that the prophets forboded, all that they suggested as possible or probable, and by turning all their poetical figures and similes into bald assertions of literal fact; we may, I think, steadfastly affirm that the great principles of revealed religion, which it was their mission to enunciate and impress by all the resources of a fervid oratory and a high-wrought poetical imagination, are absolutely and eternally true. Man does reap as he sows; all history records it. The present welfare and future permanence of a nation do depend, and have always depended, upon the strength of its adhesion to religious and moral convictions. What was it that enabled Israel to gain a footing in Canaan, and to reduce, one after another, nations and communities far more advanced in the arts of civilisation than they? What but the physical and moral force generated by the hardy and simple life of the desert, and disciplined by wise obedience to the laws of their Invisible King? What but a burning faith in the Lord of Hosts, Iahvah Sabaoth, the true Leader of the armies of Israel? Had they only remained uncontaminated by the luxuries and vices of the conquered races; had they not yielded to the soft seduction of sensuous forms of worship; had they continued faithful to the God who had brought them out of Egypt, and lived, on the whole, by the teaching of the true prophets; who can say that they might not have successfully withstood the brunt of Assyrian or Chaldean invasion?

The disruption of the kingdom, the internecine conflicts, the dynastic revolutions, the entanglements with foreign powers which mark the progressive decline of the empire of David and Solomon, would hardly have found place in a nation that steadily lived by the rule of the prophets, clinging to Iahvah and Iahvah only, and "doing justice and loving mercy" in all the relations of life. The gradual differentiation of the idea of Iahvah into a multitude of Baals at the local sanctuaries must have powerfully tended to disintegrate the national unity. Solomons temple and the recognition of the one God of all the tribes of Israel as supreme, which that religious centre implied, was, on the other hand, a real bond of union for the nation. We cannot forget that, at the outset of the whole history, Moses created or resuscitated the sense of national unity in the hearts of the Egyptian serfs, by proclaiming to them Iahvah, the God of their fathers. It is a one-sided representation which treats the policy of the prophets as purely negative; as confined to the prohibition of leagues with the foreigner, and the condemnation of walls and battlements, chariots and horses, and all the elements of social strength and display. The prophets condemn these things, regarded as substitutes for trust in the One God, and faithful obedience to His laws. They condemn the man who puts his confidence in man, and makes flesh his arm, and forgets the only true source of strength and protection. To those who allege that the policy of the prophets was a failure, we may reply that it never had a full and fair trial.

And they will say, Hopeless! for we will follow after our own devices, and will each practise the stubbornness of his own evil heart. Therefore thus hath lahvah said:

1. Ask ye now among the heathen,

Who hath heard the like?

The virgin (daughter) of Israel

Hath done a very horrible thing.

2. Doth the snow of Lebanon cease

From overflowing the field?

Do the running waters dry up,

The icy streams?

3. For My people have forgotten me,

To vain things they burn incense:

And they have made them stumble in their ways, the ancient paths,

To walk in bypaths, a way not cast up:

4. To make their land a desolation,

Perpetual hissings;

Everyone that passeth her by shall be amazed,

And shall shake his head.

5. "Like an east wind will I scatter them

In the face of the foe;

The back and not the face will I show them,

In the day of their overthrow."

God foresees that His gracious warning will be rejected as heretofore; the prophets hearers will cry "It is hopeless!" thy appeal is in vain, thine enterprise desperate; "for after our own devices" or thoughts "will we walk," not after thine, though thou urge them as Iahvahs; "and we will each practise the stubbornness of his own evil heart"-this last in a tone of irony, as if to say, Very well; we accept thy description of us; our ways are stubborn, and our hearts evil: we will abide by our character, and stand true to your unflattering portrait. Otherwise, the words may be regarded as giving the substance of the popular reply, in terms which at the same time convey the Divine condemnation of it; but the former view seems preferable.

God foresees the obstinacy of the people, and yet the prophet does not cease his preaching. A cynical assent to his invective only provokes him to more strenuous endeavours to convince them that they are in the wrong; that their behaviour is against reason and nature. Once more {Jer_2:10 sqq.} he strives to shame them into remorse by contrasting their conduct with that of other nations. These were faithful to their own gods; among them such a crime as national apostasy was unheard of and unknown. It was reserved for Israel to give the first example of this abnormal offence; a fact as strange and fearful in the moral world as some unnatural revolution in the physical sphere. That Israel should forget his duty to Iahvah was as great and inexplicable a portent as if the perennial snows of the Lebanon should cease to supply the rivers of the land; or as if the ice cold streams of its glens and gorges should suddenly cease to flow. And certainly, when we look at the matter with the eye of calm reason, the prophet cannot be said to have here exaggerated the mystery of sin. For, however strong the temptation that lures man from the path of duty, however occasion may suggest, and passion urge, and desire yearn, these influences cannot of themselves silence conscience, and obliterate experience, and overpower judgment, and defeat reason. As surely as it is possible to know anything, man knows that his vital interests coincide with duty; and that it is not only weak but absolutely irrational to sacrifice duty to the importunities of appetite.

When man forsakes the true God, it is to "burn incense to vain gods" or things of naught. He who worships what is less than God, worships nothing. No being below God can yield any true satisfaction to that human nature which was made for God. The man who fixes his hope upon things that perish in the using, the man who seeks happiness in things material, the man whose affections have sole regard to the joys of sense, and whose devotion is given wholly to worldly objects, is the man who will at the last cry out, in hopeless disappointment and bitterness of spirit, vanity of vanities! all is vanity! "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" The souls salvation consists in devotion to its Lord and Maker; its eternal loss and ruin, in alienation from Him who is its true and only life. The false gods are naught as regards help and profit; they are powerless to bless, but they are potent to hurt and betray. They "make men stumble out of their ways, out of the ancient paths, to walk in bypaths, in a way not cast up." So it was of old; so it is now. When the heart is estranged from God, and devoted to some meaner pursuit than the advancement of His glory, it soon deserts the straight road of virtue, the highway of honour, and falls into the crooked and uneven paths of fraud and hypocrisy, of oppression and vice. The end appears to sanctify the means, or at least to make them tolerable; and, once the ancient path of the Law is forsaken, men will follow the most tortuous, and often thorny and painful courses, to the goal of their choice. The path which leads away from God leads both individuals and nations to final ruin. Degraded ideas of the Deity, false ideas of happiness, a criminal indifference to the welfare of others, a base devotion to private and wholly selfish ends, must in the long run sap the vigour of a nation, and render it incapable of any effectual resistance to its enemies. Moral declension is a sure symptom of approaching political dissolution; so sure, that if a nation chooses and persists in evil, in the face of all dissuasion, it may be assumed to be bent on suicide. Like Israel, it may be said to do thus, "in order to make its land an astonishment, perpetual hissings." Men will be surprised at the greatness of its fall, and at the same time will acknowledge by voice and gesture that its doom is absolutely just.

So far as his immediate hearers were concerned, the effect of the prophets words was exactly what had been anticipated (Jer_18:18; cf. Jer_18:12). Jeremiahs preaching was a ministry of hardening, in a far more complete sense than Isaiahs had been. On the present occasion, the popular obduracy and unbelief evinced itself in a conspiracy to destroy the prophet by false accusation. They would doubtless find it not difficult to construe his words as blasphemy against Iahvah, and treason against the state. And they said: "Come and let us devise devices"-lay a plot-"against Jeremiah." Dispassionate wisdom, mere worldly prudence, would have said, Let us weigh well the probability or even possibility of the truth of his message. Moral earnestness, a sincere love of God and goodness, would have recognised in the prophets fearful earnest a proof of good faith, a claim to consideration. Unbiassed common sense would have asked, What has Jeremiah to gain by persistence in unpopular teaching? What will be his reward, supposing his words come true? Is it to be supposed that a man whose woeful tidings are uttered in a voice broken with sobs, and interrupted by bursts of wild lamentation, will look with glad eyes upon destruction when it comes, if it come after all? But habitual sin blinds as well as pollutes the soul. And when admonition is unacceptable, it breeds hatred. The heart that is not touched by appeal becomes harder than it was before. The ice of indifference becomes the adamant of malignant opposition. The populace of Jerusalem, like that of more modern capitals, was enervated by ease and luxury, altogether given over to the pursuit of wealth and pleasure as the end of life. They hated the man who rebuked in the gate, and abhorred him that spoke uprightly. {Amo_5:10} They could not abide one whose life and labours were a continual protest against their own. And now he had done his best to rob them of their pleasant confidence, to destroy the delusion of their fools paradise. He had burst into the heathenish sanctuary where they offered a worship congenial to their hearts, and done his best to wreck their idols, and dash their altars to the ground. He had affirmed that the accredited oracles were all a lie, that the guides whom they blindly followed were leading them to ruin. So the passive dislike of good blazes out into murderous fury against the good man who dares to be good alone in the face of a sinful multitude. That they are made thoroughly uneasy by his message of judgment, that they are more than half convinced that he is right, is plain from the frantic passion with which they repeat and deny his words. "Law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet": these things cannot, "shall not" be. When people have pinned their faith to a false system-a system which accords with their worldly prejudices, and flatters their ungodly pride, and winks at or even sanctions their vices; when they have anchored their entire confidence upon certain men and certain teachings which are in perfect harmony with their own aims in life and their own selfish predilections, they are not only disturbed and distressed, but often enraged by a demonstration that they are lulled in a false security. And anger of this kind is apt to be so irrational that they may think to escape from the threatened evil by silencing its prophet. "Come and let us smite him with the tongue, and let us not hearken to any of his words!" They will first get rid of him, and then forget his words of warning. Their policy is no better than that of the bird which buries its head in the sand, when its pursuers have run it down; an infatuated out of sight, out of mind. And Jeremiahs recompense for his disinterested zeal is another conspiracy against his life.

Once more he lays his cause before the one impartial Judge; the one Being who is exalted above all passion, and therefore sees the truth as it is.

"Hearken Thou, O Iahvah, unto me,

And hear Thou the voice of mine adversaries.

Should evil be recompensed for good?

For they have digged a pit for my life.

Remember my standing before Thee to speak good about them,

To turn back Thy wrath from them."

Hearken Thou, since they refuse to hearken; hear both sides, and pronounce for the right. Behold the glaring contrast between my innocence of all hurtful intent, and their clamorous injustice, between my truth and their falsehood, my prayers for their salvation and their outcry for my blood.

As we read this prayer of Jeremiahs, we are reminded of the very similar language of the thirty-fifth and hundred and ninth psalms, of which he was himself perhaps the author. {see especially Psa_35:1; Psa_35:4-5; Psa_35:7; Psa_35:11-12; Psa_109:2; Psa_109:5} We have already partially considered the moral aspect of such petitions. It is necessary to bear in mind that the prophet is speaking of persons who have persistently rejected warning, and ridiculed reproof; and now, in return for his intercessions on their behalf, are attempting his life, not in a sudden outbreak of uncontrollable fury, but with craft and deliberate malice, after seeking, apparently, like their spiritual successors in a later age, to entrap him into admissions that might be construed as treason or blasphemy. {Psa_35:19-21}

Therefore give their sons to the famine,

And pour them into the hands of the sword;

And let their wives be bereaved and widows,

And let their husbands be slain of Death;

Let their young men be stricken down of the sword in the battle!

Let a cry be heard from their houses,

When Thou bringest a troop upon them suddenly;

For they digged a pit to catch me,

And snares they hid for my feet.

"But of Thyself, Iahvah,

Thou knowest all their plan against me for death;

Pardon Thou not their iniquity,

And blot not out their trespass from before Thee;

But let them be made to stumble before Thee,

In the time of Thine anger deal Thou with them!"

The passage is lyrical in form and expression, and something must be allowed for the fact in estimating its precise significance. Jeremiah had entreated God and man that all these things might not come to pass. Now, when the attitude of the people towards his message and himself at last leaves no doubt that their obduracy is invincible, in his despair and distraction he cries, Be it so, then! They are bent on destruction; let them have their will! Let the doom overtake them, that I have laboured in vain to avert! With a weary sigh, and a profound sense of the ripeness of his country for ruin, he gives up the struggle to save it. The passage thus becomes a rhetorical or poetical expression of the prophets despairing recognition of the inevitable.

How vivid are the touches with which he brings out upon his canvas the horrors of war! In language lurid with all the colours of destruction, he sets before us the city taken by storm, he makes us hear the cry of the victims, as house after house is visited by pillage and slaughter. But stripped of its poetical form, all this is no more than a concentrated repetition of the sentence which he has over and over again pronounced against Jerusalem in the name of Iahvah. The imprecatory manner of it may be considered to be simply a solemn signification of the speakers own assent and approval. He recalls the sentence, and he affirms its perfect consonance with his own sense of justice. Moreover all these terrible things actually happened in the sequel. The prophets imprecations received the Divine seal of accomplishment. This fact alone seems to me to distinguish his prayer from a merely human cry for vengeance. So far as his feelings as a man and a patriot were concerned, we cannot doubt that he would have averted the catastrophe, had that been possible, by the sacrifice of his own life. That indeed was the object of his entire ministry. We may call the passage an emotional prediction; and it was probably the predictive character of it which led the prophet to put it on record.

While we admit that no Christian may ordinarily pray for the annihilation of any but spiritual enemies, we must remember that no Christian can possibly occupy the same peculiar position as a prophet of the Old Covenant; and we may fairly ask whether any who may incline to judge harshly of Jeremiah on the ground of passages like this, have fully realised the appalling circumstances which wrung these prayers from his cruelly tortured heart? We find it hard to forgive small personal slights, often less real than imaginary; how should we comport ourselves to persons whose shameless ingratitude rewarded evil for good to the extent of seeking our lives? Few would be content, as Jeremiah was, with putting the cause in the hand of God, and abstaining from all attempts at personal vindication of wrongs. It surely betrays a failure of imaginative power to realise the terrible difficulties which beset the path of one who, in a far truer sense than Elijah, was left alone to uphold the cause of true religion in Israel, and not less, a very inadequate knowledge of our own spiritual weakness, when we are bold to censure or even to apologise for the utterances of Jeremiah.

The whole question assumes a different aspect, when it is noticed that the brief "Thus said Iahvah!" of the next chapter (Jeremiah 19) virtually introduces the Divine reply to the prophets prayer. He is now bidden to foreshow the utter destruction of the Jewish polity by a symbolic act which is even more unambiguous than the language of the prayer. He is to take a common earthenware bottle (baqbuq, as if "pour pour"; from baqaq, " to pour out"), and, accompanied by some of the leading personages of the capital, heads of families and priests, to go out of the city to the valley of ben Hinnom, and there, after a solemn rehearsal of the crimes perpetrated on that very spot in the name of religion, and after predicting the consequent retribution which will shortly overtake the nation, he is to dash the vessel in pieces before his companions eyes, in token of the utter and irreparable ruin which awaits their city and people.

Having enacted his part in this striking scene, Jeremiah returns to the courts of the temple, and there repeats the same terrible message in briefer terms before all the people; adding expressly that it is the reward of their stubborn obstinacy and deafness to the Divine voice.

The prophets imprecations of evil thus appear to have been ratified at the time of their conception by the Divine voice, which spoke in the stillness of his after reflection.

William Robertson Nicoll, ed., The Expositor's Bible (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1887–1910) — public domain. 65 of 66 books (1 Corinthians is not separately keyed, as that volume carries no machine-parseable verse references); section-level commentary keyed to the opening verse. Introductory and overview sections not keyed to a specific passage are excluded.

The word that came to Jeremiah from Yahweh, saying, "Arise

This idiom is used to introduce a special message from God. See how you translated a similar phrase in Jeremiah 7:1. AT: "This is the message that Yahweh gave to Jeremiah. He said, 'Arise" or "This is the message that Yahweh spoke to Jeremiah: 'Arise" (See: Idiom)

the potter's house

"the workshop of the potter." A potter is someone who makes pots from clay.

behold!

The word "behold" alerts us to a new person in the story. Your language may have a way of doing this.

on the potter's wheel

The potter's wheel is a small table that spins. A potter uses it to make pots.

the object of clay that he was molding was ruined in his hand

The word "ruined" means that the object had some kind of imperfection in it. This can be stated in active form. AT: "the object of clay that he was molding with his hands was not good" (See: Active or Passive)

was molding

"was forming" or "was shaping"

so he changed his mind

This idiom means to decide to do something else. AT: "so he made a different choice" (See: Idiom)

that seemed good in his eyes to do

Here the word "eyes" represents sight and sight represents one's opinion. AT: "as he thought best to do" (See: Metonymy)

translationWords

word of God

Jeremiah

raise

ruin

mind

unfoldingWord translationNotes — © Distant Shores Media and the Door43 World Missions Community, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: git.door43.org/Door43/en_tn.