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Sermons
In The
Potter's Hands
Jeremiah 18:1-16 |
Pastor Howard Chang
December 30, 2001 |
Jeremiah 18:1-6 (NIV)
18:1 This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: 2 "Go down
to the potter's house, and there I will give you my message." 3 So I went
down to the potter's house, and I saw him working at the wheel. 4 But the
pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter
formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.
5 Then the word of the LORD came to me: 6 "O house of Israel, can I not do
with you as this potter does?" declares the LORD. "Like clay in the hand
of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.
Beautiful Pottery
We just read a story about Jeremiah going to the Potter’s house. I looked
around, but I couldn’t find a lot of handmade pottery around the church or
at home. I do have this mug in hand, which has the signature of its maker
on the bottom. It serves the useful purpose of carrying whatever I want to
drink. As you can see, it is also artistic and beautiful to the eye. This
other piece dates from the early year 2001. It is imprinted with the hand
of my eldest daughter. This piece is a keepsake reminding us of our
daughter as a young girl.
The picture on the screen depicts a Palestinian working on pottery. In
biblical times, fashioning clay on a wheel and then firing it in a kiln
was the common way to make pottery. Let’s look at the picture again. There
we see all the necessary ingredients used to make beautiful pottery in
Palestine: a room to regulate the weather, a potter, a table, a wheel,
clay from nearby fields, some pottery ready to go to the fire, a kiln,
etc.
The photo gives us a good idea of what Jeremiah would have witnessed at
the Potter’s House 2600 years ago. When we come to the 18th chapter of
Jeremiah, we read one of the most vivid accounts of pottery making in the
Bible. In this passage, the LORD directed Jeremiah to get up and go down
to the Potter’s house. This house would not be the place the potter slept,
but rather the place of manufacturing pottery. Jeremiah would have
traveled down into a valley just outside of Jerusalem to find such a
place.
What did Jeremiah learn at the Potter’s House?
In the Potter’s house God teaches Jeremiah a lesson for the nation of
Judah. The visit to the house is probably around the end of the sixth
century BC. At this time the nation of Judah had become sinful and truly
distant from God. Within fifteen years the city of Jerusalem would be
destroyed. Nevertheless, God is still willing to allow them to turn from
their ways, repent, and be restored to their Maker before this happens.
A visit to the Potter’s House gives us more than a picture of pottery
making in biblical times. It also gives us a glimpse into the heart of
God. As the master Creator, He shapes and forms His people according to
His will and purpose. He is both sovereign and loving in this process.
Verses 6-10 show us that God has the sovereignty to form nations. For His
chosen nation Israel, He wants them to be the kind of people who will
obey, submit, and devote themselves to their God. He wants them to have
godly character. But they have been unwilling. Jeremiah, as God’s prophet,
brings this message: if they will not turn back to God, He will remake
them like a piece of clay that has become spoiled. In this case He will
send the nation Babylon to drive them out of the Promised Land.
If He has the power to shape nations, He certainly has the power to shape
individuals like you and I. Today we’ll imagine we are at the Potter’s
House of Jeremiah’s time. As we come to the house,
What spiritual lessons can we learn of how God shapes and forms us?
To answer this question we will closely examine three of the ingredients
needed to make beautiful and useful pottery: clay, a wheel, and the
potter’s hand.
1. Clay
When the potter desires to create something, he must have clay. The kind
of clay that is available to him will determine what kind of pottery he
can make. There are many variations of clay. Clays can be moist or dry,
various shades of earth tones in color, and have different compositional
make-up. The potter works with each of these variations for his own
purposes and alters the clays as he sees fit.
Who is the clay in the Master Potter’s hand?
The clay in this passage is the nation of Israel. Not only nations are in
the Potter’s hands, though. He created each one of us and desires to
continue to shape us. The creation account of Genesis tells us humans were
formed from the dust of the earth:
Gen 2:7-8
7 the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. 8
Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he
put the man he had formed.
And Job speaks of God molding and making him:
Job 10:9—speaking to God in his bitterness
9 Remember that you molded me like clay.
Will you now turn me to dust again?
Job 33:6—one of friends relating to Job
6 I am just like you before God;
I too have been taken from clay.
Being clay is humbling. When we have a funeral, we say the deceased has
gone from ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Our bodies were formed from the
materials of the earth, and our bodies will one day return to where it
came. If we understand we are the clay, then we will give ourselves over
to the Potter’s purposes while we still are on this earth. It means we
will trust that how the Maker will form us will be the best for us.
If we are indeed clay in the hands of the Master Potter, what then are
we becoming as clay in God’s hands?
When we are in school, we are asked, “What do you want to be when you grow
up?” Some might say doctors, engineers, business people, lawyers, or even
ministers. We get ideas in our mind and work toward becoming something,
that something in our minds. But there is a different way to ask this
question: “What kind of person do you want to become?”
This is the kind of question God is interested in when he speaks to
Israel. What kind of nation did He want them to be? Submissive, obedient,
set-apart, loyal, loving, sacrificial, devoted, faithful, and so on. In
other words, he wanted them to have Godly Character.
When he looks at you and I, he is more concerned about the question of the
kind of people we are becoming than He is about our profession or future
profession. He desires for us to have the characteristics mentioned above
and more. He is forming us into the very character of Christ.
As we look at the clay in the shop we see a lump of clay on the wheel.
What is the wheel?
2. Wheel
The picture on the slide gives a good idea of what the wheel is. The word
for wheel in the Hebrew is a word picture—it literally means two stones.
The feet turn one stone, the bottom stone. The top stone, the smaller
stone, is connected to the bottom stone by a vertical axle. So the potter
would simply use their feet to turn the clay, freeing up his hands to
shape the vessel.
This is the wheel the potter was working on in Jeremiah 18:3. We can think
of the wheel as the wheel of life. If we go to a potter’s house today, the
wheel used today is very similar to the one used in ancient times. The
mechanism is the same—spin the clay on the wheel and shape it with one’s
hand. In the same way, life today is not much different from the ancient
days. We may use advanced technologies and live in different kinds of
houses, but the timeless concerns of marrying, child rearing, providing
basic needs for the family, search for meaning and fulfillment in life,
illness, and death are basically the same.
We are all on the wheel of life, but can we say that being on the wheel
has changed us?
Remembrances of 2001
This is the time of year to look back on the year and consider
the major events all around us. Two numbers stick out to me this year: 911
and 11. The first number represents the date of the terrorist bombings. On
Christmas day, the President spoke of September 11th and pointed us back
to the grieving and mourning of the losses counted there. Our remembrances
of this past year will linger for years to come. In these times we can
learn the lessons of how fragile life is, how important it is to live for
what is important, and how precious our family is to us
The second number, 11, represents the number of times the Federal Reserve
lowered a key lending rate this year. It also represents the recession our
country is in and the economic downturn that has especially hit Silicon
Valley. These are times we can learn to trust God for our jobs and well
being, to consider how valuable money really is, and the importance of
helping people who have lost their means to live.
Personal events may also give us opportunities to be shaped by the
Creator: These may include the birth of child, death or sickness of a
loved one, birthdays, anniversaries, changes of job, graduation, and
moving. This year was my youngest daughter’s first Christmas and it was
the first Christmas without my wife’s mother. My daughter and my wife’s
mother gave my family insights into birth and death and the desire to live
for God.
How have the circumstances of your life and my life, be they global or
personal provided opportunities for you and I to be shaped and formed by
God? Often we want to run from or change our circumstances. We may even
become embittered toward God because of the situations we find ourselves
in. If we do, we will only find that we will face the same circumstances
elsewhere. Why? Because we are still the same clay, spinning on the wheel
of life’s circumstances.
The turn of events come and go, but the clay spinning on the wheel by
itself will not make a pot. In the same way, circumstances in life do not
necessarily shape us. We must have the third ingredient, the Potter’s hand
3. Potter’s Hand
The Potter is God. It is His hand that shapes the nations, and it is His
hand that shapes you and I. The activity of the potter in Jeremiah gives
us a glimpse into how God treats us as the clay.
A. The Potter’s Hand is Caring (marred in his
hands)
v. 4 tells us the pot the potter was shaping was “marred” in his hands. We
do not know exactly what was wrong with the clay—it could have been too
wet or too dry, have been ruined or spoiled in some way. But even though
it was not perfect, he wanted to keep working with it. The clay is the
subject of his love.
Even though the nation of Israel kept straying from God, He loved and
cared for Israel. If Israel were spoiled clay, then God would try to use
it again. In the same way, we are in the hands of a loving God. Even if
there is some blemish on us that seems to make us useless, God will find a
way to shape us. He knows each one of us like the potter knows his clay,
and He cares for enough to redeem us.
B. The Potter’s Hand is Steadfast (formed another
pot)
v.4 also says that the potter formed the spoiled clay into another pot.
The verb tense in the original language suggests that the potter would do
this continually, over and over again, until the pot was made as He
wished. He was steadfast in making that piece of clay into a beautiful and
useful piece of pottery.
Not only does God care about us, but also He is steadfast in that care. He
will not give up on us even if we need to be remade. Even today Israel has
a promise that in the end time God will deliver a remnant of the nation.
Even after falling away from God over and over again, God is steadfast in
His care for them. If He does not see us responding to His making, He will
start over.
He treats us the same way, never giving up on us. Finally,
C. The Potter’s Hand is Purposeful (as seemed
best to him)
When the Potter shaped the clay into another pot, he did so as best seen
fit by him. God is sovereign over the whole process.
God is all knowing—does He know what kind of person we could be? He does.
He fashions us according to Who we are and the kind of character he wishes
for us to possess. He knows exactly how we as a piece of pottery will fit
into His purposes.
God is also sovereign—do we know what is best for us? The Israelites tried
to be the potter, forgetting that they were the clay. In 18:12, we already
know Israel’s reply to God’s call to change and repent of their ways:
Jeremiah 18:12
12 But they will reply, 'It's no use. We will continue with our own plans;
each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart.'"
Isaiah the Prophet, in 29:16 (45:9), says the same about Israel in her
relationship with God:
16 You turn things upside down,
as if the potter were thought to be like the clay!
Shall what is formed say to him who formed it,
"He did not make me"?
Can the pot say of the potter,
"He knows nothing"?
Our answer to God is often the same. We want to take our destiny into our
own hands. We want to shape and form our lives to fit what we want. When
we insist on doing things our way, then we are becoming the potter when we
are truly the clay.
Conclusion
The Potter’s caring, steadfast, and purposeful hand would apply pressure
at specific parts of the pot as he shaped it. When the Master Potter
shapes us, He too must apply pressure. He does so gently. But just as the
dentist may have to apply pressure to make teeth straight, it may hurt.
The end product, though, is the kind of person who is beautiful and useful
to its Creator.
New Year’s Wishes
The New Year is coming in just a couple of days. We look to the New Year
as a hopeful new beginning. We may think of ways to confront areas of our
life where we may find discontent. We may want to improve our skills. We
may have hopes for our education or career. None of us knows what the New
Year will hold, but we may desire to put our efforts toward shaping and
forming it.
I pray that this year will be different. Instead of proclaiming what we
will make of ourselves, may we instead submit our every day circumstances
to our Creator God. The wheel of life will certainly spin this year. It
will give us opportunities to be molded and shaped.
What kind of person does He want us to become? How will He shape us? I
can’t wait to find out. re is a future for us, why couldn't we?
For more information on this topic, see Pastor Tom Chow’s Recipe on this
passage at
http://www.ccic-sv.org/recipe/v4n8.html
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