“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. 7 If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, 8 and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. 9 And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, 10 and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.
11 “Now therefore say to the people of Judah and those living in Jerusalem, ‘This is what the Lord says: Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.’ 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.’”
18 They said, “Come, let’s make plans against Jeremiah; for the teaching of the law by the priest will not be lost, nor will counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophets. So come, let’s attack him with our tongues and pay no attention to anything he says.”
1 This is what the Lord says: “Go and buy a clay jar from a potter. Take along some of the elders of the people and of the priests 2 and go out to the Valley of Ben Hinnom, near the entrance of the Potsherd Gate. There proclaim the words I tell you, 3 and say, ‘Hear the word of the Lord, O kings of Judah and people of Jerusalem. This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Listen! I am going to bring a disaster on this place that will make the ears of everyone who hears of it tingle. 4 For they have forsaken me and made this a place of foreign gods; they have burned sacrifices in it to gods that neither they nor their fathers nor the kings of Judah ever knew, and they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. 5 They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal— something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind. 6 So beware, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when people will no longer call this place Topheth or the Valley of Ben Hinnom, but the Valley of Slaughter.
7“ ‘In this place I will ruin the plans of Judah and Jerusalem. I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who seek their lives, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth. 8 I will devastate this city and make it an object of scorn; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds. 9 I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh during the stress of the siege imposed on them by the enemies who seek their lives.’
10 “Then break the jar while those who go with you are watching, 11 and say to them, ‘This is what the Lord Almighty says: I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired. They will bury the dead in Topheth until there is no more room. 12 This is what I will do to this place and to those who live here, declares the Lord. I will make this city like Topheth. 13 The houses in Jerusalem and those of the kings of Judah will be defiled like this place, Topheth—all the houses where they burned incense on the roofs to all the starry hosts and poured out drink offerings to other gods.’ ” ”
We’re in the midst of renovating our mudroom. Some of the tiles had to be replaced on the floor. There were some matching tiles in the attic, but they had warped with time. We tried different techniques to flatten those tiles without any effect. Those tiles no longer served their purpose. Any guesses as to what I did with them? Right. I threw them out.
Now I imagine that we would all say that human beings are incalculably greater than those hopelessly warped tiles that were in my attic. I imagine that we would also say that God is incalculably greater than me. Why is it then that we uncomfortable with God making the same decision about people that I made about those tiles? One of the reasons might be because we think too highly of ourselves. There are any number of Scriptures that properly exalt the place of humanity. There are others than properly humble us and this is one. It teaches us that we are clay. It teaches us that God is the potter. It teaches us that we must be moldable to His purposes or be thrown out. That’s the claim of this sermon: we are clay and God is the potter. We must be moldable.
We will study this in three points. First: the potter’s house. Second: the people’s response. Third: the clay jar. Verses 1-11 of chapter 18 are the focus of our first point: the potter’s house; verses 12 and 18 of chapter 18 are the focus of our second point: the people’s response; verses 1-13 of chapter 19 are the focus of our third point: the clay jar.
First: the potter’s house. We tend to disconnect the word of God from daily life, but this word often came to the prophets in very ordinary ways. God sent Jeremiah the potter’s house. Pottery was a normal and essential part of life in the Ancient Near East. We use it for décor, but they used it for cups, dishes, storage, transporting water, and any number of other purposes for which we use plastics today. Pottery was just part of life. God sent Jeremiah to somewhere rather routine like going to a blacksmith shop in the Old West or a gas station today. God speaks through the extraordinary, but He speaks through the ordinary as well.
The way in which God caused His prophet to hear His word was through a potter just going about his day; verse 3, ‘I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. 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. Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?”’
The clay wouldn’t do what the potter wanted it to do and so the potter started over. God’s people were not doing what God wanted and unless they did, God was going to start over. If clay continues to resist a potter’s shaping, he throws it out. If God’s people continue resisting His shaping, He will throw them out. As Bruggemann put it, “The potter is not endlessly committed to working with this clay, if the clay is finally recalcitrant. The potter will finally quit, which means the clay has no future.”
We might not like this illustration because it likens us to clay, but we would be wise to come to terms with it because we were taken from the ground and to the ground we will return. We don’t like to acknowledge how humble we ought to be, but, as Calvin put it, “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 shows us plainly what we are.” In other words, we won’t see that we are only clay in the potter’s hands unless we are told.
Until we are humbled we will not accept this metaphor. Paul’s teaching on predestination proves it. ‘Who are you, o man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, “Why did you make me like this?”’ We are fine with a potter doing whatever he wants with clay, but, by nature, we are anything but fine with God doing whatever He wants with us. Paul, following the Old Testament, says that we ought to be fine with it because we are much more like clay than we are like God.
The lesson here is humility. Humility is not beating yourself up. It is thinking much more of God than you think of yourself. It is thinking more often about God than you think of yourself. Humility is arguable the virtue God loves best. It’s why He tells us that we are clay and that He is the potter.
The question is, “will we be moldable?” Will we like that clay at the potter’s house refusing to be shaped to the potter’s purposes? Will we, like those tiles in my attic, refuse to be flattened for the purpose to which we were made? The message here is that God is the shaper; verse 7, “If at any time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed, and if that nation I warned repents of its evil, then I will relent and not inflict on it the disaster I had planned. And if at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, and if it does evil in my sight and does not obey me, then I will reconsider the good I had intended to do for it.”
God can make any heap of clay into a glorious masterpiece. All it has to do is be moldable. It has to repent of its own ways and embrace God’s ways. He can also utterly ruin a masterpiece He’s been working on if it refuses to continue to be molded. That’s true for nations for churches and for individuals. We are all clay. God is the potter.
This message of God’s shaping and our willingness or unwillingness to be shaped is central to the book of Jeremiah. The same language of “uprooted, torn down, and destroyed,” and, “built up and planted” from verses 7-10 was part of Jeremiah’s commission back in chapter 1. This is what God first called His prophet to announce.
Many people don’t like this message. One of the central reasons Jeremiah’s message was so hated was that we don’t like to hear that we are clay, and that God can do with us whatever He pleased including sending them to Babylon. We are fine with God molding us into what we want to be, but by nature we are not fine with God molding us into what He wants even if it is the image of His Son to use New Testament terms. We want it to be about us when it is really all about God.
The clay is prideful. The potter is not. The Potter pleads with His people to become malleable; verse 12, “Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you. So turn from your evil ways, each one of you, and reform your ways and your actions.” He even pleads with His prophet to speak to the people. Our translation doesn’t show that in verse 11, but Young’s Literal Translation gives us a flavor for it with God’s word to Jeremiah, “And now, speak, I pray thee, unto [the] men of Judah…” God wants what’s good for people far more than any of us want it for ourselves. He preaches hell with tears to borrow a phrase from M’Cheyne.
The potter is willing. The clay is not. That’s our second point: the people’s response. We are picking and choosing a bit here with the text because we only have so much time, but I hope my purposes, which I hope are Jeremiah’s purposes, will become evident.
The people have heard about God’s plan. If you look up at verses 7-8, you see that God had clay He was planning to throw out, but He would shape it into something glorious if only it would repent. If you look up at verses 9-10, you see that God had clay He was making into something glorious, but He would toss it out if it refused to be moldable—same Hebrew word for plan. This is about God’s plan and we’ve seen that this second plan was what was in store for His people; “Look! I am preparing a disaster for you and devising a plan against you”—same word for plan.
God had His plans. The people had their own plans—same word; verse 12, ‘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.”’ That’s clay that refuses to be molded. There is nothing of “melt me, mold me, fill me, use me,” in that response. God had plans—for their good if they were moldable and for their ill if they were defiant. They didn’t care. They had their own plans. They were living their own life with no reference to God.
Now these people who God likened to resistant clay knew their Bibles. They knew about God’s plan. They knew all about the call to be moldable. Don’t imagine that Bible knowledge by itself means that anyone is moldable. In many ways knowing your Bible is just a prerequisite to finding out if you actually are moldable. There are plenty of people who have heard God’s word and the inner chatter of their heart has been verse 12, “It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans.” That’s the inner chatter of every heart which hears God’s word without any true willingness to be molded by it; “It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans.”
You are either moldable clay in the hands of the potter or you are clay with your own plans. That’s the only two varieties of clay out there and you need to ask yourself which one describes you.
The clay had its plans and to enjoy those plans it needed to silence the voice of the Potter; verse 18, ‘They said, “Come, let’s make plans [same word again] against Jeremiah; for the teaching of the law by the priest will not be lost, nor will counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophets. So come, let’s attack him with our tongues and pay no attention to anything he says.”’
The clay had its plans and to enjoy those plans it needed to silence the voice of the Potter. This isn’t all that different from the Pharisees seeking to silence Jesus. The clay that refuses to be formed by God’s word is by definition resistant to God’s word. Sometimes it tries to silence it by marginalizing it. Sometimes it tries to silence it by falsely accusing it in court—think about what we see in Jesus’ court trial. Sometimes the clay winds up killing the one who speaks for the Potter.
Now those who silence the voice of God rarely if ever own up to what they are doing. They justify it. They call it righteousness. Those planning to put Jeremiah to death would have appealed to Deuteronomy 18 calling a Jeremiah a false prophet worthy of death.
The message here is that the language of religion can used against religion. The language of faith can be used against faith. What was established by the word of God can be turned against the word of God. The three sources of authority we see in verse 18—the law through the priests, the wisdom of the elders, the correction of the prophets—were no longer ways by which the Potter molded the clay but had become means by which the clay tried to silence the Potter.
The clay was comfortable remaining unshaped by the Potter because being shaped by the Potter was uncomfortable. Being molded still is. Justifying yourself where you are was and is far easier. “People and leaders alike were satisfied with things as they were and as they would continue,” as JA Thompson put it. “To disturb a complacent leadership or a misguided populace was only to invite serious repercussions. Human society in every age bears eloquent testimony to the fact.”
That’s the message of Jeremiah; the clay doesn’t want to be molded and will silence any attempts to say that it must be molded. That’s the message of Jesus. “This is the verdict: light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.” In other words, people will not yield themselves to the Potter because they don’t truly believe they need to be formed on the Potter’s terms. There is clay, however, that does want to be molded; in other words, “whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” To combine the clay imagery we have here from Jeremiah and the light imagery from John, clay that is willing to be molded comes to the light—it comes to Jesus. Clay that isn’t willing to be molded never has come to Jesus.
The clay Jeremiah was talking about was unwilling to be molded; we see the logical end of that in our third point: the clay jar. God also told Jeremiah to go to the potter to buy a clay jar. He was to call the leaders in Jerusalem out to the Valley of Ben Hinnom and smash that jar saying, “I will smash this nation and this city just as this potter’s jar is smashed and cannot be repaired.”
The declaration was that the clay was impossibly resistant. The depth of its resistance is seen in the location to which Jeremiah took the elders, the Valley of Ben Hinnom and more specifically Topheth. God’s people had been sacrificing children there; verse 4, “they have filled this place with the blood of the innocent. They have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as offerings to Baal—something I did not command or mention, nor did it enter my mind.”
This is about child sacrifice. These religious leaders who were seeking to kill Jeremiah had also made some sort of peace with the fact that children were being sacrificed within walking distance of the temple. This showed how very deformed their spirituality had become. This showed how unwilling to be molded they were. False religion makes peace with all sorts of sin. True religion knows that it needs to be killing sin or sin will be killing it, to borrow from John Owen.
This business of either practicing child sacrifice or making some sort of peace with child sacrifice was unthinkable—it was appalling—to God and so God promised to make people appalling; verse 8, “I will devastate this city and make it an object of scorn; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds.” Some people killed their children in the name of religion. Others made some sort of peace between their religion and the fact that children were being killed and so in verse 9 we read, “I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh during the stress of the siege imposed on them by the enemies who seek their lives.”
That’s the Valley of Ben Hinnom. Jeremiah said it ought to be called the Valley of Slaughter because since that’s what the people did and allowed to happen to children there, that’s what would happen to them there.
Refusing to molded by the Potter leads to the Valley of Ben Hinnom; the reply of clay back in chapter 18 leads to the Valley of Ben Hinnom; “‘It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans; each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart.”’ It still does. You might recognize it as the valley of Hinnom as ge-hinnom or Gehenna. “And if your eye should cause you to stumble, cast it out; it is better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye than having two eyes to be cast into Gehenna, where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched,” as Jesus said.
The place in which Jeremiah broke that pot was, by Jesus’ day, “a place of burning sewage, burning flesh, and garbage,” as one commentator put it. It was their dump. “Maggots and worms crawled through the waste, and the smoke smelled strong and sickening. It was a place utterly filthy, disgusting, and repulsive to the nose and eyes. Gehenna presented such a vivid image,” this author writes, “that Christ used it as a symbolic depiction of hell: a place of eternal torment and constant uncleanness, where the fires never ceased burning and the worms never stopped crawling.” “It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans; each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart” still leads there. Refusing to be molded by the Potter still leads there.
God can do with the clay what He wants. He is willing to mold us. He is willing to mold you. He sent His Son to demonstrate the extent of His willingness. He sent His Son to show the pattern into which we can be molded. Do you want to become like Jesus? Are you moldable? Do you know that you are clay? That’s the question of your life. Amen.