THE POTTER’S HOUSE
#614b THE POTTER’S HOUSE
Scripture Jeremiah 18:1-6, NIV Orig. Date 2-4-75 (5-78)
Rewr. Dates 9-24-87
Passage: 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 He said, “Can I not do with you, Israel, as this potter does?” declares the Lord. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, Israel.”
Purpose: To share a message at a special gathering of high school students.
Keywords: Discipline Banquet Revelation Relationship Youth
Introduction
It was one of those intolerably hot August days. A hiker had come out of the high regions and was beginning to see signs of civilization. Occasionally, in the distance, a house. Here and there, cultivated land with crops laid by. The hiker was now thinking only of finding a place to get a cool drink of water.
Down the way, he saw an old mountain house. As he drew nearer, he saw a man seated in a rickety chair on the run-down porch. As he approached he determined to be neighborly to the man, hoping that he would be so in return. He spoke, then called attention to the disagreeable weather. Still no invitation to rest came. He went on, “How is your cotton doing in this hot, dry weather?”
“Ain’t got none!” replied the mountain man.
“Didn’t you plant any cotton?” asked the surprised traveler.
“Nope,” he replied, “’fraid the boll weevils’d get it.”
“Well,” said the passer-by, “How is your corn?”
“Ain’t got none of that either,” said the old farmer, “And if you gotta know, I figured there weren’t gonna be no rain.”
Still hoping for an invitation to rest, and a drink of water, the hiker plunged in again. “Really, well what did you plant?” he asked.
“Didn’t plant nothing,” said the farmer, getting up to enter the old house. “I just played it safe.”
There are lots of good reasons why we do what we do. Some of them even good ones, and our excuses become the determinants of the way our lives are lived. To be a farmer and not to plant is ludicrous. To live in God’s world and make excuses for discounting Him is also.
I. Jeremiah Reminds Us of Something that He has Overlooked. V2. “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause thee to hear my words.” The message is not a new one. We are reminded rather than informed. It is not something never said before, not some new thing making its appearance. There all the time but Jeremiah was elsewhere.
And, it was becoming increasingly important for Jeremiah to know the heart of God. I wonder what good thing occupied the prophet. I wonder why he failed to seek the “best” thing. Were you ever guilty of that? I have been.
Even here, we can occupy ourselves with secondary matters. Why, here is a wonderful lesson about wasted clay. The potter needs to be more careful. We can extend this to a world where waste abounds and examine others’ guilt.
Contemporary ecology warns us about waste. We are losing trees, forests, woodlands. Water quality is a problem everywhere. Oil has been wasted to the point of world revolution.
The major economic concern in America today is that we are creating debt on unborn populations.
But, that’s not the lesson. The lesson is in the message delivered through the potter. It is a lesson that shows God to be the redeemer, the user of what has been cast aside. It didn’t just involve clay. It involved people, flesh and blood. Folks with free will, who could resist their potter.
II. So, Jeremiah Has to Deal with a Relationship That Has Been Bargained. V4 “And the vessel that he (the potter) made of clay was marred.” It did not achieve what was intended. It was bargained. It was cheapened. Now, wait a minute, do those words mean the same? The world out there, young people, is teaching you to get by as cheaply as you can. That’s okay if you’re buying books, or jeans, even a car if you are careful. But what about things that matter: Home, family, community, peace, dignity, integrity. God.
Soren Kierkegaard, a philosopher you’ll study about in college, wrote a fantasy about geese. A wild goose, with broken wing, entered a farmer’s flock. After winter, with healed wing, he heard another flock flying north. He extolled the other geese to fly with him, but they would not, for the farmer’s corn was good, and the barnyard secure.
We are too ready, you and I, to bargain the true lessons of God’s spirit for material, worldly reasons. James Michener’s book, The Source, is a fictional account of Moses. El Shaddai said to Zadok-the-Righteous, “As long as you live old man, you will be free to ignore my commands. But in time, I will grow impatient and will speak to others.” Zadok: “My home is the desert. I was afraid to leave.” El Shaddai: ‘I waited because I knew that if you did not love your home, you would not love me either. I am glad that you are now ready.”
We are neither too young nor too old to discount, to bargain the word of God to us.
III. Jeremiah Begins at Last to Look into the Very Heart of God. V4b “He made it again, another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make it.” V6 “. . .As the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in my hand.”
The prophet had to learn that God was involving Himself redemptively in their lives. Exodus 19 (Moses): “Ye have seen how I bear you on eagle’s wings to myself.” Psalm 37 (David): “I was young, and now old. Yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken.”
How intuitively Jesus knew this to be the case. Matthew 5:45 “He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good.” Matthew 10:29 “The sparrow shall not fall without the Father.” Luke 12:27 “Consider the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin.”
The prophet had but to remember this Godly quality and act in obedient faith. The life of Jesus proves how unlike God we are. His doing is my undoing. Without His mercy I have no choice left. Faith is believing, and living on the basis of that belief.
I watched a little girl, 4 or 5 years old, at the baggage belt in the air terminal in New Orleans. Just the three of us waiting for luggage. She asked about putting her stuffed bear on the belt. Her daddy assured her it would come back. You cannot imagine the look of concern on that father’s face as he waited with her for his word to be trustworthy.
IV. The Prophet Reminds Us that there Is an Undeniable Discipline in Responding to the Trustworthiness of God. V6 “. . . Cannot I do with you as this potter [does with the clay]?” saith the Lord. “As clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in my hand.”
So, we are dependent. Give God the first segment of every day. Give God the first day of every week. Give God the first return on material earned. Give God the first consideration in every decision. Give God first place in your heart.
For a brave to become a chief, he had to pluck the fur from the sacred bobcat, bring down the white buffalo alone, wrestle the brown bear. Then came the trial of fire and water. “Whatever happened to wholesome good looks and a nice personality?”
Look on the potter’s wheel and see design. It was the design that was flawed. Even so, God’s people were less than he had planned, thus the renovation.
Nor must we overlook discipline. The potter’s feet were calloused and misshapen from all the years at the wheel. The tools were those of wheel, rasp, chisel, fire.
And it was thus that the light suddenly came on in the prophet’s brain. This God would have me to see. His work is never to destroy but to design. His grace is not to reduce but to redeem. The smartest thing that one can do is to let Him have His way in our lives, and the sooner the better.
Conclusion
Herman Hegedorn wrote after the initial atom bomb blast in New Mexico: “I went to call on the Lord in His high house on the hill, my head full of 150 million people having to grow up overnight. If ever a people needed a miracle! The Lord!! He looked at me as a mountain might look at a molehill.” ‘So you want a miracle. My! My! You want a miracle. You want me to come sliding down a sunbeam and make 150 million self-willed egotists into 150 million cooperating angels.
‘Brother,’ said the Lord in a voice that shook the windows, ‘that isn’t the sort of universe you are living in. That isn’t the sort of God I am. . . .
‘Give me your life, and I will make it a spade to dig the foundation of a new world.’”
Alternate Conclusion
“When was it that I completely scattered the good seeds, one and all? For, after all, I spent my boyhood in the bright singing of Thy temples.
“Bookish subtleties sparked brightly, piercing my arrogant brain, the secrets of the world . . . in my grasp, life’s destiny . . . as pliable as wax.
“Blood seethed . . . and every swirl gleamed iridescently before me. Without a rumble the building of my faith quietly crumbled within my own heart.
“But passing here between being and nothingness, stumbling and clutching at the edge, I looked behind me with a grateful tremor upon the life that I have lived. Not with good judgment nor with desire are its twists and turns illumined, but with the even glow of the higher meaning which became apparent to me only later on.
“And now, with measuring cup returned to me, scooping up the living water, God of the universe! I believe again! Though I renounced you, you were with me!”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag II (Harper and Row—1968)