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Jeremiah 18:4 – Breaking the Pottery
Breaking the Pottery
No metaphor is perfect, even metaphors God uses. Their imperfection does not come from something wrong with the one making it though, but rather in how it is used once made. For example, “So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, working away at the wheel. But the jar that he was making from the clay became flawed in the potter’s hand, so he made it into another jar, as it seemed right for him to do” (Jer.18:4). The potter is God; and the jar is Israel. The point is not that God made a mistake as He was forming Israel, although that is what happened in the illustration. The point is the potter has the right to remake what is his. To do this though, he must completely destroy what he had made. Yahweh will now do that to Israel. Israel is flawed and needs to be broken down and remade. And they are not the only ones. We too are flawed, by our own making – God is not at fault. Because we are God’s creation – He is The Potter – He has the right to break us down and remake us. This is done in Christ. The reason we fail to be completely remade is, again, not The Potter’s fault. We fight and fuss, resist and restrain The Potter’s reshaping handiwork. If we want to be made new, we have to allow God to break everything about us that is old. Only then can we be remade into what He decides we should be.
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