The hands that shape history (Jeremiah 18)

You know that time Jeremiah visited the potter to see what God was doing?

Jeremiah 18:1-6 (NIV)
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.”

That’s not how Jeremiah’s contemporaries understood God. They thought the Lord was stuck with his people regardless of how they turned out because of his covenant relationship with them.

Jeremiah is fully aware of the covenant relationship (e.g. 11:2, 3, 6, 8, 10; 13:21), but he says the Potter can crush what he formed from the clay and reshape them into something that pleases him. They cannot presume on the covenant relationship, just as they could not presume on the temple. The covenant sanctions included exile if the people were misshapen in God’s hands (e.g. Deuteronomy 28:36, 49, 64).

That’s good news. The Potter wasn’t discarding them; the pressure they felt from his hand was to reshape them into something beautiful, like the covenant said (Deuteronomy 30:1-10).

Jeremiah turns this into a broader principle about God:

Jeremiah 18:7-10 (NIV)
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.”

The God revealed in the covenant is a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love (Exodus 34:6). But God treats the nations like this too! Jonah had a problem with that (Jonah 4:2).

Jonah announced that Ninevah would fall in 40 days (Jonah 3:4). It did not. Jonah was not a false prophet. Like Jeremiah said, prophecy is conditional.

The Law and the Prophets reveal a heavenly sovereign who responds according to how we respond to him. That’s what Jeremiah saw at the potter’s house.

Paul and the potter (Romans 9:21)

The apostle Paul also used the potter analogy to make a point about the sovereignty of God:

Romans 9:21 (NIV)
Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use?

Some Christian traditions have understood this passage to mean that God created some individuals be saved and others to be damned (double predestination). Paul’s next sentence refers to objects of wrath prepared for destruction, (verse 22) and objects of his mercy whom he prepared in advance for glory (verse 23). This is framed in a context where the human vessel cannot ask of the potter, “Why did you make me like this?” (verse 20) based on the belief that no one can resist his will (verse 19).

But that interpretation yields a very different image of God as potter than Jeremiah’s. The whole point of Jeremiah 18 is that humans do have a choice in how they respond to God. Jeremiah’s point was that even when Israel ran off the rails and messed up what the potter was making, the potter kept working with them.

Jeremiah’s God is relational, a sovereign who responds to the choices his people make. Are we to say that Paul’s God is dictatorial, a sovereign who imposes his will so his people have no choice?

The difficulty evaporates when we see that Romans 9–11 is not about which individuals are to be saved, but about which peoples are to be included in the Messiah’s reign. Our cultural blindness is reading through Western eyes where the individual is everything.

That Paul is speaking collectively is clear in his next statement. He refers to the nations who were not my people, not loved as God’s chosen people. Yet the Prophets said God could incorporate the nations, calling them ‘my people,’ ‘my loved one’ (verses 25-26, quoting Hosea 2:23).

Once we treat election as corporate rather than individual, we get a very different picture of God. Instead of an unresponsive dictatorial sovereign choosing which individuals to save and which ones to damn, God is the faithful sovereign who has done far more than anyone asked or imagined, including those who were previously not his covenant people, those whom some Jewish rabbis regarded as created only to stoke the fires of hell — objects of his wrath prepared for destruction.

The language of election in Scripture comes from God choosing Israel as his people. God’s election of Abraham was not to condemn the nations, but to save them. And that’s the point ‘the apostle to the gentiles’ is making in Romans 9–11.

The potter in Romans 9:21 is the sovereign who has the right to take the nations whom his own people regarded as objects of wrath prepared for destruction and make them into objects of his mercy whom he prepared ahead of time for glory in the Messiah.

Paul is not presenting a God who is unresponsive to people. He’s not saying that God’s sovereignty implies that people have no choice. He’s saying that God has done what his people did not expect: including the nations in the Messiah. He’s saying that even if some of God’s people were not happy about it, they (like Jonah) had no reason to talk back to the sovereign because of his generosity to the nations.

Conclusion

What Jeremiah saw at the potter’s house was a God who responds to people. When the living clay messes up what God is making, the sovereign doesn’t give up. He breaks it down and reshapes it.

Remember that first generation God rescued from Pharaoh? They refused God’s leading and died in the wilderness. They missed out, but the potter kept forming them into his nation in the next generation. Tragically, that nation was being “unmade” in Jeremiah’s time. His generation would die in Babylon because of their unresponsiveness, but the potter would keep shaping them, bringing the next generation back to shape them into the beautiful artwork he intended them to be.

And the New Testament reveals the sovereign God who does the same thing for the nations. The potter never threw them away when the nations became misshapen. Despite their unresponsiveness, the heavenly sovereign always intended to reshape the nations into the image he intended in his Christ.

The eternal sovereign neither overrides nor discards human will. The potter is responsive to the clay. It spoils, and God responds. The potter keeps working, reshaping humanity in his compassionate hands until we finally become what seems good to him.

That’s the sovereignty of the God in the Old and New Testaments. The potter lives in the crafting experience with his people, engaged with the clay.

What others are saying

Christopher J. H. Wright, The Message of Jeremiah: Grace in the End, BST (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2014), 211–212:

Jeremiah had witnessed something very interesting in the relationship between potter and clay. While the potter remained in control, it was not entirely a one-sided affair. Sometimes there was something in the clay that caused the potter to change his original intention. True, the potter had the power to do what he chose with the clay. But the clay had the ‘power’ to cause the potter to change his plans. The final result was a mysterious combination of the sovereign will of the potter on the one hand and the condition of the clay on the other. Whether the first-announced plan was fulfilled seemed to depend not only on the words and hands of the potter, but to some extent also on the ‘response’ of the clay.

And it is this second element of what Jeremiah saw happening in the potter’s shop that provides the dominant message that will follow. … He is not so much focusing on the sovereign will of the potter (though that is assumed in v. 6), as on the ‘responsibility’ of the clay, and on God’s freedom to change his plans according to what the ‘clay’ does.

Tim Gombis, The Purpose of Divine Election (2011)

Divine election … does not stand in tension with God’s love.  God sets his love upon a particular people so that they might be the agents whereby God swallows up even more people into his love.

Divine election is actually an extension of God’s love for the world.  This becomes clear when we consider the Scriptural narrative.

The mission of God to reclaim creation begins with God’s call of Abram in Genesis 12.  God promised to make Abram (later called Abraham) into a great nation so that he would be a blessing to “all the families of the earth” (vv. 2-3).  From the beginning, God’s election had a universal thrust.

After Israel grows into a great nation in the womb of Egyptian slavery, God delivers them and gives them their commission.  Israel is God’s chosen people for the purpose of being a “light to the nations,” a “kingdom of priests” (Exod. 19:6). …

God’s election of Israel was not at the expense of the nations, but for the purpose of God’s redemption of the nations.  God chose Israel to receive his love and to radiate his redemptive love beyond themselves to the nations.

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