Jeremiah 19

This chapter of Jeremiah has quite a tone of finality about it. It seems God has reached the end of His rope, and there is nothing ahead for Israel except doom and gloom. Thus, God tells Jeremiah to go back to the potter and buy a clay pot that he can then smash in a dramatic, prophetic display.

Obviously, the message wasn’t a good one for Israel, nor was it a popular one! The shattering of the pot symbolized God’s total rejection of His own chosen people. And, right at the very end of the chapter, God gives the precise reason for this casting off. It wasn’t because He was angry. It wasn’t because He had lost His patience. Quite literally, it was because He had lost His patients: “Warning! Danger! I’m bringing down on this city and all the surrounding towns the doom that I have pronounced. They’re set in their ways and won’t budge. They refuse to do a thing I say.” (vs 15)

That’s right. God finally cast off the Israelites because they had so hardened themselves that there was no more opportunity to shape or sculpt them. There was nothing left to do with them but to give up on them, to let them go, to throw them away.

This is God’s “wrath.” This is what He does when He is finally and ultimately rejected. He lets go, and He allows those who have rejected Him to reap the consequences of their choices. There is no punishment. There is no revenge. There is only abandonment.

In the modern world, we have super glue, but in Bible times, there was no known way of repairing or mending a shattered clay pot. Thus, God’s little illustration could have only had one meaning in the ears of His audience—that they were not fixable. There was nothing left to do with them but toss them on the garbage heap.

So, God may be able to throw pots on the fly, but He is only able to do that as long as the clay has even the slightest, teeniest hint of malleability. Once the clay is hardened and set in stone, there is no longer any opportunity to reshape it or repair it. At that point, even the Potter is unable to do anything else with it.

The good news is twofold: (1) It takes a very, very, very, very! long time to harden ourselves to that point. Think back to Pharaoh and the plagues in Egypt. Time and time again, Pharaoh refused to listen to God, even though he confessed over and over again that he knew God was in the right and he was in the wrong. It took Pharaoh a long time and a lot of hard work to shut God completely out and become spiritually deaf. And (2), God makes it very, very, very, very! hard to get to that point. All along the way, He warns us, throws up obstacles in our path, disciplines, and even threatens. He will do anything and everything possible to keep us from becoming like that useless clay pot.

You’re a pot, and God’s going to throw you. He’s either going to throw you on the fly (as you allow Him to continue reshaping you), or He’s eventually going to have to throw you away. Don’t let it be the second one!