The Potter And The Clay

9:19-29 But, then, you may ask, "If this is so how can God go on blaming men if they do not take his way? Who can withstand God's purpose?" Fellow! Who are you to be arguing with God? Surely the thing that is molded into shape cannot say to the man who molds it, "Why did you make me like this?" Has not the potter complete authority over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for an honourable use and another for a menial service? What if God, although it was his will to demonstrate his wrath and to make known his power, did nonetheless treat with long patience the objects of his wrath, although they were ripe and ready for destruction? Yes, and what if he did it because it is his will to make known the wealth of his glory to the objects of his mercy, which he had prepared beforehand for glory--I mean us whom he called not only from among the Jews but also from among the Gentiles? Just as he says in Hosea: "A people which was not mine I will call my people; and her who was not beloved I will call beloved." And as he says in that same place where it was said to them: "You are not my people; there they shall be called the sons of the living God." And Isaiah cries about Israel: "Even though the number of the sons of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, only the remnant will be saved, for the Lord will carry out his sentence on earth completely and summarily." And even as Isaiah foretold: "Unless the Lord of Hosts had left us some descendants, we would have become as Sodom, and we would have been like Gomorrah."

In the previous passage Paul had been showing that all through the history of Israel there had been going on a process of election and selection by God. A very natural objection arises--if at the back of the whole process there is the selection and rejection of God, how can God possibly blame the men who have rejected him? Surely the fault is not theirs at all, but God's. Paul's answer is blunt almost to the point of crudity. He says that no man has any right to argue with God. When a potter makes a vessel, it cannot talk back to him; he has absolute power over it; out of the one lump of clay he can make one vessel for an honourable purpose and another for a menial purpose, and the clay has nothing to do with it and has no right whatever to protest. In point of fact Paul took this picture from Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 18:1-6 ). There are two things to be said about it.

(i) It is a bad analogy. One great New Testament commentator has said that this is one of the very few passages which we wish Paul had not written. There is a difference between a human being and a lump of clay. A human being is a person and a lump of clay is a thing. Maybe you can do what you like with a thing, but you cannot do what you like with a person. Clay does not desire to answer back; does not desire to question; cannot think and feel; cannot be bewildered and tortured. If someone has inexplicably suffered some tremendous sorrow, it will not help much to tell him that he has no right to complain, because God can do what he likes. That is the mark of a tyrant and not of a loving Father. It is the basic fact of the gospel that God does not treat men as a potter treats a lump of clay; he treats them as a loving father treats his child.

(ii) But when we have said that we must remember one thing--it was out of anguish of heart that Paul wrote this passage. He was faced with the bewildering fact that God's own people, his own kinsmen, had rejected and crucified God's own Son. It was not that Paul wished to say this; he was driven to say it. The only possible explanation he could see was that, for his own purposes, God had somehow blinded his people.

In any event, Paul does not leave the argument there. He goes on to say that this rejection by the Jews had happened in order that the door might be opened to the Gentiles. His argument is not good. It is one thing to say that God used an evil situation to bring good out of it; it is quite another thing to say that he created it to produce good in the end. Paul is saying that God deliberately darkened the minds and blinded the eyes and hardened the hearts of the mass of the Jewish people in order that the way might open for the Gentiles to come in. We must remember that this is not the argument of a theologian sitting quietly in a study thinking things out; it is the argument of a man whose heart was in despair to find some reason for a completely incomprehensible situation. In the end the only answer Paul can find is that God did it.

Now Paul was arguing with Jews, and he knew that the only way he could buttress his argument was with quotations from their own scriptures. So he goes on to cite texts to prove that this rejection of the Jews and acceptance of the Gentiles had actually been foretold in the prophets. Hosea had said that God would make a people his people who were not his people ( Hosea 2:23 ). He said that a people who were not God's people would be called the sons of God ( Hosea 1:10 ). He showed how Isaiah had foreseen a situation when Israel would have been obliterated had not a remnant been left ( Isaiah 10:22-23 ; Isaiah 37:32 ). It is his argument that Israel could have foreseen her doom had she only understood.

It is easy in this passage to criticize him, but the one thing that must be remembered is that Paul, in his despairing anguish for his own people, clung to the fact that somehow everything was God's work. For him there was nothing left to say but that.