IN THE HANDS OF THE MASTER POTTER

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, You are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand.

Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord; do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look on us, we pray, for we are all Your people. Your sacred cities have become a wasteland; even Zion is a wasteland,  Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and glorious temple, where our ancestors praised You, has been burned with fire, and all that we treasured lies in ruins.

After all this, Lord, will You hold Yourself back? Will You keep silent and punish us beyond measure?

Isaiah 64:8-12

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Have you ever held a ball of clay in your hands before?

In and of itself, it looks like nothing that could be of much use in that state and that’s absolutely true. But put that ball of clay in the hands of someone skilled and what appeared once to be useless can be formed into something of use.

For example, my wife and I were out shopping recently and she fixed her eyes on three bright, shiny planters, each matching in color but of different sizes. The plan was to fill them with soil and then place some beautiful, colorful plants within. Of interest for this devotion, they were all made out of clay and some master craftsman, a potter, had taken mounds of the material and shaped them into the pots my wife would use to display her flowers.

Given this as an introduction for the concluding scripture verses from Isaiah 64, let’s see how God’s word uses this real world act of mastery with clay to make an important point to us about our lives and the relationship we are to have with God, our Master and Maker. Look again at these words here:

Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, You are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand.

Do not be angry beyond measure, Lord; do not remember our sins forever. Oh, look on us, we pray, for we are all Your people. Your sacred cities have become a wasteland; even Zion is a wasteland, Jerusalem a desolation. Our holy and glorious temple, where our ancestors praised You, has been burned with fire, and all that we treasured lies in ruins.

After all this, Lord, will You hold Yourself back? Will You keep silent and punish us beyond measure?  Isaiah 64:8-12

The people speaking here are none other than the people of Israel who were enduring a harrowing seventy year exile at the hands of the Babylonians, an imposed penalty by God for their unfaithfulness as evident by their disrespectful worshiping of false gods and idols. The God who had once always been there for them, now seemed distant and absent as they lived in a foreign land under the oppression of a foreign people. It would be enough for anyone to find themselves turning back to God and seeking His restoration and renewal.

So how did the Israelites go about doing that? How did they petition God to take them back and return them to a place of favor with Him?

Note that they started by committing themselves to the hands of God, the only One who could turn them into the people they needed to be, a people who lived in a way that was pleasing in His sight.  

Yet you, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, You are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand.

The Israelites, once a people useful to God had made themselves useless to Him through their blatant disobedience to His commands. Hauled away from their homeland which was then desolated, burned into ruin, and turned into a wasteland, the people of Israel each became that lump of clay that needed reformed into something of value again and they knew just who could do it.

And so they turned to the Lord, the Master Potter, and committed themselves again to be the work of His hands. This meant they had to surrender their will and way so that His will and way could reign supreme for that’s the only way that the Master Potter could mold and shape them to be something special, to take something ordinary and change it into something extraordinary.

Friends, God’s word is speaking forcefully to us today and asking us to examine our lives and how we are allowing them to be shaped.

Are we allowing the world to mold us into a vessel of sin and wickedness that will only gain the Lord’s wrath and consequences, like the Israelites who ended up in a seventy year exile?  

Or are we submitting ourselves as clay to the hands of God, the Master Potter, allowing Him to mold and form us into something blessedly beautiful, something righteous that reflects His image in all we do as we serve Him and carry our His purposes for our lives?

I’m not sure where you stand but I’m grateful I can say with confidence that the hands of the Master Potter are on me, transforming me to be the man He wants me to be as I seek to conform to His will and way.

There’s no better place to be.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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