The Sovereignty of God | Jeremiah 18:1
Knowing God Part 4
Pastor Charles Price
If you have got a Bible, would you turn with me to the book of Jeremiah in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 18, and I am going to read the first 6 verses of this chapter. To many of you its familiar, to some of you it may be entirely new. But it is an enacted parable that Jeremiah was told to observe down in the house of a potter in Judah. Jeremiah Chapter 18:1:
“This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.’
“So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel.
“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.
“Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?’ declares the Lord. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.’”
That’s as far as I am going to read, but keep that page open; we’ll come back to it in just a few moments. Some weeks ago, I began a series in the evenings called “Knowing God”. And you may have forgotten a lot of that, but that’s what the Christian life, of course, essentially is. It’s not just what the Christian life is about; it’s what it is. It’s knowing God.
Jesus, in John 17:3 said,
“This is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
In Philippians 3, which we just sang from, Philippians 3:10 Paul states his ambition:
“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.”
In Ephesians, when he prays for the Ephesian Christians in Ephesians 1:17, “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation so that” … you may know more doctrine? No, that isn’t what he says – “that you may know him better”.
The Christian life is about knowing God. That is a continual pursuit. You don’t arrive at that. And the issue in our Christian lives is not how much activity are we engaging in, it’s not how much doctrine do I know, it’s not even how much do I read the Bible; it’s how well do I know God, because that’s what eternal life is, said Jesus.
Now we talked about the existence of God, and we looked at some of the philosophical arguments. You close your Bible, just look at the world around you, what does it tell you about God? And we looked at some of those arguments.
Then we talked about the knowability of God. What exactly is God like in terms of His attributes and His character? And we talked about that.
Then we talked about the experience of God, the fact that God has a number of names in the Bible and He never revealed them outside of experience of Himself. So, when He revealed Himself as Jehovah, He said to Moses at the burning bush, “I’m sending you into Egypt to take the Israelites out of Egypt to Canaan.”
“Who am I?” said Moses, 80 years of age. “Forty years ago I blew it trying to kill an Egyptian in the hope that maybe through this I might liberate them. Who am I?”
And God said, “I will be with you Moses. Who you are is not the criteria; who I am is the criteria.”
Moses said, “Well, who are You?”
And God said, “I AM who I AM.” From that we get the name Jehovah. “Moses, at any time, in any situation, any crisis when your backs against any wall, I AM totally sufficient, present tense.”
And so we understand the name Jehovah. God reveals His names in experience of God.
But today I want to talk to you about the sovereignty of God, because as we read through Scripture of course this is one of the most pre-eminent things about God - that He is sovereign.
The word sovereign – and by use of this word, what we mean is His absolute supremacy in all things. Sovereignty has to do with His will; His mind is supreme, His power, His purpose in the world and His ultimate control of all things.
Now let me just make a linguistic comment if I may at this point. If you use the King James Bible, as some of you do, you will discover when you read the King James Version, the word ‘sovereign’ doesn’t occur once in that translation. If you read the New American Standard Bible, you will find it once only. If you read the Revised Standard Version, you will find it three times. If you read the New International Version, you will find it 288 times. Now you say, “Wow, that’s a liberty for the New International Version, surely.”
Well, let me explain it. There are several names for God in the original scriptures and the translators have to decide how they are going to translate that into suitable English. The word ‘Jehovah’ – ‘Yahweh’ is probably more accurate - is translated in the NIV as LORD spelled in capital letters. So, if you have got an NIV you will notice occasionally it speaks of L-O-R-D all in capital letters. That’s because they are translating the name Jehovah.
Another name for God is ‘Adonai’ and they translate that capital L but small letters o-r-d. But there are several times when these two names come together as a compound name. And when they do, the New International Version translates it ‘Sovereign Lord’. And they do that in the Old Testament (this is Hebrew we are talking about now) – they do that 284 times.
Though in the New International Version also there are four occasions in the New Testament when they translate a particular word, ‘Sovereign Lord’. The word used for God there is the despotēs – now you know the word despot in English; that’s where that word comes from. But usually in English of course it has negative connotations about some evil dictator, some despot. But that isn’t necessarily its meaning of course. W.E. Vine, in his Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, says that the name, the word ‘despotēs speaks of “absolute ownership and uncontrolled power.”
The King James translates it ‘Master’. Uncontrolled power in the sense of course as not being controlled by anything else outside of the one exercising it, which is God in those instances.
Now that’s just a linguistic comment in case some of you are looking through your Bible and say, “I don’t find this word anywhere here and the NIV tripping over it every few verses.” It’s just the way they have translated it.
But nevertheless, the idea of sovereignty comes through the Scriptures and of course the fact that God is sovereign, that there is nobody to whom He bows His head or tips His hat, “God is sovereign in the universe” is cornerstone to our understanding of Him.
Now you probably know there’s a well-known argument that says God cannot be both loving and sovereign at the same time for this reason (goes the argument): if He is all-loving, then He cannot be sovereign because if He did and He was all-loving, He would stop the suffering and the trouble and the evil that is in the world. On the other hand, says this argument, if He is sovereign, He is totally in charge, He can’t be all-loving for the same reason, because He would prevent the trouble and suffering and evil in the world. And that is a very real dilemma.
So, what do we mean by the sovereignty of God? One of the tasks of Christian scholars through history has been to produce systems of theology. Let me explain this to you; we call it systematic theology. Systematic theology is taking all the statements in Scripture about any particular subject – in this case, about God – and trying to put them together into a cohesive, logical big picture. So, for instance, if there are things about God in the book of Genesis and something else about God in Exodus, something else about God in Psalms, something else about God in Isaiah, something else about God in Matthew, something else in John, something in Romans, something in Revelation, they put all these things together and then try and make this big picture. Well of course that’s helpful but it has some enormous weaknesses as well. The strengths are: it helps us to get a comprehensive picture of whatever the issue is that is being examined. But the weakness is that it tends to reduce God into a logical structure, which as God, He is unable to fit.
Here’s the best illustration I can think of about this: If you look up in the night sky, one the things I miss about living where we live - as opposed to where we used to live - when we arrived - out in the country was that we used to just enjoy the clear sky (when there were no clouds around, which wasn’t very often in England). But here there’s too much light pollution, we don’t see too much of the sky. But you look up into the sky at night and we see what we call constellations, we give names to them – the Big Dipper, the Plough. I think in North America you have some different names to what we have in England, to some of these. And what we do is we see some lights at different parts of the sky and we draw lines between those stars, those pinpricks of light and we create this shape that we call a plough or Big Dipper, whatever else it might be. And that helps us to map the night sky and to understand it and find our bearings and so on and it’s very useful.
But you know that’s what systematic theology does with Scripture. It looks at the kind of statements that Scripture makes and then it tries to draw lines to link them all together to create some logical coherent picture. But the problem is then that the lines that don’t exist in reality between the stars are given the same authority as the stars themselves, in our reading of Scripture. And so you can pick up books on systematic theology and they come to totally different conclusions because they simply connect different lights in the sky, different statements about God.
When it comes to the sovereignty of God then, there are people who have tried to link all the statements about God together to come up with a coherent picture and I am going to give you two contrasting ones. And then I am going to tell you how we ought to understand it. (You’re supposed to smile at that – my arrogance!) I am going to tell you practically and pastorally how the sovereignty of God is of tremendous encouragement to us in our lives and in our world.
These are the two contrasting views: one is that God is in absolute control of everything that ever happens at any time. I am going to quote you from this book by Loraine Boettner, which is widely read – it’s called “The Reformed Doctrine of Pre-destination”. And many of you are familiar with reformed teaching, which comes back to the Reformation Era of the 17th Century - John Calvin, in particular, who systematized that.
And this is part of what he says in that book; I’ve just extracted some bits from it. He says,
“The doctrine of predestination, (which is what this book is about – how that God pre-destines all things) represents the purpose of God as absolute and unconditional, independent of the whole finite creation and as originating solely in the eternal counsel of His will. God is seen as the great and mighty King who has appointed the course of nature and who directs the course of history, even down to its minutus details. His decree is eternal; it’s unchangeable. It is holy, wise and sovereign. It extends not merely to the course of the physical world but to every event in human history from the creation to the judgement and includes all the activities of saints and angels in heaven, and reprobates and demons in hell. It embraces the whole scope of creaturely existence through time and eternity, comprehending at once all things that ever were or will be, their cause, conditions, successions and relations.”
Does that sound a bit complicated? Basically it’s saying God’s in charge in every fine detail. A little bit later he says,
“Though the world seems to run at random and affairs to be huddled together in blind confusion and rude disorder, yet God sees and knows the connection of all causes and affects and so governs them that He makes a perfect harmony out of all those seeming jarrings and discords.”
Well, this is the picture of God in His sovereignty that is the cornerstone of a position within Christendom known as Calvinism, named after John Calvin, who I mentioned in the 17th Century was probably the most brilliant mind in that era in the church’s history. And it holds God to be sovereignly pre-eminent in creation, in history, in salvation, in the consummation of all things. And in fact a motto you could take from that would be that history is His story – you have probably heard that before. And this view has brought great comfort and security to many Christians at different times.
However, to the casual observer, there are many things going on in the world that do not seem to have their origin in God. And in fact, Scripture speaks in that way as well. In I John 5:19 John says this:
“We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”
That seems a rather different perspective. What does he mean? Three times Jesus speaks of Satan as ‘the prince of this world’. Three times He spoke of him that way. Jesus taught His disciples to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is done in heaven” – the clear implication being it is not done on earth as it is in heaven; that’s why you pray to that end.
And the Bible speaks again and again of people acting in disobedience, rebellion, of turning their backs, of resisting God, of hardening their hearts. We’re warned in the New Testament not to quench the Holy Spirit, not to grieve the Holy Spirit. And so, the difficulty with this is if God sovereignly rules our disobedience and then sovereignly rules His judgement on us for our disobedience, we have a problem, seemingly, with the integrity of God. So that is a position but it’s a problematic one as well.
The other view – and I am just going to give you these two contrasting views – is one which has become popular more recently. It’s been known the last decade or so as the “openness of God” or “open theism”. Basically, this says that God is primarily a reactor to events. Now the InterVarsity Press recently published a book called the “Openness of God” and it subtitled it “A Biblical Challenge to a Traditional Understanding of God”. And I want to give you quickly the four tenants of Open Theism. Open Theism says, you know, God’s mind is not made up. But here are the four things:
Number One: God’s sovereignty has been limited by Himself through the creation of free agents. In other words, God, in His sovereignty, said I am making people with the capacity to act freely and if they chose to go against Me, that their choice, their business and that’s what they have chosen to do and there are consequences to it. So that’s the first tenant of it.
The Second Tenant says: God’s power stops where human will begins and God Himself established it to be this way. He established His self-limitation by giving to human beings their ability to choose and resist.
The Third point is that God’s knowledge is self-limited – that is, He has restricted His knowledge, because – so they argue – the foreknowledge of the actions of free agents would indicate they are not really free because God already knows about them anyway and therefore how can they be free?
And the fourth is that God’s plan has a multitude of blanks due to the unforeseen actions or decisions of the free agents He has created. And God’s greatness is manifest in the fact He is able to cope with anything that turns up and anything that goes wrong.
Now that’s the view of Open Theism – that’s a superficial summary of it because it’s more complex than that, but just to let you know this, this contrast on the other side of the spectrum.
Now there are lots of ways to respond to that and I won’t because of time, although I think the subtitle of that book, “The Openness of God – A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God” is certainly a challenge to traditional understanding of God, even amongst Christians.
Now the problem is, you see, when you look at the constellations in the night, the Great Bear and the Plough and all these things don’t actually exist up there – we’ve just drawn lines and we’ve created this shape to help us map the sky. And the problem is that people have taken the points of revelation, drawn lines to create something cohesive and they have given equal authority to the lines, which is really guessing, as they have to the points in which God has revealed Himself. That’s the danger of systematic theology, by the way.
And pardon me if this doesn’t make sense to you, but always give biblical theology priority over systematic theology. In other words, what I mean by that is: instead of a system, which tries to put everything into one neat package, allow Scripture in its context to speak. So, if Matthew’s Gospel seems to say something, which seems to be different to what John’s Gospel is saying, hold them both. Allow Matthew to speak with authority. That’s biblical theology – letting the different sections of Scripture speak and hold them even though we’re holding certain things in tension. Because, by the way, if we could reduce God to a neat system, He wouldn’t be a very big God, would He? If we could reduce Him to our own minds, He wouldn’t be a very big God. I can’t get very much that’s big in my mind by any standard, let alone saying “I can understand God”. So, there’s a point at which we stand back and say, “I can see this and I can see this and I can see this and I can see this; I cannot connect them but I worship Him and I submit to Him. It’s not a cop-out. That’s recognizing there are dangers in trying to reduce God to one pattern.
But there is one very important aspect of God’s sovereignty I do want to talk to you about just for a few minutes, and it’s what we read together in Jeremiah 18. Because here’s a picture of God acting sovereignly in a situation because the whole context of these few verses I read to you begins a little earlier where in Jeremiah 17:12 it says,
“A glorious throne, exalted from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary.”
And Jeremiah is extolling the fact that God is on His throne, He’s ruling. And then God says, “Jeremiah, go down to a house, a potter’s house and when you get there, observe what you see and I will give you My message. And this is what Jeremiah saw. When he got to the potter’s house - when he got to the potter’s house, the potter was at work at the wheel. And as the wheel spun and he brought his hands against it to shape it and mould it in the way that he was intending to, he says the pot – the clay – was marred in his hand. Something went wrong. And so, he says, the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.
And then God says to Jeremiah, “Let me tell you what this is about.”
“’O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?’ declares the Lord. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.’”
So, God says, “Jeremiah, understand this: I am the potter working at the wheel. The clay are my people Israel, but they have become marred.” Now we know in the case of Israel itself, why the marring took place. It was their own willful disobedience. It wasn’t any fault on the potter of course. In fact, in verse 9 of this chapter, He says,
“’If at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, 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.’” [Jeremiah 18:9]
So, God says, “If I declare something about the nation and then it goes and rebels and does something evil, I will reconsider – (the King James says, “I will repent”) of what I intended to do – the good I intended to do.
Why does God say, “I will reconsider”? Because the clay has been marred and God in His sovereignty doesn’t say, “Well, that’s it.” He remoulds it into another pot that seems good to Him. I love the fact that that bit is added by Jeremiah – “it seems good to Him.”
You see, your life and my life are messed up, aren’t they, by all kinds of things. We are messed up by sin – we were born in sin. We inherited a sin nature. There are scars in all of our lives that are sometimes self-inflicted. Sometimes they are not self-inflicted, they have been inflicted on us by environmental issues, by home lives that we have come from, by relationships we have been in, by limitations placed on us, by all kinds of things that have messed us up at some stage. But here’s the beautiful thing about the sovereignty of God as depicted in Jeremiah 18: He remoulds into another pot that seems good. Notice it doesn’t say He remoulds into Plan Number 2 – not quite as good a pot as the original one. The pot He remoulds seems good to Him.
Let me illustrate this from Scripture, because Scripture is full of God remoulding broken things. Do you remember in the Garden of Eden when God had given to Adam and to Eve the liberty of anything but one thing – to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? And they ate of the tree - you remember all of that. And the moment that they had disobeyed God and obeyed Satan, they were filled with shame. They took fig leaves and covered their shame with their fig leaves. Have you ever wondered, by the way, why fig leaves have a bad story in the Bible – God cursed fig trees - because figs represent human attempts to meet our need. God came to them in the Garden and said, “Where are you?” He knew exactly where they were of course; He wanted them to state where they were.
“We are hiding. We’re behind the back of this tree or back of this wall (there probably weren’t any walls), behind the bush, wherever they were, with fig leaves wrapped around us.”
And in Genesis 3 it says this: that God cursed first of all the serpent, then He cursed the woman and then He cursed the man. Do you know what He did then? I think this is one of the most wonderful verses in the Bible, Genesis 3:21:
“The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.”
Did God intend for them to be clothed? Seemingly they hadn’t been and they were not ashamed and seemingly that was good. Now they are full of shame and God, having declared to them the just consequences of their disobedience, He makes them clothes of skin. Do you know what’s significant about that? A number of things are: It was the first time any animal died. God made them clothes of skin. Blood was shed. It’s a foreshadowing of what was going to be necessary to take away the sin of the world. It’s a picture of Christ of course.
But the point is He clothed them. He didn’t say when He had finished talking about the sweat of your brow, your labour, etc., He didn’t say, “And I hope you freeze to death out there with no clothes.” He remoulded the pot and He said to Eve – He said some nice things to Eve actually – He said to Eve, “Your seed – he’s bruised your heel, this serpent – your seed will crush his head one day. Eve, from your seed, he’s going to be beaten, there’s going to be a way back.”
He remoulded the clay. And history is God remoulding the clay. I heard somebody talk one day about the four wills of God, he said. And boy, he did all kinds of gymnastics – there was the perfect will of God first of all, then there was the permissive will of God, and I’ve forgotten what the other two were – they were all ‘p’s, all very nice, but all these different categories. And basically, the thrust of his message seemed to be, you know, try and move up a notch. If you’re down to the fourth ‘p’, get up to the third. If you’re in the third, get up to the second. If you really can, get up to the first – the perfect will of God.
I don’t see that. God was not taken by surprise in the Garden of Eden, because before the foundation of the world, Christ already had been crucified in the heart of God. It tells us that – before the foundation of the world – He knew it was going to happen, but He remoulded the clay.
Do you remember when in I Samuel 8, for another example, the Israelites who had been in Canaan for over 300 years, and God had a way in which He wanted to govern the nation – it was by raising up judges. They were not hereditary; in other words, you didn’t become a judge because your dad was the last judge. They weren’t elected; they were anointed by the Holy Spirit in such a way that people recognized the Spirit of God is on them and they followed them [Him] as they led and judged the nation.
But after over 300 years of this the people fell for the trap that the people of God have fallen through all through history – they wanted to be like the nations, everybody else around about them. See, God intended Israel to be a theocracy where He ruled.
By the way, it’s how He intended the church to be. He is the Head of the church, He raises up people that He calls to leadership. But you know, this temptation, we want to be like the world, everybody else, let’s do it the way everybody else does it, then we don’t feel awkward about the fact that the way we do things are a little bit different. We don’t want to be pushed into the mould. They said they wanted a king, they wanted a royal family, they wanted to know where the next king was coming from, they wanted to influence him, they wanted probably princesses and princes for the tabloid press to write stories about. You know, they wanted to be like everybody else.
And God said to Samuel when they were asking for this – and by the way, the people of God always slide away from dependence on God to setting themselves up in a way where they can operate without God; that’s always the drift amongst the people of God. And God said in I Samuel 8:19 to Samuel – it says,
“The people refused to listen to Samuel. ‘No’ they said. ‘We want a king over us. Then we shall be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and go out before us and fight our battles.’”
And the Lord said in 1 Samuel 8:7 to Samuel,
“’Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king’” (This is an act of rebellion and rejection).
“But” He said, “Give them a king, and I will tell you which one to choose.”
God remoulds the clay. He says, “There is a man, the son of Kish. He’s tall, he’s good looking, he’s strong, he’s able.” His name was Saul. And Samuel went and met him and anointed him king and Saul became king. And then of course you know the story of how he blew it and God said, “Go down to the house in Bethlehem; there’s a man called Jesse; he’s got seven sons - or eight sons”, He says, “and one of them is a man after My own heart.” And he chose David and made David king.
And do you know how Jesus is introduced in the New Testament? The very first verse of the New Testament, it says,
“A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David…” [Matthew 1:1]
It’s the very first sentence of the New Testament. David should never have been in God’s original purpose and plan but the clay has gotten marred. It’s marred because of the insecurities and the disobedience of the people of Israel. So, God remoulded the clay – not only remoulded the clay and gave them a king, but He allowed His Son, the Messiah, who became incarnate, to be known as the son of David.
God remoulded the clay. You might say, “O they have rejected God now. They have really no hope now. When they get a king, they are going to be in a total mess.”
No, God said, “I will remould the clay” – “as seems good to Him.”
Remember poor old Jonah, told to go to Nineveh, the capital of Syria, not even a Jewish city, a Gentile pagan powerful city. He went in the opposite direction, took a ship, went across the Mediterranean to Tarshish – probably in Spain. But he never got there – his boat sank and he eventually came back. And he went to Nineveh and God said, “Give them this message: In forty days I will destroy the city because of your rebellion.”
So, Jonah eventually got to Nineveh. “Alright, I’ll go”. And he preached forty days. “You will be judged forty days – forty days and God will destroy the city. Thirty-nine days: “God will destroy the city”. Thirty-eight days, Thirty-seven days, thirty-six, thirty days, twenty-five days, twenty days, ten days, nine days, eight days, seven days, six days….
“And God said, “Jonah, they are repenting; I am not going to destroy the city.”
And Jonah got so angry, do you remember? “You told me to tell them that You would destroy the city in forty days after I arrived here. My whole credibility is going to be on the line now because You are not going to destroy them.” And Jonah sat under the tree, you remember, and grumbled.
What was God doing? He was remoulding the clay. The people of Nineveh changed. They repented. The King James says, “God repented and Jonah too”- that means He changed His mind.
Of course, God knows – that’s a human way of describing what God did. But the point is: He remoulded the clay.
We commemorated recently the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of those five men in Ecuador, trying to reach that tribe then unreached by anybody. Not a big tribe, 500 people at that stage; known as the Aucas which was the name given to them – it meant ‘savage’. That’s not their real name, something that they gave themselves, and that’s how they’ve been known for a long time – now known as the Waodani because that’s their own name for themselves.
And those men tried to build a relationship. And then you remember how that when they felt that it was time to go in, flew in on this little plane, landed on the sandbar on the river. After three days, they met one of the local Auca Indians, tried to build friendship. He went back and told them that these men were cannibals, which of course they were. And then they came and speared them to death and killed them. Humanly a tragedy, but we’ve made this point before, that out of that tragedy, it’s estimated 10,000 people went to the mission field and I suspect it’s probably more. Some of the wives stayed on. They saw the first converts.
And when we commemorated that 50th anniversary here just recently with Olive Fleming Liefeld, the widow of Pete Fleming, one of those men who was killed, with Art Johnson, who had gone into the jungle to look for the men and found the bodies and buried them. I didn’t know when we sat on this platform that night, just a couple of weeks ago, that there was a baptism taking place in the river opposite the place where those men had been speared to death. And ten young men were being baptized. And two of the men who had been killers of those missionaries were there, praising God for the baptism of these young men.
God remoulded the pot. You say, “Was it the will of God for them to get killed?” We can’t penetrate the mysteries of God’s mind of course, but it was an evil act and God is not the author of evil. The whole world is in the power of the evil one. I John says the devil is very active in our world. But the point is – and this is how I want you to understand God’s sovereignty as we finish tonight. You understand God’s sovereignty not as somebody up there in a control room, pressing all the buttons and getting frustrated because of our disobedience, or even controlling our disobedience.
But I want you to see the sovereignty of God as a potter who remoulds the clay. When bad things happen, when pain comes into our lives, when our histories – things that have happened to us in the past or things we wish we could eradicate and re-write the story but we can’t; we have to live with who we are and what we’ve been through – the marvellous thing is that the hand of the Potter remoulds the clay into something that seemed good to Him. Not something bad, not a second choice; it seemed good to Him.
I don’t know where you are in your life. I don’t know what you’re struggling with. I don’t know what mountains you feel you can’t climb, which are right there in front of you. I don’t know what weights seem to sit on you. I don’t know how hurt you might be. I don’t know what sins you’ve been up to this last week. But I do know this: nobody is disqualified from coming in humility and saying, “Lord Jesus, would You please mould the clay?”
Paul talks about comforting others with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. He says, “Things have happened in your life and you didn’t like them, you didn’t enjoy them, they weren’t comfortable, they were painful. But”, says Paul to the Corinthians when he wrote that, “the very thing God has done in you through this tough time is going to be the means by which He, through you, is going to bless and do things in other peoples’ lives.” Painful, but it becomes an instrument in His hand; He remoulds the clay.
I don’t want you to go away tonight – I haven’t addressed of course, or tried to answer the question of the big picture of the sovereignty of God that this book talks about and that we need to have some understanding of – that God is supreme in creation and history and God one day will determine the day when every knee bows and every tongue confesses Jesus Christ is Lord. He is fully in control of history.
But I want you to understand it in terms of your life because some of us feel written off; I know that. Some of us feel we have done something, which makes me unusable to God. I know a man who did that and all his life he believed he had messed up what God wanted him to do. And he could not do and be what he wanted – what God wanted him to do and be. And he lived that way for more than 50 years – it was my father. He never understood the remoulding of the clay. He only understood the rejection for having done the wrong thing at a certain time in his life.
You may be burdened with that very same thing. And as we close, we’re going to pray and just say, “Lord, remould the clay. In Your sovereignty You can make something good out of the marred clay.” That’s Jeremiah 18.
By the way, if you read Jeremiah 19, Jeremiah goes then to another piece of clay. This time it has become hard; it’s not submitted to the moulding of the potter. And God says, “I am afraid that clay, piece of clay, has reached the point you need to take it outside and smash it.” It’s become hardened. You can become hardened. But you wouldn’t be here tonight – you’re here tonight because you are soft in your heart towards God. “Lord, remould the clay as seems good to You.” And in His sovereignty, the hand of the Potter will produce something that seems good to God - not second best - good to the Potter.
Let’s pray together. Father, I want to pray for each person here tonight. We’re here because we love You. We realize that knowing You is the most important thing in our lives. We thank You for revealing Yourself to us and by Your Holy Spirit, drawing us to Yourself. But none of us can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. You have been at work in our hearts, You have been awakening us to that knowledge of Yourself and we thank You for that. But thank You that now that we’re brought into relationship with You that You mould us and when we’re marred in Your hands like that clay, when things go wrong – whether it’s self-inflicted disobedience or whether it’s simply we’re the victim of something which has marred the clay – we thank You for the hand of the Potter, sometimes gentle, sometimes firm but which remoulds the clay into something that seems good to Him. I pray that each one of us will go home tonight knowing You are moulding something in me that seems good to You. And we thank You for that. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
“This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Go down to the potter’s house, and there I will give you my message.’
“So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel.
“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.
“Then the word of the Lord came to me: “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?’ declares the Lord. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.’”
That’s as far as I am going to read, but keep that page open; we’ll come back to it in just a few moments. Some weeks ago, I began a series in the evenings called “Knowing God”. And you may have forgotten a lot of that, but that’s what the Christian life, of course, essentially is. It’s not just what the Christian life is about; it’s what it is. It’s knowing God.
Jesus, in John 17:3 said,
“This is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
In Philippians 3, which we just sang from, Philippians 3:10 Paul states his ambition:
“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.”
In Ephesians, when he prays for the Ephesian Christians in Ephesians 1:17, “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation so that” … you may know more doctrine? No, that isn’t what he says – “that you may know him better”.
The Christian life is about knowing God. That is a continual pursuit. You don’t arrive at that. And the issue in our Christian lives is not how much activity are we engaging in, it’s not how much doctrine do I know, it’s not even how much do I read the Bible; it’s how well do I know God, because that’s what eternal life is, said Jesus.
Now we talked about the existence of God, and we looked at some of the philosophical arguments. You close your Bible, just look at the world around you, what does it tell you about God? And we looked at some of those arguments.
Then we talked about the knowability of God. What exactly is God like in terms of His attributes and His character? And we talked about that.
Then we talked about the experience of God, the fact that God has a number of names in the Bible and He never revealed them outside of experience of Himself. So, when He revealed Himself as Jehovah, He said to Moses at the burning bush, “I’m sending you into Egypt to take the Israelites out of Egypt to Canaan.”
“Who am I?” said Moses, 80 years of age. “Forty years ago I blew it trying to kill an Egyptian in the hope that maybe through this I might liberate them. Who am I?”
And God said, “I will be with you Moses. Who you are is not the criteria; who I am is the criteria.”
Moses said, “Well, who are You?”
And God said, “I AM who I AM.” From that we get the name Jehovah. “Moses, at any time, in any situation, any crisis when your backs against any wall, I AM totally sufficient, present tense.”
And so we understand the name Jehovah. God reveals His names in experience of God.
But today I want to talk to you about the sovereignty of God, because as we read through Scripture of course this is one of the most pre-eminent things about God - that He is sovereign.
The word sovereign – and by use of this word, what we mean is His absolute supremacy in all things. Sovereignty has to do with His will; His mind is supreme, His power, His purpose in the world and His ultimate control of all things.
Now let me just make a linguistic comment if I may at this point. If you use the King James Bible, as some of you do, you will discover when you read the King James Version, the word ‘sovereign’ doesn’t occur once in that translation. If you read the New American Standard Bible, you will find it once only. If you read the Revised Standard Version, you will find it three times. If you read the New International Version, you will find it 288 times. Now you say, “Wow, that’s a liberty for the New International Version, surely.”
Well, let me explain it. There are several names for God in the original scriptures and the translators have to decide how they are going to translate that into suitable English. The word ‘Jehovah’ – ‘Yahweh’ is probably more accurate - is translated in the NIV as LORD spelled in capital letters. So, if you have got an NIV you will notice occasionally it speaks of L-O-R-D all in capital letters. That’s because they are translating the name Jehovah.
Another name for God is ‘Adonai’ and they translate that capital L but small letters o-r-d. But there are several times when these two names come together as a compound name. And when they do, the New International Version translates it ‘Sovereign Lord’. And they do that in the Old Testament (this is Hebrew we are talking about now) – they do that 284 times.
Though in the New International Version also there are four occasions in the New Testament when they translate a particular word, ‘Sovereign Lord’. The word used for God there is the despotēs – now you know the word despot in English; that’s where that word comes from. But usually in English of course it has negative connotations about some evil dictator, some despot. But that isn’t necessarily its meaning of course. W.E. Vine, in his Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, says that the name, the word ‘despotēs speaks of “absolute ownership and uncontrolled power.”
The King James translates it ‘Master’. Uncontrolled power in the sense of course as not being controlled by anything else outside of the one exercising it, which is God in those instances.
Now that’s just a linguistic comment in case some of you are looking through your Bible and say, “I don’t find this word anywhere here and the NIV tripping over it every few verses.” It’s just the way they have translated it.
But nevertheless, the idea of sovereignty comes through the Scriptures and of course the fact that God is sovereign, that there is nobody to whom He bows His head or tips His hat, “God is sovereign in the universe” is cornerstone to our understanding of Him.
Now you probably know there’s a well-known argument that says God cannot be both loving and sovereign at the same time for this reason (goes the argument): if He is all-loving, then He cannot be sovereign because if He did and He was all-loving, He would stop the suffering and the trouble and the evil that is in the world. On the other hand, says this argument, if He is sovereign, He is totally in charge, He can’t be all-loving for the same reason, because He would prevent the trouble and suffering and evil in the world. And that is a very real dilemma.
So, what do we mean by the sovereignty of God? One of the tasks of Christian scholars through history has been to produce systems of theology. Let me explain this to you; we call it systematic theology. Systematic theology is taking all the statements in Scripture about any particular subject – in this case, about God – and trying to put them together into a cohesive, logical big picture. So, for instance, if there are things about God in the book of Genesis and something else about God in Exodus, something else about God in Psalms, something else about God in Isaiah, something else about God in Matthew, something else in John, something in Romans, something in Revelation, they put all these things together and then try and make this big picture. Well of course that’s helpful but it has some enormous weaknesses as well. The strengths are: it helps us to get a comprehensive picture of whatever the issue is that is being examined. But the weakness is that it tends to reduce God into a logical structure, which as God, He is unable to fit.
Here’s the best illustration I can think of about this: If you look up in the night sky, one the things I miss about living where we live - as opposed to where we used to live - when we arrived - out in the country was that we used to just enjoy the clear sky (when there were no clouds around, which wasn’t very often in England). But here there’s too much light pollution, we don’t see too much of the sky. But you look up into the sky at night and we see what we call constellations, we give names to them – the Big Dipper, the Plough. I think in North America you have some different names to what we have in England, to some of these. And what we do is we see some lights at different parts of the sky and we draw lines between those stars, those pinpricks of light and we create this shape that we call a plough or Big Dipper, whatever else it might be. And that helps us to map the night sky and to understand it and find our bearings and so on and it’s very useful.
But you know that’s what systematic theology does with Scripture. It looks at the kind of statements that Scripture makes and then it tries to draw lines to link them all together to create some logical coherent picture. But the problem is then that the lines that don’t exist in reality between the stars are given the same authority as the stars themselves, in our reading of Scripture. And so you can pick up books on systematic theology and they come to totally different conclusions because they simply connect different lights in the sky, different statements about God.
When it comes to the sovereignty of God then, there are people who have tried to link all the statements about God together to come up with a coherent picture and I am going to give you two contrasting ones. And then I am going to tell you how we ought to understand it. (You’re supposed to smile at that – my arrogance!) I am going to tell you practically and pastorally how the sovereignty of God is of tremendous encouragement to us in our lives and in our world.
These are the two contrasting views: one is that God is in absolute control of everything that ever happens at any time. I am going to quote you from this book by Loraine Boettner, which is widely read – it’s called “The Reformed Doctrine of Pre-destination”. And many of you are familiar with reformed teaching, which comes back to the Reformation Era of the 17th Century - John Calvin, in particular, who systematized that.
And this is part of what he says in that book; I’ve just extracted some bits from it. He says,
“The doctrine of predestination, (which is what this book is about – how that God pre-destines all things) represents the purpose of God as absolute and unconditional, independent of the whole finite creation and as originating solely in the eternal counsel of His will. God is seen as the great and mighty King who has appointed the course of nature and who directs the course of history, even down to its minutus details. His decree is eternal; it’s unchangeable. It is holy, wise and sovereign. It extends not merely to the course of the physical world but to every event in human history from the creation to the judgement and includes all the activities of saints and angels in heaven, and reprobates and demons in hell. It embraces the whole scope of creaturely existence through time and eternity, comprehending at once all things that ever were or will be, their cause, conditions, successions and relations.”
Does that sound a bit complicated? Basically it’s saying God’s in charge in every fine detail. A little bit later he says,
“Though the world seems to run at random and affairs to be huddled together in blind confusion and rude disorder, yet God sees and knows the connection of all causes and affects and so governs them that He makes a perfect harmony out of all those seeming jarrings and discords.”
Well, this is the picture of God in His sovereignty that is the cornerstone of a position within Christendom known as Calvinism, named after John Calvin, who I mentioned in the 17th Century was probably the most brilliant mind in that era in the church’s history. And it holds God to be sovereignly pre-eminent in creation, in history, in salvation, in the consummation of all things. And in fact a motto you could take from that would be that history is His story – you have probably heard that before. And this view has brought great comfort and security to many Christians at different times.
However, to the casual observer, there are many things going on in the world that do not seem to have their origin in God. And in fact, Scripture speaks in that way as well. In I John 5:19 John says this:
“We know that we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”
That seems a rather different perspective. What does he mean? Three times Jesus speaks of Satan as ‘the prince of this world’. Three times He spoke of him that way. Jesus taught His disciples to pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is done in heaven” – the clear implication being it is not done on earth as it is in heaven; that’s why you pray to that end.
And the Bible speaks again and again of people acting in disobedience, rebellion, of turning their backs, of resisting God, of hardening their hearts. We’re warned in the New Testament not to quench the Holy Spirit, not to grieve the Holy Spirit. And so, the difficulty with this is if God sovereignly rules our disobedience and then sovereignly rules His judgement on us for our disobedience, we have a problem, seemingly, with the integrity of God. So that is a position but it’s a problematic one as well.
The other view – and I am just going to give you these two contrasting views – is one which has become popular more recently. It’s been known the last decade or so as the “openness of God” or “open theism”. Basically, this says that God is primarily a reactor to events. Now the InterVarsity Press recently published a book called the “Openness of God” and it subtitled it “A Biblical Challenge to a Traditional Understanding of God”. And I want to give you quickly the four tenants of Open Theism. Open Theism says, you know, God’s mind is not made up. But here are the four things:
Number One: God’s sovereignty has been limited by Himself through the creation of free agents. In other words, God, in His sovereignty, said I am making people with the capacity to act freely and if they chose to go against Me, that their choice, their business and that’s what they have chosen to do and there are consequences to it. So that’s the first tenant of it.
The Second Tenant says: God’s power stops where human will begins and God Himself established it to be this way. He established His self-limitation by giving to human beings their ability to choose and resist.
The Third point is that God’s knowledge is self-limited – that is, He has restricted His knowledge, because – so they argue – the foreknowledge of the actions of free agents would indicate they are not really free because God already knows about them anyway and therefore how can they be free?
And the fourth is that God’s plan has a multitude of blanks due to the unforeseen actions or decisions of the free agents He has created. And God’s greatness is manifest in the fact He is able to cope with anything that turns up and anything that goes wrong.
Now that’s the view of Open Theism – that’s a superficial summary of it because it’s more complex than that, but just to let you know this, this contrast on the other side of the spectrum.
Now there are lots of ways to respond to that and I won’t because of time, although I think the subtitle of that book, “The Openness of God – A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God” is certainly a challenge to traditional understanding of God, even amongst Christians.
Now the problem is, you see, when you look at the constellations in the night, the Great Bear and the Plough and all these things don’t actually exist up there – we’ve just drawn lines and we’ve created this shape to help us map the sky. And the problem is that people have taken the points of revelation, drawn lines to create something cohesive and they have given equal authority to the lines, which is really guessing, as they have to the points in which God has revealed Himself. That’s the danger of systematic theology, by the way.
And pardon me if this doesn’t make sense to you, but always give biblical theology priority over systematic theology. In other words, what I mean by that is: instead of a system, which tries to put everything into one neat package, allow Scripture in its context to speak. So, if Matthew’s Gospel seems to say something, which seems to be different to what John’s Gospel is saying, hold them both. Allow Matthew to speak with authority. That’s biblical theology – letting the different sections of Scripture speak and hold them even though we’re holding certain things in tension. Because, by the way, if we could reduce God to a neat system, He wouldn’t be a very big God, would He? If we could reduce Him to our own minds, He wouldn’t be a very big God. I can’t get very much that’s big in my mind by any standard, let alone saying “I can understand God”. So, there’s a point at which we stand back and say, “I can see this and I can see this and I can see this and I can see this; I cannot connect them but I worship Him and I submit to Him. It’s not a cop-out. That’s recognizing there are dangers in trying to reduce God to one pattern.
But there is one very important aspect of God’s sovereignty I do want to talk to you about just for a few minutes, and it’s what we read together in Jeremiah 18. Because here’s a picture of God acting sovereignly in a situation because the whole context of these few verses I read to you begins a little earlier where in Jeremiah 17:12 it says,
“A glorious throne, exalted from the beginning, is the place of our sanctuary.”
And Jeremiah is extolling the fact that God is on His throne, He’s ruling. And then God says, “Jeremiah, go down to a house, a potter’s house and when you get there, observe what you see and I will give you My message. And this is what Jeremiah saw. When he got to the potter’s house - when he got to the potter’s house, the potter was at work at the wheel. And as the wheel spun and he brought his hands against it to shape it and mould it in the way that he was intending to, he says the pot – the clay – was marred in his hand. Something went wrong. And so, he says, the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.
And then God says to Jeremiah, “Let me tell you what this is about.”
“’O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter does?’ declares the Lord. ‘Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.’”
So, God says, “Jeremiah, understand this: I am the potter working at the wheel. The clay are my people Israel, but they have become marred.” Now we know in the case of Israel itself, why the marring took place. It was their own willful disobedience. It wasn’t any fault on the potter of course. In fact, in verse 9 of this chapter, He says,
“’If at another time I announce that a nation or kingdom is to be built up and planted, 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.’” [Jeremiah 18:9]
So, God says, “If I declare something about the nation and then it goes and rebels and does something evil, I will reconsider – (the King James says, “I will repent”) of what I intended to do – the good I intended to do.
Why does God say, “I will reconsider”? Because the clay has been marred and God in His sovereignty doesn’t say, “Well, that’s it.” He remoulds it into another pot that seems good to Him. I love the fact that that bit is added by Jeremiah – “it seems good to Him.”
You see, your life and my life are messed up, aren’t they, by all kinds of things. We are messed up by sin – we were born in sin. We inherited a sin nature. There are scars in all of our lives that are sometimes self-inflicted. Sometimes they are not self-inflicted, they have been inflicted on us by environmental issues, by home lives that we have come from, by relationships we have been in, by limitations placed on us, by all kinds of things that have messed us up at some stage. But here’s the beautiful thing about the sovereignty of God as depicted in Jeremiah 18: He remoulds into another pot that seems good. Notice it doesn’t say He remoulds into Plan Number 2 – not quite as good a pot as the original one. The pot He remoulds seems good to Him.
Let me illustrate this from Scripture, because Scripture is full of God remoulding broken things. Do you remember in the Garden of Eden when God had given to Adam and to Eve the liberty of anything but one thing – to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? And they ate of the tree - you remember all of that. And the moment that they had disobeyed God and obeyed Satan, they were filled with shame. They took fig leaves and covered their shame with their fig leaves. Have you ever wondered, by the way, why fig leaves have a bad story in the Bible – God cursed fig trees - because figs represent human attempts to meet our need. God came to them in the Garden and said, “Where are you?” He knew exactly where they were of course; He wanted them to state where they were.
“We are hiding. We’re behind the back of this tree or back of this wall (there probably weren’t any walls), behind the bush, wherever they were, with fig leaves wrapped around us.”
And in Genesis 3 it says this: that God cursed first of all the serpent, then He cursed the woman and then He cursed the man. Do you know what He did then? I think this is one of the most wonderful verses in the Bible, Genesis 3:21:
“The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.”
Did God intend for them to be clothed? Seemingly they hadn’t been and they were not ashamed and seemingly that was good. Now they are full of shame and God, having declared to them the just consequences of their disobedience, He makes them clothes of skin. Do you know what’s significant about that? A number of things are: It was the first time any animal died. God made them clothes of skin. Blood was shed. It’s a foreshadowing of what was going to be necessary to take away the sin of the world. It’s a picture of Christ of course.
But the point is He clothed them. He didn’t say when He had finished talking about the sweat of your brow, your labour, etc., He didn’t say, “And I hope you freeze to death out there with no clothes.” He remoulded the pot and He said to Eve – He said some nice things to Eve actually – He said to Eve, “Your seed – he’s bruised your heel, this serpent – your seed will crush his head one day. Eve, from your seed, he’s going to be beaten, there’s going to be a way back.”
He remoulded the clay. And history is God remoulding the clay. I heard somebody talk one day about the four wills of God, he said. And boy, he did all kinds of gymnastics – there was the perfect will of God first of all, then there was the permissive will of God, and I’ve forgotten what the other two were – they were all ‘p’s, all very nice, but all these different categories. And basically, the thrust of his message seemed to be, you know, try and move up a notch. If you’re down to the fourth ‘p’, get up to the third. If you’re in the third, get up to the second. If you really can, get up to the first – the perfect will of God.
I don’t see that. God was not taken by surprise in the Garden of Eden, because before the foundation of the world, Christ already had been crucified in the heart of God. It tells us that – before the foundation of the world – He knew it was going to happen, but He remoulded the clay.
Do you remember when in I Samuel 8, for another example, the Israelites who had been in Canaan for over 300 years, and God had a way in which He wanted to govern the nation – it was by raising up judges. They were not hereditary; in other words, you didn’t become a judge because your dad was the last judge. They weren’t elected; they were anointed by the Holy Spirit in such a way that people recognized the Spirit of God is on them and they followed them [Him] as they led and judged the nation.
But after over 300 years of this the people fell for the trap that the people of God have fallen through all through history – they wanted to be like the nations, everybody else around about them. See, God intended Israel to be a theocracy where He ruled.
By the way, it’s how He intended the church to be. He is the Head of the church, He raises up people that He calls to leadership. But you know, this temptation, we want to be like the world, everybody else, let’s do it the way everybody else does it, then we don’t feel awkward about the fact that the way we do things are a little bit different. We don’t want to be pushed into the mould. They said they wanted a king, they wanted a royal family, they wanted to know where the next king was coming from, they wanted to influence him, they wanted probably princesses and princes for the tabloid press to write stories about. You know, they wanted to be like everybody else.
And God said to Samuel when they were asking for this – and by the way, the people of God always slide away from dependence on God to setting themselves up in a way where they can operate without God; that’s always the drift amongst the people of God. And God said in I Samuel 8:19 to Samuel – it says,
“The people refused to listen to Samuel. ‘No’ they said. ‘We want a king over us. Then we shall be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and go out before us and fight our battles.’”
And the Lord said in 1 Samuel 8:7 to Samuel,
“’Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king’” (This is an act of rebellion and rejection).
“But” He said, “Give them a king, and I will tell you which one to choose.”
God remoulds the clay. He says, “There is a man, the son of Kish. He’s tall, he’s good looking, he’s strong, he’s able.” His name was Saul. And Samuel went and met him and anointed him king and Saul became king. And then of course you know the story of how he blew it and God said, “Go down to the house in Bethlehem; there’s a man called Jesse; he’s got seven sons - or eight sons”, He says, “and one of them is a man after My own heart.” And he chose David and made David king.
And do you know how Jesus is introduced in the New Testament? The very first verse of the New Testament, it says,
“A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David…” [Matthew 1:1]
It’s the very first sentence of the New Testament. David should never have been in God’s original purpose and plan but the clay has gotten marred. It’s marred because of the insecurities and the disobedience of the people of Israel. So, God remoulded the clay – not only remoulded the clay and gave them a king, but He allowed His Son, the Messiah, who became incarnate, to be known as the son of David.
God remoulded the clay. You might say, “O they have rejected God now. They have really no hope now. When they get a king, they are going to be in a total mess.”
No, God said, “I will remould the clay” – “as seems good to Him.”
Remember poor old Jonah, told to go to Nineveh, the capital of Syria, not even a Jewish city, a Gentile pagan powerful city. He went in the opposite direction, took a ship, went across the Mediterranean to Tarshish – probably in Spain. But he never got there – his boat sank and he eventually came back. And he went to Nineveh and God said, “Give them this message: In forty days I will destroy the city because of your rebellion.”
So, Jonah eventually got to Nineveh. “Alright, I’ll go”. And he preached forty days. “You will be judged forty days – forty days and God will destroy the city. Thirty-nine days: “God will destroy the city”. Thirty-eight days, Thirty-seven days, thirty-six, thirty days, twenty-five days, twenty days, ten days, nine days, eight days, seven days, six days….
“And God said, “Jonah, they are repenting; I am not going to destroy the city.”
And Jonah got so angry, do you remember? “You told me to tell them that You would destroy the city in forty days after I arrived here. My whole credibility is going to be on the line now because You are not going to destroy them.” And Jonah sat under the tree, you remember, and grumbled.
What was God doing? He was remoulding the clay. The people of Nineveh changed. They repented. The King James says, “God repented and Jonah too”- that means He changed His mind.
Of course, God knows – that’s a human way of describing what God did. But the point is: He remoulded the clay.
We commemorated recently the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of those five men in Ecuador, trying to reach that tribe then unreached by anybody. Not a big tribe, 500 people at that stage; known as the Aucas which was the name given to them – it meant ‘savage’. That’s not their real name, something that they gave themselves, and that’s how they’ve been known for a long time – now known as the Waodani because that’s their own name for themselves.
And those men tried to build a relationship. And then you remember how that when they felt that it was time to go in, flew in on this little plane, landed on the sandbar on the river. After three days, they met one of the local Auca Indians, tried to build friendship. He went back and told them that these men were cannibals, which of course they were. And then they came and speared them to death and killed them. Humanly a tragedy, but we’ve made this point before, that out of that tragedy, it’s estimated 10,000 people went to the mission field and I suspect it’s probably more. Some of the wives stayed on. They saw the first converts.
And when we commemorated that 50th anniversary here just recently with Olive Fleming Liefeld, the widow of Pete Fleming, one of those men who was killed, with Art Johnson, who had gone into the jungle to look for the men and found the bodies and buried them. I didn’t know when we sat on this platform that night, just a couple of weeks ago, that there was a baptism taking place in the river opposite the place where those men had been speared to death. And ten young men were being baptized. And two of the men who had been killers of those missionaries were there, praising God for the baptism of these young men.
God remoulded the pot. You say, “Was it the will of God for them to get killed?” We can’t penetrate the mysteries of God’s mind of course, but it was an evil act and God is not the author of evil. The whole world is in the power of the evil one. I John says the devil is very active in our world. But the point is – and this is how I want you to understand God’s sovereignty as we finish tonight. You understand God’s sovereignty not as somebody up there in a control room, pressing all the buttons and getting frustrated because of our disobedience, or even controlling our disobedience.
But I want you to see the sovereignty of God as a potter who remoulds the clay. When bad things happen, when pain comes into our lives, when our histories – things that have happened to us in the past or things we wish we could eradicate and re-write the story but we can’t; we have to live with who we are and what we’ve been through – the marvellous thing is that the hand of the Potter remoulds the clay into something that seemed good to Him. Not something bad, not a second choice; it seemed good to Him.
I don’t know where you are in your life. I don’t know what you’re struggling with. I don’t know what mountains you feel you can’t climb, which are right there in front of you. I don’t know what weights seem to sit on you. I don’t know how hurt you might be. I don’t know what sins you’ve been up to this last week. But I do know this: nobody is disqualified from coming in humility and saying, “Lord Jesus, would You please mould the clay?”
Paul talks about comforting others with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. He says, “Things have happened in your life and you didn’t like them, you didn’t enjoy them, they weren’t comfortable, they were painful. But”, says Paul to the Corinthians when he wrote that, “the very thing God has done in you through this tough time is going to be the means by which He, through you, is going to bless and do things in other peoples’ lives.” Painful, but it becomes an instrument in His hand; He remoulds the clay.
I don’t want you to go away tonight – I haven’t addressed of course, or tried to answer the question of the big picture of the sovereignty of God that this book talks about and that we need to have some understanding of – that God is supreme in creation and history and God one day will determine the day when every knee bows and every tongue confesses Jesus Christ is Lord. He is fully in control of history.
But I want you to understand it in terms of your life because some of us feel written off; I know that. Some of us feel we have done something, which makes me unusable to God. I know a man who did that and all his life he believed he had messed up what God wanted him to do. And he could not do and be what he wanted – what God wanted him to do and be. And he lived that way for more than 50 years – it was my father. He never understood the remoulding of the clay. He only understood the rejection for having done the wrong thing at a certain time in his life.
You may be burdened with that very same thing. And as we close, we’re going to pray and just say, “Lord, remould the clay. In Your sovereignty You can make something good out of the marred clay.” That’s Jeremiah 18.
By the way, if you read Jeremiah 19, Jeremiah goes then to another piece of clay. This time it has become hard; it’s not submitted to the moulding of the potter. And God says, “I am afraid that clay, piece of clay, has reached the point you need to take it outside and smash it.” It’s become hardened. You can become hardened. But you wouldn’t be here tonight – you’re here tonight because you are soft in your heart towards God. “Lord, remould the clay as seems good to You.” And in His sovereignty, the hand of the Potter will produce something that seems good to God - not second best - good to the Potter.
Let’s pray together. Father, I want to pray for each person here tonight. We’re here because we love You. We realize that knowing You is the most important thing in our lives. We thank You for revealing Yourself to us and by Your Holy Spirit, drawing us to Yourself. But none of us can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. You have been at work in our hearts, You have been awakening us to that knowledge of Yourself and we thank You for that. But thank You that now that we’re brought into relationship with You that You mould us and when we’re marred in Your hands like that clay, when things go wrong – whether it’s self-inflicted disobedience or whether it’s simply we’re the victim of something which has marred the clay – we thank You for the hand of the Potter, sometimes gentle, sometimes firm but which remoulds the clay into something that seems good to Him. I pray that each one of us will go home tonight knowing You are moulding something in me that seems good to You. And we thank You for that. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.